Tintin Forums

Anyone who has a early edition of King Ottokar's Sceptre - how much was the bill presented to Tintin in the Klow restaurant, in British pre-decimalization money?

The bill was for "5/6-" - which stands for five shillings and six pennies, no half-pennies or farthings (or 5s 6d, as it was sometimes written), which comes to 32 new pence in decimal currency, rounding to the nearest even number (in the days when we had new half-pennies, it would have been 32.5p).

The Szlaszeck was 3/6 (3s 6d, or "three and six"), the Szpradj was 1/6 (1s 6d or "one and six") and the service charge was 10% of 5/- (5s or "five shillings"), which is -/6 (6d or "sixpence").

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

And an inflation calculator puts that 5/6 as £4.88 in 2008 money - or 7.30 CHF using today's exchange rate.
I suppose that's now about the price of a Big Mac meal, give or take a few pennies.

I like the inflation calculator website, George. Mind you, the calculator arrives at that rather cheap price of £4.88 in today's money only if we're assuming that the 5 shillings and sixpence was being spent in 1958, when the book was first translated into English (in line with what Abco asked in the title to this thread).

Isn't it possible that the translators simply based their 5/6- figure on Hergé's original price in Belgian francs, in which case maybe nineteen-thirty-eight is the date we should be putting into the inflation calculator?

Doing this gives a price today of £13.75, which does seem a more realistic modern price for Tintin's meal.

Mind you, even if my assumption is right, we don't know whether the translators were converting Hergé's 1938 Belgian francs figure according to 1938's exchange rate or 1958's exchange rate (if indeed they bothered to convert the price that carefully rather than just picking a reasonable-sounding figure!).

I guess we need somebody with a copy of the original French edition to see what the price is in Belgian francs, to see how, why or when that might have converted to 5 shillings and sixpence.

Either way, not a bad price if the meal was good. But not sounding so cheap if the waiter suggests that you may have provided the meal's main ingredient yourself in the form of your pet dog's hind leg!

Interesting to note that the cost of the meal was less than the cost of the book it appeared in - my early copy of Ottokar is priced 8s 6d...!

It's a good point to ponder there, Balthazar: we already lose nuance which might have been obvious before - is Tintin meant to be fine dining, or is the Klow some sort of "greasy spoon" café?

This is indicated to us today most often by price, and may have been done so when Hergé was writing. Trouble is, we now can't tell...

The matter is compounded when we don't even know the year to use as a benchmark!

Thanks fellows for your answers to my Q. In the original version in french the cost of the meal was 11 without denomination, so presumably Belgian Francs. In the later french versions this amount has never been changed. I don't know what BF 11 represented in 1938 and I can't find an "inflation calculator" site (nice stuff),capable of handling multiple currencies. Cheers

Thanks for that info, Abco.


I haven't found a site which does historic conversions directly between Belgian francs and British pounds. But I have just found this site - www.measuringworth.com - which gives historic exchange rates between any currency and the US dollar. From this, I can obviously work out the Belgian franc to British pound exchange rate.

So here goes:

In 1938, 1 dollar equalled about 6 Belgian francs, and 1 dollar also equalled 0.2 British pounds.

So if 6 Belgian francs equalled 0.2 British pounds,
11 Belgian francs - the cost of Tintin's meal - would equal 0.36 British pounds.

Since there were 20 shillings to a pound, and twelve pence in a shilling, I think that 5 shillings and sixpence was about 0.28 of a pound (not that anyone back then was in the habit of expressing imperial money in such a decimal form!)

0.28 pounds would be about 9 and a half Belgian Francs in 1938, so that's not too far out from the 11 francs in Hergé's original. Given that the exchange rate must have fluctuated an bit throughout 1938 anyway, I think it's close enough to suggest that the English translators were giving a fair approximation of Hergé's 1938 meal price.

Whereas if I run the figures through for 1958, it doesn't even vaguely match up, since the Belgian franc exchange rate against the dollar and pound changed massively in post-war years. (I think this happened with a lot of European currencies immediately WW2 as part of post war reconstruction - the US Marshall Plan, the Bretton Woods Conference and the establishment of the IMF - but my history's a bit vague on that!)

Anyway, in 1958, 1 dollar equalled about 50 Belgian francs. As 1 dollar also equalled 0.35 British pounds (a much less drastic change), this means that 1 Belgian franc equals only 0.007 pounds! So our 11 Belgian franc figure equals only 0.077 pounds - way too cheap for a meal even back in the 1950s. Post-war French and Belgian readers must have read that 11 franc figure as a historic pre-war price.

So my guess is that the English translators were basing their 5 shillings and sixpence price roughly on Hergé's 1938 11 Belgian franc price, rather than going on the value of 11 Belgian francs in 1958.

But I'd also guess that 5 shillings and sixpence must also have sounded a plausible price for a meal for the 1958 readers of the first English edition, since they wouldn't have been assuming that British readers new to Tintin would realise it was set in the late 1930s.