FIFTY years ago on Monday, Britain changed its currency. Out went pounds, shillings and pence, which dated back to Roman times and worked on a strange system of 12, and in came decimal pounds and pence, which counted in tens.

February 15, 1971, was, as The Northern Echo said on its front page in big letters, D Day. This explained why the cost of the paper changed overnight from 7d to 3p.

The pre-decimal currency was based on the Roman coins of silver denarii and gold solidi. Twelve denarii were worth one solidi, 12d = 1s. And 240 denarii were minted from a block of silver called a libra which weighed a pound. Therefore 1l = 240d, and 20s = 1l.

Over time, the L for libra evolved into our £ symbol.

But on D Day, shillings and pence were swept away along with the 12-sided thruppenny bit and the evocative half penny which showed the billowing sails of Sir Francis Drake’s galleon, the Golden Hind. The dinky sixpence disappeared, as did the enormous penny.

(The farthing, a quarter of a penny, which had a wren on it, had ceased to be legal tender at the end of 1960.)

In came the simple decimal system: 100p = £1.

Planning for the changeover had begun in 1968, and there were all sorts of lessons and classes beforehand – a retired fellow from Sadberge, Robbie Robinson, became the area’s “Mr Decimal” and from 1968 was constantly lecturing, teaching and talking about the forthcoming change.

The day before, February 14, British Rail had switched to the new currency, and on the day itself, The Northern Echo reported that the changeover had gone smoothly – apart from in Bishop Auckland where a young girl, Sandra Johnson, of Howard Close, managed to swallow a new, small 5p. Her mother, Eva, rang the local hospital who told her not to worry and let nature take its course.

Sandra was pictured on the front of the Echo on February 16 looking nervous – obviously still waiting for the course to be taken.

While most people could work out the new money, most people also concluded one thing. In the local co-operative stores, for instance said the Echo, a packet of Daz had been retailing at 3s 2d which should have translated as 16p but was now selling for 19p; half-a-dozen eggs had been 2s 2d, which should have been 11p, but now cost 12p.

“Although D Day nerves may account for some of the most stunning price rises, it seems impossible to accept that some shopkeepers were not taking advantage of the changeover,” said the Echo. “Some prices have been legitimately rounded off – but others appear to have been blatantly increased.”

And it is the D Day rip-off that most people seem to remember from 50 years ago…

“I REMEMBER the day well,” says Nigel Henderson. “I lived at Escomb and loved to spend my one shilling (12d) a week pocket money on sweets at Dickie and Lena Dowson’s shop. They would sell you seven Sports Mixtures for 1d.”

Sports Mixtures were – indeed still are – hard, fruit-flavoured gum sweets produced in the shape of a rugby ball, a cricket bat, a tennis racquet etc…

“Decimalisation day and my shilling became five new pence,” continues Nigel, “and, to add insult to injury, sports mixtures were ½p each.

“I was devastated and immediately asked my mum and dad for a pocket money increase. No, was the answer, although I was offered the hope of a rise when I got to the grammar school – King James in Bishop Auckland – in September.

“September came and I got the increase to 15p a week. With this vast sum burning a hole in my pocket I made my way to the school tuck shop and found Tudor crisps at 3p a packet.

“I was set. One bag a day, if I disciplined myself.

“Well, I never managed to make it stretch. The school bus dropped me off at Fine Fare (opposite the Echo office) each morning, and it was too much of a temptation – but not in the way you might think! A mate’s sister worked in there and she was, in the words of us 11 year olds, ‘drop dead gorgeous’ (not that my mate thought so!).

“I was spent up by Tuesday!

“But even she was surpassed when the glamour model Fiona Richmond opened a revamped Burtons!”

Fiona Richmond (real name Julia Harrison) was the daughter of a Norfolk vicar who was a risqué model who, at the time of decimalisation, was about to release her first movie, Not Tonight, Darling, which must have been a real mind-expanding eye-opener for an 11-year-old who grew up in the shadow of the Saxon church at Escomb as scenes were shot in a striptease club. In the mid 1970s, she moved into porn movies with titles like Hardcore and became known as "Britain's premier sex queen". She, still, though was in-demand on the high street, opening branches of Top Shop and Burtons. A picture in the Echo archives was taken in Bishop Auckland in 1979 at Burtons - were you there, or at any of her other appearances?

“THE day itself went fairly well but it didn't take long to realise we had been done,” says Peter Loughlin. “The trouble was that the subtle differences between, say, 2d and 3d were lost in decimal money.

“For example, you could get 12 fruit salads for 3d but with decimalisation you could only get eight because of the conversion of 3d to 1p!

“I remember my mother complaining about the paper bill going up from 8/6d (42½p) to 45p because each paper and magazine had to be calculated separately.”

Peter remembers that the only positive was that the price of a phone call came down from 6d (2½p) to 2p.

“THE day our currency changed, I was 17 and had landed a Saturday job in a fish and chip shop in Darlington,” says Alice Potter. “It seemed ideal as it would only take up two-and-a-half hours of my Saturday and I could even get a bit of a sleep in beforehand.

“However, the confusion with the new money was intense. The shop till had not been converted and customers were finding it very difficult to accept change which seemed to be much less than the value of the money they had spent.

“I was set the job of doing the calculations on paper. Each item was a different price so someone might ask for a pineapple ring, mushy peas, two sausages and two cod, one with chips, one without, and I had to work this out and tell them what their decimal change would be.

“The horror of finding that a shilling had become only 5p and half a crown only 12½p was the cause of much discussion and argument which made the calculations even more challenging.

“Finally, after helping clean out the big vats that had held the boiling fat, the shop owner gave me my pay of 50p.

“As ten shillings it would have seemed better but after the stress of the new money I decided 50p was not worth the hassle and never went back!”

GEOFF GREGG was a conductor on United buses out of Ferryhill on D Day. “It was horrific,” he says. “We were handling both old and new coinage, and at one point, we had no option but to accept new 2p coins instead of shillings, so we were taking 2p for a 5p fare, and so our takings were very short.”

“I REMEMBER decimalisation day as I was working at Barclays Bank in Saltburn,” says Ian Stoker. “On the night of D Day, I had to take all the paper records of every account balance to our computer centre by car in Wythenshawe near Manchester. This was about 7.30pm. Then I turned round and drive home again, and was expected to be at work again for 9am.”

BRIAN RAWLING in Appleton Wiske remembers there were scare stories about soaring prices in the days before decimalisation, notably in the Daily Telegraph, which was anti-decimalisation.

“I remember an article claiming in large headlines that the cost of milk would double due to decimalisation, and setting out a series of "facts" to prove their case,” he says. “Some that I remember were:

a) The direct conversion of the price of a pint in old money was 4.7p, but as the smallest of the new decimal coins was ½p, this would result in the rounding up of the price to 5p;

b) Milk would have to be delivered in ½ litre bottles, a quantity one eighth less than a pint, resulting in a further ½p rise;

c) The Government had already announced that the price of a pint of milk would be increased by 1½d due to inflation, which was rising by around eight per cent at the time – this was nothing to do with decimalisation, but the Telegraph included it in their "facts" by adding another 0.4p, rounded up, of course, to ½p.

d) The Decimalisation Board had stated that the new ½p coin would only have a limited life as its value would rapidly be eroded by inflation, so the Telegraph helpfully added another ½p to allow for this.

“This was almost half a century before the term 'fake news' entered our vocabulary.”