FOILING THE BURGLAR

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LIII, Issue 12, 12 February 1932, Page 6

FOILING THE BURGLAR

LONDON SAFE DEPOSIT,

TWENTY-TON DOOR

A steel and concrete fortress in the heart of the West End, known as the London Safe Deposit, was formally opened by Sir Josiah Stamp last month.

Among the many precautions which have been taken to safeguard the strongrooms are doors built to resist drills, explosives oxy-acetylene, or the electric arc. The main door weighs 20 tons, is equipped -?/ith keyless combination locks, and, with the emergency door, is controlled internally by a quadruple time lock, which in emergency will keep the doors closed for three hours.

Sir Josiah Stamp said that he had opened buildings, swimming baths, and even esplanades—but never a | safe. There was nothing in the standard hand-book, "Speeches for all Occasions," to meet the situation, and even the poets failed him; the locks to which they referred were not those that love was supposed to laugh at, but rather the golden locks over | which love went "dippy." He turned in despair to the encyclopaedia, iut became involved in a next-door article on the "locomotive." If it were true that the history of the lock stared in Nineveh, and came down through Egypt, he could only say that the Egyptians had very primitive notions of how to protect their treasures.

In 1818 Jeremiah Chubb seemed to have done something very notable in the evolution of the lock and of the safe. From that time, he imagined, the name of Chubb had been associated all over the world with most progressive and beautiful workmanship in this particular line of human craftsmanship. To-day in this country some 6000 skilled operatives were engaged in this business. There were 50,000,000 locks produced in the world in a year.

He understood that this safe deposit was the finest of its kind in the country. He did not know how it compared with those in America. His experience there was that nothing whatever was left to chance. In one of the establishments of the Federal Reserve Bank he discovered that there were long rifle holes through the masonry, and a man could be shot at by guards from above; he could be electrocuted, starved, drowned—anything but be poisoned.