In message
Mizter T wrote:


On 10 Jun, 19:53, Graeme Wall wrote:

In message
Mizter T wrote:

On 10 Jun, 17:39, Graeme Wall wrote:

In message
"sweller" wrote:

(snip)

How much, say, beer, bread or cheese would the 3d buy in 1969, compared
to the £1.50 fare today?

Beer reached 2/- a pint around 1969, in London at least. So you could
get 1/8 of a pint for 3d. £1.50 should get you a half now.

Waits for Northerners to die of shock at the price.

If you know where to go you can get yourself a pint for something like
£1.80. And it's not the establishment with faux-marble bar counters.

You can in Southampton as well, but not generally in Central London (bar
Weatherspoons).


May I merrily spread the good word of Samuel Smith's Brewery.

Please do :-)

The beer may all be brewed in Yorkshire but central London plays host to
many of Sam Smith's distinctively convivial hostelries - traditional pubs,
no music, decent fellow drinkers, a lovely pint, and minimal damage to your
wallet. 'Tis a winner. If it's your round, this is the place to buy it!


I first came across Sam Smiths at a little pub in Shildon in 1975. I still
have the branded tankard presented to me by the landlord to celebrate
drinking his pub dry. ob railway, I was there for the S&D 150th as part of
the GWS sales team so I had plenty of assistance in the drinking.

--
Graeme Wall
This address is not read, substitute trains for rail.
Transport Miscellany at http://www.greywall.demon.co.uk/rail/index.html

On Jun 9, 8:50 pm, 1506 wrote:
On Jun 9, 9:33 am, nessuno2001 wrote: Hello everybody,
do you know how much was a ticket for the London underground in the
early '60s?

In preparation for decimalisation in 1971, London Transport moved all
fares to be multiples of 6d, which had an exact conversion at 2.5p.
And they were one of the last organisations to make widespread use of
the half (new) penny before its abolition.

In doing this, they were one of the few large organisations to be
completely transparent about decimalisation. Most took the opportunity
to introduce a hidden price increase, even other nationalised
transport bodies. Scottish Omnibuses increased the fare from my home
town to the nearest city from 2s 3d (just over 11p) to 13p.

John

Part of the problem surely was the (UK) Ewe Kay's decision to
"decimalise" the Whole Pound, rather than what happened first in South
Africa, and later in Australia and New Zealand, where the "local
pound" was decimalised as the rand/Aussie-Kiwi dollar based on ten
shillings, i.e. "half a pound".

A "shilling" immediately became 10 cents, not 5p... six pence became 5
cents.

In the "dominions", the only awkward conversions involved the pennies
between one and four, and six and nine.

In NZ, the Decimal Currency Board (from memory!) had strict controls
on pricing guidelines when the switch was made on Monday 10 July 1967.

I personally prepared payroll for ~50 employees for payout on Tues 11
July '67... and had it paid out in cash with the "new" paper bills and
coinage.

On Jun 10, 10:26*pm, Graeme Wall wrote:
In message
* * * * * Mizter T wrote:







On 10 Jun, 19:53, Graeme Wall wrote:

In message
* * * * * Mizter T wrote:

On 10 Jun, 17:39, Graeme Wall wrote:

In message
* * * * * "sweller" wrote:

(snip)

How much, say, beer, bread or cheese would the 3d buy in 1969, compared
to the £1.50 fare today?

Beer reached 2/- a pint around 1969, in London at least. *So you could
get 1/8 of a pint for 3d. *£1.50 should get you a half now.

Waits for Northerners to die of shock at the price.

If you know where to go you can get yourself a pint for something like
£1.80. And it's not the establishment with faux-marble bar counters.

You can in Southampton as well, but not generally in Central London (bar
Weatherspoons).

May I merrily spread the good word of Samuel Smith's Brewery.

Please do :-)

The beer may all be brewed in Yorkshire but central London plays host to
many of Sam Smith's distinctively convivial hostelries - traditional pubs,
no music, decent fellow drinkers, a lovely pint, and minimal damage to your
wallet. 'Tis a winner. If it's your round, this is the place to buy it!

Slight warning if the round includes soft drinks. The beer price may
lead one to assume that everything is cheap, but they have hugely
racked up the soft drink prices in their London pubs. I don't think
this is the case in Yorkshire though.


I first came across Sam Smiths at a little pub in Shildon in 1975. *I still
have the branded tankard presented to me by the landlord to celebrate
drinking his pub dry. *ob railway, I was there for the S&D 150th as part of
the GWS sales team so I had plenty of assistance in the drinking.

On Jun 10, 8:14*am, Chris Tolley wrote:
Peter Masson wrote:
BR went decimal a day earlier than the national D-day, so for the
price of an Oxford platform ticket (the last time I've ever bought
one) I had in my hand the change for a shilling of a 1p and a 2p coin
a day before most people could get hold of them.

Example coinage was on sale for a couple of years before it could be
spent. A plastic wallet labelled "Britain's First Decimal Coins". Anyone
could get a set.

Do you happen to know the provenance of a 1970 two-shilling (ie 10p
till 1992) coin I found in my change once?

Was there an equivalent "last non-decimal coins" set available that
included coins that weren't generally made and that someone
accidentally spent? (Given that they started using 10p coins for 2s
in 1968.)

"MIG" wrote

Do you happen to know the provenance of a 1970 two-shilling (ie 10p
till 1992) coin I found in my change once?

Was there an equivalent "last non-decimal coins" set available that
included coins that weren't generally made and that someone
accidentally spent? (Given that they started using 10p coins for 2s
in 1968.)

Yes - I have a set of 1970 pre-decimal coins, containing halfpenny, penny,
threepence, sixpence, shilling (English and Scottish versions), two
shillings, and half crown. Some of these were not minted for general
circulation in that year.

Weren't the coins enormous? The two shillings is the same diameter as the
current £2 coin, while both the penny and the half-crown are larger.

Peter

Peter Masson wrote:

Weren't the coins enormous? The two shillings is the same diameter as
the current #2 coin, while both the penny and the half-crown are larger.

I found a tin with a load of old coins in - by old, I mean post 1971 -
and I was surprised at the size of the 50p and 10p. No wonder I always
had holes in my trouser pockets.

--
Simon

Brighton
ex-Westbury, ex-Aberystwyth

sweller wrote:

Peter Masson wrote:

Weren't the coins enormous? The two shillings is the same diameter as
the current #2 coin, while both the penny and the half-crown are larger.

I found a tin with a load of old coins in - by old, I mean post 1971 -
and I was surprised at the size of the 50p and 10p. No wonder I always
had holes in my trouser pockets.

In a way it's a shame that the 5p shrank in 1990 and 10p in 1992
(can't remember when the 50p shrank). Before that you used to get
loads of funny old coins still in circulation after a very long time.

I understood that the reason why 5p and 10p were made exactly the same
size and weight as 1s and 2s was because so many people had slot
meters that would have had to be replaced. Decimalisation was in 1971,
but 5p and 10p were minted from 1968 and 50p from 1969 (hence the 1970
2s being odd) and 1s and 2s stayed in circulation as 5p and 10p of
course.

I did once find a 1938 2s in my change, but I think that the reason
why you hardly ever saw any dated before 1947 was that that was the
first year when there wasn't any silver content.

MIG wrote:

In a way it's a shame that the 5p shrank in 1990 and 10p in 1992
(can't remember when the 50p shrank). Before that you used to get
loads of funny old coins still in circulation after a very long time.

For my tenth birthday I received some pound notes from relatives. This
was the month (February 1978) that the old pre-decimal pound note started
to give way to the new smaller style. Relatives being relatives thought
it was nice to put the new crisp notes in the cards.

I was gutted, the old ones were bigger, didn't my aged Aunts realise
these were worth more!

--
Simon

Brighton
ex-Westbury, ex-Aberystwyth

Peter Masson wrote:
Yes - I have a set of 1970 pre-decimal coins, containing halfpenny, penny,
threepence, sixpence, shilling (English and Scottish versions), two
shillings, and half crown. Some of these were not minted for general
circulation in that year.

None of them were minted for general circulation, though presumably
the 6d, 1s and 2s were legal tender. Sets are reasonably common and
come up on Ebay all the time.

Colin McKenzie

--
No-one has ever proved that cycle helmets make cycling any safer at
the population level, and anyway cycling is about as safe per mile as
walking.
Make an informed choice - visit www.cyclehelmets.org.

Paul Rigg wrote:

I seem to recall that the post office put second class mail up from 4d to
2.5p (ie 6d) and first class mail up from 5d to 3p (7.2d) and claimed that
it wasnt really a price increase.

I'm fairly sure the rates went to 6d and 7d before decimalisation, but
apparently after Christmas 1970. So not very long before.

Colin McKenzie



--
No-one has ever proved that cycle helmets make cycling any safer at
the population level, and anyway cycling is about as safe per mile as
walking.
Make an informed choice - visit www.cyclehelmets.org.