Reflections on the Threepenny Bit

While going through an old chest of drawers I recently came across an old twelve-sided threepenny bit. Most people don’t remember these coins,  but to me they were once part of daily life. One of them would once have bought you a national newspaper or a very small chocolate bar. Technically, they were worth a little  more than one of the decimal pennies (always known scornfully as ‘pee’) which were introduced during that year of revolution, 1971. It was a dead thing when I found it, long unused and though not actually tarnished, just a flat, matt yellowish shape of cheap base metal.

 

But it cheered me up in some undefinable way, so I put it in my pocket with all the other change and after a few days it had come to life again, and taken on a bit of sparkle and glow. This was how I remembered it in use. It made a great difference to its power to evoke – just as the sight of a main-line steam engine on a proper railway conjures up far more memories than a tootling tank engine shuffling about on a few miles of revived branch-line track.

 

It’s not a specially handsome coin, as the old half-crown was, and the pre-1939 shillings were. It would never have bought a Mars Bar, as the old sixpence used to do (Could you get a ‘Milky Way’ with it? You could certainly get a rather unsatisfactory confection called a ‘Punch’ bar , not to mention twelve four-for-a-penny chews - though it was no good offering the lady in the sweetshop a farthing for a single one of these chews, as the farthing ( a quarter of a penny) had gone out of circulation by then, though there were still quite a few about; nor usually a ha'penny ( half penny, for those unfortunate enough not to recall this coin) for two of them. It was four for a penny, and multiples thereof, or 'Clear off!'). 

 

 It only existed as legal tender for fewer than 40 years, as it gradually replaced the old silver threepence, the despised ‘Joey’ which features so much in George Orwell’s long, heartfelt complaint about the hell of middle class poverty,  ‘Keep the Aspidistra Flying’. The ‘Joey’ was  a silver disc so small and thin that ( a bit like the modern, miserable Five Pee, or the American dime) it would stick to your fingertip and was worth so little that it was almost embarrassing to spend it, an admission that you were down to your last few pence.

 

Why did it cheer me up? Well, the usual thing, the awakening of pleasant memories of saving and spending such coins on small childhood pleasures, plus the warm, overwhelmingly British shape of it. I learned very early on in life that nobody, apart from the Swiss (whose silver pieces were comparable to our old ones in weight, detail and shine) , had a coinage that was as confidence-inspiring as ours. Foreign coins had holes in them, or were made of industrial grey metals so light that they seemed likely to blow away in the wind.  And they were all boring decimals.

 

The very idea of a coin representing three of something, and which was at the same time a quarter of a shilling, was subversive of the boring, regulated decimal world beyond our shores, in which everyone counted on their toes, and nobody could divide anything by three, or (and this was even odder) wanted to divide anything by four, let alone eight, which of course real people do all the time. Athe equivakent of a penny in the Channel Island of Jersey was in those days something called 'Eight Doubles', pronounced 'doobles' , as I clearly remember,  though Jerseymen in recent years have expressed baffled scepticism about this memory. 

 

The only exception to this was the American Quarter Dollar, another lovely coin which defied the decimal logic of the US currency and suggested that the Americans, in their hearts weren’t wholly wedded to toe-counting as the supreme form of mathematics. Which of course they're not, bless them. Free people never are. In idaho a few weeks ago I rejoiced to see paint sold in gallons, meat sold by the pound and coffee sold in fluid ounces. And do you know, it wasn't backward at all?  

 

The US Treasury also prints Two Dollar Bills, though these are quite hard to find (Ask at a bank if you are in the US. They sometimes have them. Some people regard them as unlucky). They fit into no proper mathematical sequence, toe-counting or advanced. You will only ever receive these in change at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s lovely, boyishly gadget-filled house in the Virginia Hills (depicted on the US nickel, the five cent coin). That is because they have a picture of Mr Jefferson on one side, and rather fine depiction of the Founding Fathers signing the Declaration of Independence on the other. It is in many ways the most interesting piece of paper money you will ever see (though those pyramids, eyes and strange Latin inscriptions on the single dollar bill always seem to me to attract less attention than they should).

 

It was only after my last portable typewriter eventually wore out, from too much frenzied hammering and from being dropped too often, that I realised that modern computer keyboards don’t provide fractions. This must be a deliberate decision. They do provide all kinds of wholly useless (to me) and mysterious (to me) keys, while oddly being quite unable to agree on where to put the now-essential ‘@‘ symbol, which on some foreign keyboards requires acrobatics to locate. I’m sorry, but 1/2 just doesn’t look like ‘half’ to me. There just isn’t any peaceful coexistence between decimals, and metric measures, and the old world of halves, quarters, thirds, and threepenny bits. And whenever I complain about this, angry decimalists and metricators rage spitefully at me, falsely accusing me of wanting to stamp out their dull, inhuman measures, when all want to do is to live and let live.  I assume they accuse me of this fault, because in some Freudian way they project their desires on to me.