• Money at 9DR

    Money at 9DR

    Happy new year to all readers! Here's a post on Money!  In fact I have a few items on this topic and some memories to share, so here goes! At 9DR and perhaps even more at 7DR, money was not very plentiful. I recall mummy saying that scrimp and save was very much the practice, and that this affected their lives quite a lot. Not a lot of heating in winter, nothing really fancy to wear, hand-made presents were the rule until rather late. Of course during the war-years, and even after, rationing I suppose was still ordinary. But I think the habit stuck, because there would always be this attitude of growing vegetables in the garden and collecting odds and ends "in case they might come in useful". An emphasis was laid on not wasting, and Auntie Olive's skills at sewing and darning were extremely valued. Even if all this was the consequences of bad times, it must also have struck a religious chord, since, according to the gospel: "No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money." (Matthew 6,24)...

    We were lucky to see the old and the new currency (the decimalisation took place in 1971) so I have memories of the old coins which were in use first: farthings, pennies and half-pennies, threepence, sixpence, shillings, half-crowns. And that's it because I never saw sovereigns or guineas the higher denominations. When I was back from a trip to England in 1968, our teacher at the school in Bonnebosq asked us to illustrate it  and I chose to paint a "ha'penny":

    Money at 9DR

    And a friend (a guy called Laurent Delafosse) got to do the comment of my painting:

    Money at 9DR

    (it says: "Yves went on holiday to England. He brought back some English coins which are of a different hue than ours. They bear names unknown to us: a penny, a sixpence coin, a farthing.") Below you can judge how well I had copied it! The bowsprit is missing some of its length...

    Money at 9DR

    And here are the other mentioned coins:

    Money at 9DR

    Money at 9DR

    Some of the other coins: the half-crown:

    Money at 9DR

     And a pile of threepence coins, which (unless I'm wrong) Grandma would call "thropny bits".

    Money at 9DR

    Of course there were notes:

    Money at 9DR

    Money at 9DR

    Now some of you probably know that Auntie Grandma used to send us birthday cards and since we were too old and perhaps too far away for her to know what we might like, she would add a one pound note inside the card. This came to be termed "le poond", saying it in a silly French way. She did this until we were 18 I believe, and so since the value of money slowly went down, the poor pound didn't buy much in the end and we came to disregard the gesture: ungrateful brats!

    In 1971 then, decimal money was introduced, with 100 pennies to make a pound, and we saw these new customers arriving:Money at 9DR

    Money at 9DR

    and of course there were some new banknotes, which I will spare you. The old coins were still valid for a time, I think, and I remember you could continue to use these for a while (how much were they worth?):

    Money at 9DR

    But at the beginning the new money was worth a good deal, I remember being given 50p for some work I'd done in the house (and liking the geometrical shape of the coin), and going over to Murray & Brand's in Southgate to buy one of these toy plastic elephants which was sold for 40p (check here). I think the other 10p were spent on sweets (plural!)...

    Money at 9DR

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  • Comments

    1
    Emmeria
    Sunday 17th June 2018 at 08:22
    I will love sell my Queen Elizabeth II coins good offer
    2
    Sunday 17th June 2018 at 19:01

    Hi... can you explain exactly what your message is about?

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