OH DAVID!

I may have gone to school before you did. . . . .

Not right at all, and I can still still remember it as bashed in by rote as we used to do.

"16oz one pound, 14 pounds one stone, 2 stones one quarter (of a hundredweight), 4 quarters one hundredweight, 20 hundredweight one ton."

Therefore the old ton is 2240lb and 1cwt is 112lb not 120lb.

For Steve's benefit, this is the old British ton and these measures were used in WWII and often seen chalked in a standard shipping table on vehicles for D-Day. The term cwt of course is simply "C" being the Roman numeral for 100 and then "WT" is obviously just "weight".

Our change to metrication produced a very similar measure in that 1 tonne (the tonne being specifically a metric "ton" but still confusingly being pronounced "tun") is 2200lb and so just 40 lb short of the old Imperial ton and 50kg being 110lb is near enough an old cwt.

Interestingly this gives the post-war army Land-Rover is nickname of a "One tunny" being a 1 metric ton pay-load vehicle and having all the syllables of "tonne" pronounced.

The 15cwt WWII truck was a common item and intended for this pay-load over all passable terrain, invariably these were often overloaded to a ton as needs must. Post war, when the British Army re-equipped, they somewhat mistakenly saw a continuing need for fleets of up-rated 15cwt to 1 ton trucks and had them built in quantity only to find they're really too small and so many examples seemed to go into store and then to surplus.

It is obvious that many WWII examples are quite under-rated but this does allow for the rigours of cross-country use, subsequently in peace-time dual ratings were commonplace for road only applications and alternately all service uses.

How easy do you have it now !! Count to ten and carry one, but when I was at school we had money in a base of 12 for pence to shillings and than a base of 20 for shillings to pounds, plus the weights in a base of 16, 14, 4, 112 and/or 2240.

Think of the endless possibilities for masochistic math teachers, and I had some I can tell you, hours spent struggling with homework that went something like:
"You need 1t 13cwt 1qt 7lb of widgets that cost 3/11d per stone, how much does it cost?"
No pocket calculators (pre transistor even), no slide rules and no log tables.

Don't remind me. . . . . . . . .

R.