In Britain we are holdng on to the pound while most of the rest of Europe, incuding Ireland, has moved over to the Euro.
With Christmas just past I was reminded of the old tradition of stirring in silver sixpences into the pudding and it reminded me of the days when we had a wide variety of coins, until decimilisation in 1971, with all their colloquial names.
The Pound is still often called a ‘Quid’
The Pound was divided into 20 Shillings
A shilling, or ‘Bob’, was worth 12 pence
A sixpence was worth 6 pence (not surprisingly) and was called a ‘tanner’
A Crown was worth 5 shillings and a half crown was 2 shillings and sixpence.
A Florin was worth 2 shillings
A guinea (which was long extinct by decimalisation) was 1 pound and 1 shilling.
A pretty 12 sided coin was worth 3 pence, called the threepenny piece (pronounced ‘thruppance’)
Half a penny was a halfpenny (pronounced ha’penny)
It is a wonder how we managed to work out it all out! There was a lot of resistance to converting to pence (100 pence or ‘p’ to the pound), just as there is now resistance to getting rid of the pound all together. For many years considered the reserve currency of the World, it has had such a glorious history!
