Payment Calculation Help

[DelW]

And the word 'Truck' apparently comes from the Old French "troque" / "troquer", meaning to exchange or barter or swap, and/or possibly the medieval Latin word "trocāre".

Presumably as in the phrase "I wouldn't have any truck with him", roughly a synonym for dealings.

Also, would the contractor need a license to sell it to his workers?

Although there had been some previous legislation on sale of alcohol, principally to control consumption of gin, licensing controls in the modern sense date only from the first world war, when they were justified as reducing drunkenness in munitions workers.

 

[LickeyIncliner]

Thanks @Gloster and @Mcr Warrior for coming up with the missing word !

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 31 May 2025 ==

Although there had been some previous legislation on sale of alcohol, principally to control consumption of gin, licensing controls in the modern sense date only from the first world war, when they were justified as reducing drunkenness in munitions workers.

I don't claim any specialist knowledge, but I believe the main feature of the WWI regulations was to regulate drinking hours. Licensing of premises for the sale of alcohol goes back much further - to 1552, according to Wikipedia. How that worked in terms of temporary arrangements to supply beer to navvies isn't clear, but I found this interesting paragraph in an article on the S&C:

"Around 6,000 navvies were required for this great feat of engineering and entire communities with post offices and schools were built to house them. One of these small townships, known as Ten Huts, had six fully licensed premises, including the Sportsman’s Inn, Wonder Inn, Bridge Inn Tavern, Pavilion Inn, the Anvil and Brookside Inn. The Brookside had its own brewery while John Brown’s brewery took over a weaving mill to provide the navvies with beer."

So - getting back to the OP's question in post 16 - John Brown provides an example of an existing brewer (rather than the construction contractor) supplying the beer and setting up a place to drink it. It would be interesting to know who set up the Brookside.

Beerhouse Act 1830 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Up hill, down ale on a railway masterpiece that crosses the Pennines to Scots border – Protz On Beer, by Roger Protz

The Settle to Carlisle railway was threatened with closure in the 1960s but it's survived and -- steam or diesel -- you can traverse the Yorkshire Dales and the Pennines…

protzonbeer.co.uk

 

[Andy873]

Thanks all, I've been doing some research of my own on the loop line I\m researching...

I subscribed to a website to get access to the 1871 census, not only did I find a lost area of the local town, places called Side Lane, Butts, Back Cricket St, Cock Bridge etc, but one lady, a farmer of 10 acres who is also listed as a publican at Cock Bridge.

So she must have had a license?

By 1890, the huts are gone and it returns to what it was before, a farmer's field.

 

[LickeyIncliner]

Thanks all, I've been doing some research of my own on the loop line I\m researching...

I subscribed to a website to get access to the 1871 census, not only did I find a lost area of the local town, places called Side Lane, Butts, Back Cricket St, Cock Bridge etc, but one lady, a farmer of 10 acres who is also listed as a publican at Cock Bridge.

So she must have had a license?

Licences were clearly required, so yes

 

[Gloster]

I think that early licensing laws were more concerned about preventing adulteration of beer and other drinks. I don’t think that they were, except on an occasional local level, concerned with who sold how much of what to whom and when. It was only with the late seventeenth century attempt to limit the import of brandy and mid-eighteenth century Gin Acts that some sort of national legislation appeared. There were regulations on beer houses from 1828, but they were pretty ‘light touch’ and restrictions only really began with the Licensing Act 1872.

It should be remembered that small beer was seen as a basic part of nourishment by many well into the nineteenth century. It held that place until it was usurped by the ‘cup o’ Rosy Lee’, now dethroned by weird sugary or health drinks.

 

[Rescars]

A bit of an aside, but IIRC the Permitted Hours which came into force during WW1 never applied to trains, though they did apply to bars and refreshment rooms on stations. So long after the navvies had done their work and departed, it was possible to admire the fruits of their labours whilst travelling by train and enjoy a drink at any time of day, provided you had access to a buffet or dining car!

 

[Gloster]

A bit of an aside, but IIRC the Permitted Hours which came into force during WW1 never applied to trains, though they did apply to bars and refreshment rooms on stations. So long after the navvies had done their work and departed, it was possible to admire the fruits of their labours whilst travelling by train and enjoy a drink at any time of day, provided you had access to a buffet or dining car!

As used in ‘The Titfield Thunderbolt’.

 

[LickeyIncliner]

There's a fascinating chronology of drinking laws at https://www.yeovilhistory.info/laws.htm - starting around the year 680 !

I think that early licensing laws were more concerned about preventing adulteration of beer and other drinks. I don’t think that they were, except on an occasional local level, concerned with who sold how much of what to whom and when.

True that a lot of laws were to do with ensuring that the drinker got what he/she had asked for, and in full measure. But the chronology I've just referred to mentions restrictions on pub drinking hours from the 1830s and particularly from the 1850s; the WWI restrictions under DORA were not a new kind of limitation but were notable for the dramatic reduction in hours. That's probably why they passed into folklore - until then, most people would have found that pubs were open whenever they wanted a drink.

Getting back a little towards the topic of the thread, the navvies presumably worked only or mainly in daylight hours and would have been free to enjoy their well-earned beer in the evenings like many other workers?

 

[jfollows]

A bit of an aside, but IIRC the Permitted Hours which came into force during WW1 never applied to trains, though they did apply to bars and refreshment rooms on stations. So long after the navvies had done their work and departed, it was possible to admire the fruits of their labours whilst travelling by train and enjoy a drink at any time of day, provided you had access to a buffet or dining car!

I remember comedians and “TV personalities” in the 1980s setting out to demonstrate “all day drinking” which invariably required a train between, say, London and Liverpool to cover the otherwise dry hours. This sort of legislation carried on well into my drinking years, and the afternoon closure was especially annoying to me.

 

[Andy873]

All fascinating stuff!

Going back to the 47 railway workers: labours (32), Navvies (10) and Excavators (5)
They need to be split, some digging a cutting to our left, some tipping for an embankment to our right.

How many would you put on digging the cutting? and how many tipping?

 

[Gloster]

All fascinating stuff!

Going back to the 47 railway workers: labours (32), Navvies (10) and Excavators (5)
They need to be split, some digging a cutting to our left, some tipping for an embankment to our right.

How many would you put on digging the cutting? and how many tipping?

I presume that the navvies and the excavators are employed at the workface, while the labourers do all the supporting and assisting. I am not sure what the difference is between excavator and navvy, but as they are presumably ‘specialists’ you would use all of them if possible, while you would only use as many labourers as needed with the rest used on other work or sent home.

 

[LickeyIncliner]

All fascinating stuff!

Going back to the 47 railway workers: labours (32), Navvies (10) and Excavators (5)
They need to be split, some digging a cutting to our left, some tipping for an embankment to our right.

How many would you put on digging the cutting? and how many tipping?

It will depend on what the cutting has to be dug fall, the distance from the cutting to the embankment, and how carefully the embankment is built.

Digging through topsoil would be very easy, excavation in rock, much more difficult. The embankment might be simply a heap of material dumped as it arrived, or might need to be more carefully formed. If the site was very wet, the work might need to include building paths drained enough to allow the labourers to get spoil from the cutting to the relevant point on the embankment, and the distance would obviously change as the work went on.

So I think it's impossible to say exactly how the workers would have been organised to do the work, without a good deal more information. That of course includes information about conditions below the surface along the line of the cutting which wouldn't have been entirely known to the contractor when he was bidding to do the work. It's not surprising that a proportion of contractors went bankrupt when the work proved significantly more difficult than expected.

 

[norbitonflyer]

A pint's a pound, the world around,

Only if your world view does not extend beyond the boundaries of the USA. In Imperial measure a pint is 20 fluid ounces, not 16.

 

[ThirteenArches]

You are of course right. A pint of water weighs one and four-fifths pounds. Troy, of course. And the 16 fluid ounces of a US pint are about 4% bigger than 16 Imperial fluid ounces, just to make life easier. It's these daft, inconsistent measures, with crazy relationships even within a single system, that made the would- be contractor's life a nightmare. Tons, tonnes, long tons, short tons, when the margin between success and the bankruptcy court was so slim, you needed to know and be able to do the multibase arithmetic accurately and quickly. Compound that with the possibility that you have taken a loan in pounds, shillings and pence, payable six months and hence at four and a quarter percent, to get you started....

I find the history of units and measurements fascinating, partly because there is no possible "natural" universal system. There are natural constants- for example the proton magnetic precession frequency that is about 0.04576 Hz per nanoTesla- but what's a Herz when the length of the day and year are not constant over time, and the gravity that makes the pendulum clock tick varies from place to place? (One answer - it USED to be the time taken by a large and apparently random number of oscillations of a particular frequency of light emitted by a given change in energy state of an electron in one specific isotope of caesium - but I think they found a more reliable definition and changed that.)

 

[Mcr Warrior]

A pint of water weighs one and four-fifths pounds. Troy, of course.

Why of course? Surely one U.K. pint (= 20 fluid ounces) is just over one-and-a-quarter standard/imperial (avoirdupois) pounds? Troy pounds are normally only used to weigh jewellery and precious metals, not liquids. No-one ever measures pints in Troy pounds.

 

[Rescars]

Why of course? Surely one U.K. pint (= 20 fluid ounces) is just over one-and-a-quarter standard/imperial (avoirdupois) pounds? Troy pounds are normally only used to weigh jewellery and precious metals, not liquids. No-one ever measures pints in Troy pounds.

May feel like you're paying with precious metals, the price of a pint these days!