Urban Food Chains

the links between diet and power

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draft animals haulage three quick questions

From legs to wheels

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Having covered a blank canvas with lengthy discussions of horses’ roles in the transport of goods (click on a “horse” badge for the full list), the moment has arrived to resolve any lingering doubts. Registrations of commercial vehicles on British roads grew steadily in the 1920s: the figures used in this table  are all civilian, there are no military registrations to factor in. 0 At the start of the first world war, the British government commissioned regular orders with about half a dozen automotive manufacturers equipped to fulfill wartime orders. During the hostilities, these firms built 20,000 vehicles for the military – mostly lorry chassis ready for adaptation once their role had been allocated. The government disposed of a further 6,000 vehicles that were either no longer required or beyond repair.

The only army horses ever to return to the UK were those belonging to officers, some 65,000 in all, out of a total of close on a million. There was very little reliable data on the UK’s horse population at this time. The country had been a long term importer of horses since the mid-nineteenth century. There were groups of draft horses traded by specialist breeders, who saw to it that strong lines of Shire horses, Suffolk Punches and Percherons were kept available for companies that needed to patch a gap in a team, or other specific need.

The British army commandeered as many horses as it could lay its hands on. The entire industrial world was short of mules and horses during the 1920s. It was the growing reliability of automotive products that helped some to turn the corner. There was a persistent chafing between England’s lorry drivers and coachmen who were still in a job. Knowing that the brakes on lorries were often barely fit for purpose, coachmen would wind up lorry drivers while loading their vehicles and persuade them to increase their load to a point where the vehicle was a danger to other traffic.

 

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City life horse ship

Why looking the other way doesn’t work

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There is a streak of unpredictable whimsy that runs through English high society from Georgian times up to Victoria’s accession to the throne and beyond. It was aggravated by conventions that made no sense and dug ever deeper chasms between the aristocracy and its servants. Take the brutal economics of keeping a horse in cities, large or small. It was generally reckoned to cost upwards of £300 a year per steed, looked after by specialist staff, some of them issued with uniform that cost more than their wages, even after allowing for any board and lodging found by the employer.

Town-dwelling horses were kept in grouped stables, or mews, usually bearing the name of the street they served. The  equine diets were the standard fare of working horses of the day: hay, oats and roughage, washed down with water at intervals. Horses were the prerogative of the very rich or tradesmen who could cover their outgoings from their business. Agricultural businesses occupied the middle ground in this polarised rule of thumb scenario. The more successful ones worked with established lines of Percherons, Cobs or Shires, often breeding their own draft animals and systematically avoiding the saddle horse fraternity.

There was no missing the fact that horses scaled up the waste disposal problems associated with urban lifestyles. Dung disposal alone was a significant challenge, to the point where the city of London filled at least two barges a day with sweepings from the city’s crossings, which went down to the Thames estuary under cover of darkness to dump good quality, nutrient-rich material at sea.

Clearly, today’s environmental issues have deep roots: they were taking shape in the Thames estuary and elsewhere around our coasts, long before the arrival of the automotive age.

 

 

asparagus bread flour ship UK

Distance and price

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The further food travels, the more it should cost. Logically, yes, but the full story may not be quite so simple. With ingredients travelling literally half way round the world, it is no simple matter to differentiate one proposition from another. Take the example of 1925 loaf of bread, in the  previous post. The starting point is 20-stone sack of flour that anyone could visualise for themselves, suppposedly costing 42 shillings and a halfpenny. There was, in those days, total silence from the millers concerning where their wheat came from, let alone what it might have cost. Since millers earn a living from making flour,  their reticence is understandable.

By creating a synthetic starting point for the journey that would put a loaf of bread on the table, millers were able to influence the British public’s notion of what bread ought to cost. The 42 shilling sack was not a hard sell, it was a working  price point for those years. However, the Linlithgow committee, to a man, refused to make any comment on the prices of wheat, wherever it might have come from. In one sense, wheat and bread pass through very different markets, yet the two are joined at the hip for some purposes, notably if supplies fail: no wheat, no flour, no bread. It is that simple.

All through the latter years of the nineteenth century, British ports were unloading grain from every corner of the known world. For most people, grain imports were a permanent fixture and, as part of the British Empire, this happy state of affairs would somehow be left continue. However, the U-boat attacks, which started in 1916, jolted Britain into protecting inbound shipments of any description. From being adventuresome and exciting, life on a long haul merchantman took on a more challenging aspect as the U-boats extended their range from the concrete bunkers at Rochefort, comfortably crossing the Bay of Biscay.

 

 

 

crunchy numbers customs clearance Europe haulage key concept seafood Switzerland

A voice from the past

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Twenty five years ago Europe was in a state of flux. Many differing political agendas were being promoted in the belief that drafting the right regulations would somehow automatically unlock all the expectations with little or no further discussion or purpose.

If there was a single example to illustrate the processes involved, you will not be surprised to learn that I happen to think that competition is  sine qua non  for civilised society. Considering the central role of competition in a liberal economy, it is disturbing that at no point during the closing years of the 20th century was there a single EU-backed discussion or study of commercial planning permission for urban populations. At the time, there was just one voice to be heard in the darkness, challenging the naif notion that competition would somehow develop unhindered in a bed of thistles, that we would somehow recognise this state of innocence when it emerges from the shadows. The voice was that of French deputy Jean-Paul Charié. He presided over la commission de la production et les Echanges, publishing a parliamentary report into dysfunctional competition. At the time I was a production sub on a weekly trade title . Intrigued by the subject matter and knowing that this was a one-off opportunity, I phoned the French parliament and spoke to Chariés office. I was pleasantly surprised to get a phone call back from Charié in person, when he promised to post me a copy of the report to get the full story. Sadly, I never spoke to him again, since he died, but his published work casts a bright light on topics that thenceforth could  be debated in public with impunity. The evidence he collected on commercial malpractices came from all over Europe, painting a rather downbeat picture of how ethical standards in  retailing had declined while managing to appear outwardly presentable.

Follow the Freench logo to track this extended series.

Europe haulage horse lorry

Comparing muscles to motors

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Urban Food Chains has chipped away at a series of posts on the introduction of heavy machine guns which carried out a mechanised cull of thousands of working horses and pack animals. Intentionally or otherwise, the result was to clear the way for commercial motors of different sorts on British roads. Rule of thumb loading practices for draft animal at the time would have been about 20% bodyweight. Given that the working life of a horse can be up to 20 years and you have to spend four years feeding and training them before putting them to work, there was no point in sending fit young horses to battlefields to die within weeks of arrival having realised only 0.00520833 recurring of their potential work capacity (one month, a notional average) had they lived to work for 16 years, or close on 200 months.

 

Motor manufacturers, including foreign groups which set up assembly lines in the UK (notably Ford; General Motors; Chrysler) , throttled back their car production and turned over their car lines to two and three ton lorry chassises for subsequent adaptations / personnel carriers. Their component stocks were low specificity (eg alternators to a basic spec, multiple mount options).

 

There was nothing particularly complicated about a WW1 pick up truck, like most new products there was a lot of workshop time to anticipate. There were  20 or so manufacturers supplying the market, including high end folk like Thorneycroft (half tracks and road/rail hybrids). The core manufacturers turned out just over 20,0000 vehicles during the war, when entry level commercial motors were 500 pounds a go. That gave the makers a combined order book of around 10 million pounds over the four years of hostilities.

By the time the postwar economy had settled down, engines had improved in power and reliability and manufacturing margins had recovered. The world’s horse population was about 8 million less than at the turn of the century, and the conversion of agricultural businesses to new technologies was gathering pace.

Two related nuggets: when I moved to Crawley, one of my neighbours  once worked as a spy for the British government  while posted to the Afrika corps. His favourite anecdote was that the Ford lorries supplied to military buyers all used the same drive shaft construction. This meant that US army stationed in Europe; ae well as the relatively small number sold to Hitler’s army as well as the British army were interchangeable.  Final item: Hitler couldn’t fully fund diesel powered troops on the eastern front, so he sent horse units with troops riding in a sort of sidecar. You can see them from time to time in Pathé news footage of the day.

haulage horse lorry UK economy

Technology forces changes in warfare

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The arrival of Vickers machine guns in the second Boer war changed military expectations of what would become possible in years to come.

 

Starting with the Boer war at the turn of the twentieth century, the impact of heavy machine guns was devastating  on industrial battlefields, where thousands of horses were culled. The effect on the British economy was immense and immediate owing to the huge numbers of working animals needed to move equipment such as artillery from one site to the next. Such basic tasks became lethal interludes, as enemy machine gunners could take out the lead pair in a team of six or eight, immobilising the equipment, the surviving horses and the hapless soldiers who had to sort out the situation and salvage what was recoverable.

 

Horses and other pack animals were valued more highly by the British general staff than the rank and file soldiers of the day. The loss of thousands  of horses was a problem for manufacturers everywhere, especially those who needed to provide local delivery services for their customers. 

 

You can reckon that horses would have been expected to carry up to twenty percent of their body weight. Their harnesses may not have been taken into account, but would have been a significant proportion of the loaded animals’ burden. Establishing the loaded weight of a pack horse allows us to make some very rough and ready comparisons between the horses lost to the war effort and the rising numbers of two and three ton commercial vehicles that started to appear on British roads in 1914.

 

The power output of the early lorries used in opening years was fairly low for the most part, around 10 horsepower. You could say that every lorry did work that would have taken a team of six or a team of eight horses. In doing so, it is important to establish more than one set of parameters to make the comparison useable. It is fair to add that the power output from commercial motors increased rapidly from the late 1920s, this can readily checked by consulting contemporary advertisements. Despite its years of international power and influence, Britain was a net importer of horses between around 1860 and the 1930s. This not only stressed the economy, it makes valid comparisons between machinery and horses hard to establish.

 

It is quite likely that vehicle purchases made by the British government throughout the war years contributed to greater volumes of lorry traffic on British roads attributable to registered vehicles. Even if a high proportion of military vehicles are not registered through civilian agencies, what matters is that the total pool of vehicle tonnage was boosted in the process. Wartime government purchases of 20,000 vehicles will have added about ten million pounds to the postwar development iterations of the next generation of commercial motors..

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

domestication haulage horse lorry

Commercial vehicles by numbers

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The end of the 19th century was a time of profound change for the world’s industrial centres. Without realising the consequences for the future, humankind had started to dismantle relationships with the natural world that went back thousands of years. Progress in the mechanisation of industries that spanned entire continents led to the wholesale dumping of old ways of working: new technology was the answer, now what was the question?

For urban populations, the twentieth century brought a degree of hardship and new expectations. Rural populations faced a different set of challenges, notably how to produce more food with fewer people. Technology could be scaled up, but the results had to be deliverable. The English countryside was filled with agricultural investments in steam tractors. Huge, lumbering engines were trampling the face of the earth. The assumption was that this new technology would break down old barriers, bringing with it untold wealth. Technology was declaring war on nature.

There was a pressing need to prove that the country could deliver in every sense of the word. Bringing food into towns faced a number of constraints: neither the carrying power nor the feed requirements for draft animals were extendable. Keeping more horses in built-up areas of Victorian London or any other major city was not an option, while the addition of yet more horses coming into town from the suburbs just increased the volume of dung to manage. On the other side of the channel, Parisians took a very different view of horse dung, regarding it as a measure of commercial success and prestige for the most heavily affected quartiers. On the basis of passing horses alone (who would be so indiscreet as to dream of asking what the passengers might be doing?) the Moulin Rouge and parts of Montmartre were knee-deep in earthly riches.

The graph above gives a 60-year narrative: the first 20 years are significant for present purposes. During the prewar years, Britain was home to about 20 motor manufacturers capable of turning out sturdy tractor units, mid-to-long-range lorries or personnel carriers. By the mid-1930s there were close on 40 such firms, including a small but powerful group of US manufacturers running British-based assembly lines to serve the embryonic UK road haulage market. There were commercial variants on existing automobile offerings, such as the 7 cwt Model T Ford delivery van, or the General Motors group with its Bedford and Commer ranges.

Road haulage was so new in those days that commercial vehicles and lorries were in short supply. When vehicle registration started for trucks and vans, there were only 4000 in the country. By 1914 there 18,000. The British economy started to struggle and registered truck numbers dropped. During the hostilities, the War Office bought thousands of specialist vehicles to keep the army moving. Once the war was over, thousands of potential commercial motors were sold off cheaply through army surplus outlets. While researching this post I came across a figure of around 6000 disposals. Since motor manufacturers sold the War Office upwards of 20,000 vehicles collectively, they weren’t complaining. Besides, all these motors transferred their paperwork to Civvy Street. 

The British motor industry grew apace between the wars: demand for commercial vehicles remained stronger than in the US, which suffered a fall-off in demand for commercial motors, while the UK was facing higher demand, with a smaller user base.

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One purchase the British Army hung on to was a track-laying tractor bought in 1910. Top brass acquired four Hornsby track-laying tractors to carry out extensive trials in the long-running search for a battlefield heavyweight. They’ve still got one of them at the Tank Museum — and it still runs!

domestication draft animals haulage horse

Leverage for horses

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This diagram from a US army manual issued in 1916 shows the standard loading for a pack animal.

It is time to review how draft animals are connected to their loads. The simplest example would be a pack horse or a mule, in the days when mule trains carried clay to pottery workshops. The Devon clay that was transported this way earned the name of ball clay, since it was shaped into large balls and carried in a double bag carried on the animal’s back, where a saddle might otherwise have gone. Pack animals are often quite light, enabling them to cross rugged terrain, where roads were not available. It is important to keep a regularly updated note of a draft animal’s weight, taking care not to expect them to carry more than 15-20% of their current weight.

Take a half ton horse, hitch it up to loaded lighter, and you’re off!

Carts redistribute a load, but slowing down or stopping can be more demanding, particularly when going downhill. The most efficient means of transport, particularly for heavy consignments such as building supplies, is the canal barge. This can be hauled by a (large) single horse, even when loaded with several tonnes of goods.

crunchy numbers cultivation haulage ship Turnor

Supply side risks

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The first world war forced ever greater rates of change than the old order would ever have imagined. Here is a collection of data curated by Christopher Turnor during the first world war and published in Our Food Supply: perils and remedies (Country Life 1916). Any prices quoted are face value at the time, without any subsequent adjustment for historical changes in value. Turnor does not go into detail on the sources of his data and its authenticity, but since he had the run of market information gathered by the Agriculture Board he is unlikely to have needed to look very far. The tables in this post are mostly scanned directly from Turnor’s book, with the intention of giving readers the opportunity to form a view on Turnor’s line of argument. I have made odd comments here or there, but I defer to the readers’ many and varied viewpoints, believing they are better served by sight of the original publication.

The production figures for cereals and potatoes over a 20-year time period are open to question, but the contrasting rates of change suggest that Germany had a strategic advantage in feeding its citizens over this period in its history. Sub-plot: Germany had little access to food grown in overseas colonies, so that supply chains were shorter and more effectively protected from military action.

It is a moot point as to whether a rural population of 20 million in Germany is going to be more productive than thirteen and a half million British empire citizens spread around the globe. There is no obvious equivalence, since resources, skills and infrastructure are not comparable.

Turnor was convinced that British agriculture was being held back by a high proportion of low-earning grass supporting too few grazing animals. Here is what he wrote in 1916:

“In thinking out measures which will increase the amount of our home supplies, the permanent development of agriculture must be the aim. Attempts to increase, hastily and temporarily, the production of the soil must be ineffective and can easily be actually harmful. We must get to the root of the matter. Present conditions affecting agriculture are unsound and unsatisfactory; better ones must be created.” (Christopher Turnor; Our Food Supply, Perils and Remedies, Country Life 1916.)

Scaling up from a county level to national comparisons, Turnor dug out the following figures during the early years of the first world war:

Turnor then presents a set of headline consumption figures. These classify ingredients and the opening table reflects national dietary preferences. The line for rye, for instance, identifies it as a German staple crop, and may well include sale of grain for brewing beer. A similar interpretation of barley being sold for malting would seem reasonable.

Table VII, below, sets out the cost of imported foods, probably as a set of customs values.

Stats for fifth quarter products went through the Board of Trade.

More follows

That’s it, folks.

customs clearance haulage key concept

The elephant in the room

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A wall of silence still surrounds  the computer system at the heart of the BTOM, called the Single Trade Window (STW). This will be the one and only way of getting data into the system. The final version*⁠1 of the BTOM guide, published on February 11 states: “ …the Single Trade Window could be fully operational in 2027.” 

There are a number of reasons why this could be awkward, but one will do. The STW calculates the aggregate cost of wear and tear caused by lorry traffic to roadways at ports. This operational detail is  used to set a levy called the Common User Charge (CUC). This is payable when a lorry leaves a port: the CUC is added to a rolling monthly invoice. While the STW sets a figure for Government operated ports, private operators were invited to fix their own charges, as they would do for anything else.  Dover and Portsmouth,  the two busiest ports in the UK, both happen to be owned and operated privately.

Sorry, but this is not a clickable link yet. 1 Feb-11-24-Final_Border_Target_Operating_Model.pdf para 350 page 88

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