General Chat

Talking of shopping.When I was at the grammar school inthe sixties.You know,the grammar school where they were all stuck up and well behaved, my mate used to walk home for her dinner.

I the morning we would all divi up and put in our orders.On her way home from dinner she would be in the off licence for us, buying quite substantial amounts of booze.

The shopkeeper would always ask her if it was for her mum. He must have thought the poor woman was a raging alcoholic and that her poor little girl was having to buy her booze to keep it quiet. We would have been about fourteen at the time.

And the little tiny silver mite, Roy (2 to a farthing). No longer legal tender when I was little myself, but grandma had one of those tiny little silver things (should have been 1/24th as heavy as a silver threepenny bit, but don't think quite that small).

And she had a half groat coin as well ( worth 2d, quite a large thick coppery coin, I think) :-D Think she kept those coins in her handbag for luck.

I remember learning ,along with my 'times tables' as our teacher called them , the '£sd ' tables.
We learnt them parrot fashion, like our time tables twice a week ,first lesson !
12d( pennies) is one shilling 1/-
20d is 1/8d
24 d is 2 /-
30 d is half a crown 2 / 6d
36 d is 3 / -
40d is 3 / 4d
and so on....
My son in his 20's thinks that imperial weights and measures where / are silly !
His words !
He says something like I'm looking for a bedroom unit 500mm wide... I say how many inches is that , or we're expected to have 7cm of snow over night .
...OK !! can you now say in inches / feet please ? :))
Tho he still classes himself as 6ft tall and 12st ? lbs :-D

I know that an inch 2.54cm , but I can visualize 6 inches ,12 inches a yard 12ft or 100 yds even. For goodness sake !
3 ft ,a yard being gauged by the length from the tip of a female's out stretched left arm to the top of her right ear ( it's what my mother taught me and it is in my case) ;-)
12ft , being the length of an averaged sized family car.
100 yds being the length of a Hockey pitch.

I'm OK in metres and kilometres, but sadly lacking in mm and cms quick conversions ;-) :-(

When I was a child..Thread heading.... life was so much fun and so easier than it is now :-D :-D :-D
...oooohh but what of all the exciting and invaluable experiences learned between then and now ;-) :-D :-D

Bridget The Fidget , You are correct :-|

But i did post early in the morning so i had not had enough coffee in my system, I'm no good to man nor beast until Ive had at least two cups of coffee and i had only had one at that time,
That's my excuse and I'm sticking with it :-P


I also remember the Farthing 4 to one penny

Roy:-D

Decimalisation was the biggest robbery ever carried out by a government on it's electorate :-|

Tess. I remember D Day in 1971 so well. Think it was 15 Feb without googling.

Supermarkets spent a fortune - everything had to be repriced. Huge amount of staff training required.

And, for a time, the customer could tender a mixture of old and new currency. So if the bill was £1.32 and customer gave you a pound note, a 20p coin, a florin and two threepenny bits, how much change in new pence?

Nightmare for cashiers. Edit. Agree - OP was very witty :-D

P.S the opening post made me laugh, which is difficult today as I am as miserable as the weather!

Tess

Roy,

think again.

25pence was the same as a whole crown or five bob!

Half-a-crown was just twelve-and -a half pence.

Rember 12 pennies make a shilling; twenty shillings made a pound,
so there were 240 pennies in a pound.

I remember a tanner (sixpenny piece) suddenly being two-and-a-half new pence.

Now it is one hundred pence in a pound.

When did we stop calling th " new pence" ?

I can remember my first cigarette, I was fifteen and four of us went to the cinema, two boys and two girls. One of the boys gave each of us a cigarette. I thought we were so sophisticated but only inhaled once and it went straight to my head, I felt dizzy and sick. I did not try another cigarette and then only because it was the social thing to do. I have not smoked for nearly forty years.

and if you worked for a tobacco company as I did for many years, you got them free with your pay each week!!

and if you were in the army in BAOR in the early 60's you could get 200 players/senior service for a pound........

at christmas time you could also buy cigarettes in boxe,s containing 50 i think they were mainly players, and senior service.

Yes i remember the pack of 2 if i remember they used to come with 2 matches?

Roy

Does anybody remember packs of 2? Think they were 3d for Woods, PD and Weights. Dad used to split packs of 20 into singles, wrap a match round them with elastic band and sell a small ciggy for 2d (about 1960 period) :-D

Used to sell like hot cakes - and more profit ;-)

Also remember boxes of 25, 50, 100 and 200 (I think)

I started smoking when I was 10 and they were 1/1d a pack of 10 Park Drive. Stopped in 1984 after nearly 30 years of puffing

I used to buy Park Drive in packs of 5

Roy

nope


you could do that ............. also in 10s and 20s

Did I imagine it or could you at one time buy cigarettes in packs of five?

I think mum used to 6d for a half hour piano lesson for me .......



.......... and she didn't always have that much to spare, so I would have to miss the lesson.

Think saturday morning pictures was 6d when I was a child aswell??

It was never a problem buying cigs for parents, I too was probably 6 or 7 when they sent me to the corner shop....I just remember having to use this machine one day as the shop was shut

I think OH pays £6 odd for our cigs ......glad I dont smoke as much as I used to now.

Cant remember bread or milk prices, but a shilling rings a bell

I remember a loaf of bread for a shilling, and getting a packet of 10 ciggies for my mother,
The shopkeeper was a lovely chap,only lived about 50yards from us, he knew the ciggies were for mum who only smoked one or 2 a day,so whilst I was only about 6 or7 he sold them to me,,no idea how much they cost in those days!
Not much idea how much they cost now !! Now being sold behind closed cupboards in the supermarkets, about £7 for 20 about right ? from what I read in the papers.

Mum used to send me up to the shops with 6d or 1/- to buy a loaf of bread.


One time she didn't give me enough money for whatever it was, and the shop keeper was really unpleasant to me, even though I'd often been in there.


I was only about 6 ............

......... but I still have to be sure that I have more than enough cash in my purse for whatever it is I want to buy


talk about scarring for life :-(