1971: Farewell to bobs and tanners
Britain goes decimal leaving millions of older citizens brought up with pennies, tanners, bobs, florins and half-crowns to fumble with unfamiliar coins inelegantly known as ‘p’, short for ‘new pence’ as in ‘five p’, which equals 12 old pennies (or one new shilling).
If all this sounded confusing, that’s because it was. New pence were more than twice the value of old pennies and critics said the awkward conversion scale will mean higher prices and hidden inflation.
The government insisted that the changeover was a smooth one.
Most notable historic snippets or facts extracted from the book ‘On This Day’ first published in 1992 by Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, London, as well as additional supplementary information extracted from Wikipedia.
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