THE BAKER.
HIS HEALTH.
William Cobbett was gone before we heard the rising of the storm which has since raged so furiously against the adulteration of our food and drink; yet no one has written more strongly than Cobbett against baker’s bread. I own that my heart warms to his descriptions of the cottager’s wife at her bread-board and oven. He would have had everybody, even the day-labourer’s wife, brew at home also; and there is something fascinating in his eloquence on behalf of meals of home-made bread, fat bacon, and beer, in contrast with the potatoes he so abhorred, and wishy-washy tea. He declared that the consumption of fuel in boiling potatoes and making tea was more than a set-off against the bacon and beer. Though he was unjust to the potato, from being unaware of its eminently nutritious quality when properly used, he was no doubt right about the value of a more varied diet, and in his estimate of really good bread, beer, and bacon. Where he was wrong in his advice was in neglecting the economy of time and labour. He would have set fifty cottagers’ wives brewing, with their fifty sets of utensils, and at a cost of fifty days’ labour, when they might get their beer more cheaply as to money, and without any expenditure of time, at the brewery. If there is any question as to the quality, I should say that for one housewife who makes better beer than the brewery there are a score who make worse. The uncertainty is a great drawback on both beer and bread that are made at home. On the whole, the economy of division of employments is sure to prevail; so that there was little use in opposing it, even in Cobbett’s day; but yet we may be permitted to think it a pleasant sight, in town or country, when we enter a humble kitchen just as the steaming loaves are cooling on the clean dresser.
It is also pleasant to country housekeepers to see the relish with which London guests take to the home-made loaf,—cutting bit after bit, after they have done, and excusing themselves by the goodness of the bread. Even in the houses where this pleasant sight is seen, however, there is sometimes a reverse. The next cook that comes may not succeed well with her bread, either from want of practice or want of skill. Then there is the difficulty about yeast,—still recurring, after all the advice that has been shed abroad upon it. Then there is the varying quality of the flour, and of the weather. There are few houses in which a batch of bad bread is never seen. Considering this, and the defective education of girls in household matters, and the new modes of female industry among the working-classes, it is not surprising that the professional bakers do by far the greater part of the bread-making in all societies; and if they are more or less superseded, it will not be by a return to the old article of home-made bread, but by the increasing use of machinery. Meantime, the craft is an important one for numbers in other ways. There are twelve thousand bakers in London alone.
I can just remember the case of the bakers in the miserable days of bad bread after the harvests of the early years of the century. I will not nauseate my readers by telling them what some of the bread in those days was like, when the sound old wheat was all consumed, and the soft, sticky flour from the new crop was the only thing that could be had. The large towns were particularly afflicted, and none more so than Birmingham. Some monied men believed that, by forming themselves into a company, they could provide better bread, because they could command better wheat, and grind it themselves. They succeeded in supplying good bread at the same cost as the bad, and of course they were popular with the buyers; but the millers and bakers were furious. They organised a strong persecution against the company, and at last, in 1809, induced the authorities to prosecute the directors in the name of the crown.
The public were aware that it was a curious sign of the times, and they watched the result very anxiously. The charge was that the company—an illegal institution—was injuring the interests of the millers and bakers. The verdict of the jury was undeniably true, and highly offensive to both parties. They declared that the object of the company was good—that the town was much benefited by its operations—that it commanded resources which were out of the reach of the trade generally, and that the millers and bakers had suffered by the competition. The millers and bakers had the best of it for some years after this; but there are now some half-dozen great mills at Birmingham, in public and private hands, sending out flour and bread in a way too potential to be interfered with. We are not likely to hear of Queen Victoria prosecuting any bread-making association, on the ground of its injuring the bakers. It seems strange now that such a thing could have been done in the name of her grandfather.
We may well doubt whether there are fewer bakers employed in consequence of the introduction of larger capital and new machinery into the trade. There is not only the increased number of bread-eaters to be considered, but the diminution in the quantity of home-made bread. The new census will soon tell us how many millers and bakers there are in the United Kingdom; and meantime we are informed, as I have said, that there are twelve thousand bakers in London alone. The class is thus a large one, and their welfare is a matter of deep social concern.
The ill-health of the class is a well-established fact. The miller’s cough is a too familiar sound is the neighbourhood of any old-fashioned mill, and in the family of almost every baker. If any of us remember what it was in childhood to play in or about a windmill, to sit on the steps, to watch the tremendous sails in a wind, and keep timidly away from them when not a breath was stirring,—to hear the whizz of the grain in the hopper, and sneeze in the mealy atmosphere, and play among the sacks, and laugh at the miller’s powdery appearance, we must remember the miller’s cough. He may well cough, for he is breathing dust all the time he is at work. The dust of flour is not so bad as that of needles and razor-blades, nor of the stone-cutter’s work;