I do a few WW1 talks ... but I must build in a piece on chest sizes WW1 vintage next time I'm ganching. I'm rough guessing 36.5 inch average for most of the blokes I have papers for .. no Charles Atlas types yet I'm afraid. Is this your perception from viewing ancestry?

Des,

I was interested in this aspect and averaged 100 records of East Yorkshire Regiment Men 5' 5" and 34.5 chest, many of these men were from Hull which did have a very bad medical record. I also went to my local pub with a tape measure in hand no one was that small?

Regards Charles

Desmond

I can't comment on Ancestry, but from nearly 30 years of collecting which includes uniforms, I would guess at a 36" average for other ranks. For officers the figure would be more like 38". The difference in nutrition between the richer and poorer classes was immediately very obvious.

Further back into the 19th C. the difference is even more pronounced. There's a good reason why people were smaller and it has nothing to do with genetics.

Regards,

W,

Charles

Was it 'Ladies Night"?

Guy

Guy,

Not brave enough to measure a ladies chest in a pub, not even to ask! of the 12 men there, no one was smaller than a 38" chest.

If everybody was so small, how did they manage to carry out all the manual labour that was involved in the old working practices?
For example a seasonal job, that I still do, used to involve lifting and stacking 50kg/1cwt bags at the rate of 100-140 per hour. At the end of the season, approx 10 weeks, your body shape had changed, chest bigger, in my case from 42" to 44". Quite often some old chap would come over and tell you about the "railway sacks" that he had to carry on his back up stairs etc. These were 12 to 16 stone bags! I know from experience that a lot of the ability to carry out manual work is down to technique/skill and sheer bloody mindedness! but if these chaps were doing so much manual work why didnt they get bigger?

cheers
baz

Perhaps many of them did? The chest measurements I've seen on service records have all been taken on enlistment. My g-uncle was just under 6'3" but only had a 37" chest measurement when he enlisted aged 19: the medical examiner has noted that he was "a bit on the light side but should develop".

Perhaps they were more wiry. Diminutive they might have been, but they were probably pretty tough. A significantly lower per centage of body fat on a fellow with a 36inch chest might make him more proficient at manual labour than his modern day counterpart with a 44 inch chest and a "soft" physique.

Is it my imagination, or do the German soldiers seem bigger and stronger men than the Tommies in photographs? I've read that the black bread that was given to recruits in the German army made the conscripts put on a lot of weight.

Phil.

The attempt that I've just made to answer doesn't cut much ice, does it?

I have to admit that 36inch chests are hard to reconcile with the manual exertion of the Great War: that's an almost child like dimension. IIRC, the excavation of a mass grave near Arras revealed that the soldiers - Grimsby Chums - were very poorly nourished, and the forensic anthropolgist who exmamined the skeletons siad that their defects reminded her of spina bifida.

It's awful to think how hard life must have been for those fellows : heck, they're my Grandfather's generation - it's not that long ago, is it? !

Phil.

I asked a similar question on a thread a long time ago. My question commented on the small size of tunics seen on the collectors market. Someone replied with some excellant stats. I will see if I can find the relevant thread.

Regards

TT

Try this link. The table should answer your question

http://1914-1918.invisionzone.com/forums/i...1&hl=tunics


TT

Hi Phil
thanks for the replies. The point is was attempting to make, although not very well, was that through my experiance of manual work(farm worker, civil engineering labourer,mobile seed cleaner, building labourer/groundworker, still doing it now!) your body changes and develops because of what you do.
It appears that these blokes didnt develop at all.
Is it because of the poor nutrition and living conditions prevalent at the time?
The poor development of these blokes and the work that they did coupled with poor nutrition reminds me of the stalinist gulags and other "death through work" schemes eg the Belomor Canal.
The fact that these blokes were citizens in a free country who went to fight to defend it makes it all the more incredible.
No wonder that the "establishment " were bricking it after the Russian revolution!

cheers

baz

Thanks for the link to the sizes table TT, very interesting

cheers

baz

Photographs of coal miners pre 1914 ( "colliers" as my Welsh grand mother used to call them) reveal small men, but well muscled.

There are some enthusiastic accounts from the army officers of 1914 describing how hollow chested and puny recruits soon filled out and developed well under the regime of excercise and good grub that the soldier's life provided. It must be acknowledged that for many - in Britain - the food available in the army was vastly more plentiful and wholesome than anything they had encountered before. Not so sure about France and Germany : it would be interesting to correlate this with the incidence of agrarian vs. industrial lifestyle.

An especially good point has been made on a previous thread about tunic size....it wasn't just the availability of food that counted; it was also the endemic nature of childhood diseases that stunted growth and inhibited development. This was exemplified by girls in Victorian society, who, even in privileged sectors of society, were much older when starting to menstruate than their modern counter parts.

What would those people have thought if they took a look at a London street scene today? Every other person obese, or at least significantly overweight. Imagine trying to get those lard arses digging trenches and lifting sandbags, let alone marching twenty five miles in full kit! The pendulum really does swing, doesn't it?

Phil.

I am 5'3" in my socks and only just made it into the army, I was barely 35" chest. I was on a special diet until I made the weight. After I left the army,same height but 37" chest, I worked on building sites where I routinely lifted and carried 1 Cwt bags of cement, roughly twice the weight they are now. When I was 17, I weighed barely 8 stone but carried 10 stone sacks of flour on my back. The difference is in expectation, I believe. If everybody does it, so will you. We eat a lot more now than we did just after WW2 and that in turn was more than the lower paid worker ate in the first decade of the 20th Century. That said, being bigger and heavier( fatter?) does not make you stronger. Another aspect to this is that in a world of manual labour, men were skilful in applying weight and strength to its maximum effect. The tunnelers were not giants but they would have made every ounce of effort pay. Their livelihood and continued employment in civvy street depended on it. Same went for miners and workers in heavy industry.

Just done an avarage of 25 men joining the East Yorkshire Regiment from Rural Areas, Height 5" 6', Chest 35.5, not all had a weight but the average of those that did was 134lbs.

Regards Charles

In "Akenfield", Ronald Blythe describes some WW1 veterans. The book is a fictionalised account of a Suffolk village, mostly taken from interviews with residents of Charsfield and Debach, but as far as I am aware the interviews as presented are unadorned - by Blythe, at least. One of his interviewees describes how he put on two stones in weight during his training, because he was no longer being worked to the bone on the land. Probably a little adorned by fifty years, but a interesting comment on the agricultural labourer's lot.

Incidentally I recently found my great-uncle's papers on ancestry. He was 5' 9 1/2" tall and weighed 9st 11lb. 35" chest, with 1" expansion. We've just had the dressmaker's tape out and I am almost exactly the same size - same height, same chest measurement. But I'm in the region of a stone heavier (no scales handy) despite not having any spare lard anywhere except between my ears, with an extra half-inch of expansion. He must have been really wiry.

Adrian

Gents,

Sorry but I think you have all missed the point.
It wasn't poor nutrition, or food availabilty, or diseases.

The fact is, people, man etc with no predators is getting larger. It is a natural thing.
The larger you are in nature, the safer you are from harm. If you have a good steady food source you grow as a species.

If you go back further than the Great War, how many of you have walked into a Medieval house, and had to stoop big time?
Look at the suits of armour in the Tower, or many museums etc. They were small people.

They were not stunted, or deficient, they were probably stronger than us, certainly tougher and hardier.

My jack Russell is one foot high, but she is pure muscle, size does not equate to feeble!

Guy

"Passenger" ships that brought two of my brother in laws rels courtesy of H M G to Australia in 1848 have very detailed

descriptions of the passengers. On the page those two were on were about 30 names and their heights varied from

f ft 9 in to 5 ft 3 in. and probably the root cause of this was their diet. We have to remember that mose WW1 men were

born in the range 1880 - 1900 and living conditions were improving all the time by then, thus the size of many of the

eligible enlistees were gradually increasing.

And fatter - I know my ancestors would have had a much better chance of either out running or out fighting a predator than I would.

The biggest people in the middle ages were as big as the biggest people today - there were just less of them. One of the reasons why England (and Wales) were able to maintain long bowmen able to pull a bow that could put an arrow through four inches of oak (without having to reverse the point!) was they got fed plenty of protein. A typical freeman was eating meat at least six days a week (excluding Lent) whereas the average equivalent in France was lucky to get it once a week. Of course the poor old villein did less well. It was the poor city dweller that did less well. By the nineteenth century the average nutrition in the country was much poorer... I'll stop now I'm beginning to sound like that pseud William Morris.

I have two Jack Russells - one is like yours pure muscle, eats anything that comes her way and stays lean (and when needed mean) and acts as if she's four foot to the shoulder; whilst the other is equally greedy and puts on weight by merely smelling food. (She also thinks that she's a big dog). We feed her less than the other dog and she is still overweight.

Afraid I only have officer's tunics. From a measure of 12 tunics come up with an average 36" chest for British and 34" for German. Cheers, Bill

Errr... Weren't early modern humans (oft referred to a Cro-Magnon man) around the modern average height, if not taller? Although trying to find an internet-friendly citation throws up some impressive cobblers...

I'll give you the second point, though. I've no doubt that my great-uncle could carry a four-bushel sack up a ladder that would flatten me.

Adrian

Forgot to add that some tunics were sized to accomodate the wearing of a jumper or waistvest, thus the chest size of the man might be a size smaller. Cheers, BIll

The Belgian statistician Quetelet measured the chests of 5,378 Scottish soldiers in the first half of the 19th Century. The typical chest size was 39 or 40 inches - must have been all that porridge

He was measuring the chest size of soldiers so some pre selection by recruiters for taller, stronger, well built men with a reasonable diet while in camp. Not really evidence for the average build of the male population.
I believe that the underfed and disease affected would have been found in the unskilled working class in the cities. Tradesmen and skilled workers would generally have had enough food as would their families. Country people, although not well off as regards personal possessions, would have tended to eat better because of access to a garden and farm produce not to mention trapping rabbits, keeping a few chickens and so on. It was when these people moved into the cities to seek work that their condition changed markedly for the worse.

A previous related topic on 'thin' soldiers and strength - http://1914-1918.invisionzone.com/forums/i...1&hl=weight

This may be of interest

"OUR ANCESTORS were as tall as we are, contrary to popular belief. Over the past five millennia the average height of men in Britain has remained stable at about 170cm (5ft 7in), and that of women at 160cm (5ft 3in). We may be surprised at how small the armour worn by the Black Prince or King Henry V was, but such giants on the battlefield were not physically large and were towered over by contemporaries of all classes. “The enduring myth that people in the past were much shorter than we are today contains a small element of truth,” writes Sebastian Payne, chief scientist at English Heritage, in British Archaeology. “There have been small changes, and average height has increased by an inch or so over the past 50 years,” he says, attributing the increase to better health and nutrition.

The myth seems to stem from such things as low doorways on some medieval houses, and the small suits of clothes and armour in museums. But Dr Payne says that there are plenty of tall doors, and we simply don’t register “normally” sized outfits. “Recruits in 18th and 19th-century military records were considerably below today’s average heights,” he says, but adds: “Recruits are often from poorer families whose average height is less, and were often not fully grown.”

In the abandoned medieval village of Wharram Percy in Yorkshire, the churchyard has yielded hundreds of skeletons for analysis. There “ten-year-olds were around 8in shorter than children today: by the time they were fully grown they were nearly as tall as modern adults”.

A study by Charlotte Roberts and Margaret Cox, drawing together evidence of stature from skeletons across the country, shows that adult heights in both sexes have remained constant since the Neolithic era."

British Archaeology No 84: 51

Strangely - was looking at a newspaper pic of a young WW1 MM winner. He looks positively portly around the face. Post war he was skinny!

Just got my uncles sizes from Ancestry a sergeant in DLI when he died in 1917. On enlistment in 1911 he was 5ft 3 " and 8 stone 7lbs with a 34 inch chest when expanded ! My view is that the health outside the army was much worse and the regular food contributed to a fitter army.

"A study by Charlotte Roberts and Margaret Cox, drawing together evidence of stature from skeletons across the country, shows that adult heights in both sexes have remained constant since the Neolithic era."

I have only looked at the WW1 period and of the 1,000s of documents I have consulted certainly do not give the average of 5' 7", they must have only measured rich well feed skeletons!!

Did they produce the evidence of the findings?

Regards Charles

Don't ask me - ask British Archeology

However it appears that their data is kept as part of a database by the]British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology . Do a google on their names, you'll find that they are internationally acknowledged experts in their field.

Don't ask me - ask British Archeology

I'll just stick with my WW1 data, although not an internationally acknowledged expert I do have my data to hand.

Regards Charles