Pounds shillings and pence

[BarrelOfOtters]

im in my 50s, too young to remember decimilisation in 1971 but I know about pounds, Guineas, sixpence etc. 20 shillings = 1 pound. Pence (d) – 12 pence = 1 shilling. 240 pence = 1 pound.

colleague in his 20s had never heard of this. I mean surely mos5 people have seen it in a film or read a book set in the 60s?

or am I really just old.

I'm 43 and have a reasonable understanding of it I think. I remember using the old coins with new values and talking about it with my parents as to what the old values were. I also read a lot of old books and would have found it jarring to have had them updated for me.

I just about remember the halfpenny. I knew to pronounce it ha'ppnee and assumed that was how the actress Jill Halfpenny said it. Called her that throughouht her being on Strictly until a friend mentioned the joke had worn thin. Really wasn't a joke, just thought that's how you would say it. Still do really!

If it's that important, how many pre-Euro and current non-Euro European currencies can you name without looking them up?

And how does the Euro degrade knowledge of countries, capitals, and borders? - it sounds like a very weak/hollow 'sovereignty' argument.

french franc, german mark, spanish peseta, dutch guilder, italian lira, greek drachma

Not so much knowing them, but knowing that the system now hasn't been always.

Yeah, I was confused here but I think D-day refers to Decimalisation Day

I'm 61 and remember decimalisation as a very big deal. It all seemed very straightforward to the young, but the 6 o'clock news and the papers were full of people complaining that they couldn't get to grips with it, and others saying that shopkeepers were profiteering by taking the opportunity to put prices up under cover of converting prices from old to new money. It was a time of rampant inflation so I expect they were going up anyway.

This is fun. There were lots of little public information films like this in the run up to D Day (I do remember it was called that).

That's only six out of 30+ European countries.

And currencies have changed before the Euro. The Deutschmark only came into existence in 1948, for example. Many of the others came into being in C18 and replaced previous monetary systems.

Lots of thing change. I don't think the perception of change is at risk. No more so than it would have been if the UK had adopted the Euro (which tbf was never likely).

I think there are people who love history and are fascinated by the details of how life has changed over the years/decades/centuries/millennia. And then there are others who live in the here and now, have no interest in anything old-fashioned, and scarcely remember even what happened last week, never mind wonder about how life was lived before they were born. Those might be the extreme ends of the spectrum when it comes to history.

In a previous job I had the task of transcribing ‘tithe apportionments’ from the 19th century - tables that detailed the ownership of land, buildings, tenants and rental value at a particular time. I got a pretty good grasp of £sd after that - and no, it doesn’t translate easily to Excel (although I’m sure there are bespoke programs that can do it).

I wonder if there is anywhere that still uses a similar non-decimal currency system.

It was second nature if you were brought up with it but I can see why it would raise a few eyebrows now.

Thank you, @BitOutOfPractice .
Regarding the Blyton books, I would think the publishers update them with at least a bit of an eye on selling parents the rest of the series. If a newly independent reader gets tripped up by a shilling, the parents might get put off. And of course they already had to take out the racism plus everyone being happy and gay all the time so it isn’t as if the text is untouched.
With the way that printing has changed, I don’t think it would be too onerous to adapt the value of the pound note about once every four years for the print version.

The wizarding world.

A good point - if children can cope with this in the context of fantasy, why not in history?

I took the kids to Blist Hill last summer and they loved changing their money into old money at the bank.

It does seem rather a leap to make from 'we shouldn't update pre-decimal money systems in fiction' to 'creating an entire national identity on one period of history and using the achievements of grandparents as a proxy for achievements we could be making ourselves.'

For a start, it isn't 'one period of history'. Non-decimal currency had been in use for centuries prior to 1971.

According to Wikipedia Mauritania and Madagascar are the only ones, with a base 5 currency but even those are because the smallest unit is ignored as too small to be useful.

It's similar with imperial measures, there's only a handful of countries that still use these.

Apprently Mauritania and Madagascar

Not really. The identity focus is usually centred around the few decades leading up to decimalisation.

And this didn't start out with updating money systems in fiction (I've ignored that deviation), it started out with disbelief that someone in their twenties wasn't familiar with an archaic currency system that hadn't been in use for decades before he was born - implying there was something wrong with not being intimately familiar with everyday living in the time of his grandparents.

To someone in their twenties, pounds, shillings and pence is about as relevant as Windows 95 or life without a mobile phone.

Ignorance means not knowing about something.

If he doesn't know about it the it's factual to say that he is ignorant of it.

@MajorCarolDanvers I am aware of that but the pp I was replying to has specified that she means ignorant in both ways.

I wouldn't expect most people under the age of 50 (at most) to have any idea about pre-decimal currency. What I would expect is that people would know that there was once a time when we didn't have decimal currency, just as they should surely grasp that there was a time when people didn't have mobile phones, internet, email, central heating, microwaves and all the other things that most of us now take for granted.

I was going to disagree as the old shillings stayed in circulation. Then I checked and they were withdrawn in 1990 which somehow seems to be over 30 years ago, so maybe under 50 is right.

I agree I'd expect adults brought up in this country to know we previously had a dfferent system, just from books, old films, museums with old posters etc.

I believe that the two bob bits (10p piece) were the last to go in 1993.

Yes, I meant the details of how it all worked. Unless I am even older and more out of touch than I thought, surely lots of people have heard the words shilling, penny, halfpenny and so on, and know we used to have more notes in use than we do now.

Incidentally, pre-decimal currency has left a legacy in other countries too. I’ve heard people in Australia use “like a two bob watch” to refer to something useless or unreliable.

When watching Last Night of the Proms, my husband sings (to 'Rule Britannia') a song beginning 'Rule, two tanners, two tanners make a bob, three make one and six, and four, two bob.'

I find the attitude that we should forget anything no longer relevant to the present day a strange one. Where do you draw the line? What makes a custom or event important enough to be remembered?