What's in a name...

The other day when we discovered the Cheapside Fayre and had a tour of St Mary le Bow church, I meant to write about other things too. We sat in a small garden outside what had originally been the Royal Exchange, and though the outside remains virtually unchanged, not so the inside. Now it is a very smart eatery. As we ate we heard snatches of music, which came from we realised when we walked up the steps a string quartet doing their thing. On the front porch we also spotted a butterfly decorated phone box. It was I read in the paper today a part of a London wide display of decorated booths in aid of a children’s charity.

In front of the seat where we had lunch was a plinth with an outline of the notable building in the area and there to jog my memory it was. The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street.  No not a homeless person, the nickname of the Bank of England. It is years since I have heard of it. I do remember my Mum telling me about it.

The nickname the "The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street" first appeared in print as the caption "Political Ravishment or The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street in danger" to a cartoon published in 1797 by James Gillray. It depicts William Pitt the Younger, the Prime Minister of the day, pretending to woo the Bank, which is personified by an elderly lady wearing a dress of £1 notes seated on a chest of gold.

So that had me wondering about two things, the origin of the word ‘nickname’ did it have anything to do with the devil or ‘old nick’? No such thing I found out when I googled it. It originated as an Anglo-Saxon word: ekename. In the Anglo-Saxon tongue, "eke" meant "also" or "added." The term seemed just a bit awkward to pronounce; so, it became slurred, converting ekename to nekename and finally to become nickname. So there you go.

And if you’re old enough to remember pounds shillings and pence, and like me pondered over the symbols for the same £,s,d.

The £ sign developed over the years from the letter 'L', the initial letter of the Latin word libra meaning a pound of money. It is generally agreed that the letters 's' for shilling and 'd' for penny stand for the Latin words "solidus" and "denarius" respectively. These were originally Roman coins of considerably greater value than the shilling and the penny.