This is true , although during those lean postwar years there were plenty of pies about marked "s" for sawdust. They cost a penny each or two for a halfpenny. Many middleclass families used them as fuel.

In answer to your question, delacuesta, yes, before £p the U.K. used £SD. 12 pennies (D) to 1 shilling (s), 20 shillings to 1 pound (£).
Because these caclculations induced strange hallucinogenic effects on the population, 240 pennies (d) were replaced by 100 pennies (p). no-one ever told us who got the other 140.

Sadly during this change our change changed and the shilling, previously worth 12 pennies was only now worth 5 pence. So that people wouldn't notice the loss, it was renamed - to 5 pence. Personally I thought that this would draw attention to the loss.

For more information, look up "Libra, Solidus, Denarius" and "Timothy Leary" in any decent work of reference, or wikipedia.

I once looked up Timothy Leary.

It was horrible, and quite undescribable other than that.


I miss the old groats, farthings (except Farthing Wood of which my daughter was fond in her younger years), half pennies, guineas, and crowns and half crowns and florins. Not to mention bob, half dollar, nicker,quid, zac, and all those other self evident terms we used.


They made such an easy system for monetary management and also made one sufficiently adept at number theory that at one stage I could even understand the numerical results of federal elections.