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.

In 2010 our Toothfairy left £1. What do they get now ?

Yes, they are pretty sordid, aren't they.

I suppose when I said 'focusing in the whole giant animals thing' I meant the costs and limitations of a business model based on making animals gigantic, rather than the plain fact of embiggening them..

I was 23 in 1980 and was earning £3,800 a year in a typist/admin role which was on the higher end of the scale for that type of job back then. A packet of fags was around 70p, a pint of beer was about 50p, a burger was around 40p, a bottle of wine was about £1.00 and you could pick up a 3lb frozen chicken for about 60p and a 10lb bag of spuds for 50p. So £5.00 was very well worth having and you could easily buy groceries for one person for a week with it without being ridiculously careful.

I was 9 in 1981. My granddad would give me £1 when I saw him and that was a lot of money. My "rich" uncle gave me £5 when I stayed with him, and that was an absolute fortune to me, an unbelievable sum of money.

To put into context, when I was waitressing as a teen around 1986, I was paid £1.25 per hour.

What is the size of the bottles that George was going to sell?

I earned £5.20 working a Saturday in a big supermarket.

I started work in 1975 and my wage was £18.56 a week!

Also remember bringing in 75p in an envelope for school dinners for the week, 15p per meal. This would be circa 1977

I did a day’s shift in a shop for £7.50 in 1985

It was a children’s book, and to a child at the time £5 was a lot of money, but not an unimaginable amount of money. My GPs sent me £5 at Christmas. Owning a £20 note of my own, would have seemed ludicrous but I did very rarely have my own £5.

Yes. Saw U2 in 1981 and it was about £3 for my ticket. Still have it in the loft somewhere.

You have a better memory than me. I saw U2 in 1981. Warwick Arts Centre.

I couldn’t tell you how much I paid for the ticket. Probably £3.

I got £2 a week pocket money. I must have been spoilt. I remember buying a 20p mix up every day (40 sweets 😮), paying for Brownie subs and buying a magazine! I do have quite a lot of fillings but was always slim. Can’t believe my parents let me eat so much sugar.

In 1981 the rent for my student hall of residence was £7 a week and an average room in a houseshare was £10 a week in Norwich. So yes, it was a reasonable amount.

Crikey, mine was more.than double that at Sussex in 1978!

I can answer with a specific from 1981 - I was paying a £15k mortgage, my FT monthly salary in entirety literally only just covered the monthly mortgage payment, but in 1981, for the first time ever, there was a month where an extra £5 was left in my account.
I celebrated (momentous occasion) with a bottle of Asti Spumante (Sainsbury’s) £3.99.
A Russel Hobbs kettle was £25 as I recall.

In 1984/85 half a pint of mild beer in my local was 33.5 pence and a bag of chips was 15p.

My Saturday job in 1978-1981 paid £4 a day. I can't remember if I got a pay rise in that time. My summer job at a big company in 1983 paid £80 a week & my first graduate job in 1984 paid £5200 a year, I then moved a year later for £7800 so quite a jump.
Glasto tickets were cheap & you bought them in the record shop! Bands like U2 were a couple of quid to see.

You've just reminded me: when I was in final yr of uni in Glasgow, my grotty bedsit cost £16 a week. 1982-83. That didn't include heating and electricity. Very close to the uni - Southfield Avenue.

To top it all, it turned out that it was a former brothel. That explained a lot, actually.