Wordwatch: Pence
In a recent news report, Terry Tomlinson, a worker on building the Greenbooth reservoir in the Naden Valley, Greater Manchester, recalled: “I joined in 1959 and was paid three shillings, 11 pence and a farthing an hour … that increased to five shillings, 11 pence …”
It was a long time ago, and Mr Tomlinson is now in his late 80s. Perhaps he translated those sums of money for the benefit of the journalist who was interviewing him. I can’t speak for Lancashire, but when I was growing up, we would have expressed them differently.
The currency was decimalised in 1971, and that meant not only a complete change in the character of our “small change” (including in practice a sizeable devaluation never admitted to by the government) but also the introduction of a new vocabulary and the sweeping away of familiar words and phrases that had been part of everyday life for hundreds of years.
Long established usage was abandoned practically overnight, and “pence” took over from “penny” almost at once. “Pence” is a perfectly good word, but how did people so quickly forget that it’s a plural, and its singular is “penny”? The latter term is now nearly obsolete (though not in America, where it’s sometimes used to mean a “cent”), and the absurd “one pence” is heard everywhere. In August 2003, I noticed a large hoarding on which “1 PENCE” was the slogan, in letters a foot high. And, in March 2007, I was approached by a beggar, claiming to have served in Her Majesty’s Armed Forces, who asked me rather implausibly for “one pence”.
A pre-decimal penny was denoted by the letter “d”, standing for “denarius”, an ancient Roman coin. The money we use is deeply rooted in our history, our language and our habits of mind. The philosopher Elias Canetti argued that the psychology of a nation is closely bound up with its currency. We British might draw a lesson from the way our coins and banknotes have steadily dwindled in size and weight over the last half-century or so. And decimalisation has played havoc with the memories we have of the old currency. I think it’s useful for us to know the lexicon not only of today’s money, but that of the currency we lived with through the great crises of recent British history, and which crops up in some of our most familiar literature.
Some phrases have remained easily understood like the familiar saying; “Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves”, but many others have lost their meaning now. Lewis Carroll coined (sorry) the proverb; “Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves”, and in doing so enunciated an important truth, which lies behind my homily today. If the word “pence” itself has changed its meaning since decimalisation, as if to give full official sanction to the new usage, in March 2013 the Chancellor of the Exchequer, no less, announced proudly that he was reducing the tax on beer by “one pence”.
In 1849, there was a pioneering attempt to introduce decimalisation, which resulted in a new coin, the “florin”, or two-shilling piece, a tenth of a pound. It was inconveniently similar to the half-crown (two and sixpence, an eighth of a pound), but survived and was the only decimal coin in use before 1971. By the way, six and eightpence was an amount often met within legal documents and fines: it was a third of a pound, eighty pence out of the full 240 (twenty shillings of twelve pence each).
To return to Terry Tomlinson. I think that back in 1959, he would have told you that his earnings were “three and elevenpence farthing” an hour, increased to “five and eleven”. “Elevenpence” was probably slurred: “ele’mp’nce”. However complicated the sums involved, these phrases rolled off the tongue and had a reassuring rhythm of their own. I should add that the coins themselves had physical character, too: they were more solid, handsome – something you could take pride in: they reflected a tradition of medal-casting that, like the ‘d’ for “denarius”, went back to the ancient Romans. Canetti had a point.