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I received a lot of advice, too, of course, not always very wise or good. One thing that all sorts of people kept on dinning into me was that insurance companies always beat you down in your claims and that the only way to get your due recompense was to increase your claim by twenty-five or thirty per cent. I thought this over carefully and then I made up my mind. I would not add a penny on to anything. I would claim only the actual cost or value and I would make them pay my just claim.
Our policy was with the Royal Exchange Insurance Company. When they received the claim they sent down an assessor to check it. He was a very wise and careful man but very strict and painstaking in his methods. He spent several days on the job and this is how he began: — There were very many windows and the glass had been blown out of all of them. I had claimed for fluted glass at tenpence a square foot. He picked up some tiny pieces and said this is not fluted glass; it is ordinary window glass at twopencehalfpenny a foot. I said it is fluted glass and he said it wasn't. So I suggested he should talk to some of the workpeople about the place. He did and they all confirmed what I had said. The pieces he had found were all too small to show the fluting but I think he grubbed up a little larger piece somewhere. Anyhow, he gave in.
And this is how he finished. The last single claim was for just over a thousand pounds for a large quantity of raw film-stock which had been stored in the perforating-room ready for use. There was nothing to show for it but some hundreds of crumpled tin boxes smothered in the black ashes of burnt celluloid. He looked at the few invoices we were able to produce, gazed at the black cinders which we said had been film — and passed the claim in full.
You will ask, as the coroner did, how it came about that the young fellow could not make his escape the instant the fire started. This is the more extraordinary when it is realised that by stretching his arms he could, without moving, touch both door and window and that both door and window were only lightly latched and one opened outwards.
I have tried so often to reconstruct the fatal moment and the best I can arrive at is that he had matches with him, though that was forbidden; that one dropped on the cement floor and he trod on it by accident and so ignited some bits of loose film that had fallen there; that he then tried to stamp out the flame and so lost the couple of seconds in which he might have made his escape.
Never, never try to deal with burning celluloid. I hate to see
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