A pence for your thoughts - decimalisation, history, monarchy and a rare BBC correction.

Here is an illustration of the gulf between today and yesterday which makes life increasingly melancholy and odd for people such as me, of whom there are still quite a few.

At 8.24 this morning on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, the presenter, John Humphrys, did a very rare thing. He made an on-air correction. I assume this followed a stream of stinging complaints from listeners of a certain age.

Why?

 

One of the Corporation���s Royal correspondents, Peter Hunt, had reminisced on air that the Queen had been born in far-off days when ���a pint of milk cost one pence���.

 

Now, either this will pass you by or it will infuriate you. To anyone of my generation, it is like hearing someone say . ���There was only one geese on the pond��� or ���My mum gave me a sugar mice���. That is to say, it might be pardonable in a three-year-old, but in an educated adult it is an astonishing failure to grasp the rules of the English language. The words ���one��� and ���pence��� cannot be put in the same phrase without short-circuiting the language , causing a loud bang, a bright flash and clouds of smoke in any sentences nearby. Stretcher-bearers would normally need to be called.  But in this case it is worse because it is hopelessly entangled with the rusty barbed wire of national culture.

Proper British people used to use something called money, quite different from the magnetic tokens and unconvincing scraps of paper which now pass for this thing. The coins that clanked in our pockets were mainly things called pennies, large bronze discs a bit more than an inch across, which banks weighed rather than counted (because there was an exact relation between weight and value, three pennies to an ounce, I think),   which their scales were calibrated to note. They���re still used to weight the mechanism in the great clock of Big Ben. They had Britannia staring out to sea on one side, one hand resting on a shield bearing the Union Jack, the other holding a trident (the three-pronged fish spear, not the nuclear missile) . On the other side the monarch���s head, or rather *a* monarch���s head. The oldest I ever received in change was dated 1868, polished almost smooth, though many (���Bun Pennies���) still had the beautiful portrait of the young Queen Victoria with her hair in a bun, later replaced by the gloomy old veiled widow. Every handful of change was a history lesson, and a bit of a Latin lesson too, because the penny featured so much more of the royal title (in that language, but abbreviated)  than modern coins do. Edward VII was common, George V even more so, George VI and the young Elizabeth not even worth a glance. Farthings had just been abolished when I began to get weekly pocket money, as had the silver threepence, but the half-penny, universally known as a ���ha���penny (pronounced ���haypenny���) was still very much in use

The unBritish-looking decimal ���pennies��� and half-pennies which were introduced in 1971 never achieved familiarity or popularity. The half pennies stuck to your fingertip, slipped into cracks and were more or less useless for anything except as emergency screwdrivers. 

And people couldn���t bring themselves to call them pennies or ha'pennies. The transition from one system of money, the old, intelligent, handsome British one to the new dimwit, ugly global one immediately obliterated the penny, ha���penny, threepenny bit and half-crown. But some of our old friends survived ��� the sixpence, the shilling and the florin, re-designated as two and half pence, five pence and ten pence.  All these have now been withdrawn and no trace remains of the coinage we once had as a free and independent nation.

But the new penny was an anomalous interloper. I think the problem lay in the fact that the new penny���s value bore no relation to that of the old penny ��� it was supposedly worth more but was smaller and seemed to buy less. And that what was actually a cent was called a ���penny��� because the government knew that calling it a ���cent��� would make people feel (as well they might have done) that they had quietly been occupied by some foreign power and had lost their country. It���s an amusing paradox that Americans call their cents ���pennies��� out of ancient habit. But we couldn���t bring ourselves to call these trivial, unlovely things ���pennies���.

So they were either referred to rather scornfully as ���pee���, ���new pee��� or, strangely as ���pence��� in the singular. I first came across this on Clydeside in the summer of 1971 where I was working as a Trotskyist agitator on the fringes of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders ���work-in��� protest against the yard closures there. I and others were trying to sell great reams of special issues of the ���Socialist Worker��� to the workers, priced at one new penny. An enterprising urchin offered to take a bundle of them and sell them for us,  and I was astonished to hear him brightly calling out to the passing proletarians ���One pence for a paper!���. He did better than we did.

It was the first time I���d heard this odd formula, and it puzzled me then and for some time afterwards. Now I think I understand it. But in fact Mr Hunt had it wrong. A pint of milk in 1926 cost a penny a pint, not 2.4 pennies or one new pee. . Now it costs more than seven shillings and ought to cost a good deal more if the supermarkets weren't squeezing the dairy farmers so hard. And if you know that fact and remember what a shilling once was, you understand what has happened to our national wealth and to our society.