Newspaper headlines today are remembering decimalisation of the English money system. What I remember about 15th Feb 1971 is it was the day we moved into our first house - in the middle of a mail strike. The banks were closed for the changeover so we didn't have any cash to pay people (no ATM's then). The house was in Southampton, the solicitors were in Bournemouth and the estate owners/builders head office was somewhere else again on the South coast, so there had been a lot of to-ing and fro-ing with documents (no email or mobile phones with text!). Our furniture had been stored temporarily in the garage after previous "friends" in Swansea had ordered us to remove it from theirs. They charged us for it, too. Quite a few things had suffered from the damp. Despite being left open, the fridge door had become shut and was totally green inside. We had a few curtains, but no carpets, only a huge circular reversible rug. The house cost us £5,025. Thanks to the housing boom, we sold it only two years later for £9,750. Zoopla's current price estimate for it is £260,000!
The coins in the photo are a ship ha'penny (ship depicting Francis Drake's the Golden Hind), 480 to the pound,
The wren farthing (as the wren is the smallest British bird), was discontinued at the end of 1960, and was rare when I was a child. There would have been 960 to the pound
A modern penny, 100 to the pound, with a portcullis. This was the badge of the first Tudor monarch used on coins from Henry VIII. Last used on the old thru'penny bit then on the new penny which was worth 2.4 old pence
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