I’m always intrigued by the rather spiteful mockery which follows any suggestion that decimal currency may not, in fact, be the ideal or only possible sort of currency. I’ve never been sure that a counting system based on the number of toes we all have is so fantastically superior, and so obviously more modern than the far more sophisticated system of shillings and pence which existed until I was 20 years old, during an era when the finances of this country were rather better run, at state and individual level, than they are now.

These jeers often include witless jibes about ‘ bringing back the groat’, which were also common during the equally stupid ‘progressive’ campaign to introduce the Euro. I have no idea what a groat was, and couldn’t care less, nor is it relevant to either discussion. There’s nothing specially modern or ‘progressive' about decimal systems. They’re simpler than the alternative, but so are the strip system of cultivation, architecture without arches, engines without gears, wattle and daub, septic tanks and cooking over an open fire. In fact, the earliest major country to decimalise its coinage was that heart of black reaction, superstition, autocracy and backwardness, Tsarist Russia, in 1704. The French revolutionaries associated the idea with 'progress’ but only because one of their main desires was to smash all bridges to the past.

They even tried to decimalise the calendar, but had to give this up when the universe, and suffering humanity which likes a rest more often than every ten days, refused to adapt themselves to their toe-counting ten-day weeks and ten-month years .Ten-week months were too ludicrous even for the Jacobins, as was the cubic metre, or stere, as a liquid measure. This was far too huge to be of any practical use. The current ‘litre’ is a cubic decimetre, like the centimetre a non-standard use of the metric system, employed to get over the fact that it is so cumbersome and inhuman. Even then, no decent French wine is sold by the litre, 200 years after its introduction in that country. Until recently, French wine bottles were sold by the wholly irregular measure of 72 centilitres, more or less exactly equivalent to that fine old English wine measure, the ‘bottle’. Now they’ve been rounded up to 75 centilitres. But they still haven't been forced to conform to a system that is based on ideals rather than on life.

The interesting thing (to me) is the inability of so many people to imagine any kind of world different to the one we now live in; and the equally great difficulty many people have in believing that any former system could be superior to what we now have, or that anything at all in the past was better than what we have in the present.

This attitude of shut-minded mockery is well summed up in the episode in ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’ where Winston Smith, on an illicit walk through the poorer parts of IngSoc London, visits a proletarian pub, and witnesses this exchange: ‘‘I arst you civil enough, didn’t I?’ said the old man, straightening his shoulders pugnaciously. ‘You telling me you ain’t got a pint mug in the ’ole bleeding boozer?’

‘And what in hell’s name IS a pint?’ said the barman, leaning forward with the tips of his fingers on the counter.

‘‘Ark at ’im! Calls ’isself a barman and don’t know what a pint is! Why, a pint’s the ’alf of a quart, and there’s four quarts to the gallon. ‘Ave to teach you the A, B, C next.’

‘Never heard of ’em,’ said the barman shortly. ‘Litre and half litre — that’s all we serve. There’s the glasses on the shelf in front of you.’

‘I likes a pint,’ persisted the old man. ‘You could ’a drawed me off a pint easy enough. We didn’t ’ave these bleeding litres when I was a young man.’

‘When you were a young man we were all living in the treetops,’ said the barman, with a glance at the other customers.’

The author of this passage, George Orwell, famously noted that one of the first things that you noticed when you came home from the continent was that ‘the beer is bitterer and the coins are heavier’. He knew these things mattered not just for themselves, but because they represented something else that was different about this country, its ancient, polished-in-use institutions, laws, customs, made by and for its people, not imposed on them by neat-minded rulers.

When we hear people sneering about this subject, we observe two interesting and not very creditable forces at work. One, a shut mind that refuses to think; the other a prejudice against the past which prevents any lessons being learned from it. Groats, indeed.

I have long thought that the old British currency was destroyed for two reasons, both foreseen by Jim Callaghan (then Chancellor of the Exchequer) when he made the announcement that decimalisation would proceed, in the midst of a pre-election mini-budget on 1st March 1966. The first was that he anticipated the severe inflation which was about to burst on the British economy, and which would be to some extent disguised by a new currency whose smallest unit was almost two-and-a-half times the size of the existing smallest unit (in 1966 any typewriter keyboard would have had keys for fractions, which have now completely disappeared. I am not sure if early computer keyboards in fact contained them. An interesting unnoticed change). The second was that the establishment had made up their minds to join what was then the Common Market, where a single currency was already foreseen, and a decimal pound would be more easily merged with it. I believe, but cannot find the reference, that our Common Market 'partners' placed actual pressure on British governments to take this step.

The prejudicial establishment of a committee which was not even allowed to discuss the issue of whether decimalisation would be good or bad, came at a time when the establishment was all but pleading to be allowed into the supposedly glorious Common Market.

As far as I know ( I have not been able to obtain a copy) , the September 23 1963 Halsbury Committee which investigated the introduction of Decimal Currency into Britain (Report of the Committee of Inquiry on Decimal Currency) was specifically not asked to discuss the issue of *whether* Britain should have a decimal currency, only to look into ways by which it could be done.

As with metrication, there does not ever seem to have been any actual Bill before Parliament on the matter. It was just done. The committee was divided between those who thought the pound should be retained, for reasons of national prestige, and those who thought we should follow several Commonwealth countries, and base the new unit on ten shillings, as half a pound was in those days. There was also a problem about what we could call the new, smaller currency. ‘Dollar’ (though chosen by Australia and New Zealand) would be too obvious a surrender. But if we called it a ‘pound’ people would think it was a form of devaluation.

Certainly nobody did anything about it at the time. Gordon Greig, of the Daily Mail, reported ‘Sir Miles Thomas, the industrialist’ had asked ‘Would someone tell me what benefit Britain will achieve by this hysterical plunge towards continental standards? Surely we can use £100 million in ways better than confusing ourselves and our export customers by changing to a decimal system?’.

Nor did Callaghan seem to be in a hurry, when he announced the change on 1st March 1966. The implementation of the decision (which cost about £4 billion at today’s prices) was to be in five years, in 1971 (by which time Mr Callaghan would be in opposition) . In any case it was overshadowed by a new betting tax and the usual pre-election gimmicks of help for poorer mortgage-holders and attractive new ways of saving.

And so it just went, as things do in a world where everyone is either seduced by the new or unwilling to fight for the old.

The old system was better in practice because it was immensely more flexible. It was divisible by three into whole numbers and exact sums, which decimal systems are not. The different values represented by pounds, shillings and pence were appropriate to the things they were used to buy – pennies for sweets, milk or a newspaper, shillings for books or bacon, pounds for the bigger, more permanent things (something similar is true of inches, feet and miles, of ounces, pounds , stones, hundredweights and tons). Nobody who was brought up with it ever had any problem with it . You just had to learn your times tables in those authoritarian schools we used to have. I get short-changed (and, more worryingly, long-changed) much more often now than I did when we still had proper money.

Prices went up more slowly, and it was more noticeable when they did.

I *liked* the old coins for all those reasons. But I *loved* them because they were full of history – a pocketful of change would contain portraits of Queen Victoria, both as a young woman and an old veiled widow, some of them polished almost smooth, some miraculously unworn, Edward VII, George V, George VI, and our present Queen. The older silver coins, which really contained quite a lot of silver, shone when you rubbed them on your sleeve.

A couple of half crowns clicking together in your pocket, and you felt both rich and English.

They went not because there was anything wrong with them, but because the country they represented so well – an educated, self-disciplined and serious place - had vanished, along with the old-fashioned, solid wealth and hard work that stood behind them and made them feel so reassuringly heavy. What a strange thing it was in those days to go abroad and feel in your palm the featherweight, inflated, laughable coins of less happy lands, only fit for buying poor, thin beer. Now we have those here.