Who remembers (and misses) the old money?

My father used to waffle on about the benefits of an infinitely divisible base 12 unit of measurement (imperial). He also loved Pounds, Shillings and pence for the same reason.
I never got to use anything other than decimal money and I'm grateful for that. Fractional number systems are a massive pain in the arse when it comes to the math. Metric should be world-universal at this point in our development.

Also, haven't used real money much since COVID. I have a 10'er in my phone case for emergencies but genuinely don't need it. Even beggars have tap-n-go these days.
 
Bill Walker said:
Come on you FOCs, I miss the interesting old money. It had character and a certain charm..... didn't it?

Just as the pound had nicknames—e.g., a quid—so a shilling was a bob. A single record might cost six bob [30p]. Ten shillings [50p] was ten bob. £1 10s [£1.50] could be written as 30s and said as thirty bob. Coins took on these and other nicknames: the 3d was a threppence or thruppence, the 6d (sixpence) was a tanner, two shillings two bob, and the large silver coin worth two and six (2s 6d) was half a crown or a half-crown. Two pence (2d) was known as tuppence, and fractions of a penny were known as the ha’penny (half-penny) and farthing (quarter of a penny, phased out in 1960). Something costing just pennies—e.g., 4d—would be known as four penn’orth, short for “four pennies worth.”
There were several ways of writing shillings and pence, so eight and six could be 8s 6d or 8/6 or even 8/6d.

More interesting than this multiples of ten boring crap. :)
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The 20th century monarchs were in your pocket.
Divide £23-4-7d by 4/9d.
8/6d in change weighed a ton.
The old fiver folded in three and was white.
Entry to the Kippax was 3/- or 1/6 for juniors.
No, I don’t remember it at all.
 
I don’t really remember pre decimalisation. But I do remember those tiny little silver coins. Were they called a sixpence? But they were actually 2 1/2p I think.

They stick in my mind because they were the price of an ice cream.

So did they keep some imperial coins in circulation, post decimalisation for some reason? I’m thinking they must have done. Because I wouldn’t have been mincing around at the ice cream truck on my own before 1971.
 
gordondaviesmoustache said:
Not sure who the ‘they’ is but metric is far more sensible and practical than imperial.

You say ‘we’ to those three things but that’s far from correct. I’d say most people I know weigh themselves in kilos. Height and miles for travelling I’ll grant you are fairly ubiquitous, but not universal. Plus there are many things that are overwhelmingly metric. Weight of goods in shops and temperature both spring to mind.

It’s actually a fairly nuanced picture, so to say it never really left us has to be, in part at least, incorrect.
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I'd say the majority of people do still think in imperial, I take your last point that there will be some instances where the metric measurements have taken hold but in the main I don't see people talking in KG's, Kilometers,and metric in general.

As mentioned upstream we buy milk and beer in pints and we buy TV's in inches, I'm 6 foot 2 and weigh 12 and a half stone. So I'd safely say that in normal speak imperial is still with us colloquially and because it is written into everyday speak it's pretty hard to shift.

As for the "They" ? Quite simply the people who decided it needed to change. Ohhh I am not for one minute saying that the imperial system was easier and I do agree that the decimalisation of business and commerce had to change but that doesn't mean that culture wasn't part of our culture and still is.

The educated elite of society wrote Latin but it was never the language of England, officially yes but never the norm.
 
Mr Grumpy said:
Also, haven't used real money much since COVID. I have a 10'er in my phone case for emergencies but genuinely don't need it. Even beggars have tap-n-go these days.
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The last time I tapped n' went was the Forest match, wont be long until it's all on the mobile phones anyway and then onto the mark of the beast and a barcode tattooed onto the back of your freshly shaved head :)
 
mexico1970 said:
We give our weight in imperial
We give our height in imperial
We still converse in miles and not kilometers

It never really left us even though they tried to erase it from the way we think or do business.
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Not really, I’m 62 and can honestly say I never use imperial measurements ,other than miles, for the simple reason I have long forgotten how they work,probably never knew as don’t remember learning them , and whether the measurements are split ito 8 or 12s ,14s 16s. When I go in my butchers and hear old people asking for X ounces of this or a pound of that I haven't the faintest idea what they are getting.
 
blueparrot said:
Not really, I’m 62 and can honestly say I never use imperial measurements ,other than miles, for the simple reason I have long forgotten how they work,probably never knew as don’t remember learning them , and whether the measurements are split ito 8 or 12s ,14s 16s. When I go in my butchers and hear old people asking for X ounces of this or a pound of that I haven't the faintest idea what they are getting.
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We do use miles though on our road signs and we use MPH for speed limits, it's not about splitting measurements it's about the way we describe things.

This shit hasn't really removed imperial and it wont, people still know what a ten bob bit is even if they have never seen a ten bob note.
 
It's pretty ridiculous to have a mixed system, and it reflects people's fear of change.

If we changed road distances to kilometres, who, honestly, would give a fuck? I wouldn't.

The metric system is far more rational and makes calculations easy. Some people would have us shitting in buckets, because that's how it 'used to be'.
 
BrianW said:
It's pretty ridiculous to have a mixed system, and it reflects people's fear of change.

If we changed road distances to kilometres, who, honestly, would give a fuck? I wouldn't.

The metric system is far more rational and makes calculations easy. Some people would have us shitting in buckets, because that's how it 'used to be'.
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That's North West Waters job and very good they are at doing it too :)
 
mexico1970 said:
We do use miles though on our road signs and we use MPH for speed limits, it's not about splitting measurements it's about the way we describe things.

This shit hasn't really removed imperial and it wont, people still know what a ten bob bit is even if they have never seen a ten bob note.
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I don’t know what 10 bob is or even what colour it was, means nothing to me, and to my children you may as well be speaking latin.Decimal is vastly superior to imperial which is a shit system. Of course it’s about splitting them and making the calculation of things easier.Describing things in imperial is just stuck in the past nonsense.Yes we still use miles, though we should have changed to Km when we went decimal.Think Australia just decimalised everything and that’s the right move.
 
blueparrot said:
I don’t know what 10 bob is or even what colour it was, means nothing to me, and to my children you may as well be speaking latin.Decimal is vastly superior to imperial which is a shit system. Of course it’s about splitting them and making the calculation of things easier.Describing things in imperial is just stuck in the past nonsense.Yes we still use miles, though we should have changed to Km when we went decimal.Think Australia just decimalised everything and that’s the right move.
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What I am saying is that it is STILL here, whether you prefer it or not isn't the question. The reason why it is still here is because it is woven into our language it's part of our culture it's obviously hard to shift.

Somewhere in the tides of time there were people who spoke Briton and some of those people complained that speaking Briton wasn't moving with the times so there was a concerted effort by the state to make the children speak English.

Now of course they are trying to reverse that and get Welsh people speaking their mother tongue which doesn't fit in with modern life because it is part of their culture and is therefore important,
 
Ashton Moss Messi said:
So just 3, 6, 8 and 12 missing?
Then again, to split 8 ways means splitting 4 ways and then half that. So 8 not a problem.
If you want to split a pound to 3 ways then ask yourself if you really care about the odd penny.
And in the old days did you lose sleep splitting a 19/11 bill 3 ways.

I learned old money and all the imperial measures but decimal much easier.
Don't forget the US still uses imperial measures (the only ones?) and that's enough reason to be metric.
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Their imperial units of volume are/were different from ours.
 
Grassland Blue said:
The first appearance of the 50p piece was in 1969.
The coin was used at the start of the F.A. Cup Final.
(City vs Leicester).
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I've an original ten bob bit knocking around, it's huge compared to the one in circulation now.
The old man used to call the old 10p a Florin? Maybe another name for a half crown?
 
Not yet mentioned, but, apart from the Yanks, who the fuck uses Fahrenheit for temperature any more?
Centigrade is much more sensible.
 
Djibrilshairdo said:
I've an original ten bob bit knocking around, it's huge compared to the one in circulation now.
The old man used to call the old 10p a Florin? Maybe another name for a half crown?
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Florin was 2 shillings mate 24 pence in old money.

A ten bob note looked like this (This is mine).

TEN SHILLINGS note hollom cashier-reverse.jpg
 
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idahoblues said:
I remember my English teacher filling up our ink wells, we were only allowed to use a piece of dowel but we could choose our writing tips, I tell people over here about it and they think I’m full of shit.
I am full of shit however not on this
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We had the old desks with the inkwells built in it but we were given pots of ink and blotting paper.
 
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