This female factory hand was photographed at work in Birkenhead during September 1918. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Logistics contractors refer to it as the final mile, but many of us would settle for “delivering the goods.” It is potentially a complex stage in a product’s journey to meet the end user.
In December 1924, the LinLithgow Committee supplied the Royal Commission with four sets of costings and an outwardly robust methodology to analyse the cost of bread. It was based on the bakers’ key ingredient, the 20-stone (127 kg) sack of flour at the heart of every batch of bread baked across the land in those days. In its day, this was a Known Value Item, to borrow a modern term. It traded at forty two shillings and a farthing, according to popular belief, not moving from one year to the next. Every baker who ever bought a sack of flour from a miller in those days paid 42s and one farthing, the story goes. Did anyone ever query the extra farthing? Where did it come from? Where did it go?
Here is the first of the Linlithgow production costings, based on data supplied by the National Association of Master Bakers. It gives a repesentative view of the additional inputs to make a batch of bread from a sack of flour. The data were supplied by 26 local firms and 63 local associations. Get ready to work in farthings for a while, since the farthing was the lowest common denominator of the day.
The dry ingredients added to a 20 stone sack of flour were valued at 161 farthings or 3s/4d and a farthing. Upstream expenses for converting the flour totalled 112d, that is 9s/4d, ignoring a stray halfpenny. Downstream expenses including distribution for the resultant bread was 11 shillings. Total cost to convert a sack of flour left change out of £2/4 shillings. Stables accounted for just over three shillings of the running costs, while depreciation on the capital for automotive vehicles was just a third of that. The early stages of growing automotive investment can be detected in the economy, but there is no indication of its likely size as yet.
