World: Requiem for a Pennyweight

To present-day Englishmen, the British Imperial System does not mean the White Man’s Burden but something very nearly as outdated: a labyrinthine heritage of weights and measures that would long since have driven a less hardy race to dementia or to decimals.

Britain’s schoolchildren grapple for years with three different and conflicting methods of measuring weight (avoirdupois, troy and apothecaries’ table), three ways of measuring length (linear, chain and nautical), and a bewildering variety of dry and liquid measurements, ranging from drachms, grains and scruples to tuns, hogsheads and chaldrons. Port is measured in pipes (105 gals.), people in stones (14 Ibs.), pickled peppers in pecks (554.84 cu. in.). For good measure, Britain’s hundredweight is 112 Ibs., not 100; the pennyweight has been unrelated to the weight of any penny for a century and a half, but equals one-twentieth of an ounce. Both ounces and quarts have entirely different values in different tables, and pounds can consist either of 12 oz. (troy) or 16 oz. (avoirdupois), not to mention the pound sterling, which is 20 shillings.

Last week, after nearly 150 years of discussing reform, the House of Commons debated a weights and measures bill no less momentous than the Act of 1824 that abolished Queen Anne’s wine gallon (231 cu. in.) and the ale gallon (282) in favor of the present imperial gallon (277.4). The government bill abolishes entirely the linear measurement, beloved of school textbooks, known as rod, pole or perch, a 5 ½yd. unit based originally on the combined length of the left feet of 16 men. The government also lengthens the yard* and lightens the pound to conform to international standards, and in five years it will also abolish pennyweight, scruple and drachm.

While the reforms were most loudly welcomed by rod-spared schoolchildren, they also stirred joy in English pubs, where a “single” Scotch or gin is usually one-sixth of a gill—barely enough, Britons grumble, to wet the glass. Henceforth, pubs will be allowed to dispense one-sixth, one-fifth or one-fourth of a gill.* But will be forced to display a sign saying clearly which measure they use. The greatest spur to thoroughgoing reform will undoubtedly be British membership in the European Common Market. In time, Englishmen may even order their mild-and-bitter by the liter, and pay in decimal currency—but few last week would bet a fluid dram that they would live to see the day.

* First standardized by Henry I (1100-1135), who made it conform to the distance between his nose and outstretched right thumb.

* Which approximately equals the standard one-ounce U.S. shot.