Hall & Stevens

Arithmetic made difficult!

Rummaging through the boxes of books at a Boot Sale, I came across a copy of Hall and Steven's ' School Arithmetic' in pristine condition. At 30p I could not pass it by. After all, it was from a similarly pristine copy of that same book that I learned most of my Arithmetic in the 1950's. Having taken it home (and having opened it at random) my eye fell immediately on the following problem.

"5 men can do a piece of work in 14 days. If they have 2 boys to help them they can do it in 12 days. What proportion of a man's work can a boy do"

In the old days it would have been simple and by going at it the result was easily arrived at. God be with the old days, the innocence of those who set the problem and our own innocence in presuming the problem to be THAT simple. It would not be so simple nowadays.

In 2007, we should have to check Labour Law to ensure that the boys were above minimum age for working alongside grown men and/or ensure that the men had CRB clearance. We should need to check Education Regulations to establish whether the boys should not be at school. We should need to check insurance, rates of pay, hours worked, EU directives and much more before we could even CONSIDER addressing the problem posed by Hall et Stevens!

Proper research in Time and Motion would need to be indulged in to establish why it took the original five men fourteen days to do the original job in the first place. We should need to ascertain whether man-hours were side-tracked to tea-making duties or running errands to such places as the Bookie's shop on days when racing was held and to what extent the boys replaced the GO-Fors. For it could be deemed that output per man-hour could be increased without any child-labour participation in the Work-in-Hand.

Indeed the five men might have completed the next section in twelve days entirely as a result of better weather, hotter tea or good luck with the horses raising morale during the second fortnight. Life is not as simple as it was when Hall and Stevens were young.