TL;DR: £ or L? p or d? How did they use to write prices?
Attempting to write a realistic game set in Britain, 1926, where everything is kept the same as it was then. I want to use the correct symbol on price tags and the UI. On the Wikipedia page, it states:
But they don’t cite a source for it. For pence, most people refer to it with an abbreviated “p”, but the national archives’ websites represent it with a “d”, which would be the correct representation for Pound and Pence for the period?
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Prices were in pounds, shillings, and pence, not pounds and pence. The £ symbol was used for pounds, but most prices were in shillings and pence and often written 10/6 (for a price of 10 shillings and sixpence), 10/- (for 10 shillings exactly), and prices for things in pennies were given using ‘d’ and written in the form of ‘4d’ (for four pence);
Example: https://scontent.fbrs1-2.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/471519169_8869451523092144_3776878681961409124_n.jpg?stp=cp6_dst-jpg_tt6&_nc_cat=105&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=aa7b47&_nc_ohc=yixIea0WGGYQ7kNvgH7Tgc5&_nc_oc=AdnbuGOnYrdpwluFOQFaB0uk9aNORjQrCo3ufTYJTLcP6HpfBwHYg325xa6XSQ78uiA&_nc_zt=23&_nc_ht=scontent.fbrs1-2.fna&_nc_gid=10WZyJlsuE_E3rEXfBtm_w&oh=00_AYGwbHPA573Ehcn3xfnTHI4a1UsEBxamDqRGPRGbaL-vdA&oe=67F35906
Example: https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/07/27/article-0-0D2F629C00000578-40_964x751.jpg
lsd was often used when referring to pounds, shillings, and pence, with 12 pence to the shilling and 20 shillings to the pound. The coins consisted of bronze (though often called copper) farthings, ha’pennies, and pennies worth 1/4, 1/2 and 1 full pence respectively, the silver threepence/thrupenny bits (the latter term also being cockney rhyming slang), sixpence, shillings, florins/two shilling coins, and half-crowns worth 3d, 6d, 12d or 1/-, 2/-, and 2/6 respectively. Gold sovereigns and half sovereigns (worth £1 or 20/- and 10/- respectively) were used extensively before the First World War but fell out of favour afterwards and began to be phased out and replaced by bank notes.
Prices often ended in 11d in much the same way that modern prices often end in 99p, though it was also common to see prices ending in 6d (as it was half a shilling).
For pence, “d.” would have been used in the 1920s. “p” is the abbreviation for the decimal “new” penny (1/100 of a pound), while d was used for the old penny (1/240 of a pound).
(British currency became decimal in 1971. I don’t know exactly when the abbreviation “p” for the new penny was chosen, but it was in official use by the time of the Decimal Currency Act 1969.)
In terms of pounds, the pound sign £, which has existedsince the 17th century , was used where available (in handwriting or printing) but it was more commonly known to be an L than it is today. For instance, AA Milne’s 1920 poem “O.B.E.” uses “L.s.d.” to mean money, and it must be pronounced “Ell Ess Dee” to rhyme properly.
To add to this, another common way of writing prices in pre-decimal currency was to give the number of shillings and pence separated by a slash. For instance, “1/8” would mean one shilling and eight pence (or twenty old pence, one twelfth of a pound) while 30/- would mean thirty shillings (or one and a half pounds).
FWIW, probably worth adding (and writing as one of the… ahem…’younger’ people actually to remember using the old money) that even as recently as the late sixties/early seventies, a pound was a /lot/ of money – most prices were of the 3/6 variety rather than £1 4s 6d.. I’d imagine £4 or £5 would have been a weekly wage for a family breadwinner in the 20s.