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See A Penny, Pick It Up (Superstition / Luck Related To Money Found)

Back on topic for a second, I found a 20p and two 2p coins this morning. I reckon the local kids will be asking for it all back in about ten years time when they have to pay their own bills :p
 
They've made her bootylicious and she's standing in front of the Death Star for some reason? ..
brittania1.jpg
 
I reckon the whole concept of a £675 fifty pence piece is a lot-more disturbing than a Fifty Pound coin (with Angelina Jolie channelling Pussycat Riot as Britannia Spears).

It looks almost like a cheap British utility version of a Krugerrand. And a bit Shell/Esso commemorative medals, circa 1972 Munich Olympics "Event Number Seven...Tossing the trident for distance"

But, whether Pennies (Angelinas, or Kims) you'd have to pick them up, regardless of their face value, or how long they've been in circulation.

Model citizens us all (including @escargot1 ), we do know that change always has it's costs. And, to coin a phrase, a penny in your hand's worth more than one in somebody else's....a coin is, I mean.

EDIT Ooh, ooh, I just remembered that classic coin Jackanory story..... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Queen's_Nose
250px-The.Queen.Nose.title.card.png

queens%20nose.JPG
 
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To tell the truth ........ I would (with new Brittania, no offence skargy) ..
 
@Swifty to be honest, I think she could be high maintenance.

Face it, clearly she reckons £50 is just small change. She's got either Aslan or Clarence as a house-cat, an aquatic toasting fork, a Death Star, and a Trojan's helmet (that all sounds accidently quite rude).

Of course, it's possible that @escargot1 possesses all this equipment as well. Or were you lent it for the photoshoot, Ms Snail?

Here's some '70s blast-of -past Esso alloy medallion coins, all of which we '60s kids would almost have killed each-other for, if it'd meant completing a set...
essocoin.jpg
 
@Swifty to be honest, I think she could be high maintenance.

Face it, clearly she reckons £50 is just small change. She's got either Aslan or Clarence as a house-cat, an aquatic toasting fork, a Death Star, and a Trojan's helmet (that all sounds accidently quite rude).

Of course, it's possible that @escargot1 possesses all this equipment as well. Or were you lent it for the photoshoot, Ms Snail?

Here's some '70s blast-of -past Esso alloy medallion coins, all of which we '60s kids would almost have killed each-other for, if it'd meant completing a set...
essocoin.jpg
I had that set. With ALL the coins! IIRC, one of the coins was larger and it was a gold colour.
Silly me, I left the set under the bed. They all went rusty.
 
I pick up pennies out of superstition! Then they all go in the 'copper jar' for playing Newmarket at Christmas.

I've just found an interesting snippet of coin-collecting folklore in an old issue of FT....

I mentioned somewhere upthread of a not very PC tradition at my school of, without warning, throwing a coin or coins (usually only coppers, maybe the odd 5p or two bob bit), or more infrequently the cheap 'penny chew' type of sweets at a group in the playground or corridor accompanied by the cry 'Jew Scramble!!' An often reasonably violent scrummage would then ensue as any number of participants competed to pocket the coins or other prize ahead of the other 'players'. This didn't seem very controversial at the time as gags about Scottish and Yorkshire people being 'careful with their money', Irish people being thick etc were also standard light entertainment fare. A bit of googling has turned up other references to this game in schools up and down the land so it is, or was, definitely 'a thing'. We also, on this thread, discussed the possibly related phenomenom of schoolkids (generally boys) mysteriously throwing away their change in the street...although the 'retrieval' aspect of the exercise has apparently been consigned to history.

Anyway, on p62 of FT218 (Jan 2007) - the 'Nazi Christmas' issue - Paul Sieveking (for it is he) reviews Steve Roud's 'The English Year - A Month-by-Month Guide to the Nation's Customs and Festivals from May Day to Mischief Night' [Penguin, ISBN 0140515541], giving it a 9/10 rating. To quote PS's review:

"Did you know that scambling days were the Mondays and Saturdays in Lent when no regular meals were prepared and people had to make do with odds and ends? Scambling predates scrambling, to which it is closely related, and meant both "to scatter" and "to struggle", often in the sense of contesting for money, sweets, or food thrown to a crowd, as the OED puts it, "in an indecorous and rapacious manner".

Interestingly, Paul Sieveking's piece reviewing this and another book on British folklore and superstitions is entitled 'Pocket that lucky bit', hence it drew my attention in rememberence of this thread. But this, as I discovered on reading further, has nothing to do with picking up pennies:

"From at least 1851...the tongue tip of a calf or ox, generally called "a lucky bit" was inexplicably carried around for luck by English people from most levels of society. This custom lasted well into the 20th century, but seems now to be forgotten".

I think I'll stick to picking up pennies.

[Edited for spelling]
 
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I mentioned somewhere upthread of a not very PC tradition at my school of, without warning, throwing a coin or coins (usually only coppers, maybe the odd 5p or two bob bit), or more infrequently the cheap 'penny chew' type of sweets at a group in the playground or corridor accompanied by the cry 'Jew Scramble!!' An often reasonably violent scrummage would then ensue as any number of participants competed to pocket the coins or other prize ahead of the other 'players'.
I remember some lads at my school doing this (about 40 years ago), with those very words.
 
It's surprised me how widely spread this evidently was, and suspect it may have mutated from earlier folk superstitions. There were, on the other hand, a load of 'Lord of the Flies'-style subcultural traditions at my school that no one else has ever heard of. Presumably the same applies to all schools.

It still amazes me how such memes as this and the whole 'chinny reckon' thing were ubiquitous even in the pre-interent age.
 
"Did you know that scambling days were the Mondays and Saturdays in Lent when no regular meals were prepared and people had to make do with odds and ends? Scambling predates scrambling, to which it is closely related, and meant both "to scatter" and "to struggle", often in the sense of contesting for money, sweets, or food thrown to a crowd, as the OED puts it, "in an indecorous and rapacious manner".


Could the throwing of trinkets and sweets at Mardi Gras be related?
 
Who knows? Worth a bit of further research, including in the FT archives*, I'd say. There is the connection with Lent i.e excess followed by fasting...

*wish I'd bought the CD-Roms now, doh.
 
Maybe that was partly why we Brits still refer to small change as 'shrapnel' ... as well as kids also collecting actual shrapnel from exploded bomb debris during WWII, they were also picking up Yank discarded coins?.


Loose change was known as shrapnel in Australia too Swifty - another import from the Mother Country?
 
I mentioned somewhere upthread of a not very PC tradition at my school of, without warning, throwing a coin or coins (usually only coppers, maybe the odd 5p or two bob bit), or more infrequently the cheap 'penny chew' type of sweets at a group in the playground or corridor accompanied by the cry 'Jew Scramble!!' An often reasonably violent scrummage would then ensue as any number of participants competed to pocket the coins or other prize ahead of the other 'players'.
I never heard of this before, and it didn't happen at any school I attended.

But WWII bankrupted this country, and we still had rationing for many years after, so I guess the post-war generation didn't have much money to 'throw around'. It wasn't until 1957 that Prime Minister Harold Macmillan felt able to say "You've never had it so good", but [also] warned of the dangers of inflation, summing up the fragile prosperity of the 1950s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Macmillan
 
I was at school in the Midlands during the 80s - when the cry of "SCRAMBLES" went up in the playground, it meant that a kid was running around scattering their swapsies from the latest Panini sticker collection in the air, cos they'd finished the album.

No coins or Jews involved - slightly more PC by then, obviously :p
 
We had 'scramble' with coins, too, but there were no antisemitic connotations to it. Although the joke about 'how was copper wire invented? Two Jews fighting over a penny!' seemed to be told often. I'm not even sure many kids in my school actually knew what a jew was. There doesn't seem to be a significant population in Peterborough. Shame our first factoid about an ethnicity should be a racial stereotype.
 
...the joke about 'how was copper wire invented? Two Jews fighting over a penny!' seemed to be told often. I'm not even sure many kids in my school actually knew what a jew was...

Exactly - quite the situation at my school.
 
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