>>going digital? I thought it was going decimal. Posted by pulykamell
In case you needed more of a reply… People (usually) have ten fingers (or digits) on their hands, so things based on counting in powers of ten is considered digital.
My father was working in the bank at the time and reckoned that if you were throwing money around all day (Banker, Shop assistant etc) the pre-decimal system wasn’t hard to work with at all. Would a calculator designed to deal with £ s d really be such an awesomely complex device?
Seeing this film at the equally impressionable age of 5 made me wonder what was wrong with the kid. Its a bank, that’s where you put the money, screw the old woman and her bloody pidgeons!
The old half-penny was generally pronounced ha’pence but the ‘h’ was almost silent.The last issue of those had a sailing ship (tea-clipper perhaps?)on the reverse side.
I remember the last of the farthings or quarter pennies, the last of which had a European Robin on the reverse side, the were almost useless as currency by the time they were discontinued and one used to find them on the ground quite often, they were not even worth the trouble of picking them up when dropped, the only thing I could remember that you could buy with them were small chewy sweets (or candy in deferance to US posters) called Blackjacks and Fruit Salads which were eight a penny or two for a farthing.
The threepence piece was a scuffed brass sort of colour, had a portcullis on one side and I think it had twelve flat edges, which made it possible to stand them vertically edge on edge, in fact, I believe there was a world record for this feat and there were regular articles on childrens tv of boy Scouts trying to outdo it.
I’ll bet that brings back a nostalgic smile to Brit posters of a certain age.
There was a small silver disc threepence piece before that brassy looking one but it had already gone out of circulation before I had the chance to spend one but I had an 1876 one and it had remained almost unchanged from then for a good 70 years or so, I wish I knew what happened to that coin.
The most charismatic coin for me would have to be the jolly old sixpence, everything was priced so many shillings and sixpence, virtually every vending machine, pay phones, pinball tables, used them, they were very small compared to other coins and yet a handful of them represented quite a lot of purchasing power, you could hold ten shillings worth of sixpences in your hand easily, try that with pennies.
Most children got their pocket money in sixpences and you could get small dispensers to hold your sixpences in.
Sailor I well remember those pennies with kings on them from, what seemed to my youthful mind, eras of ancient history with the fine detailing worn almost smooth from many decades of use.There were coins around with Victoria on them, each coin was almost a small time capsule in itself and gave a sense of continuity with the past, a national identity even, and the way prices were quoted in old magazines, encyclopaedia and the tin advertising plates that had been left from generations ago was the same.
Those big old coins had a solidity and permanence about them which was kind of reassuring, you could go into a pub and play shove ha’penny using the same coins as had been done since your great-grandfathers day on a slate playing board with the gradations marked out exactly as he would have seen it.
::::::sigh::::::
An interesting story about that one, told by one of the Guinness Book of Records people (Norris McWhirter, maybe):
A chap wrote to say that he had broken the record, by stacking 13 thruppences edge-on. He had a photo to prove it. The Guinness folks went to investigate, and asked if he had a photo showing a stack of twelve (the standing record was 11). The chap admitted he didn’t, and further admitted that he had faked the photo by laying carpet on the ceiling, nailing a coffee-table upside-down to the ceiling, and hanging 13 thruppences on a strip of sellotape from the coffee table.
Casdave, those pennies inspired the same feelings in me. It was like you were looking at history. Yeah, I also remember the tiny sixpences and other coins. But thrupence was what something cost, the name of the coin was a thrupenny bit. Wasn’t it like that?
I probably have a bunch of these different coins at my other home. Next time I go (in a few months) I’ll check and I’ll scan them so I can keep the scans in my computer.