15th February 1971

Being of a certain age, your writer notes that the 40^th anniversary of decimalisation in the UK has passed by without a murmur, no great fanfare, no memorials, just a forgotten memory – for some of us.

In recent years I have developed what my wife calls a very disturbing habit. Every time I make the regular shop with her I have this habit of looking at prices and converting them back to the old £sd. How much is that loaf of bread?? I recall being able to buy a loaf of bread for 1/11, the chocolate bar was 5d and as for petrol, at 5/- a gallon I could buy 4 gallons for the pound. The surprising and pleasant result of this habit is that I rarely get taken shopping any more.

But it does raise the issue of how much more interesting the old currency was and the various names the coins had. For example we had 960 farthings to the pound, 8 half crowns in my pocket also made a pound, not forgetting the florin, the tanner, the joey, the shilling (bob) – after all two shillings known as two bob made one florin and that took ten of those to make a pound. Lost yet? Now isn’t that much more interesting than a straight 100 pennies to the pound or dare I say it 100 cents to the Euro.

Of course these nicknames for our coins delve way back into our history. I will let you look further into this. But somehow being paid 2/6 for a Saturday mornings work sounded a lot richer that 12.5 new pence, which became new pence and then just pence.

I recall visiting the post office on the 15^th February 1971 to convert some of my hard earned pocket money for the new coins. The new half penny was certainly very small compared to the old ship half penny. It was obviously a sign of the things to come, as indeed the new coins did not quite buy as much as the old coinage and the fate of the new half penny was short lived as inflation started to take it’s toll during the seventies. As most of us were still coming to terms what this new coinage would buy for us inflation crept up on the blind side and before you knew it four gallons of petrol for a pound was history, made in a blink of an eye!

The BIG mistake today though was looking at the share price of my Lloyds Bank shares, 4/9d. Okay 24p, to you but I still cannot help thinking how much was the Lloyds Bank share price in 1971. Is it just possible the share price then was higher than this?  I know Lloyds Bank have made various changes to their share structure, but the moral of the story to me is if I am looking somewhere to store my wealth, then I think a visit to an Independent Financial Adviser may be just more profitable than a visit to the Bank.

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