Farewell sixpence and shilling! a hundred pennies make a pound;

              ByAlexThomson
Farewell
Sixpence
and Shilling!
a Hundred
Pennies
Make
a Pound
To any American—in fact to anyone
from the rest of the world who has
visited Britain—the ancient British
currency system is a source of
confusion for at least the first few days.
All other currencies are based on the
decimal system, cumulating in units,
tens and hundreds. We count dollars
and cents in the same way we count
everything other than money.
For centuries in Britain, however,
twelve pence have been required to
make a shilling and twenty shillings to
make a pound. As a result, visitors make
mistakes checking a hotel or restaurant
bill. American servicemen in World
War II had trouble with their change
until a little fast action with poker and
dice taught them to think fast in British
money terms. One can imagine the
difficulties met by the British
schoolchild, or the time lost by the
bookkeeper in small business
transactions, when the system of adding
(or dividing) money does not
correspond to the decimal system of
counting.
Now all this is going to be changed.
In February 1971 Britain is joining the
rest of the word in shifting its money
system to a decimal base. Mr. Alex
Thomson of the London office of
Deloitte, Plender, Griffiths & Co.
prepared a paper on currency
decimalization for the 1969 seminar of
the United Kingdom staff of Deloittes.
HirS Reports presents here a
shortened version of Mr. Thomson's
paper explaining the coming
25 changeover and the history behind it.
We are the last of the major countries
inheriting European civilization to give
up our ancient currency system. The
United States, with the enterprise of
their newly independent people, were
first, in 1792. They introduced a dollar/
cent currency based on the silver dol­lar
which already circulated widely in
America. France followed the next
year, discarding a system of livres, sous
and deniers with similar origins to our
own, in favor of a franc/centime sys­tem.
The Commonwealth countries
have now changed. We, the Republic
of Ireland and the small islands round
our coasts are the only such countries
still keeping to the old system.
Three units of currency: pounds,
shillings and pence, and three systems
of notation: 10, 12 and 20. And why
mark pence with a d, and pounds with
an L when shillings are marked with
an s? It is confusing to our own school­children,
confusing to our visitors from
abroad and needlessly slow.
The difficulties of our present system
have been apparent for many years.
The first suggestion of a decimal cur­rency
recorded in England was in the
translation of a suggestion by a Dutch­man
(Simon Stevin) in 1608 for deci­mal
currency and weights, and a num­ber
of writers during the seventeenth
century wrote of its advantages. Among
them was the famous engineer and
architect, Sir Christopher Wren, the
builder of London's famous cathedral,
St. Paul's. He suggested a coin divided
into tenths, and tenths again, "which
continual division will be very proper
for accounts."
Little more was heard of these pro­posals
until 1824 when a motion for
decimal currency was put forward in
the House of Commons. Royal Com­missions
were appointed in 1857 and
1920; both reported unfavorably. In
i960 a committee formed jointly by the
British Association for the Advance­ment
of Science and the Association of
British Chambers of Commerce re­ported
in favorable terms. This report
led the Government to decide in 1961
that a change to decimal currency was
desirable, and it appointed the Hals-bury
Committee to advise on the best
method to proceed.
On February 15, 1971 the old sys­tem
finally goes. To appreciate the full
significance of this historic change we
must consider its origins.
Until 1914 all the main currency
units, in this as in other countries, ob­tained
their value from the weight of
gold or silver which they contained.
The first penny, accordingly, contained
a specific weight of silver, about
1/240th of a pound, or 22/2 grains. The
origin of this weight is not known, but
it is similar to that of a late Roman coin
(Thrymsa) still circulating in Europe
in the eighth century, when the first
pennies are known to have been struck
in England. The authorized version of
the Bible translated the Roman coin
denarius as a penny, and when today
we write d for pence we are referring
to this Roman coin. The symbol for our
pound (<£.) is an ornamental L, the
initial letter of libra, the Latin for
pound.
Although the Romans introduced
trade and currency from the Indian
Ocean to the Atlantic, and from the
Danube to the Sahara, they never in­vented
a satisfactory system of express­ing
numbers. Every schoolboy learned
to use the abacus, a wire frame with
beads which enabled calculations to be
done on the decimal system. But in
writing down numbers no improvement
had been made on the old system of I
for one finger, of V for the five fingers
and of X for the fingers on two hands.
For a hundred and a thousand the ini­tial
letters (C and M) for these words
were used.
When the English first introduced
their silver pennies they needed some
way of counting them up to one pound
weight. To help them count money the
Saxon and medieval accountants and
treasurers used a chequerboard, simi­lar
to that used for the game of chess.
Pennies were placed in the penny line
of squares until they reached twelve,
when the pile or a counter was trans­ferred
to the shilling line of squares.
When twenty shillings had been
reached this was transferred to the
pound line. Counting by twenties con­tinued
until a hundred pounds was
reached, and so on. It is from this prac­tice
that the Government's chief ac­countant,
the Chancellor of the Ex­chequer,
derives his title.
The first coins of twelve pence value
were not issued until about 1544. The
name shilling means a piece cut off
a larger piece, and may owe its origin
to the practice in previous centuries