Decimalisation: This will never take on in Wexford, Mr. Morrison!

by Patrick J Heneghan

The approach of D-Day in Ireland was one of the challenges that the country had to meet in 1971.  “Going decimal” with our currency was to happen in tandem with the British.  11 February 1971 was the date fixed for the introduction of the new decimal notes and coins in Ireland.

For the first forty years of my life to 1971, we had been used to dealing with the complication of having 20 shillings in the Irish pound and 12 pennies in the shilling. We also had farthings.  The penny was divided into four farthings, which were tiny coins scarcely the size of the nail on your small finger, just about enough for a child to buy a few boiled sweets. The ha’penny (halfpenny) coin was worth two farthings.  The new system was to divide the pound into 100 pennies.  The old penny was then worth 0.42 of the new penny.

My earliest recollection of a money dealing was at age five when I went with my pal John Donohue to the grocery shop at the end of our terrace in Tralee, and put a penny in a slot machine.  I lost my penny, but a kind neighbour, seeing my distress, relieved it by pretending that I had overlooked to take my winnings out of the pay-out slot. She gave me the handsome amount of two pennies, an two-to-one win.  I was cute enough to know what she had done, bless her heart! – and I had sense enough to keep away from the one-arm bandits from that day on.

One of the skills we had to learn in school was to be able to total columns of cash figures.  For book-keeping there were three columns.  The pound column carried the sign £ on top (a stylized letter L for libra), on the next column was s (for solidi or shillings) and on the third column was d (for denarii or pennies).  The notations for the new decimal columns were just two, £ and p (for pounds and pennies).

It was publicly announced that initially the old and the new coinages were to be circulated in parallel, until the appointed day came for the use of the old coinage to be discontinued. In the interim, shops were to display price-tags on goods in both the new and the equivalent old currency.

Obviously it would be necessary for the civil service in which I worked to familiarise itself with the new system, and a post of “Decimalisation Officer” at Assistant Principal level was created to promote the new system.  This post was to be filled by open competition from within the Departments.   Many of us tried for the job, and the eventual appointee was Harry Morrison, an officer from the Department of Local Government.  He was an excellent choice: he was a skillful presenter and he was also endowed with a wonderful asset and a sense of humour.

I was present on several occasions when Harry addressed meetings for civil service and semi-State personnel.  His presentations were a combination of useful information followed by Question-and-Answer sessions in which he related his experiences, some of which were quite hilarious, particularly the tales he brought back from rural areas.  Some of his answers to the questions thrown at him came in the form of witty one-liners.  Had he been in Hollywood, he would have given Bob Hope a close run for his money!  An earnest young man from an assurance company had a problem stemming from the fact that his company’s contracts were all set out in the old L.s.d currency.  The company’s solicitor had advised that the clients’ premiums had to continue to be dealt with in the old currency.  What advice could Harry give him on this problem?  Harry’s response was short and sweet:  “Get a new solicitor!’.  (Sustained laughter)   There was an old lady in Wexford who one evening, after having listened attentively to what Harry had to say, came around afterwards to congratulate him.  ‘That was a wonderful speech you gave, Mr. Morrison,’ she said, ‘ but you know – that’s never going to catch on in Wexford’.

In the various Departments local Training Officers held meetings for the various grades of staff who would have to meet the requirements of the changeover.  I was in the Central Training Unit of the Department of Finance and a few days before D-Day the Unit called together the heads of all Departments (i.e. the Secretaries, now styled Secretaries General) to satisfy them and ourselves that there were no loose ends out there that we did not know about.  We had about thirty persons in attendance, as some of the Secretaries brought their deputies with them. On the final one of the three days we spent on our work we set up small tables and divided the attendance into groups of four.  On a sheet on each table we placed one of a series of questions touching on situations of a type we felt would be commonly met with when D-Day arrived and the two currencies would circulate in parallel.   One example of what we set out will give the flavor of exercise.  Take for example the question on Table 7 the discussion of which was particularly memorable:

At most of the railway stations some incoming travellers will wish to buy a newspaper or periodical from a waiting newsvendor.  D-day has arrived and you have a mixture of coins in your pocket, as does the newsvendor.  The papers you usually buy cost nine pennies old money.  You take your purchases and give the newsvendor on shilling ‘old’ money. What change will you get?

Most of the ‘trainees’ arriving at Table 7 spent a few minutes pondering the question, and after that lively exchanges began.  Then the notebooks came out and juggling with figures commenced.  Just as it seemed that faction fights might break out, a training officer intervened and asked the group if they would like to move on, and said that the Table No. 7 question and others would be discussed at the concluding session.

The answer to the Table No. 7 question is:  You should get either three pennies old money or one penny new money.  Remember the newsvendor will have to make dozens of these decisions without delaying his customers.   Most vendors of low-priced goods would have worked out for themselves well in advance the various combinations likely to be tendered, probably far more efficiently than the civil servants who devised the new system.  It was up to the purchasers of items such as morning papers also to have their mode of payments worked out in advance and tender the right combinations of coins, or risk being ‘jipped’ of a small fraction of a penny on each transaction.  In the example, receiving change of three pennies ‘old’ money would represent no problem to the customer, but a customer receiving in change one penny ‘new’ money would suffer a loss of 0.26 of one penny (new money).  Most street vendors however were not likely to run out of coinage of either the new or the old currency.  For purchasers of goods of higher value, vendors such as shopkeepers were supplied with official conversion tables, which relied on a certain amount of rounding up of prices, so that what customers lost in the swings would be recovered later in the roundabouts.  Provision was also made for goods to carry dual- price tags.

At the end of our training session, we managed to tie up all the loose ends – or very nearly did so.
Only one question remained: “Is there anyone now who does not know what the changeover to decimalisation is all about?’ Only one hand was raised and the question was: ‘What exactly does the term D-day stand for?’  The individual in question, I believe, had to apply later for early retirement!

How did it all work out in the end?  Long before the use of the old coinage was to cease, the public had adapted to the decimal coinage.  There were complaints that a general rise in prices followed decimalisation, a phenomenon that was found to have occurred also in other countries that changed over to the decimal system.  Inflation, of course, said the politicians.  It never goes away!  - and they of all people should know.

Granduncle William Nolan, Able Seaman

by Patrick J (Paddy) Heneghan, (The Meandering Milesian)

Grandmother Foley of Tralee was the third child of the family of great-grandfather George Knowling, who died in a drowning accident in Waterford Harbour some time in the middle of the 19th century.  There were seven children in his family, five girls and two boys.

The Cruel Sea: Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,

So do our minutes hasten to their end (W.Shakespeare).

William was the youngest of the family, which over time changed its name from Knowling to Nolan.  He took to the sea at an early age.  This is what I first saw and remembered about Granduncle William from visits when I was a child to Grandmother Foley’s home.  His photograph was hanging in a prominent place in the Tralee kitchen, a stern figure in the uniform of the British navy.  Grandmother never accepted the fact of his death in a Canadian warship called The Royal Edward, which was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat in 1917 off the coast of Turkey.  She told us that she spoke to a survivor from the sinking warship who visited her when the war was over.  He told her that there was virtually no chance that William had survived.  Nevertheless grandmother firmly believed that her brother, who had survived thirteen shipwrecks, probably managed to reach the Turkish shore, and could well have settled down there.

Stormy Waters and Strong Gales

Lighthouse on Skellig Michael (off the Co Kerry coast).  Credit: Wikipedia

by Patrick J. (Paddy) Heneghan (The Meandering Milesian)

 

My mother used to tell us about "The Night of the Big Wind" (Oíche na Gaoithe Móire in Irish literature).  It is recorded that on the 6th-7th January 1839 a violent storm hit Ireland, causing massive damage not alone in the town of Tralee where she lived, but all over Ireland. Winds reached a force beyond any others in living memory. It was more than just an “ordinary” storm.  It left trees uprooted and did considerable structural damage. According to meteorologists, speeds up to seventy miles an hour can be expected during such violent storms.  I am not aware that the wind on the occasion in question was scientifically recorded.

Unfortunately I can remember very little of the detail recounted to us by my mother, who had had it from her father. He in turn must have had the details from his own father, whose family were merchants in Tralee at the time of the event. The heavy iron gates of the County Gaol in Ballymullen, my mother said, were lifted by the storm and deposited some distance away.  She had heard a story about an “ass and cart” which had been lifted bodily from one street to another, an occurrence which the animal had apparently survived.

For reasons other than the memory of the January 1839 event, my mother and her family were never very easy when storms were brewing. There was a foreboding about high winds which haunted my mother and grandmother, and “trimmings” were always added to the family Rosary for sailors and others at sea.  My grandmother’s father had drowned in Waterford Harbour late in the 19th century when a sudden squall upset the small craft from which he had been fishing. My mother’s uncle William (grandmother’s brother), while engaged during World War I in an action against Turkish troops, was drowned off the Turkish coast from a Canadian warship, the Prince Edward. 

River Run

by Patrick J. Heneghan (The Meandering Milesian)

The River Dodder in quieter times

What are the chances of seeing all the rivers of the County and City of Dublin simultaneously running overground?  Not just the obvious ones, like the Liffey, the Tolka and the Dodder, but ALL of them.  What are the chances of having two children in a family having the same birth dates, as in our case, August 25th?  What are the chances of these astronomical sets of odds coming together?  Maybe about the same as having a bet on a long-odds winner of the Grand National coupled with a bet on a long-odds winner of the Derby.  Maybe higher!  I leave it to the  mathematicians to supply the answers.

Which brings me to 25th August 1986.  The younger of our two birthday children, Padraic, was celebrating his 21st. We were living in Templeogue in South County Dublin, between the River Dodder and the River Poddle.  Nothing would do “She Whose Word is Law” but to book the eight of us who comprised the family for a meal and a show that very night in a hotel in Portmarnock, where one Anne Bushnell was presenting a cabaret entitled  “A Night with Edith Piaf”.  

One does not like using the “p” word in polite family literature, but that is the word that comes to mind to describe how the rain performed all that particular day, from early morning until after midnight.  The non-stop rain was combined with a hurricane called “Charlie”.  It was a working day in Dublin, so the plan was that we should set off for Portmarnock in two groups of four each, shortly after 6 o’clock that evening.  The male members of our entourage, quite unchivalrously, were to go in the family car, probably because that side of the family would include Padraic, the “Birthday Boy”, who was 21 on that day, as well as his younger brother, who was only 13 at the time.  The female group, the three girls (the eldest of whom, Clare, shared the birth date with the main celebrant) with Mom in charge, were to go downtown on the bus to Sutton, and then go to Portmarnock by the DART (our very efficient electrified rail system, the Dublin Area Rapid Transport service).