Sir, – In an age where every anniversary is an occasion for a celebration, a festival or a retrospective, no one seems yet to have picked up on the 50th anniversary of decimalisation, which took place on February 15th, 1971.
I had just left school, was going to university in the autumn, and was working as a bus conductor for Bradford City Transport, my home town in West Yorkshire.
The conductor, for those young enough not to know, was the person who collected the fares and issued the tickets, and a bus required a crew of driver and conductor to operate.
The conductor’s job provided a wonderful vantage point for the drama of decimalisation.
On that Monday morning, we went on the road with the new coinage (certain coins, such as those for the five pence, ten pence and 50 pence had already been issued, since they corresponded exactly to a shilling, two shillings and the ten-bob note, and with a new set of fares, in the new money.
Our job was to take in the old coins, in multiples of six old pence (corresponding exactly to 2½ new pence), issue tickets in the new (higher) fare and, where necessary, give change in the new money.
Many of the passengers (this was before the days of “customers”) had only a hazy understanding of these operations, some of them holding out a palm of old coins and stating plaintively what their destination was.
There was money to be made that day by the unscrupulous conductor, if such a beast existed.
As well as the mental gymnastics already described, we conductors also had to juggle two cash bags instead of one, plus the ticket machine.
Rush-hour that Monday morning 50 years ago, with 80 passengers on a double-decker, with the upper deck a fug of cigarette smoke and condensation streaming down the windows, is a memory of my late teenage years which I have treasured ever since. – Yours, etc,
DAVID DENBY,
Glasnevin,
Dublin 9.