Journal (Volume 5)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: BAKERIES. Before entering on the subject of the evening, I should like to express my sense of the honour conferred on mo by your Committee in asking me to deliver this paper. I could have wished that someone better able to deal with the matter had been chosen, but I may say that in addressing myself to the task, T have found it personally advantageous. Fire Officials are generally credited with possessing knowledge of a most versatile character, and being always primed with facts and figures which enable them to write on almost any subject under the sun at short notice. This, I suppose, accounts for my selection as the lecturer of the evening, for I am not aware of any other reason why I should be considered specially qualified to deal with Bakeries. I trust you will not suppose it is my desire to controvert this flattering opinion, but it is, I think, admitted among ourselves that our knowledge in regard to many things is necessarily superficial, and confined to a great extent to the immediate purpose of correctly estimating the fire hazard of the particular cases coming under our notice. On approaching the subject, I must confess that in many particulars my ideas were not very lucid, and I soon found that a visit to n number of factories would be necessary for the purpose of clearing up doubtful points. I should also like to add that, having had no experience outside of Scotland, I do not pretend to speak of the class as it is found in other parts of the Kingdom. I take it, however, that while some difference in arrangement may exist between bakeries north and south of the Tweed, these, I think, will be more a question of detail, and unlikely to be material. It would be well, at the outset, to mention that while some firms are bread and biscuit bakers, the two branch...