Was £5 a lot of money in 1981?

[BertieBotts]

I was reading DS3 George's Marvellous Medicine and when George's dad the farmer sees what the medicine can do he says they are going to make more medicine and sell it for £5 a bottle and become rich. Obviously the amount was more when the book was published, which was 1981 (I suppose it could have been written in the 70s).

I was only born in the late 80s but this didn't sound very much to me so I put it into an inflation calculator and it came up as about £20. Which also seemed a bit too low - if you had a magic medicine that could create giant animals you'd charge more for it wouldn't you? I put it into Google and this is what the AI summary came up with which sounds bonkers to me. Translating all the items it could supposedly buy seems more like over £100 in today's money. Which TBF, sounds like a better price for a magic medicine. So I thought I'd ask some real people who were alive then which interpretation is true.

Based on inflation calculators, £5 in 1980 is equivalent to over £27 in 2026.
Here is what £5 could buy in the UK during the early-to-mid 1980s:
Pints of Beer: Around 40 pints of ordinary bitter.
Tobacco: About 20-25 packets of 20 cigarettes.
Entertainment: Around 20 Penguin paperback books.
Travel: A standard 2nd class return ticket from London to Liverpool or Manchester.
Food: Approximately 30 burgers from a burger bar.

I was 25 in 1981 and moved jobs the year before where my new salary was £3000 p.a. - previous post paid £2650 pa so big raise for those days. 😁 (Northern major city)

I was also taking driving lessons during 1980/81 which were £5 per hour so just under 10% of my weekly gross pay.

Can't recall much else.

I was a student in 1983 and I know I used to withdraw £5 on a Monday for all my week's expenses to Friday. And then withdraw another £5 on Friday afternoon for the weekend. And I didn't feel I did without because I was socialising with people on similar budgets.

I also used to travel from the North West to London quite regularly from the mid-80s. I did have a YP Railcard but I never felt that the fare was extortionate.

About 8-10 pints of beer for a fiver in those days. 40? No chance.

In 1981, as a penniless student, £5 was my budget for a week's food.

Mainly beans on toast, omelettes, sausages, apples & bananas. 😁

Presumably with such riches you could even buy a fax machine for the most up to date of business.

They never seem to consider the fact these animals would be difficult to transport to a slaughterhouse, nor that they would need ginormous barns to keep them in and prevent them roaming off across the countryside, especially since the Grandma seems to develop superhuman levels of fitness with her growth. I also think they never actually test what happens when they breed. One of the chickens lays an egg but they don't try to hatch it. I wonder if they give birth to giant baby animals or normal sized tiny ones.

George's father is presented as an excitable, impulsive type so perhaps he was not being especially sensible

I think you may be expecting a little too much reality, @BertieBotts It's a Roald Dahl children's novel, not an academic paper on the practicalities of large animal husbandry.

This is a very good point. I suppose I was trying to understand what it would suggest to a child. As it is DS3 is only 4 so he doesn't really have any sense of what is a lot of money. But for DS2 who is 7, if I wanted to arbitrarily suggest a large amount of money/something expensive to him I would probably choose £100. The child in the story is 8, so closer to DS2's age than DS3's.

I take the point some other people have made that £20/30 would also sound like a large enough amount to a child especially with the idea that you could sell unlimited bottles.

And yes, the proper inflation linked calculator said £19.something - no idea where the AI summary got the £27 from at all.

I may not be taking it entirely seriously

You’d get maybe max three penguin books for £5. I’ve just randomly checked one on my bookshelf that I had for my French a level in 1983 and it was £1.25. Quite a slim one though, and possibly out of copyright so cheaper

Yes, in about 85/86 I would spend about £10 on a week’s food as a student. Pasta etc but also a bottle of really shit wine (£1.99 from memory)

£5 was a night out in 1981
£1 cigarettes
Lager 50p/pint
Chips about 20p
£2 taxi or £2 into a club and walk home

I think gig tickets such as AC/DC , Eurythmics etc were only about a fiver then for instance. I earned about 14 pounds a day in my Saturday job then.

An album would cost a fiver, it wasn't easy for me at 15 to save up, I got £2.50 a week for my paper round

I used to £3/hour, which was a very good wage. Must have been £21 or £24 a day.

I was in primary school in early-mid 80s and I vividly remember being at sports day and someone's dad having a fiver poking out of their shirt pocket and me going home and gleefully reporting on this blatant display of wealth to my shocked parents 😂

They were. I saw a display in a museum not so long ago from when lots of bands that became really big played in small local venues like the Duchess in Leeds and Sheffield Leadmill and the tickets were only a few pounds.

I know i could go out and have a good night on a fiver. About 1982/3 dh and I went with mates to a new club, pub drinks before. I said what banging night we'd had. He agreed but said we couldn't do it regular as we'd spent 20 quid! And we'd not even got a taxi home at that point.(£2)
I worked in a city centre boozer in 81, beer was 40p a pint, lager 50. A mate had been to that London and was horrified that lager was a pound a pint.

Beer at my sailing club was 35p a pint. So on that basis I would say the inflation calculator is on the low side.

Based on inflation calculators, £5 in 1980 is equivalent to over £27 in 2026.
Here is what £5 could buy in the UK during the early-to-mid 1980s:
Pints of Beer: Around 40 pints of ordinary bitter.
Tobacco: About 20-25 packets of 20 cigarettes.
Entertainment: Around 20 Penguin paperback books.
Travel: A standard 2nd class return ticket from London to Liverpool or Manchester.
Food: Approximately 30 burgers from a burger bar.

well that is a wild set of figures!
I went off to university in 1985 and I dearly wish that I could have bought 30 burgers and 40 pints for £5.
In our student union bar I think the beer was about £1 a pint which was a really good deal.
I didn't smoke, but i am pretty sure cigarettes were over £1 a box.
And books - they were never that cheap i my lifetime!

I absolutely love how George's dad's possibly ill-thought-out pricing strategy for magic medicine has prompted so many sensible reflections on the cost of living in the 1980s. I thought the thread would focus more on the whole giant animals thing.

Wow that’s bad. I had a paper round 1984 - 1988 when I was 11-14

an got £1 a day /round so £7 a week and took less than an hour.

well no, because we all can accept that in the world of Roald Dahl giant animals are just normal!
😂

When I was a teenager I used to watch Tales of the Unexpected on TV. It was so scary and the product of a quite screwed up imagination.
I didn't realise for years that they were alos written by Roald Dahl

I think the original post said Penguin books, so I looked at Penguins and Puffins.

There were probably lots of books under £1.50 in other categories including student texts and kids books

I mean like a pack of Pokémon cards today in 2026 is about £5. Somewhere there are definitely executives becoming very rich from selling those.

I’m on medicine that costs about £45,000 per monthly dose. Obviously, costs me personally nothing. Thanks, NHS! Someone is also getting very rich on that though.

I can remember me and my friend finding 50p in a bush around then and buying so many sweets/chocolate with it. We certainly felt rich.