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You will know, if you read the last timeline, that in the United Kingdom our money was divided into pounds, shillings and pence. There were 12 pence in a shilling and twenty shilling in a pound. This made simple maths pretty complicated. For example, if I needed to buy 5 items which cost £1 12s 8d (one pound, twelve shillings and eight pence) I would have to do the following sum. First multiply 8d by 5 giving me 40 pence. Then divide the 40 pence by 12 to give 3 (shillings) and 4 pence. I would then multiply the 12 shillings by 5 giving me 60 shillings, add on the 3 and divide 63 by 20 (the number of shillings in a pound) to come up with the answer of £3 and 3 shillings left over. Then I would multiply the £1 by 5, add on the £3 I had from the shillings division and end up with £8 3s 4d. What fun, In the money we use now, I would multiply £1.63 by 5. 63 times 5 is 315, so £3.15 and £1 times 5 is £5, add on £3.15 and you get £8.15. Simples.
By the way pence was shown as “d” in the old money because the Romans, remember them, had a coin called the denarius which was also the name for an English penny.
It was therefore decided to change to a simple decimal system, which is what we have now, where you had 100 pence in a £1. However this would not be straight forward as if you do a simple sum you will see that with our old system we had 240 (12 pence to a shilling and 20 shillings to a pound so 12x20) pence to a pound. Now there would be 100. So each new penny, to be shown as “p”, would be 2.4 old pence. This worked out OK for converting shillings (12d to a shilling ) as you could divide 12 by 2.4 and get 5. So, 5p equalled the old 1 shilling, 10p=2 shillings and so on.
But for other amounts there was no exact equation. So when converting we rounded things up or down. 1d and 2d and 3d became 1p, 4d and 5d became 2p. At the time I worked in an assurance company and my job was to calculate the amount we charged people for their assurance. We had a book which had all the figures in it for standard policies and we had to recalculate, reprint, check, correct every single figure. As I said, what fun.
Forward to 1973AD
