Hey, we sang that back in sixth grade! 
*I’ve got sixpence to spend
and sixpence to lend,
and sixpence to send home to me wife,
poor wife!
No cares have I to grieve me,
no pretty little girl to deceive me!
I’m happy as a lark, believe me,
as we go rolling, rolling home!
Rolling home (rolling home),
rolling home (rolling home),
by the light of the silvery moon!
Happy is the day when we line up for our pay,
as we go rolling, rolling home!*
In MY day, a slide rule was the thing.
Hey, I had one of those in ninth grade! Got pretty good with it, too. 
For the first time ever, a picture of Johnny L.A.:
AIEEEEEE, Jonny! :eek:
Well, it’s the USAns that are now keeping it going with their archaic system of weights and measurements… 
OB
In my book, to be a strictly pukka English gent, he would simply have struck out into the middle of the road pointing his rolled umbrella like a cavalry charge. Up to the hoi polloi to give way, doncherknow. (One of the teachers at my grammar school was notorious for nearly causing car crash after crash doing that).
Seems just right to me. The movie made clear, I thought, that tuppence was a trivial amount (just right for feeding birds), adding humor to the bank’s eagerness to get their hands on it!
When comparing amounts of money past to present, the huge rises in productivity lead to a dilemma: Do you compare wages or purchasing power? According to this site, in 1910 mean annual wage was £70.92 (only 25% what it was in 2016 in real terms). Thus, tuppence had the purchasing power of 78 new pence in today’s money but was as hard for a laborer to earn as £3.12 today.
That website uses a standard consumer “basket” that goes back to 1209! It may be very misleading since much of today’s spending power goes for iPhones, gasoline cable TV charges, etc. which are NOT in the 1209 basket!
It can be highly misleading to try to convert historical values into modern currency.
Anyone who has visited a foreign country today knows that straight conversion into one’s own currency is not necessarily helpful - money has a different ‘feel’ in different countries.
On first arriving in a foreign country and being told a cup of coffee costs X amount, we convert that to our own currency and wonder whether this is cheap, expensive, a rip-off, or what. We can’t tell how that amount ‘feels’ to a native of the country until we have been in the country a while.
If this is the case in different countries today, in our era of globalization and instant communication, how much greater is the effect when we are talking about a remote period of history? The effect is so much greater that any conversion is practically meaningless.
In my book, $1 (or the equivalent) for a small bag of bread crumbs is pretty damned expensive anywhere, in any period! 
In my travels over the last quarter century, I’ve found the only reliable economic barometer is that of the Big Mac.
Some limitations of the Big Mac index.
According to this PDF, the typical cost of items in 1910 was:
1 loaf of bread 2½d
1 pound butter 1s 2d
1 pound sugar 3d
1 pound tea 1s 6d
20 pounds of potatoes 10d
1 pound cheese 6d
1 pound bacon 9d
1 pound onions 1½d
1 dozen eggs 1s
1 pound biscuits 8d
1 pound lard 7d
1 pound jam 5½d
1 pound apples 3d
12 pints milk 3d
1 pound meat 10d
Wrights Coal Tar soap 4d per tablet
Child’s boots 2s 11d
Letter post 1d
Swan Vestas matches 1d
So a whole loaf of bread (probably smaller than a modern loaf) was 2½d, but I suppose the bird lady had to make a profit somehow.
Milk was very cheap. You could get 10 pints of milk for the same price as a loaf of bread.
I agree to disagree! In Thailand, for many people eating out at McDonalds is a treat, rather than a last-resort cheap option.
I just got back from our local “Western food” restaurant where I had a chicken steak with salad, fries and Pepsi for significantly less than a local $4 BigMac (let alone BigMac with fries and drink). And of course a filling noodle soup or papaya salad would have been a fraction of even that low price.
Even worse is the U.N. expat’s salary adjustment index, which uses a basket based on Marlboro, Johnny Walker Black and 4-star hotel. Local cigarettes and whisky are much cheaper than imported brands!
The bird lady was similar to a matchstick girl: You don’t pay her tuppance because that’s what the breadcrumbs or matches are worth. She’s basically begging, and the “product” she’s offering is just to put a thin facade on it, both for the sake of her dignity, and because begging might have been technically illegal.
My tenuously-valuable contribution to this thread is in relating how on a trip to Europe a few years ago to meet my girlfriend’s relatives, l somehow picked up the habit of referring to coins as “eurocents”. For some reason, this annoyed her.
My first instinct had been to call them “centimes”.
I am your age and British, and I do not recall a tuppence coin. The farthing was quite a large coin for its value, but that is true of all the copper coinage of that era. The penny (not pence) was huge.
Crowns? I think they disappeared with Queen Victoria. We had the half crown, a large and thick silver coin.
It has been said that British currency tends to be disproportionately heavy for its value, hence you weigh down your pocket to have enough ready small cash. The Euro is better scaled for weight and size, although you need to look very closely to distinguish between the small coins, which look similar to the next one up or down the scale. The simplest solution would be to have coins with holes in them, like the Japanese 5 yen and 50 yen coins.
Whether in London in 1976, Moscow in 1992, Helsinki in 1998, Tallinn in 2003, Vilnius in 2012, Riga in 2017, or Toronto right now, the price of a Big Mac has consistently remained the same in real terms, regardless of how the locals view eating at McD’s. How they do seems to have little effect the company’s business, since the outlets I’ve been to have always been packed.
As for the Bird Lady, it all depends on how willing you’d be to give $1 of your hard-earned money to a beggar. This would be higher on the utility curve for some people than for others. Whether your children would be entertained by doing so is something that would definitely have to be factored in, as it could enhance the value of the product (bread crumbs).
The tuppence, as a single coin, was apparently quite rare:
Surely Ms. Poppins intent was to instill charity in her wards. She was a practical lady smart enough to know “the birds will always be with us.” 
I’ve always preferred the Mary Poppins books to the movie. They are definitely weirder, and sometimes less benevolent.
The whole story about the bank in movie, and trying to convince the children to deposit their money there, doesn’t occur in the books. Mr Banks is never ‘saved’ and never needs saving in the books - all that was an invention by Disney. In the books, he is always a pleasant, devoted father, and a very minor character.
From the first book, Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers: