The Night Bakers

There are very few circumstances in which I would willingly get out of bed at five o’clock in the morning but discovering that somebody nearby has just taken fresh bread out of an oven might do it.

Walk through a town or city before most people are awake and there is not much happening yet. The streets are cold, the shops are closed and then, somewhere along the way, you pass a bakery and smell warm bread coming from behind the windows.

Rolls, loaves, cakes, pastries. Divine.

I would love to tell you that I could have been a night baker, but realistically I would have been a walking advertisement for the business within a fortnight. The smell is the lovely part of the story, though, because behind all that fresh morning bread was a workforce that had already been awake for hours.

By the nineteenth century, particularly in towns and cities, customers increasingly expected bread and rolls to be fresh in the morning. Somebody therefore had to make them while everybody else was asleep.

BREAD FOR BREAKFAST

Bread was a major part of the British diet, particularly for working families, and producing enough of it for a growing urban population required bakeries to work on a scale that is difficult to picture when you are standing in front of a modern supermarket bread aisle.

Freshness mattered too, and that dictated when the work happened.

In 1875, clergyman and writer Charles Maurice Davies spent a night in a London bakehouse and recorded what he saw. In the bakery he visited, the first batch went into the oven at around four in the morning and came out at about half past five. Rolls and fancy breads were prepared between batches, followed by another batch that was ready by eight.

So, the smell of warm bread drifting into the street as the city began to wake was not merely the romantic part of the story. Somewhere behind the shopfront, bread really was coming from the oven at five or six in the morning.

The baker, unfortunately, had begun his day considerably earlier.

THE SHIFT STARTED THE NIGHT BEFORE

Davies’s bakers began work around half past midnight. Earlier nineteenth-century accounts describe some journeymen starting at eleven at night.

The first part of the shift involved preparing dough and getting it ready to ferment. During a pause in the process, the men might have a short opportunity to sleep, although sleep is doing quite a lot of work in that sentence.

Davies described a period during the early hours when the men could rest if they wished before the main activity began again around three. Other accounts describe journeymen lying on bakehouse boards, sometimes using sacks beneath their bodies or rolled up under their heads.

There was no staff room upstairs with a proper bed and a kettle.

Some of them slept where the bread was made.

I enjoy a nap as much as the next person, but sleeping on my worktop between batches feels like we have stretched the definition of a break.

Once the dough was ready, the pace changed completely. It had to be divided, weighed, shaped and baked, with rolls and other goods prepared around the main batches. The ovens had to be managed carefully, bread removed at the right point and the next batch prepared to take its place.

By around eight in the bakery Davies visited, most of the baking was finished.

Unfortunately, the working day was not.

YOU MADE IT. NOW GO AND DELIVER IT.

This was the part that surprised me when we first researched the job.

Three of the four men Davies watched left the bakehouse at eight in the morning and went out to deliver the bread they had spent the night making. Once the deliveries were finished, they came back for more cleaning and general bakehouse work before finally being free until the following night.

Other nineteenth-century reports describe bakers carrying enormous loads on their backs or moving bread through the streets in hand trucks.

Imagine reaching eight o’clock in the morning after spending the entire night beside an oven and somebody handing you a basket of bread.

Away and run up ma ribs.

Some journeymen worked well into the afternoon before they were finished, slept for whatever time remained and returned to the bakery around midnight to begin again.

The morning customer answering the door to receive a fresh loaf might therefore have been looking at someone who had already completed what I would consider an entirely adequate working day.

He was still working.

THE BAKEHOUSES WERE NOT NECESSARILY LOVELY

Our modern idea of an old bakery is not especially helpful here.

I picture wooden shelves, sacks of flour, golden loaves and a warm oven glowing somewhere in the corner. There is probably a little bell above the shop door.

Some nineteenth-century bakehouses were perfectly respectable workplaces. Others were dreadful.

Parliament was hearing complaints by 1848 about journeymen working in confined, heated and unhealthy spaces, and MPs were told there were around 12,000 journeymen bakers in London, Middlesex and Westminster alone.

Contemporary investigations described bakehouses below street level with poor ventilation, bad drainage, low ceilings and intense heat. One account recorded an underground bakehouse so small and hot that the workers had to go outside to recover before they could eat. Others had bedrooms underground beside the bakehouse, while in some places there was no bedroom at all and workers slept on the boards.

That one rather ruins the cosy image.

I abhor being too hot, so hearing that people were surrounded by bread and felt too ill to eat any of it is a deal breaker for me.

The ovens created tremendous heat, while gas lighting, poor ventilation and the location of some bakehouses below street level made the air worse. In winter, men delivering bread could then move repeatedly between the heat inside and cold streets outside.

The lovely smell coming through the shop window had quite a lot going on behind it.

SO... DID THEY EAT THE BREAD?

Obviously, I researched this.

We have standards here at The Midnight Archive.

Working arrangements varied, but nineteenth-century accounts describe some bakers receiving food alongside their wages. In establishments that also produced cakes and biscuits, this could include what was known as “the run of the bakehouse”, meaning the men could use bread, butter and sugar for themselves. In bread-only shops, bread and potatoes might be provided instead.

So technically, without the underground heat, dreadful hours and complete destruction of my sleep schedule, I may have found my calling.

Although I suspect “the run of the bakehouse” would have become financially disastrous if I were employed there.

“Where are the morning rolls?”

No idea, boss.

Bread baking and confectionery were not necessarily the same branch of the trade, however, so I cannot simply place myself in a Victorian bakery at three in the morning eating cakes and call it research.

Shame.

THE HOURS WERE RIDICULOUS

There is no delicate way of putting this.

The hours could be brutal.

When the conditions of journeymen bakers were raised in Parliament in July 1849, MPs were told that their hours commonly ran from eleven at night until six or seven the following evening, with even longer hours on Fridays and Saturdays. While around sixty hours a week was cited as an average in other occupations, the journeyman baker’s week was said to average about one hundred hours.

The year before, a petition presented to Parliament had complained of men labouring for eighteen to twenty hours a day in a confined and heated atmosphere, leaving little opportunity for family life, education or proper rest.

Other contemporary accounts describe men starting their week at eleven on Sunday night and working until the following afternoon, doing the same through the week, then facing especially long stretches towards the weekend when demand increased. Some were also expected to attend on Sundays to deal with dinner baking.

The phrase night baker suddenly sounds considerably less cosy.

They worked while everybody else slept. When everyone else got up, they were often still working. By the time they finally stopped, much of the day had gone and they needed to sleep before returning that night.

There were married men whose working lives left remarkably little time to see their families awake.

All because somebody wanted the bread ready in the morning.

THE PUBLIC WANTED HOT ROLLS

This turns out to have been one of the great problems.

Reformers argued that much of the night work could be reduced if customers accepted bread and rolls slightly later in the morning. The public, inconveniently, liked them fresh.

An account promoting reform argued that one of the main obstacles to bakers beginning work at a more reasonable five-thirty or six in the morning was the demand for hot rolls at breakfast.

This argument lasted an astonishingly long time.

Nearly ninety years later, Parliament was still discussing hot breakfast rolls while debating night baking. In 1938, one MP objected to men spending decades working through the night simply so customers could have warm rolls first thing in the morning.

The morning roll has apparently caused more industrial tension than I realised.

TRYING TO CHANGE THE HOURS

Journeymen bakers organised and campaigned against excessive hours and night work throughout the nineteenth century.

In 1849, an attempt was made to introduce a Bill prohibiting labour in bakehouses during certain hours of the night. The working conditions themselves were not really disputed, but the proposed solution was.

One opponent argued that government should not interfere with the freedom of labour and described the proposal as “communism”.

There we are.

Apparently suggesting that bakers should perhaps not work one hundred hours a week was how Britain was going to fall.

The campaign continued. A government report into bakers’ grievances later examined whether work could be reorganised so that baking began in the morning rather than at night. Evidence from Scotland was particularly interesting: the report said a twelve-hour system had already spread through many of the principal Scottish towns, covering both production and deliveries.

So, the idea that morning bread absolutely required someone to spend the entire night awake was already being challenged.

THE BAKEHOUSE REGULATION ACT

Meaningful regulation arrived in 1863 with the Bakehouse Regulation Act.

It did not abolish night baking for adults, but it did place restrictions on younger workers. Nobody under eighteen could legally be employed in a bakehouse between nine at night and five in the morning.

The Act also tackled the physical condition of bakehouses. They had to be kept clean, properly ventilated and free from foul smells coming from drains, privies and other nuisances. Sleeping accommodation in larger towns also had to be properly separated from the bakehouse and provided with an external window capable of ventilation.

When the Bill was debated in the House of Lords, the condition of some London bakehouses was described as a scandal, with legislators referring to evidence about premises requiring repeated cleaning and whitewashing.

The fact that Parliament needed to specify that a place making the nation’s bread should not also fill with smells from the privy tells us quite a lot.

THE ARGUMENT LASTED ANOTHER CENTURY

The 1863 law improved conditions, but it did not settle the question of night work.

The debate kept going into the twentieth century. In 1909, MPs were still raising cases of bakery workers putting in extraordinarily long weeks, and night baking remained a political issue through the 1930s and beyond.

A particularly lovely Scottish moment appears during the debate over the Baking Industry legislation in 1954. Parliament heard about experiments in Hamilton and Stirling using newer production methods to provide morning rolls without requiring bakers to work through the night. One MP pointed out that being fond of a Scottish morning roll did not give anybody the right to demand that somebody else get up at two in the morning to make it.

Quite right.

The Baking Industry (Hours of Work) Act 1954 eventually placed statutory limits around night work rather than simply banning it outright. Among other provisions, workers formally employed as night-bakery workers could only spend a limited number of working weeks each year employed between six in the evening and six in the morning.

More than a century after Parliament first discussed the problem, Britain was still trying to work out how to provide fresh bread without ruining the lives of the people making it.

THEN MORNING ARRIVED

For all the dreadful hours and underground bakehouses, there is still one part of the old night bakery that I find lovely.

The moment the work became visible to everybody else.

By five or six in the morning, the first loaves were coming out of the ovens. Rolls were being finished, baskets were being filled and bakers were preparing to deliver them while the streets outside began to wake.

There must have been flour everywhere: on clothes, hands, faces and hair. Behind them was the heat of the bakehouse; outside was the morning air.

And the smell must have been incredible.

That is what I would have noticed if I had been walking past.

I would have followed it. Obviously.

THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE MORNING LOAF

This is what I have loved about researching the Evening Workers.

Every job has changed the way I picture the same streets. The night watchman was walking his route while the lamplighter moved from lamp to lamp. Railway workers were keeping trains and goods moving while most passengers were asleep. Around the coast, lighthouse keepers were watching their lights, and in less glamorous corners of the city the night soil men were dealing with the job nobody wanted to think about.

Somewhere amongst all of them, there was a light burning behind or below a bakery.

Inside, somebody was kneading dough.

By the time everyone else woke up, the evidence of his night’s work was stacked on shelves, sitting in the bakery window or being carried through the streets in a basket. The customer did not need to know when it had been made, how hot the bakehouse had been or whether the man handing it over had slept on a flour sack two hours earlier.

They smelled fresh bread and bought their morning loaf.

The baker eventually went to bed while the rest of the city was getting up, and that evening, while everyone else began settling down again, he returned to the bakehouse and started another night’s work.