Decimalisation and the relative value of money

Or, how much is that in old money?! Or, how much is that worth today?!

So today, 15 February 2024, is the 53rd anniversary of the UK changing its currency from pounds, shillings, and pence (£ s. d.) to pounds and pence. This was quite a dramatic change, as we were used to there being 12 pennies in a shilling, and twenty shillings in a pound! And now we were changing to 100 pennies in a pound! I'm sure many of us were good at our 12 times tables because of our currency!!

So, in 1971, just before we converted, we had coins to the value of halfpennies, pennies, threepences, sixpences, florins (2 shillings), half-crowns (2 shillings and 6 pence), and ten shilling notes (although, actually these were replaced in 1969, just before decimalisation for what is now the 50 pence piece), £1, £5, £10, £20, and £50 paper notes. 

I'm sure somewhere I've got a set of mint decimal coins that I was given when we changed our currency ... and unlike today, these included the new halfpenny piece, a new 5-pence piece, but no 20-pence piece.

Of course, at the time the new money was introduced, shoppers were quite convinced that the price of goods would increase as there were fewer coins of a lower denomination. I guess this was probably true, because the old halfpenny which was taken out of circulation was actually worth a fifth of a new penny (i.e. £0.0021) and since the lowest new denomination was a halfpence, worth £0.005, which means nothing could cost less than this!! I think!! There's a good article on the internet which explains our coinage much better than I have! 

This all got me to thinking about inflation and when people (I've selected a number of industrialists) left money in their will when they died, how much would this be worth today! Sounds simple enough, but actually, trying to work it out, even with the aid of online calculators was actually quite difficult! And, just how accurate this is, is open to consideration!

Please excuse the red underlining which is Word telling me I've made a spelling mistake, and please excuse the odd places where I've put a comma instead of a full stop - rest assured the final calculations are based on the correct figures with commas and full stops in the right places!! And please excuse the fuzziness of the text!

Firstly, I tried using the Bank of England calculator, and this is the result of asking for a conversion of the value at the time of death, to today:

Next, a friend tried another calculator for me, and got wildly different figures:

So, I thought I'd better try another calculator, and this time, I converted first to the 2017 value, and then from the 2017 value to today's value. This is the result of the conversion to 2017 values:

And this is the result of the conversion from the above 2017 values to today's values:

Just to be sure, I tried another calculator to convert from the 2017 value to today's value:

Having reached such different figures, I decided to take the four values and calculate the average of these, to arrive at a potential figure for what these industrialists left, and what it might be worth today:

So, to put the values into perspective with each other, here's the chart of who appears to have left the most, and who left the least:

Of course, there are other ways to look at the value of money, here's one example: around the time of his death, Thomas Messenger would have been able to spend his money in one of the ways listed below:

Calculation and picture courtesy of the National Archives

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Posted by lynneaboutloughborough

With apologies for typos which are all mine!

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