Tee hee – I’m misleading the youth of today into coming to my blog. Aren’t I clever? Well, no, not really. I will of course be mentioning the hippy drug du choix but only in passing – the real weirdness lies further ahead.
LSD (the drug) was one of four things the Swiss have given the world (the other three being the cuckoo clock, Toblerone triangular chocolate and the army knife). A Swiss chemist named Albert Hoffmann discovered it in the 1930s while working for a pharmaceutical company in Basle. In case you’re of a scientific bent, the formula is C20H25N3O. The chemical name for it is lysergic acid diethylamide, so I fail to see where the “LSD” abbreviation comes from, even though I have read texts which try to explain it. Hoffman himself experimented with the drug, which I think says a lot. If you think you’re a small petunia called Arabella, you probably aren’t in a frame of mind to name anything.
Now that’s out of the way, we come to the real reason for the title: pounds, shillings and pence. “But Tom”, I hear you say – “that would surely be ‘PSP’ would it not?” I’m afraid not, no. For the complete newcomer, pounds shillings and pence was the system of currency used in the UK until February 15, 1971 when the decimal system was introduced. Britain went from an archaic and confusing currency system (more on that later) to counting in tens and people took to the streets to complain – maybe it never occurred to them to use their fingers. Only in Britain could this happen.
The system explained: The unit of currency was – as it still is – the pound (£). So far, so good. The pound was subdivided into various other combinations of coins: the farthing, the halfpenny, the threepenny piece, the sixpence, the shilling, the florin, the crown and the half crown. They were broken down as:
Farthing: The smallest denomination available, equal to one quarter of a penny.
Halfpenny: Speaks for itself. Half a penny (or 2 farthings).
Penny: One hundredth of a pound? Nope. There were in fact 240 of them to the pound.
Threepenny piece: Again, self explanatory. Worth 3 pennies (or 6 halfpennies or 12 farthings).
Sixpence: Er, 6 pence. Also 2 threepenny pieces, 12 halfpennies, 24 farthings or half a shilling.
Shilling: 12 pennies or one twentieth of a pound.
Florin: 2 shillings or one tenth of a pound.
Half crown: 2 shillings and sixpence or one eighth of a pound.
Crown: You guessed it – 5 shillings or one quarter of a pound.
In addition to this frightening array of coinage was the Guinea. This was a nominal sum left over from an age even further back (guinea coins were no longer minted except, I believe, as commemorative coins). 1 guinea represented one pound and a shilling and was often use by people to massage the price of things. Obviously, 20 guineas is much better value than 21 pounds – much like the “under 100 pounds/euros” you see today, on things that cost 99.99.
On to the point (finally). Why was the system known as LSD? The pound sign itself gives away the first part. In Italy, before the Euro, was the Lire. The symbol for the Lire was not that different to the one used for the pound – although the values certainly were. LSD stands for Librae (from which “Lire” was contracted), Solidi, Denarii, all terms used in Latin. A libra was the Roman equivalent of a pound in weight. As coins were originally worth their weight in the metal from which they were made, this actually makes some sense. Librae is the plural of libra. The solidi was a gold Roman coin. Solidi these days is used in colloquial Italian to mean “cash”. Finally, the D a denarius, a silver coin also minted by the Romans. What have the Romans ever done for us? Quite a lot, apparently.
I still have a set of pre-decimal coins somewhere (including a Coronation “crown”) – they feel enormous, especially considering what each is worth in current values. Oh for the days when it was an event for a child to be given half a crown!
The problem with changing money is not the reality of calculation, it’s the inbuilt sense of relative values (it’s the same with metric measures). I knew what half a crown bought: in the time it took to ingrain an equivalent sense of what twelve and a half new pence bought, inflation was wiping it out – that’s what upset people (that and the sense that the two phenomena were not unconnected).
I can remember a friend of mine, some time in the late 80s, finding himself having to do without a car for the first time in years. When he got on the bus with a group of people, he stepped up to pay, and produced the 70p the driver asked for. When the driver said “What about your mates?”, my friend heard himself saying, like some Edwardian housewife, “Fourteen shillings? EACH?!”
I understand what you mean about relative values, Autolycus. Most unfortunate for me was that I am at the age where I was brought up learning the old money system (along with pounds and ounces, feet and inches) and then when I was about seven, they changed it all. I still remember being told off by my teacher for calling 10p “two bob” – even though she’d taught me that not six months earlier.
ooohh— words for vanished coins (and values):
joey: for the silver threepenny bit (not carried on to the twelve-sided one)
tanner: sixpence
bob: shilling
florin: for two shillings (from a half-hearted Victorian attempt at decimalisation)
The threepenny bit still survives in rhyming slang, of course, as thruppennies (work it out); and there’s a street near me called Docker’s Tanner Road, to commemorate a great strike for sixpence an hour – I wonder how that name will be misinterpreted in the future.
and I was forgetting “two and a kick” for half a crown (two and sixpence).
…and wasn’t five bob (or a crown) also known as a “dollar”? Those were the days – four bucks to the pound!