I’m 64 and have lived in England all my life.
What follows is to the best of my memory
When I was a lad (say early 60s), we had a pound note. This was divided into:
2 ten shilling notes (known as ‘ten bob’’)
and various coins
8 half-crowns (silver, circular, large)
20 shillings (silver, circular, medium)
40 sixpences (silver, circular, small - thus two sixpences made a shilling)
80 threepenny bits (yellow, 12 edges, small)
120 twopences (bronze, circular, large)
240 pennies (bronze, circular, medium)
480 halfpennies (bronze, circular, small)
960 farthings (bronze, circular, very small)
‘Tuppence’ was a frequently used word for a single twopence coin.
There could have been a ‘Crown’, but I don’t remember it.
I think my pocket money was about a shilling a week - or six tuppences.
(I remember saving for about 10 weeks to buy something costing 50 pence.)
You could buy several sweets with tuppence (gobstoppers, sherbet lemons come to mind),
or go on a short bus journey.
I’m not sure how much a cinema ticket cost - I would guess about a shilling (6 tuppences.)
I expect you could buy a **comic **(The Beano) for tuppence.
The list leaves out the florin, equal to 2 shillings. Since there were 10 florins to the pound, this was a first step towards decimalisation, and florins could be used as 10p coins after decimalisation, just as shillings could be used as 5p coins.
I lived in England 1947-1955 and 1961, and I don’t think I ever saw a 2 penny (2d) coin.
Decimal is much easier for calculating, but twelve is easier for measurement tools, as it can be divided by so many numbers, every thing under it but 5 & 7 & 11.
As GreenWyvern said, a bob was a shilling. Now, it’s occasionally used for a pound, though it’s not very common in my experience. Quid would be more usual.
Technically £1 should worth much more than a shilling, which, at decimalisation, was worth 5p, but in terms of purchasing power a modern bob won’t get you as much as a good old bob.
It gets stranger - Marks and Guineas.
If we go back further in time to the 15th, 16th, and 17th century, we often see what seem at first sight to be strange uneven amounts, such as:
£6 13s 4d
£1 6s 8d
These are actually exact amounts in ‘Marks’ - a similar name to the old German currency.
1 Mark = £⅔ (two thirds of a Pound)
So 1 Mark = 13s 4d
Half a Mark, or one third of a Pound, was 6s 8d.
A Mark was a concept, not an actual coin, or actual currency. So if you left someone 10 Marks in a will, you would denominate it in legal currency as £6 13s 4d.
The guinea was £1 and 1s, or 21s.
Amounts for prizes, for professional fees of doctors or lawyers, and for art work, were often given in guineas. The idea was that there was a ‘bonus’ on top of the number of pounds. There were actual guinea coins (as well as ‘sovereign’ coins equal to £1.)
The advantage of the guinea as a concept was that it was evenly divisible by 7, 14, 21, and 28 - very useful if you were calculating weekly wages from a daily wage.
The guinea as a currency concept still survives in livestock and racehorse auctions. The purchaser pays in guineas ie multiples of £1.05, and the seller receives the same amount of pounds. The auctioneer keeps the difference as commission.
Young schoolboys trained on problems like, “What is 3½% of £5 3s 4d?” Once you’ve learned how to do sums like those, quelling a native uprising is easy.
(The answer is 3s 7.4d, in case you are interested.)
Going a LONG way back, I remember a segment on a game show (I want to say What’s My Line?) where the mystery guest (probably someone like LeCarre) gave the panelists some espionage problems to solve (this was probably around 1964, at the height of the Bond craze). In one, MI5 was trailing a suspected foreign agent masquerading as an Englishman in London. It went something like this:
Mr X stopped at a tobacconist, bought a box of Gitanes and a copy of The Times, and counted out his money very slowly. He stopped at a fish-and-chips shop for lunch, and ate the fish but left the chips. There was a light sprinkle outside, but he didn’t bother unfolding his umbrella. He then stopped at a curb [kerb], looked over his left shoulder and then his right, and crossed the street. He was arrested as he was returning to work at the Foreign Office that afternoon.
Question: What was the tipoff that he was an agent?
He didn’t cross the street like an Englishman. In the UK, they drive on the left side of the road, so if Mr X was indeed English, he would have automatically looked over his right shoulder first.
