Forty years ago on Tuesday it was D-Day. No not that D-Day – the other one – Decimal Day. Over-night, a system of currency essentially in use since Roman times was swept away. Instead of 12 pennies in a shilling and 20 shillings in a pound to make 240 pennies in a pound, the shilling was discarded in favour of 100 New Pence to make a pound.
This is one of the ways it was introduced to the nation by the Decimal Currency Board.
While it made a kind of sense to go decimal, for supposedly making it easier to do currency calculations, I can’t help thinking that we lost something. Yes it is a shame that we lost denominations such as the Shilling, Guinea, Crown and Half-Crown but we lost something more than the cultural. The £SD system was not just random – twelves are far more versatile for dividing-up than tens (1,2,3,4,6,12 vs 1,2,5,10). Even the Guinea (21 shillings or 252 pennies) has the versatility of division by 7. There is a school of thought which says that our mathematical brains are far-less nimble at basic calculation because we’ve lost the knack switching between bases which the £SD system forced on us. Calculators and computers would have played their part there too. That said, now having easy and cheap access to versatile computing machines in business and personal life also makes much of the justification for going decimal moot.
I can recommend the excellent Archive on 4 programme Decimal Day – What’s That in Old Money broadcast by Radio Four to mark the anniversary.
