How did they count the days?

[KGarrad]

We used Log Tables! (not wooden!!)

Not for addition / subtraction though

My comment was in reply to a post about slide rules - which also don't handle addition or subtraction

I can still remember that log 2 = 0.3010

Other numbers I remember:
Pi = 3.14159
Square Root of 2 = 1.414
Square root of 3 = 1.732
Square root of 5 = 2.236

[Maiden Stone]

My mental arithmetic's pretty good but I think I'd still want someone to invent some kind of wooden slidy thing that could do the work for me

What you need is an abacus. So they did have calculators "back then".

[Jomot]

Not just the army forms... this school admission is completely unfathomable!  As its written, Richard Griffiths was 13 days, 4 months and 4 years old, on his last birthday 

F m P has then transcribed his date of birth as 13 Apr 1904, even though the register is from 1876 

[Erato]

"We used Log Tables!"

We sure did, and slide rules, too.  My dad gave me math tables and a slide rule for Christmas in 1963 and they served me well until 1981.

[Rosinish]

Not just the army forms... this school admission is completely unfathomable!  As its written, Richard Griffiths was 13 days, 4 months and 4 years old, on his last birthday 

F m P has then transcribed his date of birth as 13 Apr 1904, even though the register is from 1876 

Jomot, You mean you can't work it out....you were at the wrong school  That's a cracker!

I can still remember that log 2 = 0.3010

Other numbers I remember:
Pi = 3.14159
Square Root of 2 = 1.414
Square root of 3 = 1.732
Square root of 5 = 2.236

I dreaded Pi, E = MC Squared, Logarithms, Square Roots & anything else similar, gave me a headache & that was back in the day before calculators!

I'll stick with Genealogy Roots 


Annie

[Jomot]

Not just the army forms... this school admission is completely unfathomable!  As its written, Richard Griffiths was 13 days, 4 months and 4 years old, on his last birthday 

F m P has then transcribed his date of birth as 13 Apr 1904, even though the register is from 1876 

Jomot, You mean you can't work it out....you were at the wrong school  That's a cracker!

Isn't it just!   And if that's the standard of the admission register, the mind boggles at what they were teaching the children 

[Berlin-Bob]

They were good at mental arithmetic back then.

There is also the mindset involved. In 1939 there were many refugee children from the European mainland in English schools. 

At my mother's school it was noticeable, that the refugee children were (generally speaking) worse at mental arithmetic than the English pupils but much better at languages.

Arithmetic: The English children had had lots of practice in doing sums and conversions to and from

pounds, shillings, pence and farthings a quantity of something measured in pounds and ounces or yards, feet and inches or gills, pints, quarts and gallons

etc, whereas the mainland children had mostly done mental arithmetic using the metric system.

Languages: English children couldn't "see" further than the English Channel ("if we talk English loud enough the foreigners will understand us") whereas mainland children were more used to crossing frontiers, interacting in different languages, etc.

Bob

[Maiden Stone]

I suspect that school admission register was filled in by a school monitor or pupil teacher who has substituted children's ages for DOBs for some unfathomable reason.
The teacher of my class of 7- year-olds once gave me the task of marking my classmates' exercise books. It was a short-lived tenure.  I was sacked after I wrote comments in them like the teacher did. A trusted pupil in the top class, (age 14) had the weekly responsibility of banking school dinner money. Practical arithmetic.

[Rena]

General question about ages on Attestation Papers:

I see things like "18 years 214 days".

STG

My dad was born 1912 and it was common for him to quote years and days as you describe and occasionally include the hours too.  I don't know whether it was his schooling or whether it was something to do with his engineering job.