Like many readers, I’m sure, I can well remember the day in 1971 when decimal money came in and we had to forget all about our lovely old half-crowns, bobs and tanners, and get used to the five pee and ten pee, as they were pointedly pronounced.

However until this week, I hadn’t realised the concept of a decimal monetary system wasn’t something that dated from within my lifetime. Indeed, there were proposals to decimalise sterling as far back as 1824 (and I’m certainly not that old, whatever you may have heard).

So why did it take so long to get a decimal system in the UK? The French, after all, decimalised the franc not long after the French Revolution.

It seems it wasn’t for lack of trying. Last week, I stumbled upon a letter from Canon A Jackman which was published in the Watford Observer of May 27, 1938. Headlined “Canon Jackman and the Decimal System” it reads:

“Sir. — Despite Randolph Churchill’s classic disapproval of the “Damned dots,” all our school children and school teachers will hail with delight the advent of the Watford Decimal Association for the destruction of the duodecimal-cum-sexdecimal system, which has tortured generations of innocent children.” [Note: Lord Randolph Churchill (1849–1894), a British Conservative politician and Winston’s father, famously said: “I never could make out what those damned dots (decimal points) meant.”]

Anyway, Canon Jackman continues: “All that can be said in its favour [the old system] is that 10 is only divisible by 2 and 5, whereas 12 is divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6; but it is the additions and multiplications of 12 and 16 that so harass the children; and if the Watford Decimal Association succeeds in enthroning gentle and flexible 10 in its rightful place, hundreds of thousands of mites will be thankful for saving them time and efforts which could so usefully be spent on more cultural pursuits.

“What is pasteurised milk to the liberation from the nightmares of inches, feet, pennies and ounces? All this would be swept away by the pervasive, digestible standard of ten, which comes so natural to children, invariably born with ten fingers to their hands and ten toes to their feet. Ten is as natural a standard as are its factors 2 and 5, since we have two ears, two eyes, two arms, two legs and five senses – whereas nothing in our constitution goes by three, fours or sixes.

“Every good luck to this work of intellectual emancipation.”

And that, you might think, was that. A chorus of “Hear hears” and off we gallop to Decimal Day. But not a bit of it.

The following Friday, the Watford Observer published three letters on the subject, the first very much against the Canon’s ideas.

“Sir —” writes M. Roberts of Talbot Avenue, Oxhey, “Surely Canon Jackman leans not a little to the side of bigotry and error in his views respecting the decimal system.

“Ten, he states, is as natural a standard as are its factors 2 and 5. Nothing in our constitution, he asserts, goes by threes, fours or sixes. I beg to differ. I will take the most natural constitution of all – the human anatomy.”

He continues: “The following groups of bones are distributed throughout the human bodies for the main part in irregular numbers: skull, 26; vertebrae, 23; ribs, 12; wrists, 8; palm, 5 (I must cede Canon Jackman a point here); phalanges, 3 in each finger and 2 in the thumb. There are 32 bones in each upper limb and 31 in each lower. I will wisely refrain from quoting the total number of bones in the human anatomy. It would appear in an osteologist can laugh at multiples and divisors of ten – certainly Nature has.”

After a patronising dig at Canon Jackman for counting thumbs as fingers, he (or indeed she, but I bet it was a he) goes on about other “popular groups” composed of irregular numbers, including the world being created in six days, seven wonders of the world, seven days in a week and so on.

“It would seem,” he concludes, “the most popular group of numbers are not 2 and 5 but 2, 3 and 7. Personally, I do not see why the Continent do not scrap their pernicious system in favour of ours.”

So, that seems to be one in favour and one against.

The next letter, from Henry Coates, of Hempstead Road, Watford, begins by claiming that in days of old, it didn’t matter whether it was 12 inches to the foot and 66 feet to the chain since nobody knew how to multiply anyway and accurate work was, he says, “unknown”.

“Today,” he writes, “such methods are fatal in business. Science reigns supreme and all its work has to be calculated on the metric system. After that, our foreign competitor goes straight ahead, but we have then to convert our results into pounds of 16 ounces or cubic feet of 1,728 cubic inches, and so we come back to that tangled mess that worries us from the school to the grave.

“The old arithmetical tables, with their “Rod, Pole and Perch,” 112lbs to the ton etc, must give place to the international trend towards decimal systems of calculating weights, measures and coinage,” he says. “Today, two-thirds of the world’s peoples use decimal systems, a great increase over the pre-war position. Watford can become a pioneer town if from this centre, we are able again to direct the attention of our Government towards reconsideration of this change ... I would welcome support from all who desire to assist in spreading this gospel of simplification.”

The third letter, from a maths teacher called W Corbridge, of Swiss Avenue, Watford, is also in favour, arguing that “the public do not sufficiently realise how easily our present coinage can be adapted to a decimal one.” His plan, however, doesn’t seen terribly easy at all, not to me at least.

He argues that as there are 96 farthings in a florin [that’s four farthings to the penny and 12 pennies to the shilling, which is half a florin –  four times 12 times two is 96], you divide the florin into 100 bits called “cents” instead, so a shilling would be worth 50 cents and a sixpence 25 cents. “These may be renamed half-florin and quarter-florin,” he offers helpfully.

Then you need to get new coins of 10, 5, 2 cents and 1 cent and, he says, “I venture also to suggest they be made ten-sided, five-sided, square and round (with central holes for the 2 and 1).” Couldn’t be clearer...

“I urgently suggest the change be considered again seriously,” he concludes. And 33 years later, so it was...

ONLINE TOMORROW: Val Doonican crowns Miss Rickmansworth in 1968.