Editor’s note: This detailed and painstaking analysis of costs, prices and profits was ‘supplied by S. T. Warner’ as the second of the five appendices in Valentine Ackland’s Country Conditions (Lawrence & Wishart, 1936).
Appendix II
the milk marketing Scheme
The ‘Third Contract’ was the first in which the Milk Marketing Board and the purchasers’ representatives were able to come to an agreement as regards prices; previously intervention by the Board of Agriculture had been needed.
Prices fixed under the Third Contract (October 1934 to September 1935). The Board sold to the retailer:
| Dec., Jan., Feb. | … | … | 1s. 5d. per gall. |
| Oct., Nov., Mar., April, Sept. | … | … | 1s. 4d. per gall. |
| July, Aug. | … | … | 1s. 1d. per gall. |
| May, June | … | … | 1s. 1d. per gall. |
From the money thus collected the Board paid the producers:
| Oct. | … | … | 1s. 0¼d. to 1s. 2¾d. per gall. |
| Nov. | … | … | 1s. 1d. to 1s. 2½d. per gall. |
| Dec. | … | … | 1s. 2d. to 1s. 2¾d. per gall. |
and the average prices for these three months for the eleven regions of the Milk Pool were: 12.04d., 13.80d., 14.34d. per gallon.
The Board of Agriculture’s published figures do not extend beyond December 1934 for Milk Pool prices. Under the two previous contracts (October 1933 to September 1934), when prices to retailers had been slightly lower, the Regional Pool prices had varied between 1s. 3¼d. and 9¾d. per gallon.
Under the Third Contract the minimum prices to consumers were also fixed. They were fixed in four groups according to density of population:
| Group | per gallon | |
| 1 Population of less than 10,000 | … | 1s. 6d. to 2s. 0d. |
| 2 Population 10,000 to 25,000 | … | 2s. 0d. to 2s. 2d. |
| 3 Population over 25,000, excluding | ||
| South-Eastern Region | … | 2s. 0d. to 2s. 4d. |
| 4 South-Eastern Region | … | 2s. 0d. to 2s. 4d. |
But in Group 4 milk is 2s. 4d. per gallon for eight months of the year, whereas in Group 3 it is 2s. 4d. for six months only.
A comparison of the monthly prices paid by the retailers to the Board and the corresponding prices paid by the consumer to the retailer shows that, at a rate of one gallon per month, the consumer pays:
| In Group 1 | 8s. 3d. more than the retailer pays the Board. |
| In Group 2 | 10s. 1d. more than the retailer pays the Board. |
| In Group 3 | 10s. 11d. more than the retailer pays the Board. |
| In Group 4 | 11s. 7d. more than the retailer pays the Board. |
Under the Third Contract prices were also fixed for milk sold for manufacture. Among these prices are:
| For Tinned Cream | … | … | 5d. per gall. |
| For Milk Powder | … | … | 4½d. per gall. |
| For Condensed Milk for export | … | … | 4d. per gall. |
A comparison of the prices paid by consumers (1s. 6d. to 2s. 4d. per gallon) and those paid by the manufacturers should prove clearly whose interests are best served by the Milk Marketing Scheme.
(Appendix II supplied by S. T. Warner)
Notes On Contributors
Howard J. Booth is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Manchester. He is the co-editor of Modernism and Empire (2000), and the editor of New D. H. Lawrence (2009) and The Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling (2011). He is the general editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Fiction of E. M. Forster.
Ingrid Hotz-Davies is Professor of English Literature and Gender Studies at the University of Tübingen in Germany. She is especially interested in women’s writing, early modern literature, queer/gender theory and literary practice, and the study of affect in literature. She has published on a variety of issues in these fields, from the uses of camp or shame to the affordances of religious poetry for women writers.
Jan Montefiore is Professor Emerita of the University of Kent, where she taught English Literature and Women’s Studies from 1978. Her books include Feminism and Poetry (1987, 1992, 2004), Men and Women Writers of the 1930s (1996), Arguments of Heart and Mind (2002) – all of which contain substantial discussion of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s writings – and Rudyard Kipling (2007); in 2016 she published Shaping Spirits 1948–1966, a memoir in sonnets. She is also a long-standing contributor to The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society.
Gemma Moss is Lecturer at Birmingham City University. She studied at the University of Manchester, where she completed an MA in Postcolonial Literature and a PhD on music in the novels of Joyce and Warner and the poetry of Pound. She has previously taught at the Universities of Salford and Manchester.
Jake O’Leary is a PhD student at the University of Bristol, funded by the South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership. His research examines anti-fascist women writers and modernist magazine culture, with a particular focus on Sylvia Townsend Warner, Storm Jameson and Virginia Woolf.
Paul Robichaud, a native of Toronto, Canada, is Professor and Chair of English at Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, Connecticut. His publications include essays on Geoffrey Hill and Louis MacNeice, as well as Making the Past Present: David Jones, the Middle Ages and Modernism (CUA Press, 2007). He is writing on Sylvia Townsend Warner for his second book-length project, Mapping the Isles in British Modernism.
Emma Shaw is a doctoral candidate at the University of Manchester. Her research examines the function of walking in the work of women writers in the first half of the twentieth century.