Page:Pyrotechnics the history and art of firework making (1922).djvu/127



"October the 11th, 1825.

Sir:

By Virtue of a Precept from my Lord Mayor, in order to prevent any Tumults and Riots that may happen on the Fifth of November, and the next ensuing Lord Mayor's Day, you are required to charge all your Servants and Lodgers, that they neither make, nor cause to be made, any Squibs, Serpents, Fire Balloons, or other Fireworks, nor fire, fling, nor throw them out of your House, Shop or Warehouse, or in the Streets of this City, on the Penalties contained in an Act of Parliament made in the Tenth year of the late King William.

Note. The Act was made perpetual, and is not expired, as some ignorantly suppose.

C. Puckeridge, Beadle.

Taylor, Printer, Basinghall Street."

During the period of the operation of the Act, that is from the end of the seventeenth to the middle of the nineteenth centuries, on the occasion of public rejoicing, the authorities were in the anomalous position of employing persons to break the law, both by manufacturing and displaying fireworks.

Although, as we have seen, this Act had very little effect on the quantity of fireworks manufactured, it had considerable adverse effect on the industry. As the whole thing was illegal, no regulations were framed to control the making, storage, or distribution of fireworks, or the safety of either workers or public. The manufacture was conducted on lines which, at the present time, appear inconceivably reckless. Several people working in one room in a crowded building, with loose composition and gunpowder, and a fire in an open grate round which finished or partially finished goods were put to dry, and this in a thickly populated area of London.