When he was asked how much the wager was, Wessex starts to say "50 shillings"
but then after a cold look from the Queen he changes it to "50 Pounds"
What was up with that? Was the term "shillings" somehow an insult
or disrespectful? I didin't understand that?
There were twenty shillings to the pound. Wessex is trying to reduce his liability. It's a lot of money.
shareThank you!
I had thought shilling was just another way of saying pound
(like the "common" folk would use shilling or something).
Thanx for the clarification--that makes sense
(Wessex being a cheapskate) :)
My pleasure. We had twelve pence to one shilling, and twenty shillings to the pound, until some time in the 1970s. I remember it well. We were very good at mental arithmetic.
shareI worked on the buses in my gap year during the changeover. What a headache!
"Two two-and-tens and one half, please". ( 7s 1d or 35.5p) And they could pay in either £p or £sd. And as for hapennies and farthings.
Oooh yes - I remember that. And do you remember that people bought little plastic adding machines to help with this difficult new system of adding up in tens instead of twelves?
We also used to learn a table of money, like this -
Twelve pence is one shilling.
Twenty pence is one-and-eightpence,
Twenty-four pence is two shillings.
Thirty pence is two-and-sixpence,
Thirty-six pence is three shillings.
Forty pence is three-and-fourpence,
Forty-eight pence is four shillings...
And so on.
Part of the bus conductor training course had a fascinating session covering the new and old currency.
The threepenny bit had a dozen sides and two dozen nicknames. I can only remember 'Joey' and 'Bag-buster' - they were heavy. The 50p coin was already in circulation, replacing the ten bob note. Did you know its seven sided design is based on a curve of constant width? If you used that shape for the wheels of a car, it would run along straight and level.
I didn't know about the 50p but I remember lecturing some of the London relatives that it's "thre'ppence" not "thru'ppence" in the 1960s. They emigrated to the Isle of Lewis in 1973 to avoid me. ;O)
Marlon, Claudia and Dimby the cats 1989-2005, 2007 and 2010.
Is there any room up there for some of my relatives?
shareI first went to GB during the changeover and thought I would lose my mind; I was actually reduced to holding out whatever coins were in my pocket and asking shopkeepers to take what I owed, because I simply could not do the old to new conversions in my head.
shareI probably should ask this in a separate thread but I have another question about the 50 pounds. Shouldn't the sack with the money actually weigh 50 pounds? (50 lbs. troy, approx. 45 lbs. avoirdupois).
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Resolutely Analog In A Digital World!
A pound coin that weighed a pound would be quite something!
According to Wikipedia, that infallible source (!), a pound in currency was originally the worth of a pound of silver, hence the name.
Here's a fun link on the currency of the period - http://elizabethan.org/compendium/6.html
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You would not believe the amount of resistance here in the UK to even the 50p coin, except, since you still have dollar bills, you probably would.
It's one of those issues in which vast quantities of emotion "You can't mess with what makes this country great" are instantly overcome by the immediately obvious advantage.
But if the Bank of England hadn't had the sense to run the 50p coin alongside the 10/- note for almost two years before decimalisation, I suspect we'd still have pound notes here. They survived decimalisation, ironically, for 12 years. There were plenty of pockets of similar resistance to the £2 coin which also became ubiquitous overnight.
The introduction of one, two and five dollar coins would give the US economy a shot in the arm. And you could get rid of the penny.