Cecil, when did you last pick up a British newspaper and find something advertised in guineas? I’m guessing round about 1969.
I can’t think of any other contemporary usage of the term “guinea” in the monetary sense other than in the worlds of horseracing (where by tradition some races have names like “the 1000 guineas” - presumably once a substantial purse) and livestock auctions.
Before decimalisation in the UK, very grand ladies’ clothes and hat shops gave prices in guineas. Lawyers (and other professionals?) were paid in guineas. “Rank is but the guinea stamp” wrote Robert Burns. The “100 Guineas” is a horse race.
I don’t know about Sotheby’s etc, but I agree that, although certain business DID like to price things in guineas long after guineas had ceased to exist, it wouldn’t have made sense, even when Cecil was writing in 1977, to price something a “only a guinea”. Well, all right, I cannot exactly guarantee that it did not happen, and I do remember larger items being advertised in guineas because pricing something at 100 guineas instead of pounds might just fool people for long enough, but I *really *don’t remember the “only a guinea” thing.
In fact, I think it seemed to me that after decimalisation, one really didn’t see the guinea-price trick any more, at least not in high street shops and not in terms of advertising. (My pocket money did not really let me buy antiques or racehorses, unfortunately). I suppose we were all confused enough with all that new money and the horribly difficult way of counting it.
Or as Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman put it:
Edited to add: Now I wonder, why DID we change to decimal anyway? The old system was a bit mad, but we were sort of used to it. Of course, being at primary school at the time was odd, because the real world money had one set of rules and all the money “sums” at school had the new way.
£sd was a big nuisance for computers and other calculating machines, though, by the time it actually arrived, things were sailing along fairly well.
For whatever it’s worth, I remember that Philishave electric shaver adverts in the Underground ca. 1968-1969 quoted prices in guineas, and I think James Smith (in New Oxford Street) did the same for their umbrellas, shooting sticks, etc..
Yeah, that’s the thing, really. The sneakiness of putting prices in guineas would have been not nearly so widespread by 1977, although we could hardly have expected Cecil to pop over to Britain just for a laugh at our funny, druggily-named money.
And of course having a pet pound-and-five-pee pig never sounded as cute as a guinea pig. (OK, ignorance and all that - I know they are cavies, really).
I sort of miss the cute thrupenny bits and the ha’pennies with a ship on them. And big pennies! Hey I wonder if all the U.K. Dopers should re-start the guinea habit. We could go around superglueing those silly fivepenny pieces to pound coins, as they’re not a whole lot of use for anything else.
When decimalisation first occured in the UK, the term “New Pence” was used. I think they missed a golden opportunity to have a unit of currency named after a country, the “New Guinea”.
For a certain period at the end of the 17th and much of the 18th centuries, while the basic money of account was the pound sterling, the roughly-a-pound coin was the guinea – which was when first minted intended to have £1 in gold content, but fluctuated wildly, getting up to 30 shillings (£1.50) in the wake of the South Sea Bubble before settling down at 21 shilling (£1.05). The guinea was issued from 1660 to 1813; the sovereign (previously from 1489 to 1604) was revived to replace it as a coin valued at one pound, and issued as such from 1817 until 1932, and again from 1957 on, with the tie to the value of one pound sterling no longer valid.
The whole problem was that the relative prices of silver and gold kept changing. (This had been a problem for as long as there had been minted money.) When the new one-pound gold coin was established (frequently known as a “sovereign”), they started putting a little less silver into the silver coins, in the hopes that this would fix the problem of people melting down silver coins every time the price of silver went up, and then chopping up their gold coins into little bits because there were no more silver coins to make change with. By cheating on the value of the silver coins, they were putting in a safety buffer. It worked pretty well for a while, and most of the world adopted the same system, until the huge expenses of WWI and the Great Depression put too much strain on the whole economy. This was what the “gold standard” actually meant – the value of money was based on the gold in the gold coins. The silver coins were worth less than their face value, but, since they were small coins, people trusted the government to cover the difference.
Technically, no, IIRC. Precious metals are measured in Troy ounces, 12 ounces to the pound. Dog pooh (depending on your neighbourhood, I suppose - unless it’s Corgi pooh?) is measured in normal avoirdupois ounces, 16 to a pound. So a pound of feathers or doggie doo weighs more than a pound of gold. It’s just not worth more…
And we can’t pass up the joke about the name for the one-pound coin. Someone suggested it be called the “Thatcher” because it’s thick and brassy and thinks it’s a sovereign.
I just came in to say that I was disappointed that Cecil didn’t mention the reason that solicitors (and some other professions) continued to charge in guineas long after they were effectively obsolete - they got an extra 5%!
