JAMES H. FORSYTH.
The genial cashier of the Baking Society is one of the best known and most highly respected business men in the Co-operative movement. His balance-sheets are models of lucidity, and this feature is often commented on in the columns of the financial press. Mr Forsyth has had a lifelong acquaintance with Co-operative accounting. As a lad he entered the office of the Wholesale Society, and waited there until, as he himself has put it, he began to understand what double entry bookkeeping really was. Then a desire to see other lands possessed him for a time, and he voyaged to the great Republic of the West. He had been there for only two years, however, when the homing instinct possessed him, and returning to Glasgow, after a short interval, entered the office of the Baking Society as bookkeeper. Here he had been for some four years when Mr David Smith retired from the management of the Society, and the board, deciding that they were going to try and work the Society for a time at least without a manager, appointed Mr Forsyth cashier and bookkeeper, and cashier and bookkeeper he has been ever since. Mr Forsyth is one of those officials who treat the business for which they work as if it was their own. He is indefatigable in his efforts to maintain and even to improve the wellbeing and to accelerate the progress of the Baking Society, and during the strenuous years of the war, when the demands of the War Office were depleting his staff, nevertheless he “carried on” in a manner which won the approval of management and delegates alike. He is one of those careful, painstaking officials who are assets of great value to the societies fortunate enough to possess them.