Well the OP has slightly misdirected the target, because you would never have paid 28d for anything, it would have been 2s4p - just short of half a crown.
Anyhoo, it was easy enough because it was really all based around fractions, remember that base 12 has more divisors than base 10.
If you look at it in fractions then
£1 = 960 farthings, or 480 half pennies. or 240pennies or, 80 thruppences, or 40 tanners, or 20 shillings, or 10 florins(two shilling coins) or 8 x 2/6 coins(aka half crowns) or two 10 shilling notes.
I honestly cannot remember seeing a crown coin in use but one was issued as part of the Queen’s silver jubilee - I have no idea how I got it, but one sits in my coin drawer.
I also remember a friend of mine who was issued a golden half guinea or sovereign by one of the Royals when he was part of the Royal Navy mast climbing display in 1977 - he got it because he was the button boy(and yet the internets state that such a coin does not exist - but I remember him proudly showing it off)
It did make splitting amounts down by half quite easy, and if you look at the imperial system of measurement then you’ll find that too is based around splitting things down by half - which makes measuring materials, volumes etc fairly easy - no need to think, just cut it in half.
The only real issue was that there were so many coins and they were pretty large - it soon wore through your pockets and you generally had a list to port of starboard depending on the location of your money pocket.
I do remember getting old pennies and ha’pennies in my change that would have Queen Victoria’s head on - still legal tender, the oldest tanner I ever got was an 1877 one. I can’t remember the oldest penny legal tender you could get, I think it was early Victorian around 1860 or so.
The obvious advantage to halving in the days before well-regulated and repeatably-manufactured weights and measures was that it’s easy to put the two portions on a balance and move the material back and forth until they balance. Making thirds or tenths is much harder.
Doing the same with denominations of coinage flows naturally. Coinage at one time having been measured (=balanced) chunks of valuable metals.
Once upon a time, in a land called New York City, there was a big and important market. People from all over the world came together to trade magical assets and financial instruments; it was a lively scene! Here is the thing: prices were set in terms of dollars, and these could be halved, and halved, and halved again and again! Powers of 2.
IMHO, the largest missed opportunity with the metric system was that they didn’t build it around multiples of 12 rather than multiples of 10, accompanied by base-12 math.
That is exactly right. No tipping, no sales tax for a retail customer to be concerned about. So when the bill comes, it is straight, no mental arithmetic required. All those nickels and dimes added to your bill are an American thing.
Pre-decimalisation in the UK, everyone knew their pounds shillings and pence. You grew up with it and schools taught the necessary arithmetic. People handled a lot of hard cash in those days. When decimalisation came along in the 1970s, there was a national programme to educate people about the new coinage. TV programs, lessons at school with cardboard copies of the coins. There was lots of anguish from the older generation who didn’t take kindly to the change. But everyone knew it was a lot easier.
It was an age when the industrial worker held sway over the economy, the country was strikebound and labour unions with muscle won big pay rises. Miners strikes could shutdown power stations and the guys who unloaded the ships, the dockers, could hold the country to ransom by picketing the ports. They were inflationary times and decimalisation was widely held to make the problem worse by disguising price increases.
The joke was that the rather unusual heptagonal fifty pence piece, the equivalent of a 10 shilling note became known as the dockers threepenny bit because that old coin also had a lot of sides.
One day the UK will get around to adopting the metric system.
I’d forgotten about that, and it wasn’t very long ago at all (i.e., 2001) when the NYSE finally changed over from fractional pricing to decimal pricing.
DH (and by extension, me) was posted to England in December of 1970, just before decimalization. We had barely learned to manage pounds, shillings and pence before “sixpence is two-and-a-half new pence” landed on us overnight and with full force. Decimal Day was 15 February 1971.
I was very, VERY pregnant and due in March. As many homes at the time did not have a phone (including ours) the plan was to go to the local pay phone to call the hospital to alert them when I went into labour. Three weeks after Decimal Day, birth day arrived, we hopped in the car and made a stop at the nearest phone box. To DH’s great dismay, one aspect of decimalization had been overlooked - not all the pay phones had been converted to the new coinage. This was one of them and it only took the old cartwheel pennies. :smack: All our old coinage had been returned to the bank, so DH had to drive to the local police station and convince the young rookie at the desk to let him use the phone. Permission was finally granted, hospital was contacted and daughter was born without further drama.
I’m not surprised that England did not adopt the euro.
I distinctly recall the CBS Evening News from back then, where Walter Cronkite interviewed some (older) British people. My favorite quote was “If twelve disciples was good enough for Jesus, why do we need to go decimal?” I remember it well because I was just getting interested in collecting foreign coins, and being an American, I had no idea what the reference meant.
Just think how cool it would be if the UK abandoned decimal currency and go back to L-S-D. We have install cell phone apps that would be very useful.
Way back in the very early 1970’s I was on a job in Nigeria (Lagos) for several months. At that time the Nigerians were still using the pound-shilling-pence system of the British. I found that shifting over from the dollars and cents system we have to the British monetary system was almost trivial. Within less than a week I was thinking in pounds, etc. - it all seemed very natural. Then upon returning to the States, it took me several days to get back into dollars and cents. An interesting experience.
I clearly recall a news report from the time when Britain decimalized their monetary system that detailed someone killing herself because she could not get the hang of the new system.
Every time foreigners (and mouthy Americans) complain about U.S. measures of unit, my explanation is pretty similar to this. It’s hard for you, not for us. We live and breathe by it.
India still inconveniences me, what with their lakh. Yeah, it’s decimal, but the grouping is not intuitive. Or rather, as an American, see complaint addressed above!
