When Health & Safety Did'nt Exist ;-)

Elfin: Try to get this will you. 2cwt sacks were a standard unit and were routinely handled as such by one labourer. The norm would be that it would be delivered onto your shoulder, you would then walk with it to a lorry bed or storage area and “shrug it off” onto the load. It is work that was normal, routine and regular. It would be extremely unusual however for a dead lift from the floor to be carried out as per Grahams picture. Frankly thats a pretty daft lift and will hurt you eventually if repeated too often.

elfin, do you turn every thread that you think you are right in to an argument?

do you turn every thread that you think you are right in to an argument?

youve been here too long to play dumb like that si 😉

Here you go a selection of references where you can check it out. The hansard one is quite telling in that it talks of the risk of rupture from handling these weights, but handle them they did.

http://www.witheridge-historical-archive.com/threshing.htm
http://www.harpershaulage.co.uk/history.htm
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1943/may/19/sacks-size

so who is Fred? Was that Elfin? Was he banned from here?

youve been here too long to play dumb like that si

I SHOULD know better 🙂

elfin, do you turn every thread that you think you are right in to an argument?

Erm, no. I state the truth, and other people can’t handle that, so resort to pathetic attempts to have a pop at me. S’ok, don’t bother me much. Just makes me even more right. 🙂

I’m bored now anyway and there’s stuff to do so play nice amongst yourselves.

I’m bored now anyway and there’s stuff to do so play nice amongst yourselvesA number of people have posted quite a bit of proof, so I’m going to pretend they haven’t

FIFY

I think if you’re posting on this kind of thread (or any thread for that matter) in the early hours of the morning – then that speaks volumes…

Surely there are other ways to deal with being lonely?

Back to my other question. Why do people also call Elfin fred?

Elfin is like Dr Who. He regenerates periodically, with a different name.

One of which was Fred related.

Be interested to know what he was banned for.

I state the truth, and other people can’t handle that

lol, you really believe that don’t you? anyway, I am right your wrong and you can’t handle that. so ner 🙂

Elfinsafety – Member
Yeah, right.

That little skinny bloke could carry 100kg all day long?

You seem to keep on a bout the fact that he is skinny but he is obviously getting on a bit in the photo. It’s perfectly possible he was much bigger when younger, his baggy collar would suggest so to.

Be interested to know what he was banned for.

As far as I remember, with him being right all the time, he was in danger of making the Web redundant. It was a conspiracy perpetrated by ‘The Man’ so that they could continue with the ‘panem et circenses’ of the Web and keep us warm and contented.

i’m bored now anyway and there’s stuff to do so play nice amongst yourselves.

Or as its known a Dead Fred Thread

He is right quite often, a bit like a Jeeves to Stoner’s Wooster.

Not read all of this but I was always under the impression that a bag of coal weighed 1cwt. ??????

And as an aside, when I was 15 (and weighing some 9st) I used to work as a chip shop peeler/chipper and one of my duties was offloading all the bags of potatoes. I could happily carry two 56lb bags – one on each shoulder (and could pick them both off the floor and on to my shoulders somehow). In the busy summer months we used to do (IIRC) about 30/40 bags twice a week so I regularly lifted 4,500lbs a week.

So – given MY experience, I could believe that someone knowing the right technique could be able to lift 2cwt pretty much all day.

Finally – I know someone who was a coal man and he couldn’t stand straight in his 50s so I guess doing it may not actually be good for your long-term health.

Elfin is like Dr Who. He regenerates periodically, with a different name.

Doctor Who regenerates periodically with the same name, I think you’ll find.

(-:

Doctor Who regenerates periodically with the same name, I think you’ll find.

…and is generally quite entertaining 😯

See, you simply don’t have anything intelligent with which to answer. Because you know you can’t prove your own claims

i showed peer reviewed scientific studies. it’s as intelligent as you can get.

but then you can prove any argument with facts.

Jeez. Whats happened to my thread 😯

My nan found the article but not the BEP version. Scan to follow.

Jeez. Whats happened to my thread

You’re a liar, we all found out and now we’re going to lynch you

@CharlieMungus

🙁

Here we go…

130 tonnes of cement in a day 😯

Basically we are a bunch of pansies now 😉

[/url]
Iron Man Jim is still going strong at 81[/url] by SGMTB[/url], on Flickr

Must remember to always have a camera to hand to take pictures of the monotonous, heavy, day to day lifting.
Still can’t guarantee you a picture though Elfin, as I must admit it takes me two hands to carry such loads.

Elfinsafety – Member
…And this:

I used to hire men for heavy labouring in a limestone quarry where the temperatures in the bowl of the quarry were often 40 – 50º or higher (outback Queensland).
Erm, highest recorded temp in Australia is 50.7ºC. So again, exaggeration.

Mmmm, seeing as you are suggesting I’m a liar, how can I respond to this except to suggest you are displaying monumental ignorance of real life conditions in places you have never been, and obviously you have never worked with real men.

A limestone quarry is a white bowl and any time the sun shines into one, it is a lot hotter than the rest of its local environment, and as pointed out by someone else, temperatures are measured in the shade. These guys were not working in the shade.

EpicC. Don’t dignify his prejudices with elaboration. The rest of us understand the conditions you were describing

Yeah Stoner, I realised after I posted that it will end up looking like 2 fools arguing. 🙂

When I were a lad…serving my apprenticeship as a plasterer in the early 80’s.One of the rights of passage was being able to carry two bags at once.I mean you didn’t,that was plain stupid, but you had to be able to,or continue to get the poo kicked out of you as the easiest target.That would have been at about 10 stone body weight.Plater was easier because it was looser in the bag, I would imagine coal would be similar.

C’mon be fair, Elfin was only playing. Now he has clearly lost the game, on so many levels, he will gracefully turn up and admit it.

Or invoke the Scottish defence….

that would be the edinburgh defence

scottish defence infers that there is a scot involved

* I fail *

Will this draw the righteous elf out from his lair? is the bait just too tempting to resist?

I used to hire men for heavy labouring in a limestone quarry where the temperatures in the bowl of the quarry were often 40 – 50º or higher (outback Queensland).
Erm, highest recorded temp in Australia is 50.7ºC. So again, exaggeration.

Official temperature record will have been measured in the shade. He may have been working in direct sunlight. I don’t know for sure.

HTH

That 130 tons of cement a day claim…

Let’s make that a 13 hour day, without breaks, to make the maths easier.
So that’s 10 tons an hour.
One ton every 6 minutes, or 360 seconds.
1cwt every 18 seconds.

Then we get on to the 22 hour working day shifting coal and coke.
18s a night at 5d a ton.
It’s not quite clear, but I think it means 18s each at 5d a ton between them.
So that’s 54s/5d = 130 tons of coke loaded a night, or 43 tons each in 11 hours.
Approximately 1 ton every 15 minutes, or 1cwt every 45 seconds.

It’s a nice story for a local paper to print.

MTG you’ve shattered the myth with your simple maths, you should be ashamed.

1cwt every 18 seconds.

Thus proving that he must’ve been able to carry 2 bags at a time 🙄

That 130 tons of cement a day claim…

That’s not what the paper cutting says. It’s ‘130 tons…. in a single day’, so maybe not every day. Maybe that day wasn’t a ‘normal’ day. Still sounds alot.

TSY, how have I proved that he carried 2cwt every 36 seconds rather than 1cwt every 18 seconds ?

Richmars, good point, it could have been a one off challenge to see how much he could shift in a day, not a normal working day.
It still sounds like a lazy journalist reporting folklore as fact to me.