Decimalisation Day, 1971

D-Day, Decimal Day. For the passenger side of British Rail was 50 years ago today, while the rest of us had to wait until the 15th (tomorrow):

I was lucky, by the time that I was aware of money, decimalisation was fully adopted.

I still have a bag of "tanners", with some I think may have a silver content?

Mick Strong, weren't they all silver, tanner or joey. The threepenny bit was gold and a nobbin. I hated the new money, still do.

Hi Kaga, I thought only pre 1948 contained silver? After that I thought they were all nickel. Also have some silver threepenny bits my mum left me. Never seen a gold one?

Silver coinage had 92.5% silver in them until 1920, then reduced to 50%. In 1947 the silver was replaced with cupro-nickel. Pre 1947 the silver content was worth more than the coin face value.

I worked in a children's book shop in London when the new currency was introduced and we had no training whatsoever. New books came in with the decimal price on the cover, otherwise we had to look up the equivalent cost on a list at the till. We had quite a lot of American customers and we accepted dollars. At one point we were working with one dollar to one pound conversion - something my boss came up with. I think owners did very well. I still have trouble with the pound coin and miss the paper version - much lighter, easier to carry around. I also remember those huge white five pound notes.

I was still at school when we went decimal. Does anyone remember the "decimal diddlers"? These were shopkeepers and suchlike that rounded up all their prices where the new decimal coinage did not equate exactly to the old £sd. Our tuck shop was an example. We'd all worked out that the price of a Mars bar should be 3.5p. But they said "that's four"! That added to inflation a bit. For a long time, nobody used the words pence or pennies, as in people's minds that meant the old penny, of which there were 240 to the pound. It might cause confusion. Eventually, people forgot about the old d, and starting using the word pence. Strictly speaking, one hundredth of a pound was never a penny, it's a cent. Something else the government got wrong.

When talking of a cash job, the expression "it's a pound notes job" is still used. I recently heard a bloke complain of being overcharged, and he said "I'll be a sheet down", meaning a pound note. Old habits die hard.

Slim, I remember this being especially egregious when it came to the price of a bag of crisps. What happened to the penny selection almost every sweetshop and newsagent had?

I worked at the factory that changed the tills in shops. I worked out the bonuses of the salesmen that took orders for the machines. They were sky high, made fortunes for a couple of years but the orders collapsed after they had all been changed, and the new machines came in.

Our till was an old wooden one, with a bell that went DING every time you opened the drawer, and you wrote down stuff on a paper roll, so we didn't need a new till.

I was working in a supermarket when decimalisation began - we had about two hours training beforehand. For quite a while every item in store had two price stickers on it, one in 'old' money, the other in 'new'. Some of the older customers found it difficult to adjust, they would just open their purse and say to me - take out whatever you need.

Did we do away with pounds (lbs) and ounces at the same time as we changed the currency?