Tintin Forums

In the third page of Secret of the Unicorn, Tintin sees a ship and asks the person selling it how much it costs. It costs a quid, which I think means a pound, and it the next frame Tintin tells him "Seventeen and six". What does this mean? I think Tintin was bargaining but I don't understand what he meant by "seventeen and six". Did he mean that he would buy the ship for 23 pence because 17 added with 6 equals 23?
I'd thought for a while that he might have been saying that he would give 17 pounds and 6 pence for it, but he must have been a really generous person then, because the ship cost much less than that.

No, it's not 23p, it's 87.5p!

"Seventeen and six" is "seventeen shillings and sixpence" (which could have been written as "17/6" or "17s 6d"), and refers to the British pre-decimal monetary system of pounds, shillings and pence. There were twenty shillings to a pound, and twelve pennies to a shilling.

When the currency went decimal in February 1971 (one hundred pence to the pound/ 100p = £1), equating shillings to the new system was fairly easy: they became equal to 5p (both being one-twentieth of a pound). So 10 shillings (for which there had been a bank-note) was replaced by 50p (a coin), for example.

The pennies didn't line up so well, given that under the old system there were 240 pennies to the pound, and now there were only 100 new pence (hence 2.4d = 1p). Sixpence (6d) had been half a shilling (1s), and had had its own coin, but, converted to "new money", that amount became half of five pence (5p), thus was now a slightly ungainly 2.5p.

When Tintin offers "seventeen and six", that is 17 shillings + 6 pennies; this converts to decimal currency as (17 x 5) + 2.5 = 85 + 2.5 = 87.5 pence (or, if you prefer, ((17 x 12) + 6)/2.4 = 87.5)

One of the reasons that the now seemingly random figure of "seventeen and six" might have been picked is that it is 2 shillings and sixpence less than a pound, and "two-and-six" (2s 6d) was an eighth of a pound.

While it seems cumbersome now, especially when compared to decimal systems, the "pounds, shillings and pence" system has a massive advantage over the latter, in so far as it can be divided up accurately in far more ways than "100 pennies" can be - thirds and sixths and eighths and twelfths, as well as halves and quarters and tenths, and so on.

There were for many years notes for the pound and for ten shillings, and coins for five shillings (called a "crown") and two shillings and sixpence (the "half-crown").

As a regularly available coin the crown was discontinued in 1965, and the half-crown in 1969, but at the time the Methuen book appeared in 1958, both - especially the half-crown - were still in circulation; so, rather than 17/6 being an irregular amount, made up of lots of change, it was effectively as standard fraction of a pound (three-quarters, to be precise) which Tintin could have paid with just a note and couple of coins.

Following decimalization, as the half-pence coin became worth less and less in value, it was eventually withdrawn (just as the Euro's cent coin already has in some if not all countries of the Euro Zone). So, were he to try and pay for the ship now, and assuming that the seller still wanted only the direct equivalent of 17s6d, Tintin would either have to round the amount to the nearest even number (88p), or haggle the man down to 87p - either way, a bit of a bargain!

You might wonder why "17s 6d" or "17/6"as the shortened form?

This goes back to the use of Latin in the Middle Ages, and the system was denoted as "Libra solidus denarius" or "L.s.d" (pounds, shillings and pence). The "£" symbol is in fact a fancy capital "L", and the typographic symbol "/" is correctly called a "solidus" (not a forward-slash), hence the abbreviation "17/6".

In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter's hat has a piece of paper tucked into the band, with the legend "In this style 10/6" written on it - this means the hat would have cost 10s 6d, or 52.5p in new money.

This also seems to be a rather random figure, until one knows that there was a British gold coin called a guinea.

Initially this was worth £1; however, the value of the gold in the coin meant that the face value remained the same, but the worth of the coin went up and down as the price of gold rose and fell. Eventually, the value of a guinea was fixed at twenty one shillings (a shilling more than a sovereign (20s), which became the de facto pound coin, even though it too was made of gold, and the value went up and down, etc.).

For most practical purposes the pound was used as the basis for all transactions, but in certain areas - such as tailoring, horse-racing, live-stock sales, medical bills and property deals - the guinea persisted even into decimalization, perhaps to denote "poshness". The Hatter's topper is therefore priced at half a guinea.

To add slightly to the confusion, the Royal Mint still produces a coin called a crown from time to time, to celebrate historic occasions, for example such as a Royal jubilee. This is a decimal coin, and you could, if you wanted, spend it in a shop - however, the fact that versions are often minted in gold or silver (meaning the material value is often higher than the specified denomination of the coin) makes using them in this way highly unlikely.

Increasing the muddle, decimal crowns produced up until the middle of the nineteen-nineties had a face value of 25p, corresponding to its pre-decimal role as a five-shilling coin...
...But since that time, any crowns produced have been revalued, and they now have a face value of £5 (and no, you can't spend a pre-revaluation crown today and say it is now worth a fiver!).

The situation is muddied further by the fact that given these special coins are often worth more as a collectible (especially the silver and gold versions which often get issued) that their "real" value as currency, so a rare "25p" coin might be worth more than a modern "£5" coin...

Confusing, eh?

Note: For more "Fun & Games with Pre-decimal money!", see the dicussion in this thread.

Well, that is indeed confusing. Here in America I think it's always just been dollars and cents.

The U.S. used Colonial Currency, in £.s.d, between 1775 and 1792, when the Coinage Act established the silver dollar. You just abandoned it and went decimal earlier, that's all...
To be fair, pounds, shillings and pence was a system which lasted over a thousand years, so although it might look confusing to us now, it obviously worked. Similar systems existed in many countries (France and The Netherlands, for example), and as I said, it goes back to the financial system of the Roman Empire, which managed a universal currency over a great area, across international borders, and for many many centuries, in ways we could only dream of today.

Oh, and to our U.S. readers, don't forget you have the eagle and the mil!
Officially, U.S. currency is the eagle, the dollar, the cent and the mil (an eagle is a unit of $10, and the mil is one thousandth of a dollar, as laid out in the Currency Act).

Thanks jock, very interesting stuff. I'm glad they haven't updated the books to the "new" monetary system. It would sound kind of odd if the man said "a quid" and Tintin offered him "eighty seven and a half pence". (And now that the half pence is long gone it would have to be rounded up or down to 88 or 86 pence.)


Indeed, I hadn't thought of that. Tintin could have given the man a 10 shilling note, a crown (five shillings) and half a crown (2 shillings and sixpence). Mind you, it looks as if Tintin was reaching into his wallet for a note, so he might have given him a quid (20 shillings) and got half a crown change. (Yes, I know that originally it was in francs, but it's interesting to speculate!)

I love the "old money"!

Ah good point! He could also have offered two ten shilling notes, and got back the half-crown as you say.
Just to keep the coin trivia coming, there was a ten-shilling coin issued, prior to decimalization, but only in Guernsey.
It was more or less square, with rounded corners, and was made in 1966 to mark the Battle of Hastings and William the Conqueror, so it was also odd in that the "tails" side had a head on it (it had the portrait of the Queen on the front, as usual, and King William on the reverse).
It wasn't a popular success, and the experiment foundered. Most of the coins minted remained uncirculated in the banks, so it isn't that scarce to find today in very good condition.
[Aside: Interestingly, Jersey issued a pound coin of the same shape and dimensions in 1981, upon the bicentenary of the Battle of Jersey in 1781]

A "quid", as Harrock says, is the slang for a pound; a "bob" was a shilling, and a "tanner" was sixpence. A half-penny was a "h'ap'ny" (hayp-nee) and a three-penny coin was a "thrupney-bit". Until the end of the Fifties there were coins worth a quarter of the penny, and these were called farthings; they feature in the nursery rhyme about the bells of London, Oranges and Lemons: "You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St. Martins", we sang, although the internet now seems to favour "five farthings". That"s inflation for you!
A two-shilling coin was (officially) a florin, but I never heard it called that.


It is a fascinating subject, but for day-to-day use, decimal is very easy to understand!

I've got a 1966 (the year I was born) Irish two shilling coin I keep in my pocket for good luck which has "flóirin" written on it, so it was official in Ireland at least. As I'm sure you know, the florins became 10 pence pieces after decimalization and remained in use up until fairly recently (the 90s?) before the coins were shrunk in size.

Getting back to the old money in Tintin;
I just remembered, I was wrong about them not updating the the books to "new" money. I've got some early editions of Tintin which have a few other mentions of the old money that later got changed. In the pre-decimal version of Crab one of the Thompsons goes to pay for a drink which I think the waiter says cost "two and thru'pence" and Thompson offers him a (dud) half crown. Also in the original English edition of The Shooting Star Professor Phostle asks his assistant to buy sixpence worth of bulls-eyes. There might be some other examples, but both of those mentioned were updated sometime after decimalization. (Actually, The Shooting Star is a funny one because for some reason they also decimalized the bit near the end about the rate of speed of the Aurora would need to catch up with the Peary. I don't currently have the book to hand, but I worked out that they made a mistake in converting knots and nautical miles into kilometres, or something like that, so that it's now all mathematically incorrect!)

No one ever uses those units, and, in fact, I've never even heard of them. These days, we just use dollars and cents. No mils or eagles.

Not having heard of them doesn't actually mean that they don't exist or have a function though, does it? ;-)


Well, the (U.S.) Currency Act establishes them, even if you don't work with them. The mil actually does get used: it manages the fractions of cents left over in large financial transactions, oil deals and that sort of thing. You may have heard tell in urban legend of wily accountants who divert the minute remainders of money in corporations into secret accounts (it's also the basic plot of Superman III)? Well, those are mils. There has never been a mil coin, but some states issued tokens in the thirties when their sales tax demanded it; also trading stamps, awarded to shoppers in relation to how much they spent, and some coupons - such as you might cut out of a magazine, newspaper or from packaging - for shops had, under U.S. law, to have some redeemable value - and that is, or was, normally set at a mil. :-)

Update: I realize now that I have made a fundamental error: strictly speaking, it isn't the "mil", it's the "mill"; "mil" is the abbreviation... Sorry for any confusion...! (Why a four letter word needs a three letter abbreviation, I don't know... They sound identical... They could have just made it the "mil" from the get-go, and been done with it... I guess some criminal enterprise skims off all the extra "l"-s, and squirrel them away somewhere to use for who-knows-what purpose...)

More Update: The U.S. Mint are still issuing eagle ($10) and double eagle ($20) coins, albeit for the collector and speculator market... What's more, the Mint has now changed order limits, so that each household can order up to 25, instead of a paltry ten! Admittedly they cost a whopping $1,339 each (see what I meant about some coins being worth more than their face-value?).
Now, before I get started on the 3 cent note, I'll try and stop drifting off topic... ;-)

Well, that's interesting. And confusing.
Thanks!