Money Money Money

Hard to believe it is now fifty years since we replaced Pounds, Shilling and Pence with that new fangled Decimal currency. Thus making these weights obsolete overnight. No more 10/- notes, no more 3d bits and no more pre-decimal bronze coinage of any description. The only coins surviving the cut were the shilling and florin, which I think stayed around for a while as they were directly interchangeable with the 5p and 10p pieces.
Weirdly, considering I only had 10 years of £sd, I still think in terms of things costing 3/6 or 15 bob, etc, even though I’ve been using decimal currency for 50 years! Must have been down to the way we were taught at school. The only things I really remember from February 1971 is that a penny chew (1d) remained a penny chew but now cost 1p - over twice as much. At the same time, my pocket money was changed from half a crown to 10 new pence! I was definitely worse off on both fronts. I also recall that the local bus company couldn’t get its ticket machines converted in time, so for a week after D-Day we were told the fare in “new” pence and then the conductor used a chart to convert that to the old currency in order that he could issue a ticket!
I started working in a bank only 7 years later, and there was still quite a bit of the old currency knocking about - we could only send it off to the Bank of England in specific amounts as I recall. The weights in the picture didn’t completely go out of use until electronic coin scales came in. As they were adjusted by adding or taking out the lead shot, it was easy to repurpose them after decimalisation by simply changing the weight and putting a sticky label with the new amount on - e.g. 50p Bronze.
Since coronavirus though, using any sort of coin has become a thing of the past as we have switched to contactless and other electronic forms of payment, to prevent infection. Whether we will go back to using notes and coins when things get back to normal, remains to be seen.