(There is a little skipping on the audio but it does not detract too much from my velvet tones)

For those of you under the age of 50 some explanation might be needed – probably on a number of levels.

First of all, “3d” was thre’pence under “old” money.

Second, the “d” stood for denarii – a valuable legacy of Roman coinage.

Third, and perhaps most important, you’ll need an understanding of how the wonderful pre-decimal currency worked.

There weren’t 100 pennies in the pound as is confusingly the case now but the altogether more convenient number of 240.  A shilling (1/-) or bob (solidi in the abbreviation Lsd) was 12 pennies while a 6d was a tanner.  Thre’pence came in the form of a thre’p’ny bit.

In order for you newcomers to get your bearings, a 1/- therefore equated to 5p now, a tanner to two and a half p and a thr’ep’ny bit to half of that.

Moving on, 24 pennies (2/-) made a two bob bit and 30 a half-a-crown (2/6d).  There was a crown but by my time these were largely ceremonial.  10/- was a ten bob note.  There was no nine bob note which was a disgraceful simile of its time used to describe homosexuals.  Two ten bob notes therefore made up a pound note or quid.

The system also regressed downwards from a penny with a ha’pe’ny and a farthing – not a distant object as you might assume but a quarter of a 1d.  These were phased out when Modern Times arrived in 1961, although their value held in the form of 4 Blackjacks to the 1d for some time after.

You’ll see at a glance, therefore the superiority in terms of convenience of this “old” money compared with today’s decimalised currency which is nothing short of a French plot to undermine our British economy and why it is spoken of in such hallowed tones by dewy-eyed Brexiteers.

All very interesting but simply an overly long diversion to the thrust of this post which is, you remember, about “3d back on the bottle”.

In those days of smoke-belching power stations gorging themselves on 100m tonnes of black gold ripped from the bowels of Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, the North-East etc, “3d back on the bottle” was incentivised recycling, decades ahead of its time.

You’ll have gathered already how it worked.  Once your dad had finished off his weekly crate of Mackeson, you took the empties back to the beer-off and got thre’pence back on each bottle. 

A spin-off to this noble act of environmental sustainability was that it also encouraged gutter-snipes like us to go litter picking (well, bottles at least!).

The pinnacle of this entrepreneurial recycling would see us climbing over Sabin’s back wall after dark to pinch back the crates we had taken in days before.  Give it a couple more days, then Bingo! Take them in again.

3d back on the bottle, see?