Britain Still Dragging Its Feet Over Metric System : Metric System Still Resisted in Britain

LONDON —  Two decades after it set out to measure things by the millimeter, liter and kilogram, Britain is part way there but still not very enthusiastic about it.

Shillings and sixpences are gone, and the liter--spelled litre here--is showing up at gasoline stations.

But miles are still the measure of the highways, and pounds and kilograms depend on where you shop.

“Every retailer is afraid to change,” said Andre Gabor, an economist who has advised the government on going metric. “No one will go out on a limb for metric because they fear people might go to the next shop.”

“I haven’t personally gone metric,” said Sir Thomas Padmore, a former member of the Metrication Board, founded in 1969 to oversee the transition.

“My principal hobby is gardening, and I still use a gallon can. There is total confusion in buying things like pesticides, which are marked half in metric, half in imperial measure, and some people are extremely tiresome about it.”

Padmore, who is 80, added: “Older citizens my age think it’s a damn nuisance.”

As a member of the European Economic Community, Britain is part of the tariff-free 12-nation trading bloc that will come into existence at the end of 1992, and the resulting economic harmony will put the British imperial system of weights and measures all the more out of step.

Thus, by order of the EEC, gills, gallons, feet, fathoms, pounds and ounces are to be phased out by the turn of the century.

The idea is to use the metric system for everything that is negotiated across borders. Thus acres stay, as does the mile; the cost of replacing every road sign in Britain and Ireland would be enormous.

Also saved are the furlong, one-eighth of a mile in horse racing; the troy ounce, in which gold bullion is traded, and the pint for milk or a beer at the pub. The British also will still be able to weigh themselves in stones, units of 14 pounds.

Loose goods such as vegetables will stay imperial until 1999, but packaged goods must come by the kilogram by 1995.

The country’s mistrust of the metric system dates to at least 1791, when it declined France’s invitation to join in establishing an international system devised by the Paris Academy of Sciences.

Not until 1897 did Parliament legalize the use of metric measures in trade and commerce.

In 1965, Prime Minister Harold Wilson pledged Britain would go metric, but he foresaw the problems when he remarked that the British “don’t like four-syllable words like metrication.”

Indeed, popping down to the pub for a 0.568 of a liter never seemed likely to catch on, which is why the pint stays.

A public opinion poll in 1970 indicated that most people preferred the imperial measures. Fifty-seven percent opposed going metric and only one-third said they understood the system, even though it should be a lot simpler, since it works in multiples of 10 as opposed to the 12-inch foot, eight-pint gallon and 5,280-foot mile.

A government poster took the metric-is-beautiful approach by showing bikini-clad Della Freeman with vital statistics in millimeters--914-610-914.

Think metric, the poster exhorted, but Freeman didn’t help things by confessing a preference for inches.

“Millimeters sound so enormous that it is rather unflattering,” the model said.

The currency was changed in the early 1970s. Out went shillings, sixpences and half-crowns in favor of a decimal system whereby the 240-penny pound became the 100-pence pound.

Despite intense grumbling from traditionalists, decimalization worked. Schoolchildren began learning the metric system in 1974, and it looked as though the 1979 deadline for full metrication would be met.

But in 1979 a poll found 46% still opposing metrication, and today, says the National Consumer Council, British consumers have the worst of both worlds.

“Consumers find that comparison of goods is made much more difficult by the fact that products are often measured in different ways in different shops,” the council said. “Conversion from one system to the other is neither quick nor simple.”