Shopping in working class London in the early 1900s

Women shopped locally when I was a child in the early 1900s, and I sometimes went with my mother to our local shops in Edmonton. (Never with my father, as it was unheard of for men to be seeing doing women's work.) There were no supermarkets to sell everything in one visit. So we had to go to numerous different shops which made shopping a lengthy business. This was especially so because even being served took quite a time, as so social chit-chat was expected and many of the goods had to be weighed out specially for each customer. It was, though, quite interesting for me to watch the shopkeepers rapidly manipulating the weights on the scales as we waited. They did it so quickly and they always seemed to get nearly there from size alone.

Shopping was also hard work because we had no cars to carry our purchases back home, and the wickerwork baskets were heavy even before anything was put in them. Fortunately it was common for shops to deliver. It was also common to send children on errands. I often had to go and pick something up when my mother ran out.

  

We paid in pounds, shillings and pence, ie £-s-d where 12 pennies made one shilling [5p] and 20 shillings made one pound [£]. Common spoken abbreviations were a 'quid' for a 'pound'; a 'bob' for a shilling, a 'tanner' for sixpence [half a shilling], 'thruppence' for 3 pence, written as 3d, and 'tuppence' for 2 pence, written as 2d. Farthings [quarters of old pennies] were used a lot. If something cost one penny and three farthings, ie 1¾d, everyone said "a penny three" in everyday speech. In practice, though, most things we ever bought in the early 1900s only cost a few coppers.

shop price display cards in the pounds-shillings-and pence currency

Because each shop only sold one general type of ware, shops needed to attract customers who might otherwise just be passing by. So prices were displayed on the goods in the windows. Similarly once customers were inside buying one thing, the shopkeepers needed to attract them to buy other things by putting the prices on their counter goods. The following photographs show samples of price-display cards as they appeared in the early to mid 1900s.

Price-display cards were quite large - perhaps of a size between that of a child's and an adult's hand - an the currency was the pre-1971 non-decimal pounds-shillings-and pence system. The following photographs were taken in a range of museums.

2d pronounced "tuppence"

5d pronounced "fivepence"

8d pronounced "eightpence"

10d pronounced "tenpence"

The following price-display cards probably come from just prior to decimalisation after rampant inflation, because the selling price of goods in the early 1900s would have been much cheaper than the displays show.

1/- pronounced a "shilling"

1/3 pronounced "one and three"

1/8 pronounced "one and eight"

3/- pronounced "three shillings"

This website Join me in the 1900s is also known as Join me in the 1900's and is © Pat Cryer.