Thread: Potatoes

I remember our local greengrocer "Mr Kingston" had the 56lb weights by his scales, so I'd say yes they did sell sacks of spuds that weighed that much.

We used to buy a threepenny bit's worth of peanuts in the shells and eat them on the way to school

A bushel is around 56lbs so the weight is probably legit. However the average 10 year old girl wouldn't weigh much more than 56lb. So she was pretty much carrying her own body weight of potatoes. A solid effort even in those days.

A hundredweight is 112 pounds or 1 CWT, you bag of spuds is a half hundred weight. Never could work out why it was a hundred weight when it was 12 pounds more.

Originally Posted by Dark61

Big(ish) argument with the Sis tonight - she reckons, she used to bring back a 56lb bag of potatoes from the local market , up a short hill , on a bus - then home. This is back in pommy land in the mid 60's - she would have been 10 years old. She's 4 years older than me and I have no memory of it. I think it sounds dodgy on many levels - but .................. I've got a vague memory I used to chuck 56lb bags of sugar about when I was working in a sweet factory back in the late 70's - so there possibly was a standard bag that came in 56lbs...... but as a 10 year old??!! I know they bred them tough in those days but Mmmmmmm.............. any thoughts?

that's a lot of chips on your shoulder...

Originally Posted by roversmith

A hundredweight is 112 pounds or 1 CWT, you bag of spuds is a half hundred weight. Never could work out why it was a hundred weight when it was 12 pounds more.

A hundredweight was originally 100 pounds (medieval French Avoirdupois weights), but was rationalised with the more commonly used British weight of a stone, which, at 14 pounds, does not go evenly into 100 pounds, so that by about Elizabethan times a 'hundredweight' was informally eight stone. The difference was not a concern to the average person, as the value of a pound was ill defined anyway, and in the absence of large scales weight measurements larger than several stones were rarely made. This appears not to have become a legal definition until the nineteenth century, after the American revolution, and hence the definition of a hundredweight as 112 pounds never found its way to the USA.

John

some women I know carry more than 56lbs of body fat on them and think nothing of it , in fact at least one I know carries more than double that. she is same size frame as my 47kg wife , at over 125kg she's carry over 110 excess lbs on her body.

yesterday , I carried a 28 kg object a short distance and I really knew I was carrying it , so I don't know how they do it.

Originally Posted by ramblingboy42

some women I know carry more than 56lbs of body fat on them and think nothing of it , in fact at least one I know carries more than double that. she is same size frame as my 47kg wife , at over 125kg she's carry over 110 excess lbs on her body.

yesterday , I carried a 28 kg object a short distance and I really knew I was carrying it , so I don't know how they do it.

Simple in a lot of cases too much junk food and no excercise. This trend has been happening for years, that's why we have an obesity problem

56lbs is about 25kg which is a standard size commercial produce bag so its possible it was the same back then, but being carried by a 10yo i doubt it very much.