Making change in shillings and pence

It was like doing any other day-to-day arithmetic in non-decimalized units, like you do with time or English system volume or weight measures.

12 pence made a shilling, 20 shillings made a pound. Prices of items were given as pounds/shillings/pence, using the pound sign, and "d" for pence. So if something cost 2/4d (two shillings, four pence), and somebody paid for it with a pound, they got, uhhhh, 17 shillings and 8 pence in change. Somebody who actually did it all the time can probably comment on how proficient you became at carrying 12s and 20s in your head.

When they decimalized, the "new penny" (abbpreviated "p") became 1/100 of the existing pound, so many of the old coins could continue to circulate as some number of new pence. The shilling became 5p, for instance. Unfortunately, they had a very popular "half crown" coin (2/6d), which came out to 12 1/2 p.

Old British coinage had a huge number of denominations, with a large number of special terms for them. For instance the aforementioned "crown" = 5 shillings, so that a half crown was 2/6d.

Cue Van Morrison:

"Me and Billy standin there with twelve-and-a-half p." ... just doesn't have the same ring to it.

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• Wikipedia article on pre 1971 English Coins

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