All fun and games – Lots of high jinks while fundraising
Right, Rag parade
1984: students dance atop a float in front of Clifton’s Habitat, now the Beacon House study centre
Left, the 24-hour pedal car race at Hengrove in 1967. This particular event led to over 500 participants and spectators ending up in A&Es across Bristol, complaining of rashes. Conspiracy theories abounded, but in the end, it seemed that the cause was only a combination of dust, tar and sunshine
Richard Denby in his brilliantly inventive costume as ‘the Pink Baron’ in 1988
Above, the ‘prehistoric car’ from the parade during Bristol Rag Week in 1925
The King and Queen of the 1980 Rag Week, Michelle Rudolph and Saul Horner
MONDAY February 15 1971 – 50 years ago yesterday – was D-Day, the day on which Britain switched over to decimal currency, or “the new money” as many insisted on calling it.
The ancient system whereby 12 pennies equalled a shilling and 240 pennies added up to a pound was swept away overnight, to be replaced with a suspiciously “modern” or even “continental” system where the nation’s time-honoured principal unit of currency was divided into 100 smaller parts.
Many of those BT readers old enough to remember the switchover may have had to accompany older relatives on their shopping trips to help explain the new coinage to them, or rather to translate the new prices into old ones they could understand.
Most older people could grasp that 50p was ten shillings, that 10p was two shillings and that 5p was a shilling, and the more arithmetically confident had few problems. But many people’s mums and grans had problems figuring out what, say, 8p (1s/7d) was in “Old
Money”, let alone an exotic sum like 67p (it’s thirteen shillings and fivepence, Mum.)
Many people’s dads and grandfathers were just as confused, but were far less likely to admit it.
What they did know, or at least suspect, was that the inexact translation from old pennies to new meant that shops would round their prices upwards, diddling each customer out of a fraction of a (new) penny with every transaction.
While the switch took place literally overnight, it had been a long time in coming. For years, coins that could be precisely translated into the new denominations, had been issued.
On D-Day itself, Britons had long had Five New Pence pieces in their purses and pockets as well as shillings, Ten New Pences alongside two shilling pieces (still referred to as “florins” by traditionalists) and 50 New Pence coins equivalent to the much-loved ten shilling notes (which had already been withdrawn from circulation by 1971).
What was new on the day was that the price of everything now had to be displayed in decimal currency. We also found ourselves with new copper coins.
Nowadays, anyone who remembers the fuss and tries to explain it to someone under the age of 50 is liable to get blank looks. What on earth is so difficult to understand about there being 100 pennies in a pound? Breaking the principal unit
The pre-decimal contents of your pocket or purse; a pound note, a ten-bob note twelve pennies in a shilling and 20 shillings to the pound, but 21 shillings in a gui pence pieces (“thrupenny bits), sixpences (“tanners”) and shilling (“one bob”) c crown which was worth two bob and a tanner. do you understand why som
Left: At branches of the Trustee Savings Bank, confused customers could be advised on the new money by “Decimal Dollies” wearing “hot pants” (which were then all the rage) of currency into 100 smaller ones is the same system that operates in almost every other country of the world.
This was one reason for the change-over. Decimalisation was something that some had been calling for since the early 1800s. It was why the two-shilling piece, or florin, had been invented in Victorian times – this was a coin that was exactly one-tenth of a pound.
But for most of the 19th century, and well into the 20th, decimalisation was seen as unnecessary and “foreign” and those who campaigned for it were seen as cranks and eccentrics or, worse, unpatriotic. This sort of thing was fine for Americans with their cents and dollars, perfectly OK for the French and Germans with their centimes, francs, pfennigs and Deutsche marks, but …
… But now even the countries of the Commonwealth and Britain’s former empire were going decimal as well.
The decision to make the change had been pondered by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s government, which in 1961 set up a committee to look into it. By the time the Halsbury Committee delivered its report, more and more bankers, businesses and academics were calling for it.
By now, Harold Wilson’s Labour government was in power. Wilson was an arch-moderniser and it appealed to his sense of Britain being transformed by the “white heat of technology”.
Wilson and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, James Callaghan, knew that it would be unpopular, but reckoned it should be done. The Decimal Currency Board was set up to oversee the transformation.
Wilson and Callaghan knew there would be opposition. Traditionalists who regarded the old system as somehow symbolic of all that was great about Britain were
and all the coins. Until February 15 1971 there were 240 pennies in a pound, and inea. The pre-decimal cash included pennies and halfpennies (“ha’pennies”), three coins. There were also two-shilling coins (“two bob” or “florins”), and the halfe people thought it was insane that we didn’t just have 100 pennies in a pound?
Decimalisation was a long time in coming. Below left, Chancellor James Callaghan and his wife Audrey visit a mock-up “decimal supermarket” in 1967. By the look of things they were having a tinned steak and kidney pudding and salad cream that night. Callaghan would have left 11 Downing Street by the time decimalisation was implemented one thing; a much bigger concern was the public’s fear they would be swindled.
At one point they considered postponing D-Day until well into the mid-1970s, and Wilson tried to calm people’s fears by ordering that the old coins should remain in circulation alongside the new ones until everyone got acclimatised.
In the event, it would not be Wilson’s problem. Labour lost the 1970 general election to the Conservatives, and Ted Heath and Anthony
Barber were the occupants of 10 and 11 Downing Street when the day came.
The Decimal Currency Board, had long-since been preparing the public with TV and press advertising campaigns and decimal currency converter cards that slipped easily into pocket or purse.
The till in the shop corner in primary school classrooms throughout the country was filled with cardboard decimal coins. The BBC had a long-running five-minute TV programme, Decimal Five explaining aspects of the new coinage each weekday evening at tea time.
(BT has found a couple of mentions of a dance band which seems to have played a few gigs around the north Somerset area at this time and calling itself The Decimal Five. If anyone has photos or information, do tell us more!)
February had been chosen for the changeover because it was one of the quietest times of the year for banks and shops, and because few people were on holiday.
The banks had been closed for four days beforehand to convert their machinery, carry out final staff training and to clear all cheques made out in old money.
Shops had to convert their tills. Phone boxes, gas and electricity meters and vending machines needed new slots. New stationery for invoices, receipts, account books and more had to be printed.
If you think “Decimal Dollies” in bank branches were demeaning to women, meet this young lady, who is modelling “hot pants” and thirty bob’s worth of the new penny and 2p coins. The poor girl would have been rather chilly in February, and would have been better off spending the money on clothes
Mechanics at Bristol Omnibus Company depots worked shifts for 36 hours to convert the ticket machines. Coming in for the morning shift, drivers and conductors looked sideways at the plasticwrapped rolls of gleaming new copper coins for their cash floats.
One of the biggest concerns in the Bristol area was that the bus company was going to use decimalisation to put up its fares. The firm had made a huge £500,000 loss the previous years and was putting up its fares on February 21 anyway. A spokesman explained the rise was necessary, but that they were not taking advantage of decimalisation.
The day dawned with the Decimal Currency Board’s message to the nation ringing loud and clear: “Don’t worry ... think decimal.”
All you had to do, they said, was remember that there were now 100 pennies to the pound, not 240.
A further tip was to keep “old” money in one pocket and “new” in the other.
On the day, the most visible change was in the way that shops displayed prices, almost always in both new and old money. Dual pricing would be allowed for some time to come, though a couple of years later it would become illegal to display prices in the old system.
The other significant change was in your, well, change. While the silver coins in the new denominations had been around for a while, we now had new pennies, 2p pieces and tiny little half-pence coins.
The Post reported how Bristolians were so keen to get to grips with the new currency that they handed over pound notes for the smallest of items, just so they could fill their pockets and purses with ‘new’ change.
Housewives took to the shops clutching their decimal currency converters. One West Country shopkeeper told reporters that all was going well and “the public are adopting a very jolly attitude to it all”.
A Post reporter went out to buy boxes of matches, with some curious results. She purchased two boxes, both priced at three old pence, one with 44 matches, but the other with just 41. But she also bought, for one-and-a-half new pence, a box with a whopping 49 matches in.
(You have to wonder whether her expenses claim for this lavish spending was submitted in old pence or new, or whether she was just a heavy smoker.)
Housewives (it was still permissible to call them that) did a bit of shopping, many just dipping their toes into the decimal pool by venturing out for just a loaf of bread or pint of milk. Some would struggle for weeks or even months to come, often getting their children to accompany them to translate everything into old money. While shops usually displayed prices in both, shoppers didn’t always trust them.
The new half-penny was never popular. A Kingswood postmaster told the Post: “The customers were wanting to know whose idea the whole thing was. Many of them said the halfpence was very small and would soon go out of circulation.”
In town, the Silver Blades ice rink refused to accept it, and rounded its prices up instead, and others dubbed it “Toytown money”.
The half-penny would remain in circulation for more than ten years to come, though. Much as it was disliked, it was necessary precisely because it made it harder for businesses to raise their prices. That nasty little piece of shrapnel was a defence inflation. Decimal Currency Board chairman Lord Fiske said: “It is not unduly small by world standards. It has an important role to play particularly in price-shading of low-priced goods.”
For months to come, the coinage in Britain was a curious hybrid. The old penny coins remained legal tender until August, though by then most had disappeared as people exchanged them for new money, or hoarded them in the hope that they would be valuable collectors’ items in years to come. Threepenny bits were phased out at the same time.
The greatest survivor from the old system, and mainly for sentimental reasons, was the tanner. The sixpence coin was not only much loved, but also had the advantage (unlike the old penny and threepence) of translating precisely into decimal terms – two and a half new pence.
No new sixpences were minted, but they remained legal tender until 1980, though by then very few were in circulation. Again, many would be hoarded for sentimental reasons, because few coins in all of British history were as loved or carried so many happy memories.