There is no shortage of examples of horses travelling to WWI battlefields, only to be shipped out as carrion within a month, if that. The British army had been working on mechanised replacements to haul heavy artillery pieces, for the best part of a decade. It would only be fair to give the military engineers credit for their efforts to minimise internal rows, and soldier on to modify the original design through two or three iterations by the end of the first world war. Thousands of horses still died in the process, but there was an end in sight to mass equine butchery.
This could not come too soon, as inter-war businesses set about restoring their delivery systems. When trying to track the development of value in the pricing of bread and bakery goods, the editor of Industrial Peace, Major W Melville, conceded that the public grasp of the price structure was “little understood”. The only accessible estimates came from the Linlithgow Report and started outside bakeries with the purchase of sacks of flour. From the plains of north America, the vast expanses of Australia, to the more modest arable holdings of England, Linlithgow collects the entire growing stage of breadmaking flour into a single undifferentiated lump.
The disadvantages of average returns are there for all to see. Melville put it like this: “No evidence offered in respect of price structure of flour. My inquiry begins at the point at which the baker buys his flour from the miller.” The opening price of breadmaking flour in January 1923 was 42 shillings and a penny. There is no indication of whether this should be taken as an “asking” price or a “taking” price, as given in a trade paper, meaning that flat pricing goes out of the window, speeded on its way by discounts applied at strategic order volumes. The figures discussed in the Linlithgow report were fixed during a time when flour prices were starting to fall, leaving a number of question marks over the validity of 42 shillings and a penny as a credible price for a sack of flour at this time.
more follows later…
