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University of Huddersfield Repository University of Huddersfield Repository Cook, Andrew J. Britain’s Other D-Day: The Politics of Decimalisation Original Citation Cook, Andrew J. (2020) Britain’s Other D-Day: The Politics of Decimalisation. Doctoral thesis, University of Huddersfield. This version is available at http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/35268/ The University Repository is a digital collection of the research output of the University, available on Open Access. Copyright and Moral Rights for the items on this site are retained by the individual author and/or other copyright owners. 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For more information, including our policy and submission procedure, please contact the Repository Team at: [email protected]. http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/ BRITAIN’S OTHER D-DAY: THE POLITICS OF DECIMALISATION ANDREW JOHN COOK A thesis submitted to the University of Huddersfield in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Huddersfield March 2020 CONTENTS Page Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………. 2 Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………… 4 Chapter 1: Introduction…………………………………………………………………… 6 Chapter 2: Political Management…………………………………………………….. 50 Chapter 3: Britishness and Europeanisation…………………………………….. 92 Chapter 4: Modernity, Declinism and Affluence………………………………. 128 Chapter 5: Interest Groups………………………………………………………………. 172 Chapter 6: Decimalisation and the Commonwealth…………………………. 216 Chapter 7: Decimalisation in Ireland………………………………………………… 248 Chapter 8: Summary and Conclusion……………………………………………….. 280 Appendix 1: Main Alternative Schemes of Decimalisation……………….. 292 APPENDIX 2: Brief Biographies of Halsbury Committee Members…….. 294 APPENDIX 3: Brief Biographies of Key Bank of England Personnel…….. 296 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………. 304 1 Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude for the help and support I have received from a number of people. My supervisor, Professor Barry Doyle has been a source of wise and invaluable advice and has provided much encouragement throughout the past three and a half years. I was particularly grateful for his support when I had to temporarily suspend my studies due to my partner’s illness. Doctor Mark Stocker, whose study on the designs of the new coinage led him to become aware of my work, has been a source of much valuable critiquing of my developing thesis, delivered with typically antipodean forthrightness and wit. He also kindly put me in touch with the former Assistant Secretary to the Halsbury Committee, John Rimington, and the Director of the Royal Mint Museum, Doctor Kevin Clancy, both of whom gave me highly useful insights into their areas of expertise and knowledge. Doctor Rob Piggott has been a valued colleague, offering advice based on his recent experience in completing his doctorate, with generosity and good humour. The staff at the various archives I have visited during the course of my research have been unfailingly helpful. These were the National Archives at Kew, the Modern History Centre at Warwick University, the Bank of England Archives and An Chartlann Náisiúnta, the National Archives of Ireland. Finally, I would like to thank my long-suffering partner, Susan Kinghorn, for encouraging me and for putting up with my varying moods throughout the process of producing this thesis. 2 3 Abstract Some commentators have seen the introduction of decimal currency in the UK as part of a broader process of Europeanisation, driven by a zeal for modernisation, and leading to an abandonment of a traditional British exceptionalism. This thesis will argue that this view is false, and that the modernisation of the currency was an essentially conservative reform. In preserving the existing pound sterling, the Government was keen to maintain the supposed prestige of the currency, and the retention of the name ‘penny’ for the minor unit was based on an appeal to the public’s perceived adherence to tradition. There is little evidence that either the fact of decimalisation per se, or the choice of a system based on the existing pound, was influenced by Britain's attempts to gain entry to the European Economic Community, or indeed any desire to emulate wider European practice. In fact, by far the more important external stimulus to action by the British authorities was the decimalisation of the currencies in the 1960s by successive Commonwealth countries, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, which left the UK, in the mid-1960s with the prospect of being virtually the only country in the world operating a non-decimal currency. However, I will argue that, although the influence of the decisions made in Australia and New Zealand was important, it was limited in scope. Whilst the UK was content to follow the lead of its Commonwealth partners in decimalising its currency, it did so on the basis of the existing £ unit, rather than the 10-shilling basis favoured in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. It did so, despite significant internal opposition from retail and other interests, largely as a result of an unlikely alliance between the City of London, anxious to preserve the international status of the pound as a reserve currency, and a Labour government with decidedly conservative views on the traditional image of the pound. 4 5 Chapter 1: Introduction On the 13th of February 1971, two days before the introduction of decimal coinage in the UK, the Chairman of the Decimal Currency Board (DCB), Lord Fiske, predicted that the changeover from the old currency to the new would be achieved so smoothly that it would be ‘the non-event of 1971’.1 By June of that year this changeover had been largely realised, and the DCB was able to recommend that the transition period of dual running, in which transactions could be made in either pre-decimal or decimal currency could be ended twelve months ahead of schedule, in August 1971.2 The smoothness of the transition was largely attributable to exemplary administrative project management by the DCB and the Royal Mint. This aspect of the decimalisation project was comprehensively and admirably covered in an official Treasury publication in 1973, by the secretary to the DCB, Noel Moore, and consequently is not the main focus of this work.3 Instead, this thesis seeks to explain why the implementation of decimal currency in the UK occurred when it did, and in the form that it took, examining the political, social, cultural and economic factors underpinning the impetus behind the change. This will not be limited to issues internal to the UK but will also consider the extent to which the decision to decimalise was influenced by developments elsewhere, in Europe and the Commonwealth; and conversely the impact of the decision on other countries. In doing so I will conclude that the issue of decimalisation, largely seen as an unimportant administrative process by most historians, was in fact more significant than previously recognised. Its significance lies in the 1 Times, 13 February 1971. 2 Decimal Currency Board: Fourth Annual Report, 1970-71, London, HMSO. 3 Moore, N.E.A. (1973), The Decimalisation of Britain’s Currency, London: HMSO, p.24. 6 light it sheds on British society, economics and politics in the late 1950s and 1960s, and the extent to which it supports or contradicts the historiography of the period. In particular, the thesis will examine the extent to which an ostensibly modernising project was compromised by a conservative attitude to change. This can be summed up by the misgivings expressed by a Treasury Official, G.R. Bell, who chaired a Working Party on Decimal Currency in 1961. Reflecting on resistance from the Bank of England to any scheme of decimalisation which did not involve retention of the existing pound, he observed that ‘when we … modernise we tend to throw away some of the benefit by insisting upon retaining traditional arrangements which have no place in the modern world.’4 This tempering of modernity by an arguably undue attachment to tradition forms a leitmotif of this thesis. It is also worth considering why, after over a century of resistance to any change, the UK chose to embark on the road to decimalisation in the 1960s. Some recent commentators have characterised the abandonment of the UK’s traditional currency as part of a project of Europeanisation of British society foisted on a reluctant population by Government’s operating in the interest of a metropolitan elite. I will argue that this view is a travesty, and that the impetus for change, at this specific time, came from a combination of internal pressure from a variety of interest groups within the UK, and external examples of successful decimalisations in Commonwealth countries which had previously operated the same system as Britain. For more than ten centuries England, and later the UK, operated a system of currency, based on a pound divided into two hundred and forty pennies, with an intermediate unit, 4 National Archives, BT 258/1193, DC (61) Decimal Currency Working Party, 9 February 1961. 7 the shilling, comprising twelve pence or one twentieth of a pound. According to the Royal Mint, ‘The custom of reckoning in librae of 20 solidi and 240 denarii grew up in the Frankish kingdom and crossed into England quite early, perhaps in the seventh century.’5 This was translated into the vernacular as “pounds, shillings and pence”, but the symbols denoting the coinage of librae, solidi and denarii, (£sd) were retained. Similar systems were in place in much of continental Europe until the Napoleonic era, when many of the countries invaded by France followed the example of their occupier and adopted decimal currency.
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