No, Colibri has the right answer there. In the 60s and 70s there was a fixed exchange rate between the pound and dollar which was £1 = $2.40.
As an aside (mild hijack), I found it surprisingly easy to shift from US$ to English money. Back in 1970 I spend a month in Nigeria, where at that time all the money was pounds, shillings, and pence. It took only a matter of a few days before I was thinking in English monetary terms. And then, upon returning to the US, I found myself automatically converting from US money to English money to see how much things really cost.
Far out ! Or, possibly, far back 
A three-pence coin was also a ‘threppeny bender’ and a sixpence ‘spratt’ as in something costing half a crown was 2/6 therefore ‘two and a spratt’
There were crown coins, I had a few as a kid. They were probably commemorative, coronation possibly, but still exchangeable for face value.
I’m so old that I remember having a farthing (had a picture of a wren on it, I think) and a ‘threepenny bit’ (yellow with funny straight sides.)
Farthings did indeed have a wren on them. I regularly received pocket money in farthings and ha’penies.
You could buy a ‘Black Jack’ (chewy sweet) for a farthing each.
What about “Tuppence”?
Agatha Christie had a detective character whose nickname was Tuppence. In one book, one of the clues that a letter supposedly from her was a forgery was the fact that the forger had spelled the signature as “Twopence” rather than “Tuppence.”
Also, from Mary Poppins - “Feed the birds, tuppence a bag”
I also made a mistake - A ‘tenner’ was always £10. Ten shillings was a ‘ten bob note’ or ‘arf a bar’
I had at some point gotten the idea that a ‘bob’ was, post-decimalization, used for a pound. Was I wrong, or did it, in fact, shift like that?
You were wrong. I’ve never heard “bob” used to mean a pound. It was always a shilling.
I wonder where my brain took that wrong turn, then…
Yes - that’s exactly what I meant to say. So since there were 240 pennies in a £1, a British penny was equal to a US cent. It follows that 2 bob, would have been roughly equal to a quarter (actually 24¢).
Another slang term is ‘quid’ equal to a pound. On my trip to the UK recently I noticed that it’s the same in the singular and plural - 1 quid, 2 quid, 3 quid, et cetera. I could have misheard though.
That is correct. The expected plural, ‘quids’, is not used. Also it is not uncommon to hear the singular ‘pound’ used in a similar way as in “ere mate, that dodgy motor is gonna cost you five hundred pound”, so maybe that is why we do the same with the word quid.
I remember them too, although farthings were no longer legal tender by the time I might have used any!There were still some lying about the house though.
But I do happen to have a drawer with maybe a couple of quid’s worth of old currency in it (mainly kept by my late mother for no particular purpose and found when I had to clear the house). Thrupennies are probably smaller than you remember them being - I was slightly surprised when I just looked at one…
And, for no particular reason, I just decided to weigh a shilling’s worth of pennies and found that 12 fairly well worn pennies weigh 109 grams, or 3.84 oz. A real weight in your pocket if you had more than a few, and may well help to explain the number of times the pockets n my shorts needed repaired when i was growing up in the 60s!
Most of what I have is coppers (pennies and ha’pennies, at least one farthing) but also some silver; the odd thrupennny bit, sixpences, a florin or two, some half crowns and several commorative crowns (although those are all post-decimal)
It’s also used far more often than pounds. Pounds is used in formal contexts, so it’s what you’ll hear on the news, but in real life it’s more common to use quid. And pennies are similarly nearly always referred to as p. 2p, not two pence.
That’s for current money, not pre-decimalisation, where a penny was d, a shilling was s and a pound was l. LSD, going from highest to lowest (libra, solidus, denarius). You can still see it on the backs of, say, old secondhand books - 2s 4d, for example.
You very occasionally still get an old sixpence given to you in change because it’s the same size as a modern 5p coin. Very, very occasionally, but it’s happened to me at least three times.
@MrAtoz - I think the money term tuppence was usually still spelt twopence. Tuppence’s name wasn’t spelt that way, but that’s why the person made that mistake. Thruppence was the pronunciation of threepence, but usually still written as threepence, and ha’penny (said like hay-pny) was usually spelt halfpenny. They weren’t exactly slang, because they were universal across classes.
There are probably counter-examples where writers are approximating the sounds of real speech but in general, it’s just the name Mainwaring, which is pronounced mannering but doesn’t change its spelling.
Or indeed “nicker”.
And then there are all the slang terms for different quantities of pounds, like “monkey”, “pony” and so on (though might that be a purely London thing).
Most of the Cockney money terms are obsolete now or only used in an ironic way. It’s a shame, really, they’re beautiful.
I better be careful here - this may be a regional thing*. But back when there was any use for a single penny, you would here people use the plural when they were talking about one penny; as in “Have you got one pence? You’re one pence short.”
This adds nothing to the debate, but it’s another example of imprecision about singular and plural when it comes to currency.
j
-
- North west
One joke was that when the pound coin was introduced, someone suggested it be called a “Thatcher” - “because it’s thick and brassy and thinks it’s a sovereign.”