General Chat

It was on this day in 1971 that we went decimal. Shillings went the way of the dinosaur. People moaned about the pound being devalued (from 240 pence to 100 pence). But the new system is much easier to use, isn't it?
Who here misses the days of LSD?

I remember it well I was 20 and remember going to the shops for the first time has a new mum very strange but would not go back to LSD

It wasn't easy to use it was a right bag of nails. For men the huge heavy coins were a sure fire way to ruin clothes. OTOH very good for people who looked down the back of sofas ... Also good for robbing foreign tourists.

coins 1/4d 1/2d 1d 3d 1s 2s 2s 6d + maundy money
huge notes 10s £1 £ 5 £ 10
... what a nonsense!
I still have a bagful of silver 3d which we use at Christmas.

For whatever reason even after the currency going decimal we had a 1/2p for a while.

The government wanted the new coins to be known as "new pence" but the term "pee" stuck which was pretty accurate considering the drop in buying power of the £ in yr pocket since 1971.

Taken together with the rest of the "imperial" system it made school mathematics a nightmare which the subject has never really recovered from.

libra solidus denarius ... rest in peace you are not missed

I have a bag of 5 p's for parking meters

It was a way of ripping off the motoring public..........

a rise per litre is 41/2 times that per gallon

a couple of p/litre rise doesn't seem much until you relate the cost per gallon,,

I miss the days of pounds , shillings and pence , not so much because of the currency but just because those days where my happy carefree childhood :-)
I remember handing over my dinner money at school in old money and getting the strange , shiney new coins back as change :-0

How long did it take for all the old money to disappear from the system ? I seem to recall that sixpences hung around for quite a few years but the beloved threepenny bit didn't ? :-S

I worked in a Bank then and for weeks before we had to do practice tests using the new coins so we would be familiar with them. The 15th was a Monday and on the Friday before all banks were closed so they could update the accounts. It seems unbelievable now but this was pre- computers and the accounts were still added up in ledgers and we had to go through every one of the accounts by hand converting the balances to decimal.

There is another thread on this subject - entitled 'D Day'.

The other thread is about the conversion day to the decimalisation of our currency, Dermot :-D . From the simplicity of 4 farthings to a 3d bit, 6 ha'pennies to a shilling and 4 groats to a guinea (pig?).

This thread is presumably about LSD - which you and I probably avoided altogether ;-). Otherwise, how on earth would we ever have coped with the imperial system?

I remember the day well, it was the opening of a new hotel and restaurant in my home city, where I had returned from a relationship break up in Cambridge. I needed a job and was relieved to be chosen as one of ten staff from a total of 45 applicants. Those were the days, there would probably have been 450 applicants these days lol What with learning the menus and the layout of the restaurant and getting to grips with decimals it was a steep learning curve. I had always done waitressing etc as well as a day job of office work but this was full time work, split shifts for several days then two or three days off - took some getting used to but I enjoyed it and made new friends. Sadly the Quarterdeck bar/restaurant part that I worked in was closed down after about 18 months to add more bedrooms to the hotel and move the restaurant into the bigger posh restaurant 'below decks'

Happy memories tho and thinking of Decimal Day always reminds me of the time I spent in the Hotel Nelson.

Lizx

Like Janet I worked in a bank and remember it well. I think we were closed Thursday 11th too - something to do with getting all the cheques paid in up to Wednesday processed through the clearing system and on to the customers ledgers.

We weren't yet computerised but had mechanised ledgers which were updated on terminals the size of a tea chest. A stop gap measure before the terminals were eventually connected to the computer system.

Conversion was done by feeding each customer ledger into the terminal and keying in the lsd balance. It then converted it and printed the new decimal balance. Deposit accounts were still hand written in great big Kalamazoo binders and had to be converted by hand.

Oh, Kalamazoo binders, that rings a bell with me from way back........


Lizx

I was teaching Maths at the time and we had been practising for some time with plastic coins. Once they got used to the change, it certainly made the sums easier for them