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149
Ice Cream Shops.—These are all periodically inspected. At
the end of 1912, there were on the register the names and
addresses of the proprietors of 106 shops in the Borough.
They were inspected on 126 occasions, and as a result 18 notices
were served for sanitary and other defects. There were no prosecutions.
The methods Of manufacture adopted by itinerant ice
cream vendors are far from satisfactory. The ice cream may be
made in the common wash-house used as a lumber room and containing
fouled straw mattresses, discarded bedding and dirty,
soiled blankets.
The boiled milk may be cooled in a dark, frowsy basement or
in an open iron bucket on the wash-house floor. Sometimes a
gauze cupboard has been provided for cooling, but even then
the top of the cupboard is littered with lumber and broken so
that cats can and do enter. The churns are washed in spent
soap suds, which are kept over from one day to the next. The
freezing is done on the gutter kerb. The cover of the freezer is
placed on the dirty pavement and replaced without being cleaned.
The man employed in freezing may be smoking a cigarette
and spitting on the pavement quite near to the cover. He is
too lazy or too unconcerned to spit into the roadway away from
the cover When the freezing is approaching completion he
takes out a sample on a wooden spoon, draws his teeth and
tongue along the edge and replaces the spoon without cleaning
it. Worse still, he has been known to use the side of his barrow
for purposes of micturition. The difficulties of supervision are
further increased by the fact that the itinerant may sleep in
one borough, manufacture his ice in another borough and sell it
in still another borough.
Restaurants.—There are 237 restaurants in the borough.
They are regularly inspected. In 1912 the number of notices
served was 42, the number of inspections 278. These premises
are not included in the sum total of workplaces given on another
page.