American Reacts to British Predecimal Currency - This is Insane!
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In this video I react to the predecimal currency that the UK had until 1971. I had no idea British money used to be so complicated. It must have been really annoying to have to figure up the different coins you would need to exchange every time you made a purchase. I'm guessing that most Brits old enough to remember predecimal currency are happy it came to an end.
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They didn’t show the pre decimal, ‘ten bob note’, which was half a pound, or ten shillings.
The system of £ s d (pounds shillings & pence) take their characters from Latin; the £ is a stylised "L" short for "libra" or pound (in weight, not money) then s short for "solidus" (but actually the abbreviation for "shilling") and d short for "denarius" (actually the abbreviation for penny).
Just about to type a comment explaining £sd to him and I saw you'd beat me to it.
As was iI
to add my tuppence worth lol a great reference to this was a quote "Half a Denarius for my bleedin life story" ,still makes me chuckle
also it stands for LSD (n0t the drug), Libra, Sistersi and dinari.
@@betawan3195 "Leave that Welsh tart alone Brian!" ............
I grew up (in a British colony) with £sd (pounds shillings and pence) and Imperial measurements and while at school we changed to decimal currency and to the metric system. So I feel perfectly at home with them all. One advantage of having 240 pence to the pound is that 240 is more perfectly divisible than 100. 100 can be divided by 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, 50 and 100; 240can be divided by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 24, 30, 40, 48, 60, 80, 120, 240 !
The £sd abbreviations for pounds, shillings and pence come from the Latin currency denominations librae, solidi, denarii.
240 is a highly composite number (look it up!) very rare, its a number that has more numbers than it can be divided by than any other, great for making change.
@@sarahkb7 apparently the difference in the pint and gallon is the evaporation factor of transporting liquids across the Atlantic.
@@sarahkb7 then along comes the metric tonne which is 1000kg and is therefore almost exactly the same as a british imperial ton, just to add to the confision. I guess this is why they settled for a name that sounded the same but wasn't quite.
And with 960 farthings to the pound there were so many more possibilities...
I was born in 1949 so I grew up with the old money. The decimal coins started coming out in 1967. Started off with changing the 2 shillings to 10 pence. Then the 10 shillings to 50 pence. The elderly people thought it was complicated but us young people it was fine.
I was at school (primary then secondary) at precisely the crossover point. Sterling was a nightmare because of the different bases involved (same for Imperial measurement). Moving to decimal was the best thing that could have happened.
I was also born in 49 and in a way, was sad to see it change. It was inevitable that it had to go decimal but there was character to the old coinage. As a kid, I used to keep all the Victorian coins I was given in change but these became rarer as more and more people did the same.
Actually April 68 for 5 and 10p,Oct 69 for 50p (and in fact the 10 bob note wasn't for about a year after that)🎩
@@sualdammacsamildanach8154 It wasn't a nightmare at all, it just needed a little thinking. In those days we weren't too lazy to think for ourselves.
@@mothmagic1 I can 'do' Sterling/Imperial. I often have to when reading American publications. As I said, we did both, since the official crossover took place while I was in school. Sterling was a complete ball ache because of the different bases. There was no way the majority of people could do that in their heads. Those who could usually did it by rote, and not proper mental arithmetic, since there were little tricks to learn as well.
Decimal was (and is) so much easier - which does not make it a bad thing. People struggled with Sterling, though fewer struggled with decimal. The modern computer age would have been held up for decades if they'd had to convert binary to the multiple base systems (which varied between countries) common to Sterling/Imperial for humans to understand. Even Victorian scientists resorted to decimal/base 10 for many of their more complex calculations for precisely that reason.
People easily confuse 'decimal' with 'metric' (with a hint of 'Brexit' for good measure). In one way, they are the same, but especially with weights and measures, metric is a way of standardising. Counting in decimal is one thing, but weighing something using a decimal-based system is another matter entirely unless you have a standard to refer to. Before that, people could decide what a pound or a quart was themselves - and they often did, as evidence by the differences between (some) UK and US Imperial measurements.
The old money was not confusing to the Brits.
Where is the ten bob note in this? Why I started work I used to love these notes, made my pay seem to last longer..
Because decimalisation happened during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, all our coins show the Queen's head. Before decimalisation it was possible to receive coins minted during any of the reigns of former monarchs, it was not unusual to find coins with the head of Queen Victoria, King Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII (although these are rare as he abdicated the throne before his coronation) and George VI in your change. I always found this useful as a way of remembering the order of succession and the regnal dates. Early Victorian pennies showed the Queen with her hair styled with a bun - 'bun pennies' were thought to be especially valuable and the victorian sixpences were made of silver and were perfect for putting in Christmas puddings. We will soon be seeing coins with Charles III on them.
The Imperial System was a fraction bonanza. So flexible and very easy to use. 240 pennies is divisible by so many more numbers than the metric number 100.
1d is 1 penny
Exactly - and even the metric-inventing French had and still have many work arounds - like (their version of ) pints for measuring and selling peas.
Or, use decimals not fractions and then you have unlimited divisions, so much easier to add up. Don't get me wrong, I understand the advantages of fractions but the disadvantages are also huge. In order to work with them you have to have a whole different way of adding numbers (as demonstrated in this video) and that would have been out of the mathematical reach of many poorly educated people. But that's ok because they will never get to see 20 shillings right? I'm so glad I spent my first couple of school years in Australia (72-74) so missed the mess that was the changeover period, when we got back all the books were decimal and I never had to learn it other that in a historical context.
LSD
@@andyjdhurley If you had been at school during that time (as I was) you would have found both systems easy, and if you had progressed in mathematics you would have found handling different bases natural. Also binary fractions that were used might have helped you understand the binary system that computers use, though binary fractions continued after the change.
@@andyjdhurley It's nothing to do with the mathematics. Decimals are irrelevant. It's dividing-up the actual quantities or things into equal portions. Nothing to do with paper calculations.
The beauty of the old currency was that you could divide it by multiples of 3!
My mum still speaks in old money lol.
When I was a kid I'd get "two bob" to go to the sweet shop
As a 76 year old Englishman I have a few comments.
1 - I’ve driven many miles around England, Scotland and Wales and have never seen the distances on road signs given in kilometres.
2 - We grew up with L, S, D, ( pounds, shillings and pence), it was second nature, adding up a couple of items was easy, any more needed pen and paper unless you were a maths genius.
3 - I was a technical dyer of wool and synthetic fibres all my working life. Before decimal it was a long job to work out the recipe for our colour batches. Standard recipes were saved in pounds, ounces and drams, imagine the time taken to convert a dye pan load recipe saved as 275 pounds to one of 120 pounds. Metric weight recipes saved us hours a day converting dyeing’s.
4 - Despite working with metric at work I still think in Imperial in my home life.
If you grew up with it, and there is no other system, you learn it easily enough. I was 14 when the system changed, ut I remember it and can work with it easily, even now more than 50 years later. We also used miles, yards, feet, inches (and chains and links etc), which as Americans, who still use them, they seem natural, but to anyone who only used Kilometres, metres, centimetres, etc, , Miles, parts etc seems very complicated. Again, being in the UK we use both, so for many of us either system is natural.
Speak for yourself, I don't even know what you mean by chains and links unless you are talking about securing something with a chain. If you use feet and yards you stick out like a sore thumb as being of an older generation and we only use miles because that is what is written on all the old speed signs (and as with everything in rip-off Britain it would be too expensive to make the switch to using km). Even inches are only really used by plumbers because so many older buidings were constructed using 1/2", 1" and 4" pipe (I only know this because I used to work in plumbing supplies) with the standard conversion of 25mm to 1" and 15mm to 1/2" not matching up to reality or even making any mathmatical sense.
@@jameslewis2635As Mr PW said most not all. I'm 63 and can use both. I just use what is convenient/easiest at the time. Also many young people who weren't taught imperial sometimes use is for height and weight. 😊.
I was 15. It was what we had along with all the other crazy measurements. WE should have got rid of the pound, as the Australians did, for one shilling being 10 pence (or cents or what ever). Inflation shot up as older people lost the "feel" for money. "10p, that's a shilling isn't it?" as my Nan asked me.
@@markwolstenholme3354 well said all the measures and weights were printed on the back of our school jotters.
@@jameslewis2635 3 feet = 1 yard; 22 yards = 1 chain (the length of a cricket pitch); 10 chains = 1 furlong; 8 furlongs = 1 mile. Easy! Alternatively, 1 mile = 1760 yards = 5280 feet…
That also explains why most athletic stadium tracks are 400 metres long - they used to be 440 yards or 1/4 mile.
"Rule two tanners, two tanners make a bob, three make one-and-six, and four two bob" - sung to the tune of Rule Britannia!
Brill!
They neglected to say that the twenty pence piece was only introduced in 1982, at the same time the half penny was withdrawn. Also, pound coins replaced pound notes in 1988, with the 2 pound coin being introduced in 1998.
I was born in '77 and remember a few old coins still being used as a kid buying sweets 😊
@@larryjimbobuntil they reduced the sizes of the 5 and 10p pieces, the shilling and florin were interchangeable.
The 20p denomination was originally introduced in 1887, the 50th anniversary of Queen Victoria's gaining of the throne, and the first Sherlock Holmes story saw print. Back then, the new denomination being introduced was the "Double Florin" (four shillings), only slightly smaller than a Crown (five shillings); they were made only until 1890.
One 'New Penny' was equivalent to 2.4 old pennies, so it was sometimes used to mask price rises. Something that used to be 8 (old) pence could suddenly become 6 New Pence and seem like a price drop, albeit it had actual gone up to the equivalent of 13 old pence. Also, coins were much larger back then. The new 5p coin was the same size as the shilling it replaced, and the 10p coin was the same size as the florin it replaced. Over the years, the coins have reduced in size a lot.
Most people were never deceived!!
The exception was the cost of a call from a phone box, which went down from 6d to 2p.
The US penny isn't a penny, its just a nickname of the cent from colonial days. The UK still has a penny.
@@js1872 What are you on about? Of course 1p is a penny 😄. Just have a look at one, it even says penny on it. Pence is plural.
@@js1872 I'm looking at one now. Says one penny on it 😉
But you entirely miss the point.
My parents can explain UK pre-decimal in a flash. It wasn’t difficult at all. Today we’ve just grown up with decimal. As a Computing graduate, it’s easy to calculate in binary base ( 2) or hexadecimal (base 16) for eg. To finish, UK road signs are NOT, I repeat NOT displayed in KM/Metric. This would be illegal. Just a myth.
@@js1872 earlier comment, but never mind.
I’m 69, and so old enough to have been working whilst we had £sd (pounds, shillings and pence) It was great and so natural. I went out on the protests against its demise, and was arrested, told off and let go. We saw it as losing our identity, and some still do. I could slip back into it without pause. When I was very young farthings we’re still in use, I think.
Yep! Farthings went out of circulation in 1960.
@@huntergray3985 I was 5, so it could be on the edges of my memory. Wow! That’s a good memory for an old fart.
@@primalengland 👍
We used to get 4 mojo sweets for a penny back then.
@@phillipneale5256 Blackjacks and Fruit Cups.
I grew up with pre-decimal until I was about 20 ........ it just came naturally, you didn't have to think about it
Do you still refer to 50p as ten bob? I still do😂
Exactly
I found a ten bob note when I was 13 and spent most of it on sweets. I was use to the coinage as a child but it changed to Decimal when I was fifteen years old. My mum would give me and my brother 1 Shilling each to go to Saturday morning pictures. 1d to town on the bus, 6d for the pictures, 3d for an ice lolly (fab), 1d to spend in the amusement arcade and 1d home on bus. When it Changed to Decimal I recall the price for things went up, say something cost 1 shilling which is equivalent to 5 pennies, after Decimalisation it suddenly cost 7 new pence. Weston-Super-Mare, Somerset.
Always got told that when it came in it made everything more expensive
Me too. It seems incomprehensible to younger people, but it was simply the system. I could go back to it tomorrow
We also had a 10 shilling note, not sure why this wasn't mentioned because they were common currency and widely used. I was 16 when the system changed, I can still easily convert decimal currency to Imperial and vice versa. My grandmother did find the new system baffling for a while but eventually became used to it.
If you recall. Mean Mister Mustard in the Beatles song ‘keeps a ten bob note up his nose’.
I still miss it and remember the decimal currency coming in confused our older generation.
Yes the ROI uses the Euro. After they kept voting until they got the right result 😉
Pretty sure the 20p was introduced much later. Yep, just looked it up - 1982 and not 1971 as seemingly suggested in this video.
One thing that he didn't mention is that the Pound Sterling/GBP is the oldest surviving currency in the world.
Although this is in name only, you could easily argue that it is relatively new only coming into its current form in 1971.
@@jameslewis2635 Not so, The pound was continued from before , It was decimalisation that changed the other coin names.
@@jameslewis2635 Hardly
@ Reacting To My Roots I grew up in the pre-decimal era. Nothing confusing about it at all. And yes, we did calculations in our heads. Back then mental arithmatic was a thing in school.
The old money was no problem, it just came naturally, you didn't even have to think about it. You got a lot more for a penny in those days. 1d was a penny, d being the term used for a penny, the initial was from the Latin "denarius" which was an ancient Roman coin.
I've lost track of how much it costs to spend a penny now...
The video failed to clarify early on that a penny is the 'd' in Lsd, being pounds (£ - L - Latin: libra ponda), shillings (s - Latin: solidi) and pence (d - Latin: denarius). The narrator didn't get the pronunciations quite right. 'Pence' in say, eleven pence does not have the 'e' stressed in normal speech, so 'eleven pnce'. By the same shortening, you got the example of halfpennyworth to ha'p'rth (I've only ever heard two syllables there, not one), three pence to thruppnce. If you are familiar with pronunciation, it would be a 'schwa' sound - ə, ie. thruppənce. This has all but disappeared in decimal parlance.
Also not made truly clear was that the short form of writing the money was 2/6d for two shillings and six pence (said 'two and six'); 5/- for five shillings; and just 3d for three pence. This is how you'd see it on price markers in shops and market stalls. £6 19/6d if pounds were included.
On d-day, I presented 2 shiny new pence as my bus fare, which had previously been 5d, but the bus company went decimal after the rest of the country and it wasn't accepted. Strictly speaking, 5d didn't tally exactly to 2 new pence, it was 2.1 new pence. Lots of prices changed slightly because things didn't line up exactly and this led to the widely held belief that 'we wuz robbed'.
I know it's a click-bait title, but just because something requires a bit of effort to understand doesn't make it insane. Insane would be if only the first seventeen pence of a pound counted as legal tender and the rest had to be paid in cheese and kisses.
It might have looked complicated, but it was what we knew - and our mental arithmetic was second to none! Lol
Those were the days
to my mind that change cheated us we couldn't buy as much in the decimal system and you do have to have decent mental arithmetic skills and these days the youngsters would be lost if they ever had to use that coinage in fact once where I worked the tills went down and it wasn't a problem for me to add up the groceries whereas others couldn't even start to think about what to do and that is with the decimal system so in our old coinage they would probably have had a mental breakdown.
It's only as complicated as fractions, inches, feet, yards, etc,.
@@RoyCousins Or when you say 5/16, which the USA has. We have all gone digital.
@@RoyCousins Fractions are actually easier to do mental arithmetic with than decimal points in many real life situations.
Had no problem with old money. Used to enjoy looking for rare or old coins, as a child. Much more interesting than present money. In the addition he forgot the ten Bob note, Crowns were not in use, only half a crown. Guinea was used in buying and selling horses, we knew what they meant. I learned about currency before I could tell the time.
I agree there was no crown since the second world war but there was the ten bob note.
I got a special Coronation crown to commemorate Queen Elizabeth II’s Coronation in 1953. I think they were issued to children that year as a souvenir…technically legal tender at the time, but I still have mine 70 years later.
I was in my early teens and used to collect coins. In a handful of change, you might find Victorian or even Georgian pennies.
Guineas were used for things like clothes & stuff in posh shops, If you went to Bond St. London it would all be in guineas
I loved my pound, shillings and pence😊. I also love the history that created it. It came from the Romans and their system of money to the power of 12. I always felt it had more worth and gravitas. With a wealth of old names for the different denomination coins. Getting a half crown when I was a child was fantastic 😂
Decimal day was (from memory) in February 1971. I had just started a new job at an accountants' firm so you can imagine the fun we had over the next few years having to work with both systems and converting between the two!
I remember more when VAT replaced Purchase Tax in 1973, because I had a weekend job in a supermarket. We had to spend a whole day repricing items. back when everything had a little paper price ticket on it. Fast forward and I was heavily involved in planning how changing from Sterling to Euros would affect the national VAT computer system in 1990. It involved converting old records on the fly whenever they were accessed. Fortunately for us, it never happened.
You forget that, at first, some of both sets of coins were identical (except for the writing on them) and interchangeable. The 5p and shilling were the same, and the 10p and florin were the same. This made the changeover easier.
The decimal coins were made smaller only several years later.
15/2/1971. To be exact and the shop owners had a field day ripping us off..
I worked for a bank when i was 18, such fun with new system for customers 😂
I' m also an accountant and I remember decimal day, i was inundated with members of staff wanting to change their LSD to decimal, it was so confusing because you were still using old coins as well like the shilling. But we had a laugh if nothing else.
I have a glimpse of a memory, I think as an 8 year old in 1973. My family had been abroad for a few years, on returning to England the confusion as what coins to use and a very patient shopkeeper explaining to us the change we received, I was just glad I got my sweets.
I have the advantage of having reached the grand old age of 22 at the time of the introduction of decimal coinage. The old pre-decimal coinage is therefore immovably stuck in my head. In my first ever job in a Cost Office (from 1966) we had to work to four places of decimals and I just know that 10d was £0.0417 or 4p, 6d was £O.0250 or two and a half new pence.
When decimalisation was looming I received a letter from a customer asking that we render our invoices only in decimal currency with immediate effect, and I was able to reply that we had been doing this since 1947 and had merely given the total invoice value in £/s/d.
Obviously my four children born between 1974 and 1984 consider this knowledge of mine yet one more example of the arcane knowledge that their father possesses which is of no practical use whatsoever.
I remember the joke at the time of the old lady who was asked her opinion of the changeover. “I think we old people find it very confusing. They should have waited until we’re all dead”.
This was really interesting! As an adult who has lived in the UK my entire life, I never knew anything about the old money system. Feel like I've learned a lot.
We lost a lot from decimalisation and had the first calculators come in say two years earlier I doubt we would have changed.
Decimal currency came in in the UK in the 1970s. I remember when a 5p piece came out it had written on it 5 new pence and 1 shilling on the same coin a guinea was worth just over £1 and if you buy animals at a farm or horse live stock market you still buy the animals in guinea to this day
Your reaction to our pre-decimal currency is exactly the same as the world's reaction to the US using imperial measurements now. Hope it gives a little extra perspective on why we look at you so strangely when you measure things in inches, ounces, wotnots and doobries.
I was around for this....and I can tell you you certainly knew when you had a pocket full of change...the coins were big and heavy.
As a bit of a numismatist, thank you so much for this upload, steve! I could honestly sit here and comment for hours about this but there is just so much when it comes to the history of money, currency standard, coins, its an entire wonderful world of interesting knowledge. Oh and btw when it says "2 of these in 1d" the D stands for the latin word for Penny, which is denarius. That's why so many coins in the world are also known as "denars", fun fact 😊 (though it can be confusing if you dont know that of course, and the guy who made the video probably should have specified this)
Now it makes sense. I had no idea the 'd' meant denarius and that was Latin for penny. Thanks for clarifying it. :)
They carefuly chose some of the new coins to be the same size as the old coins, eg. the 'new' 10p was the same size as a 2-shilling. This allowed them a smoother transition, and I remember into the 1980s, getting change in a shop, and realising that the 10p was actually a 2-shilling.
Yep, made it interesting as you would often get coins with early 20th century monarchs on the all the way up to the early 90s when the 5p and 10p coins finally changed size and the Shilling and Two Shilling coins withdrawn.
This is why we the older generation are sooooooo good at maths !!!!!
My mum will be 85 at the end of the month (she had me late on in life) and she has told me about her first wage.: she mentioned shillings and other coins and said her weekly wage added up to todays money would’ve been around £1.70. And she said she used to go to dance halls and so on with that money. She had enough to do whatever she needed to do. It baffles my brain!
I remember my grandparents trying to explain to all the grandkids the old currency. We were beyond confused lol. It’s funny how Ive always remembered the coin names but mostly only the slang terms for them. In the future, children won’t be counting physical money at all, so the same thing will happen. The same thing has started to happen with time telling. They read time on the phone and not a physical clock on the wall now.
Sadly it seems all to easy to tap a card or phone onto a machine and with Covid this seemed to accelerate the use of cards, although cash use is coming back. I agree with reading the time and will be interesting to see how future generations learn to tell the time.
I was born in the early forties and I don't remember anyone ever having a problem with the currency. In fact people had more problems get used to cost of things after they changed over. It didn't last long and we soon got used to it
I was quite sad when Sterling went £ s p being given a sixpence as a young child was great
I was born in 1954 and had no problems calculating in the old currency. I still have the knowledge and so still find no problems with £SD. The problem today is every country is losing its national identities. All countries in the EU now use the Euro whereas it was more interesting in Europe when travelling and you had to change your money into the appropriate currency like Franks, Guilders, Deutschmarks, Krone etc. Now all of Europe is bland with a Macdonalds on every street and a Starbucks every 100 yards (sorry metres).
My mom, in her 80s, worked retail for years before the change. Not too long ago, she said she still converted current amounts back into predecimal currency in her head!
I occasionally still do that. 19 shillings for a Mars bar! It’s an outrage !
Has everybody in the UK now started to use the Americanism 'mom' in the comments sections? Nobody in the UK writes 'mom' yet so many comments supposedly from people in the UK use the word 'mom'. Interesting.
@@Ben-xe8ps I think the truth is, it's quite regional and always has been. I'm in the Midlands and have always used and heard 'Mom' since the 70's.
@@Ben-xe8ps i,m from the uk, but i think mom is better than saying mum, up north of uk we have allways called our mother, mam or mammy, but it is difficult to buy greeting card with mam on it, some card shops have them, prob cos of people allways asking if they have any cards with mam on, instead of mum, which with mum on, wont sell up north
The d in pre-decimal currency, commonly called penny is from the Latin denarius (plural - pennies and denari in Latin).
He didn't give the name for the 6d coin (the tanner) we were told it was to prepare for joining the EEC. I was 11 in 1971.
I grew up learning the pre decimal currency and it wasn’t as hard as it looks here. I guess it’s what you were used to. I can still work it out now.
My grandmother was horrified when decimalisation came. She would also ask “how much is that in real money”. She swore she was being cheated.
Pennies were, confusingly, abbreviated to 'd'. This is because the Latin word for this coin was 'denarius'.
I also grew up leaning the imperial system. We still use miles and MPH. Even though we buy our petrol in litres we still measure consumption in Miles per gallon.
I was also taught in Fahrenheit & Celsius so I can also relate to that as well.
I worked as a builder for many years and it was not uncommon the hear or see measurements like: 10cm by 2 inches.
@@huntergray3985I’ve asked for ‘3 metres of 4x2’ (inches) fairly recently and it’s been dealt with as if it makes perfect sense. Which it does if you know both systems. 😂
@@chixma7011 👍
We may not speak "foreign" but we owd uns are bilingual in weights and measures 🤣
Oldies, like myself have kept a selection of the pre-decimal coins, for old times sake.
Our kids and grandkids find it fascinating to sort through them.
Pre decimal currency was far superior than what we have in UK today. If it was so bad why did We use it for nearly 2000 years? As an example, divide £10 or even $10 equally between three people. you can't do it! But you can in the Pre decimal system. Also interestingly if you had 240 pennies or any combination of coins that made up £1 and weighed them it weighed 1lb! In banks they had scales so if you took in lots of coins they would weigh them rather than counting them to determine the amount. A lot faster.
Yes, Ireland uses the euro. It’s not that different. We travel in Europe a lot and are fluent in the euro! I worked in Woolworths on Saturdays when I was 13/14, my wage for the day was ten shillings, that’s 50p in todays money! I bought my lunch out of that and still had enough for the week to buy snacks and magazines or save up to buy an item of clothing!
It was easy if you grew up with it! The cost of things immediately got more expensive when we changed to decimalisation!
You are correct. The biggest cause of inflation at that time was decimal currency. People lost the value of money. When the grocery shop put everything up by a penny, we accepted it, forgetting the it had really gone up by 2.1 old pennies. This escalated and of course some businesses took advantage of it. Causing more inflation. Once we all got used to it it is much easier. One good thing about it was getting rid of Guineas. I remember looking in Curry's window for something, it said 99 gns. Of course it was really £104 :10 sh. What a scam.
@@paulroberts7561 I remember all the rounding was done to the favour of the shops so my penny chews instantly got more expensive and I noticed, still angry about it now!
@clanger422 Indeed the old pound had 240 pennies, if I remember correctly when it started we had half pennies, so totalled 200 haf pennies. That's a 20% loss.
@@paulroberts7561 . 100% correct, and I think that's what led to a lot of the social and political upheaval throughout the 1970s as well (strikes e.t.c).
Before decimalisation 240 pennies =£ 1 .
I'll be sixty next birthday so I was 7 when me decimalised on 15th February 1971, and I still remember how people of my parents and grandparents generations were very confused by the new money. In some cases it took many years for them to get used to it, and even then they'd still often use the pre-decimalisation terms to describe the cost of something.
My mum still uses pre decimal terms.
I was ten when it changed so I can just about remember using old money. Even at that age though, I could use it easily enough.
I was born after decimalisation, but still it must be admitted that in some ways, the old system made more sense. 12 is a very divisible number. It divides into 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6. 240d can be divided more ways than 100p.
This is why we still divide the day into 24 hours, and a circle into 360 degrees. Being able to divide a number into more intergers is very useful - splitting a £100 restraunt bill three ways shows why. Base 12 systems historically had more social utility.
My parents and grandparents said it was easy to use. But to anyone who wasn't used to it is was extremely confusing.
We still use Imperial in Britain, we're supposed to use metric but we use Imperial by choice. All our signs are in miles :)
That's because we were forced by the EU only to buy and sell goods in decimal units. You can't sell a distance between two towns.
I don't know anyone who still uses imperial for anything apart from road-related things. I haven't heard anyone use pounds or ounces since I was a kid
@@VillaFanDan92 Pints?
@@VillaFanDan92 I use imperial for my weight.
@@VillaFanDan92
I live 25 miles from Cardiff, drink pints, have a car which does 55mpg. I weigh 15 stones and am 5 feet 11 inches tall.
I spent the vast majority of my schooldays and all my adult life under the metric system, which I am completely at ease with, but I don't know anyone, of any age, who gives their weight or height in metric. (I'm sure some people do).
And nobody drinks beer or cider in metric, except in cans or bottles.( Even some of those are 568ml, which is a pint)
He honestly made it sound ridiculously complicated, but it wasn't. You grew up with it. You used it. It worked.
remember my nan telling me that everyone was in uproar because bread and milk had like doubled in price overnight
The abbreviations £ s d stand for the latin names for the coins:
£ is "libra" meaning "pounds" [hence "lb" is used for a pound in weight in the avoirdupois pre-decimal units of weight].
s - stands for "solidi" which means "shillings"
d - standing for "denarii" meaning "pence".
We changed to the decimal system to enable us to join the Common Market, (which later evolved to the EU) I was 15 when it changed. I worked Saturdays in a bakers shop. It didn't seem difficult. At school, we had many tests in mental arithmetic, particularly money. In those days, we had to add up the total of a customer's purchases in our head!
I was also 15 and I was a Saturday girl in Woolworths! 🤓🏴
Decimalisation was not brought in simply to join the Common Market, it was to improve international trade overall. Many Commonwealth countries had already decimalised, so Britain doing so made sense.
@@PedroConejo1939 But it totally failed.
It had nothing to do with the EEC/EU - decimalisation had been considered for over a century. The florin coin was introduced experimentally in 1849 and it was inscribed “One Florin - One Tenth of a Pound”, but Parliament didn’t proceed with the experiment. Canada adopted dollars and cents in 1859, South Africa decimalised with the introduction of the Rand in 1960, and Australia and New Zealand decimalised in 1966 and 1967 respectively (their old Pound became 2 dollars, so the new cent was worth 1.2 old pennies).
@@patrickpowers5995 What totally failed?
The phrase ‘old money’ in conversation means you will be talking in imperial weights and measures. Eg. Milk is sold in litres but in old money we buy 4 pints and the bottles are in 4 pint size.
I still convert decimal currency back into pre decimal currency. I don't know why I do this!
The letter 'd' denoted 'denarius' which is an old Roman name for a small coin. It was one Old Pence (not to be confused with New Pence which is uses the 'p' symbol).
There was also the Farthing which was 1/4d but it went out of use before decimalisation come in.
The Royal Mint definition: "Legal tender has a very narrow and technical meaning in the settlement of debts. It means that a debtor cannot successfully be sued for non-payment if he pays into court in legal tender. It does not mean that any ordinary transaction has to take place in legal tender or only within the amount denominated by the legislation. Both parties are free to agree to accept any form of payment whether legal tender or otherwise according to their wishes. In order to comply with the very strict rules governing an actual legal tender it is necessary, for example, actually to offer the exact amount due because no change can be demanded." Crown coins are still technically legal tender but shops will not accept them, £5 (Crown) any amount . 25 Pence (Five Shillings) up to the amount of £10, we also have 25p (Crown) - for any amount not exceeding £10, £20, £50, £100 coin too. yes can be used for debt, or even a fuel station if no signs saying they only accept, as fuel becomes yours as soon as it measured out so becomes a debt so fuel station cannot refuse it as if they do they have no other option to recover so you get free fuel if they throw coins back at you, or to clear any debt. some old money can be used in day to day stuff but not much, fuels one them as we pump first then pay. lets not forget the limited special coins have a value of there own the metal they made from. Pre-1920 Shillings are made of sterling silver (92.5% pure silver). Shillings issued between 1920 and 1946 contain 50% silver. However, if your Shilling was minted from 1947 onwards it is made of cupronickel and is therefore less valuable.. better than today's money plastic is worthless, or coins not worth what they should be as cheaper materials used. in some ways going back to using real silver and gold but keeping the £ system best for all just make the £ coins from metals what have a true value
The “Guinea” was actually a coin. It was called Guinea, as the gold came from British Guinea. The coin was meant to be a new £1 coin worth 20 shillings. However, the price of gold increased shortly after the coin was introduced, resulting in the coin being worth £1 1 shilling or 21 shillings. The coin itself was withdrawn relatively quickly, but the Guinea as a currency unit lasted until decimalisation in the form of professional fees. For example, lawyers and accountants would bill their time in Guineas.
Our pre-decimal currency was called and abreviated to £ (L), S,D. Nothing to do with drugs but latin for:Libra,Solidus and Denarius - Pound, Shillings and Pence
When I was a student I worked in a store during vacations and I could always add up faster in old money than the electronic till could. However, I was told not to tell the customer how much to pay until the till had finished because I'd have to pay for any mistakes. When the till went wrong I asked if it would pay me but no luck!
We still use a mix of Imperial and Metric and I can use one just as easily as the other. In fact I tell my younger relatives that I am bicubic, bitemperate, and bicalculable. 😁
My mum would go back to this system tomorrow if she could. After years working in retail she missed it and says the cost of everything went up with decimal currency.
The farthing (a quarter of a penny) was legal tender, until 1960. The ten bob note was legal tender until 1970, and was replaced by the fifty pence piece.
The oldest used currency in the World is the British Pound being about 1, 200 years old. Also ancient is the English Penny.. Quote: "The first English penny was introduced around 735 by King Offa of Mercia". 🏴🇬🇧🇺🇸
Pounds , shillings and pence was also as known as LSD which stood for Librum, Solidus and Derarius because,i believe, it was based on the Romans division of a pound of silver into 240 denari.
When in my early years I was a milkman. In the early hours and dark on a Friday it would be pay the bill time and it became very challenging indeed. No calculators then, all done on paper and in the head. He missed the 10 shilling note. 1D is 1 Pence.
We in Britain uses the phrase ‘that’s X in old money’, about just about anything.
Ah those were the days! Great fun to see visitors from overseas battle with its weirdness!
I worked at a company that had a 200 page priced catalogue and at the tender age of 20 was responsible for converting all the prices from pounds, shillings and pence to the new decimal currency. It took me years after to stop automatically converting backwards to the old £sd!
In shops all over the country many prices were 'rounded up' to the nearest 5 new pence, the old shilling, a somewhat hidden inflationary action. As already mentioned, the old 240 pence to the pound gave much more flexibility than the 'new' currency.
This is interesting. I worked in an office with mechanical calculators using base 10. We had to convert Lsd to decimal “on the fly” to punch in the figures. It got a bit borderline, over 10d. There was a very impressive chap in the next office who could add columns of Lsd in total in his head where we all had to do it a column at a time d, then s and finally L.
Decimal day was 15 February 1971 it had been planned for several years. 1d comes from the Roman denarius.
One interesting thing about the old system is that, with 240 pence, you could split a £1 evenly between three people, which you can't do now.
An old pound of 240 pennies could be split evenly between 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, and 12 people, even more up to 240 people, more if you used halfpennies and farthings.
Great reaction Steve. I grew up with the 'old money' it was no problem because of course we knew no difference! All I will say is we had to be good at mental arithmetic in those days, especially shop workers in the days before 'automatic tills' and bar staff in pubs were amazing taking orders for several drinks and adding the total in their heads as they went along !! ..... most people were not too keen at the start of the 'change over' to decimal ;-)
I don't know about Ireland, but using different currencies is common on the mainland of Europe. For example, Switzerland is a little island of Swiss Francs in a sea of Euros.... a lot of shops in Switzerland display the prices for both currencies and can accept both at the till. If you pay by card in a different currency from what you've paid into the bank it converts automatically when it's taken out, but the exchange rates aren't always a good deal. One supermarket I used to go into in Italy still displayed their prices in Lira (with the Euro price in tiny tiny print) years after the currency had become defunct lol.
Pre-decimal currency was in fact very beneficial for children's education. It helped with practicing their mental arithmetic and kept them
informed about British history, as coins featuring 6 monarchs dating back over100 years to Queen Victoria were in regular everyday use
I remember getting a silver sixpence for my daily pocket money, and 2 silver half crowns for five days school dinner money. When school dinners cost one shilling per day. Later I used to get a silver half crown every day. which was six pence pocket money, 2 x sixpence bus fares and one shilling for dinner money. For my sixpence pocket money I used to buy a comic for thruppence and thruppeny worth of sweets.
If you think British pre-decimal currency was stupid, take a 100p pound and see how many numbers you can divide it with, getting whole numbers.
Now do the same with a pound worth 240p.
240 is a pseudoperfect number.
240d = £1
½ = 120d = One *10 Shilling* Note
⅓ = 80d = 6/8
¼ = 60d = 5s = One *Crown*
⅕ = 48d = 4s
⅙ = 40d = 3/4
⅛ = 30d = 2/6 = One *Half Crown*
¹/¹⁰ = 24d = 2s = One *Florin*
¹/¹² = 20d = 1/8
¹/¹⁵ = 16d = 1/4
¹/¹⁶ = 15d = 1/3
¹/²⁰ = 12d = One *Shilling*
¹/²⁴ = 10d
¹/³⁰ = 8d
¹/⁴⁰ = 6d = One *Sixpence*
¹/⁴⁸ = 5d
¹/⁶⁰ = 4d
¹/⁸⁰ = 3d = One *Threepence*
¹/¹²⁰ = 2d
¹/²⁴⁰ = ONE *PENNY*
_and we're still not done yet:_
¹/⁴⁸⁰ = ½d = One *Halfpenny*
¹/⁹⁶⁰ = ¼d = One *Farthing*
How's that for divisible?
*Now for Decimal*
*_100p = £1_*
½ = *50p*
⅓ = 33.3p _That's not happening_
¼ = *25p* _Okay, we're back on track._
⅕ = *20p* _Yeah, alright._
⅙ = 16.6p _Uh-oh. Not again._
⅛ = 12.5p _If only we still had the Halfpenny_
¹/¹⁰ = *10p* _There we go. That's what decimal is all about. 10s_
¹/¹² = 8.33p _Huh?_
¹/¹⁵ = 6.66p _Is it?_
¹/¹⁶ = 6.25p _Where's a Farthing when you need one?_
¹/²⁰ = *5p* _Hey, a Shilling_
¹/²⁵ = 4p
¹/⁵⁰ = *2p*
¹/¹⁰⁰ = *1p*
Are we sure the decimal system was less complicated?
I'm really starting to realise that base-10 is actually kind of clunky.
Boomer here. I was only a kid when the transition happened, so I found it all pretty exciting, but I do recall older people being freaked out by it and opposed to the whole thing. I'll agree with others who have said the old system didn't seem hard when that was all we knew - you just got used to it. My only regret is that we don't seem to have tried as hard as our forbears to come up with friendly-sounding slang terms for our decimal currency. I hate "pee" for "penny", and just repeating numbers as names is pretty dull. One nickname they had for a crown (not mentioned in the video) was "dollar", and so half a crown was "half a dollar", based on the long-standing equivalent value in US dollars for those coins.
Another consequence of decimalisation was the introduction of the phrase "in old money" to the language, which you'll still often hear for anyone recalling an obsolete or fondly recalled past custom. Initially the meaning was obvious (an in-the-head conversion of a current price to the pre-decimal units), but it's used for all manner of other circumstances too. For instance, weather forecasters give temperatures in Celsius now, but if they want to convert to Fahrenheit for emphasis they'll often say "tomorrow will be a scorcher -- 39 degrees, or 102 in old money".
Brits generally are frequent visitors to countries using the Euro and the value of the Euro/Pound are now relatively close so switching between the two if you're hopping back and forth between N.Ireland and the Republic is simple. Especially now that the vast majority of transactions are carried out with a card payment (the only time I use cash is at the barbers!) and theres little need to physically have the coins in your pocket. I imagine its much the same for US citizens living along the Canadian or Mexican borders.
I used to like looking through the change looking for old kings when I was little
I used to look for those with Queen Victoria on them . I still have a selection of the old coins with different monarchs on them.
Republic of Ireland used to use the Punt, but now use the Euro since they aligned with the one currency EU system.
I have a set of in circulation coins from the year of my birth, (1953) - farthing,half penny, penny, thruppence (three pence), six pence, 2 x 1 shilling (one English and one Scottish on the tails side), florin, and half crown. I can still remember at school doing mental arithmetic and spelling exercises, which often included money (I was crap at the spelling as I have mild dyslexia which runs in the family) - I was pretty damn good at the sums involving money,by the time I was 7 or 8, I didn't want anyone swindling me out of my pocket money.
It's also noteworthy that there are 240 pennyweights in a pound (Troy)
So when a pound was literally a pound of silver, the penny was literally 1pwt of silver
🤦🤯 im so glad it was simplified! Phew! I still had trouble understanding and that was very well explained 😳
It was on 14 February 1966 that Australia started to use decimal currency - the dollars and cents that we know today. Peace out. How long has Australia used metric?
Between 1960 and 1988 Australia adopted the SI units. In 1970 the Australian parliament passed the metric conversion act, and the Australian building trades made it the standard in 1974. (Note that to avoid confusion builders do not use centimetres, but rather record lengths in millimetres or in metres.) Peace out.
Lindybiegh has an excellent video on this topic, and it did make a lot of sense as twelve divides by more numbers than 10. This is especially important when trying to slit things 3 or 6 ways.
It wasn’t as bad as you think due to the divisibility of 12, 1,2,3,4 and 6. Obviously, people back then were much better at fractions. It also made sense that imperial measurements also used more divisible bases than 10, like the inch/foot, the ounce/pound/stone/hundredweight/ton, etc
In Australia we changed over to decimal on the 14th February, 1966
Republic of Ireland uses the euro! When I was young, the whole of the island of Ireland used British and Irish coins and notes without a problem, as both currencies had parity for years and years,until one fine day in the late 1970’s the Irish Punt (pound) was devalued overnight!! You’ve never seen so many Northern Irish people trying to offload their “foreign “ currency!!! The Punt never again made parity with the pound before it was replaced with the euro.
Until decimalisation, £sd (or Lsd) was commonly thought of as pounds, shillings and pence, but it stood for _librae, solidi_ and _denari._ This was a Roman system (Carolingian monetary system) of money common throughout Europe for over a thousand years. So the _d._ represents pennies. Funny enough, _denari_ means tens or one-tenth in Latin even though it worked in base 12.
In the clip, the narrator appears to try to make an admittedly complex system even more complex: For instance, in the list of English coinage (apart from the made-up ones) many of them had dropped from use and/or were not used at the same time as others. And the Scottish coins listed are mostly foreign coins commonly used for trade because there was not a strong central government able to control coinage and minting.
The Guinea was a gold coin weighing a quarter of an ounce and had a face value of one pound sterling. However, because the price of gold fluctuated it was abolished in 1816. The Guinea became a purely notional price of 21 shillings, or one pound plus 5% so it was used by auctioneers, and professionals as a way of collecting commission: If you sold a piece of art at an auction and it went for 50 Guineas, you would receive £50, the buyer would pay £52.10s (£52.50p in decimal) and the auctioneer would receive £2. 10s ((£2.50p decimal.) The Crown was not used as a negotiable coin from the very early 19th century, although commemorative Crowns were (and still are) struck.
I'm not really, really old, I was thirteen when the UK decimalised, but it didn't seem like a complex system (I worked at the weekends in a shop from the age of eleven.) It's true that a lot more mental arithmetic was needed, but almost everyone could do mental arithmetic. Now most people find it hard to calculate in their heads, and why should we given all the technology we have at hand. One more thing, about nicknames for coins, my favourite is "half a dollar" which was half-a-crown (2/6) or 12.5p in decimal. How things have changed.
I remember as a kid in the 80's always finding half pennies on the ground where ppl just threw them away
when I was a kid in the 80s , we still had 1/2p coins and also lots of sixpences floating around, because they were the same size as the new 5p coins, and shop keepers still accepted sixpences as 5ps
Wasn't an old sixpence equivalent to 2.5 new pence? I do remember it hanging on in there, that's for sure.
Lindybeige ha the best video on this. It's very long, but well worth watching. It also explains why Imperial is just a more human system of measurements than metric is.
It's worth mentioning that he made a mistake or two in that otherwise excellent video, which he admitted to.
@@Otacatapetl Even so, he explains the system in a much more unbiased way. I'm not a fan how pro-metric/decimalisation people always say bad things about the imperial system for no reason other than a lack of understanding. Lloyd just has a better way of explaining it all because he understands both systems well enough.
I was 8 years old in 1971. I can remember when we changed to pounds and pence. I was so glad, as I couldn't get my head around the old money.
Because you grew up with it, it was really easy to use. In the early years of school when you learnt your multiplication tables you learnt from 1 to 12. So you were taught the necessary skills from an early age.
In the video he missed out the 10 shilling note (half a pound) so using all available coinage the sum he presented was wrong.
It is worth noting that elements of the system still exist in the horse racing world. Horses are still sold in guineas. There is also a betting odd of 100/30 which is much harder to work out what you have won (assuming your horse or dog wins) in decimal than is is in the old £sd.
Fun fact the old £sd used to be known as LSD so in 1960's Britain LSD could have two very different meanings.
The 'd' for old pence comes from the Roman empire 'denari' and the £ sign is a stylised 'L' for 'Livre' all Roman currency (and they left 1600 years ago). The Republic of Ireland changed twice: to decimalise the 'punt' (pound) then to change to the Euro at a later date. They missed out 2 18th century coins: the 'noble' and 'double noble' worth 6s/8d and 13s/4d which seems an odd amount until you multiply a 'noble' by 3 and that equals £1. You nearly got the reason for a 'guinea': in horse trading/auctions, the commission was 5%, so if you bid £20 you would pay 20 guineas. I own an Elizabeth the 1st sixpence which is solid silver, worth £200 today and also a load of pre-decimal coins worth not a lot as so many people saved them. Brian May of Queen uses an old sixpence as a plectrum.
It's denarius and librum. Plurals are denarii and libra. They're Latin.
It's also why lb is a pound in weight.
They said prices wouldn’t go up , but they did, as shops rounded up instead of rounding down. Regards JH