When I was a child I used to visit my dad at his work as a dough maker at Hardings Bakery in Yardley at the swan. To me it was a very modern bakery, dad used to empty the flour into the big tubs from the upstairs floor. He told me the story of one night the electric had gone off and the tubs that were in use would have lost the dough and there would have been no bread so dad got the workers to put empty flour bags on their feet to knead the dough in the tubs. When the electric came back on the dough had been saved and when it went into the prover the dough rose as it should have, then it went onto a conveyor belt through the ovens to bake and the loafs were saved. Dad also told me of the night he was on Hardings roof during world war 2 and that he could see the blitz happening in Coventry he didn’t say too much about it though. All the Birmingham bakeries then baked extra bread to help Coventry.
