Pound Foolish

One of the lesser benefices conferred by Britain's empire builders on untutored natives was the British monetary system of pence, shillings (12 pence) and pounds (20 shillings). As the empire slowly dissolved, most colonials seized the first chance to convert to a saner system. India, Pakistan and Ceylon switched to a decimalized rupee, Canada and Singapore to a decimalized dollar. Last week South Africa, whose Afrikaner government is intent on being as separate from Britain as it can be without taking itself out of the Commonwealth, replaced the pound with a decimal system of Rands and cents.

Under the new system, the Rand is equal to 10 shillings ($1.40), and can be divided into 100 cents. Already the government has spent $21 million converting old-type cash registers and accounting machines to the new decimal system. But the chief beneficiaries of the changeover are South Africa's schoolchildren. For 135 years. South African schoolboys, like their brothers in England and the empire, have had to learn mathematics twice--first in the manner of the civilized world, which counts on ten fingers and decimalizes accordingly, and then in the English manner, which counts laboriously in 12s and 20s.

Addition and subtraction were perhaps no more difficult than they were for the Romans, who could easily take XXXIX from CIV, but multiplication and division often unhinged the juvenile mind. Sample: if 23 cricket bats cost -L-25 11s. 9d., how much does one cricket bat cost?*

In Britain itself, reform is resisted. Last week the Institute of Chartered Accountants warned that unless Britain abandoned -L-, s. and d., it would be by 1965 "the last significant upholder of that system." Britons, as usual, heard the announcement with the stony silence usually reserved for ill-bred bounders.

* The answer: -L-1 2s. 3d. It is solved by first turning everything into shillings, then into pence. Multiply the pounds by 20, add the shillings, multiply the sum by 12, and add the pennies. Then divide by 23 (cricket bats) and convert back to pounds, shillings and pence by division. Answer in the new system: 2 Rands, 22 l/2 cents.

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