A question about former British currency [closed]

It certainly does. I'm old enough to have grown up with this historical pain in the neck. It was actually worse than that because we had halfpennies and farthings (quarter pennies) as well so you could get amounts like £2/18/7¾ spoken as "two pounds eighteen and sevenpence three farthings" or, as my father who was a shop worker in the 1930s said was common "two pounds eighteen and seven three".

This must have been a bit confusing because eighteen shillings and threepence was usually spoken as "eighteen and three".

There were other oddities in the spoken version like "haypney" (written as ha'penny) for halfpenny "tuppence" for two pence and even the somewhat pretentious "thruppence" for three pence (most people with working class accents said "threppence")

Then there were prices quoted in guineas, a guinea being £1/1/- or one pound, one shilling and no pence, quite commonly spoken as "21 shillings". I can remember seeing adverts for furniture quoted in guineas, presumably to make it look both cheaper and 'posher' at the same time.

For some reason horses and some other livestock are often still sold in guineas or multiples of £1.05 in sensible money.

Some people of my generation are still nostalgic for "old money" but it really was a clumsy way of doing things. In my opinion decimalisation was a great advance.