How to get rooked

Harry Shannon

If you grew up in the UK before 1971, you had to learn how to cope with your money, which was divided into pounds, shillings, and pence (pennies). The abbreviation is Lsd (or £sd), after the Latin names.

I hadn’t realised before, but according to Wikipedia this was a system once used across Western Europe. There were 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shillings in a pound. Most countries moved to decimal currency in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, but good old Britain stuck it out until February 1971, creating 100 new pennies to the pound. You can imagine how much time school students spent learning how to use the Lsd currency.

One person who grew up in the pre-decimal era was the novelist William Boyd. According to his website, he was born in Ghana in 1952 and studied at Gordonstoun School in Scotland (Prince Charles went there), and would certainly have been taught pounds, shillings. and pence.

So whose fault is it that Boyd can’t do calculations involving the old money?

Don’t get me wrong; Boyd is a great writer. I have enjoyed several of his books, including his latest one, “Trio.” It’s set in 1968 and follows three central characters. One is Elfrida Wing, herself a novelist. Early in Trio (p.49), Elfrida buys a pamphlet costing 4s 6d (four shillings and sixpence). A while later, for reasons I won’t go into, she buys 50 copies from the author and writes a cheque for £22 5s (p.113).

You don’t have to have spent hours in the classroom to see this is far too much. Just do some rough calculations. 4s 6d is less than 5s. Since there are 20s in a pound, you can buy four pamphlets for a pound and still have some change. So £20 would buy you 80 pamphlets with something left over. Elfrida has overpaid. The exact amount she should have paid is £11 5s, £11 less than she did.

That difference sounds fairly trivial, but that was £11 in 1968. The Bank of England’s Inflation Calculator shows that this was worth £195.10 in 2020, not so trivial after all. Interestingly, Elfrida was a little miffed when she paid the £22 5s that she didn’t get a reduction for bulk purchase. Had she – and Boyd – been able to do arithmetic, she’d have known she wasn’t just losing out on a discount. She was getting taken.