The case raised the question of weights and measures to national prominence, and the traders were dubbed the “Metric Martyrs” by the press. Thoburn’s scales were confiscated, and along with four others accused of similar crimes, he was convicted in 2001 of breaking the law. In the year 2000, a market-stall owner in Sunderland named Steve Thoburn sold the fruit in question to an undercover trading standards officer, pricing them using pounds and ounces (25p for a pound) and so contravening an EU directive that all loose goods should be sold using metric. The slow march of the metric system might have continued unabated if it hadn’t been for a bunch of bananas. By the 1990s, only a handful of prominent public-facing measures, like road signs and grocery weights, remained in imperial or dual units. This changeover - as culturally significant as the loss of pounds and ounces - happened without too much trouble, and in the decades that followed, all the UK’s major industries, from car making to pharmaceuticals, went metric. In 1971, the UK took the significant step of decimalizing its currency, dropping the old system of pounds, shillings, and pence (inherited from the work of the eighth-century metrological reformer Charlemagne).
In the years that followed, various aspects of UK life went metric: paper sizes in 1967, pharmacy prescriptions in 1969, government weather reports in 1970, and so on. Importantly, this decision to metricate was taken years before the UK joined the European groups that would form the nucleus of the European Union, showing that metrication in the UK has been, from the start, an internal decision rather than an external imposition. The plan was drawn up at the behest of industry groups, who felt that the UK’s attachment to imperial units was holding it back in international markets. For ARM, the battle against metrication in the UK began in 1965, when the government outlined a 10-year scheme to go metric.
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