General Chat

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

Tess

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

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 :-|

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

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.

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.

I had a chuckle to myself the other day whilst I was in a toy department searching for a present for a little girl.
I happened to see a display of 'old fashioned' shop things, packets of Lux Flakes etc and centre of the display were some replica old fashioned cash tills. I'm sure you all remember those great big tills with the price buttons on long 'stalks' which had to be pushed right down, then the price would be displayed by price tabs wihich popped up in a small 'window' on top of the cash till.
Well,these toy cash tills looked very authentic until I noticed the price buttons....they were marked 1 up to 12 for the pennies, and then had 1/- 2/- and 2/6. But instead of having 1d 2d 3d etc, they were marked as 1p 2p 3p - BIG ooooops to the manufacturer!!!! :-S :-S

:-D :-D @ Karen

"librae, solidi, denarii"

How would the youngsters today cope with going back to Lsd? Times when an ounce was not a member of the cat family? You can't get an ounce into a pint pot. Nor a quart into a furlong :-S :-S

P.S. Even though farthings were no longer legal tender by the time I got to pocket money/sweet shop age, I can remember them so they must have only recently been withdrawn from currency. Didn't they have a wren on one side?
Anyway, I well remember getting 4 chews for a penny. And by a penny I mean a penny and not one new pence :-S you could have Fruit Salads or Black Jacks.
I always went for the Fruit Salads! :-D

Ithink farthings were withdrawn from circulation in about 1961 or 2. We were doing fractions at primary school and had to do all the money sums about farthings as ha'pennies.

Threepenny bits had thrift on one side.

Mmmmmmmmmmm Karen, I had forgotten about Black Jacks I loved them and also Liquorice toffee :-D

I seem to remember the 50 new pence coin being the first new one in circulation - well before D Day in Feb 71. Also, 5p and 10p came in early.

Such a furore over the 50p coin. We had always been used to a substantial bank note for 10/-. All of a sudden we had this horrible mis-shaped coin :-( :-( :-(

I remember going to the shop for Dad's "ration" during WW11 and being asked "does he want Grande Pasha or Turk?" :-S

Sandie


my mother's measure (and the grammar school teacher's as well) was

.............. from the tip of the thumb on the right hand across the top of the chest to the start of the left collarbone

:-D :-D :-D



no wonder measuring used to be haphazard :-D :-D :-D




BTW .................. I still measure cloth that way :-D

Ha ha and my yard was measured in yet another way........hold one end of the material between thumb and forefinger in outstretched right arm, and hold the other end of the material between left thumb and forefinger at tip of nose. ;-)

Lol Karen and Sylvia ,
I have short arms perhaps that's why it was' measured' to my ear ,and it was material we would be measuring , yes I still do it too :-D
Sandie.x

karen in the desert thats how I measure ...my kids think its bloody stupid!!!

And as for sweets well 6 of them for a half penny!! lovely

I've just tested mine with a measuring tape - comes to 33" . oooops!
Imagine if I'd worked in a material shop in 'ye olde days', I'd have been selliing my customers short ;-)

Anyone noticed, I've lost the winter robin and gained a Valentine's theme.

33inches!!! oh thats not good and if you had been caught today you would need to pay a huge fine and close down your shop!!!

PC gone wrong just like the money

Karen I Just tested the 'yard 'measure too, and actually doing with a tape measure ,

I seem to recall, if it was material it was from my pinched finger and thumb on my left hand to the tip of my nose,head turned to the right..35 and 3/4 inches :-D

or tip of middle left finger to top of ear lobe ( head straight ahead ) 36 and a quarter inches ! :-D
Perhaps your arms are shorter than mine ;-) ;-) or it's me turning my head to the right .Hehehe !
I bet my sister still does it too !!!