Baker Who Burned Down Warburtons Factory ‘Thought Thermostat Was Timer’

A new member of staff at the Warburton’s bread factory in Bolton which is currently burning to a crisp has contacted the Nev Filter - under condition that she remains anonymous - admitting responsibility for the conflagration which ten fire crews are battling to extinguish.

“They gave me 5000 loaves to bake, and told me they wanted them quite well browned,” the teenage work-trial employee said. “There was just this big dial with no numbers on it like. ‘Cos I was bursting for a pee, I thought ten minutes would give me plenty of time to get to the loo and back, so I turned it up full, obviously. I was just making a quick detour to the vending machine in the canteen for some chocolate on my way back, when all these alarms started going off everywhere.”

“I mean, how was I to know I’d set it to like 10,000 degrees fahrenheit?” she added. “It’s not like it’s marked or nothing. So it’s like totally not my fault, is it? Even if it is, sort of.”

“This is the worst disaster to hit Warburtons since the factory had to be reconstructed back in the thirties, after the builders accidentally dropped it upside down,” said a spokesman for the 140-year-old company, adding that “any bloody fool” should have realised what the dial was for. However, when pressed, he finally admitted that although the factory – the third largest bakery in Britain - originally came with a small instruction leaflet, nobody could remember where they’d put it.

He went on to say that, as the firefighters have now almost got the flames under control, the 3300 staff employed at the site might be able to salvage some of the factory by scraping off the charred bits.

“We’ll be claiming off the council for this,” he added. “We’ve been asking them to put a giant smoke alarm in some sort of airship circling high above Bolton for years, but would they listen?”