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Aerated Bread Company

once-famous British bakery and tea-room chain

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 8, 2026
Entity authorityQ4687954 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Aerated Bread Company Ltd (A.B.C.) was a British company founded and headquartered in London. It was established in 1862 by John Dauglish as a bakery using a new method he had developed for breadmaking which did not use yeast. In 1864 it opened a shop selling tea and other groceries, followed in the 1870s by tea rooms. It was one of the first café chains in Britain and other parts of the world. (Others included Lyons and Lockhart's Cocoa Rooms)

History

Founding

The Aerated Bread Company Ltd was founded in 1862 by John Dauglish (1824–1866).

The company had a factory in Adelaide, in the colony of South Australia, in the 1870s-1880s. Cecil Augustus Motteram, who later established his own company manufacturing biscuits, became manager in 1881.

The business was created as an incorporated company listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE). When the company was floated, its failure was predicted and its initial public offering was poorly supported. However, its initial £1 shares had risen to £5 7s 8d by 1890.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Aerated Bread Company” is once-famous British bakery and tea-room chain. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Aerated, Bread and Company, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1862, 1864, 1824, 1866—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1862. For this dossier, Aerated, Bread and Company is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “once-famous British bakery and tea-room chain” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4687954. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1862, 1864, 1824 and 1866.

Critical limits

A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  2. Expand the search: follow Aerated Bread Company primary sources, Aerated Bread Company archive and Aerated research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Aerated Bread Company” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.