Greetings---
When I was studying in London in 1977-78 vendors in the Underground station s were selling "Farewell Sets" of Old Money coinage. I ended up buying a bu nch of these Farewell Sets as gifts for family.
As the CR discussion on British coinage was at its height I went a-looking for my only remaining set of these coins and couldn't find them. Then, toda y, whilst dusting (when I wasn't looking for them of course!) I found them.
Here is a link to a scan of these coins in their paperboard holder, showing a Churchill pound coin, a half crown, florin, silver threepence, English a nd Scotish shillings, penny, sixpence, farthing, brass threepence and halfp enny---obverse and reverse sides.
http://s89.photobucket.com/
Cheerio,
Peter Jourdain
Whitewater, Wisconsin USA
> From: John Betmanis <johnb@oxford.net>
\r?\n> Subject: Re: [CR]Making sense of old British prices
\r?\n> To: classicrendezvous@bikelist.org
\r?\n> Date: Friday, November 28, 2008, 9:06 AM
\r?\n> At 08:15 AM 28/11/2008 -0000, Paul Grosvenor wrote:
\r?\n> >A "quid" is a pound, or a nicker, £1.
\r?\n> >Half a dollar is 2/6, or half a crown, or in todays
\r?\n> money 12 1/2p
\r?\n> >A "tanner" is 6d (sixpence) or in todays
\r?\n> money 2 1/2p
\r?\n> >The pre 1971(14th February) pound had 240 pennies, or
\r?\n> pence, or d. It
\r?\n> >had 20 shillings, or 20 bob. 12d made 1s (or 1/-). It
\r?\n> sounds very
\r?\n> >complicated, and it probably was, but on 14th February
\r?\n> 1971 we suddenly
\r?\n> >had to get our heads around 100newpence = £1.00, no
\r?\n> more pennies,
\r?\n> >halfpennies, tanners, 2 bobs, half a crowns, threepenny
\r?\n> bits - what a
\r?\n> >shock that was!
\r?\n> >Interestingly, I was in Kenya earlier this year where
\r?\n> their currency is
\r?\n> >the Kenyan shilling - which they call the
\r?\n> "bob"!
\r?\n> >And their 50 shilling coin is exactly the same as our
\r?\n> 50p coin!
\r?\n>
\r?\n> You've just about covered it, Paul. (Can't remember
\r?\n> if anyone mentioned the
\r?\n> florin, which was 2 shillings, a bit smaller than the half
\r?\n> crown coin.) And
\r?\n> just to keep this close to topic, let's not forget the
\r?\n> farthing (as in the
\r?\n> penny-farthing bicycle). The farthing was 1/4 of a penny, a
\r?\n> copper coin
\r?\n> just a little smaller than our penny. I think they were
\r?\n> phased out in the
\r?\n> fifties and I last remember the denonination being used in
\r?\n> the price of
\r?\n> bread. The old British penny was a copper coin about the
\r?\n> size of our old
\r?\n> silver dollar, so you can picture a penny-farthing bicycle.
\r?\n>
\r?\n> John Betmanis
\r?\n> Woodstock, Ontario
\r?\n> Canada