Jarrow march - How far did £1.00 go?

[5129frederick]

Everybody knows about the Jarrow march.  Although he could well have turned it to his advantage on point scoring to come across as a caring Prime Minister, the PM refused to see any of the marchers.  However, for all their efforts, each returned by train the next day with £1.00 in his pocket.  Upon their return they were treated like heroes.

What I'd like to know, is how far would £1.00 go in 1936?  Food-wise could you live on £1.00 a week?  Does anybody have a past relative who went on the march?  It was put at nearly three hundred miles which is a heck of a distance. 

[aernethril]

You would think that this information would be easy to come by - but not that I've found.

Anyway, after a bit of digging I've found two sources that put £100 today at an equivalent spending power of £6,206 around then - so £1 would have equalled approximately £62 by today's standard.

However, that's only part of the equation because the relative costs of items for daily living have skewed in proportion over the years.

There is a pdf from the Office for National Statistics but rather unhelpfully it is all in decimal currency and I'm not sure how accurate it is in converting.

eg an 800g (large) unwrapped white loaf would have cost 1.5p which would have put it at around thruppence ha'penny back then.

consumerpricesindex

This article gives a bit more of an insight on prices and how inflation has affected household costs, and there are some interesting facts.

thisismoney Price-loaf-bread-rises-11-000-past-100-years-thanks-inflation-says-Lloyds

eg  Although retail prices doubled during the First World War, the 1920s and 1930s witnessed a long period of deflation, with prices falling in 11 of the 20 years.

A pint of milk in 1914 cost 1p, rising to 45p last year - an increase of 6,495 per cent. A dozen eggs would have cost approximately 8p 100 years ago, but cost on average £2.60 now.

So quite a difference in the ratios of what was then to what is now..

There's a small table to give a rough idea of some changes but  one I cannot find out about is coal which would have been a very important part of many households not just for heating but also for firing small ranges for cooking and neither have I found how much a bar of soap (for body and clothes) would have cost.

[023mjc]

I'm sure my granny used to buy a slice of soap which the grocer would cut off a large bar, (bit like the cheese)  so it was probably sold by the ounce.  I know salt and sugar came in big blocks and you could buy all the block, or have some shaved off.

I spent many happy hours at my grannies table sculpting the sugar with a blunt knife.

[5129frederick]

As a youngster I was widely travelled because of my late father's job - aeronautical engineer, so part of my schooling was done in Cyprus, part of it in the UK.  As a result I went to about eight different schools!  I didn't see a set of escalators until we moved to London and  I was amazed to see a packet of butter - out in Nicosia it came out of a tin which I assumed was the norm!  We had some stuff like Laughing Cow cheese, but your tea was made mainly from evapourated milk - did wonders to your teeth!  I'd probably throw up if I had to drink it now.  

I read George Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier which helped greatly to get an insight as to how things were money wise in the early thirties but I didn't want to make too many howlers on the cost of food etc.  I am in the very early stages of writing a novel on one man's journey south in a bid to find employment after having been made redundant as a newly qualified welder.  Based in the above a good quality secondhand bicycle would have gone for about ten bob.

[5129frederick]

Thanks a million - this certainly gives me something to go on.  I don't know if you read my other post, but it's for a full length novel I'm putting together so I'm having to check and double check everything before putting pen to paper or in this case my hard drive.

[aernethril]

Good luck with your book, Frederick.

The info is out there somewhere because it's used in decent fiction books and for tv films / plays and the like.

If I can think of where I've come across any further info that will help I'll stick it up here.