I don't know if you can call this answer "masterful," but here goes.
This article (entitled: "Snatch," "Hole," or "Honey-pot"? Semantic Categories and the Problem of Nonspecificity in Female Genital Slang.) is quite an extensive study on many, many statistical phenomena and anomalies when it comes to, as they call it, female genital slang. They also compare these slang Female Genitalia Terms (FGTs) by category to Male Genitalia Terms (MGTs).
This article is very extensive, so to highlight what they have to say about the term "tuppence" (which here falls under the "money" category):
FGTs contained both explicit (e.g., tuppence, thruppeny bit, Mrs Penny), and implicit (fur purse, pocket book) references to money. In most terms, the amount of money was very small, suggesting reference to money rather than to value. Many FGTs not coded with this category (e.g., fish, lettuce, quiff) have, historically, meant money (Wentworth &. Flexner, 1975), and many have simultaneously meant prostitute--Green's (1999) money category is identified as the money-maker. These terms suggest women's worth and value to be in their genitalia, and commodify the genitalia as objects to be purchased. Indeed, commodity was a sixteenth century British term, now obsolete, for the genital area (McConville & Shearlaw, 1984).
Thus, as @Garet Claborn intimated, this term seems to derive from referring to prostitutes, specifically cheap ones, and as they say points to women's worth (at least the opinion of the times) being in their genitalia.
With reference to your mention of whether or not this word enjoys usage, as you say a quick Google search will yield a number of hits connecting the word "tuppence" to a female genitalia reference. As for how widespread it is, a discussion on this forum suggests that it's not a very widespread and widely known word, one user saying the following:
I'm guessing that as Mummy, Walt Disney, Agatha Christie and my other half (parents from West London, raised in various locations across Europe) and the Online Oxford English Dictionary do not know the "front bottom" meaning [referring to tuppence], its geographical spread is limited.
Hope this answers your question.
The origin of the word 'tut' as a noun is, as of yet, unknown. The OED entry for Tut says:
Etymology: There is perhaps more than one word here. Of the origin nothing has been ascertained.
However, the use of the word 'tut' in the 'rubbish' sense may be supported by this definition from the OED:
a. Orig. in the Cornish tin-mines, now also in Derbyshire lead-mining: in the phrase upon tut (also by the tut), and attrib. as tut-bargain, tut-man, tut-work (also as vb.), tut-worker, tut-working, tut-workman: denoting a system of payment by measurement or by the piece, adopted in paying for work which brings no immediate returns, as distinct from tribute n. 3; hence, work of this character; dead-work.
The OED takes less of a cop-out on Tut, v. saying:
Etymology: A natural utterance; the spelling tut sometimes represents the palatal click (also spelt tchick n., tck int.).
Which may also explain the etymology of the slang word - being something that is just replaced for a word that is better left unsaid - a sort of self-censorship of more appropriate or cruder language.
Ultimately my guess would be that it's some combination of the two.
Best Answer
Speaker A asks "Can I help you?" and gets the answer from speaker B "Yes, your face, my arse."
This is the joke answer to an entirely different question, namely "Do you have a match?"
Speaker A concludes that Speaker B has misheard "Can I help you?" for "Do you have a match?" so Speaker A clarifies his question by repeating it.
Speaker B admits his mishearing by saying "Oh, I see" and proceeds to respond reasonably to the Speaker A's question offering help.
The joke (such as it is) is that nobody would mistake "Can I help you?" for "Do you have a match?" but both parties proceed to act as if that were a perfectly natural thing to happen.