DON’T EVER CHANGE, NEVER CHANGE [434]

The Isle of Man is part of the British Isles, but not part of the UK. It is a self-governing Crown Dependency, but the UK government is responsible for its defence and representing its interests abroad. The British monarch is the Isle of Man’s head of state, and their head appears on their currency, the value of the Manx pound being tied to the British Pound.

The Isle of Man government has said it will no longer produce their own 1p and 2p coins, as they cost more to produce than their face value. Businesses on the island have been asked to start rounding prices to the nearest 5p, in preparation for shortages of the lower value coins in the coming years.

This is old news to many people. Six countries that have the Euro as their currency have not used one- and two-cent coins since 2013, something I hardly noticed when I visited the Republic of Ireland in 2016. The policy there is also to round up the final amount to pay to the nearest five cents, a policy introduced in Sweden in 1972 when they began a similar process with the krona – the öre still exists as one hundredth of a krona, but the one-krona coin has been the smallest unit of physical currency since 2010.

The last item I bought for a penny was a few years ago, a second-hand book obtained through Amazon, although the cost of postage must have made up for any shortfall. I remember being able to buy penny sweets individually, but that was in the 1990s.

The time is now ticking on the practicality of the British penny, despite the protestations of coin collectors. My own coin collection exists mainly to have examples of old coins, like the old pre-decimal farthing, one quarter of a penny when 240 pennies made a pound, itself withdrawn in 1960. I also own three unopened rolls of decimal half-penny coins, withdrawn in 1984 when dividing a pound into more than a hundred units became useless. Few coin-operated payment machines in the UK now accept coins under 10p in value – by the way, one Swedish krona happens to be worth between seven and eight pence. I usually only carry coins in an emergency, anticipating if a car park is only accepting cash, or if a card payment machine in a shop is broken, otherwise only paying in coins to get rid of the weight received as change from using banknotes. I would be fine with the “shilling” being the lowest value British coin, as the five pence coin is smaller in size than a penny.

Coins don’t wear away that fast, so coin collectors will be fine for some time to come – this group is the reason I rarely see a fifty pence coin in my change, as they are usually issued these days as special editions. A new set of standard, “definitive” coins will be introduced by the Royal Mint, with a dormouse and red squirrel on the 1p and 2p respectively, so they will remain for some time yet. The penny could eventually become a commemorative coin, having been pure silver until the switch to copper in 1796, before bronze and copper-coated steel followed – this will allow the usually-commemorative crown coin, valued at £5, to finally replace the £5 note.

FIVE, SIX, SEVEN EIGHT NINE TEN, I LOVE YOU [156]

One Florin: One Tenth of a Pound (1849)

The main reason most people still require mathematics is when they deal with money, and hearing people express dismay about what were, at the time, massive changes to how they needed their minds to work, is rather odd indeed.

I have now listened twice to a radio documentary titled “Decimal Day - What’s That in Old Money?” Broadcast by the BBC as part of the “Archive on 4” strand, it takes a brisk walk through the process that replaced the old Pound Sterling – the one counted in shillings and pence – with a new decimal currency, climaxing on 15^th February 1971. Amongst all the talk of what the new money should be called, and how attached people were to the old sixpence coin, I took from it the concern that people were having to change the way they counted.

Used in Britain since the 8^th century, one pound was divided a very large number of ways: twenty shillings made a pound, and twelve pence (still using the Roman “d” for denarii) made a shilling, meaning 240 pennies made a pound. Forty sixpences, or “tanners,” made a pound, as did eighty threepenny bits. Eight half-crown coins, valued at two shillings and sixpence (written 2/6), made a pound. There hadn’t been a guinea coin for well over a century, but the term was still used to denote one pound and one shilling. There had been one sop to progress in 1849 with the florin, with “one tenth of a pound” written across it, but this later became just “two shillings.”

However, decimalised currency, was used in most of Europe for over a hundred years by 1971, and for nearly two hundred years in France. Instead of changing from counting in mathematical base 12 in pennies, to base 20 for shillings, along with all the various jumps needed for other coins, it would be far easier to count in just one base, from one to ten, especially for anyone outside the UK. Indeed, one way to replicate how old money was counted is to count through the list of prime numbers – finding a number only divisible by itself and 1 requires full use of your times tables.

As the documentary points out, the opposition to decimalisation shifted from practical to emotional as Decimal Day was reached – the sixpence was given a reprieve, having been referenced in so much popular culture, and was revalued at 2 1/2 new pence until 1980, when it was finally withdrawn. One- and two-shilling pieces continued to be used until 1990 and 1993 respectively, only because the replacement five and ten pence coins were made the same size, and were only withdrawn when they were made smaller – the current five pence piece is closest we have to the old sixpence.

Something I hadn’t known about was there had been discussion on what one hundred pennies would have equalled. In some former British colonies that used the old currency, like Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, the decision was taken for one hundred new cents to equal ten old shillings, so one old pound equalled two new dollars or rand. The new British pound could have gone the same way, but the eventual decision was for it to equal one hundred pence instead. Half-pennies, originally removed in 1969, were reintroduced to sub-divide a pound into two hundred units, not unlike the other countries, and not far from the old total of 240. 

A sixpence could have equalled 5p, but because it now equalled 2 1/2p, it was just that little bit more to calculate, a tiny amount of hesitancy. No wonder it was easy for some unscrupulous people to take the “d” in the price and make it “p”, from 5 d to 5p, more than doubling the actual price. Decimalisation is sometimes blamed for the high inflation experienced in the decade that followed, peaking at 25% in 1975, but increasing the supply of money had more to do with that.

This all feels a bit quaint now. Sooner or later, as more and more transactions take place by card or online, and with the price of a bar of chocolate approaching £1, we won’t be talking about pounds and pence – what comes after the decimal point doesn’t matter as much as it once did.