Many thanks to Eric Earnshaw for sending in this brochure which showcased Allied Newspaper’s Withy Grove, Manchester, UK “Allied House” newspaper plant.

Enjoyed the photos? Well, you’ve found the main page! But there’s another couple of pages on Metal Type you may have missed. More photos here: Withy Grove (no names for the people photographed though, maybe you could help out in the Comments) – and some pics sent in by Eric Saltmarsh here: Men and Machines. 

NEW: Withy Grove Forum

There has been such a large response to these posts that I have decided to set up a special sub-board on the Metal Type forum. I hope people will find it useful.

The post Allied Newspapers 1930s/1940s Pamphlet appeared first on Metal Type.

I would imagine in those days the first one to apply would get the job, and earn enough money to live on. How times have changed!

The post 1953 Recruitment Ads appeared first on Metal Type.

Machinery In The Modern Printing Plant of the ‘Northland Age’ –

TOP left: The Klischograph Photo Engraving Machine. This machine played a big
part in the engraving of blocks for this magazine. Right: The Leitz Enlarger in our
modern photographic department. LOWER right: 2 typesetting machines. Left:
The thirteen and a half ton Cossar printing machine on which the Northland Age is
printed twice weekly. BOTTOM left: One of our Heidelberg letterpress machines
used for the many printing jobs required in your business – letterheads,
statements, docket books, wedding invites, catalogues etc.

Top left: Trimming paper on the guillotine. Top right: Keeping the accounts straight.
Centre: The Linotype machines. Bottom left: A printing machine for small work.
Bottom right: The machine which prints ‘The Northlander.’

Left Panel reads: We Are Printers of Everything. Right Panel: Let The News Do That Next Job.
Centre Panel:
“The News” Printing Department has the machines, and men to look after all your
printing requirements. It costs nothing to get a quote.

NEWS LTD
Box 1 KAIKOHE Phone 321
“The Northlander” was printed in Kaikohe by “The News”

The post Printing the Northland Age, 1962 appeared first on Metal Type.

A well-dressed Linotype operator

Bank of Linotypes, with a female operator in the background

Another well-dressed operator with visor and cigar

Close-up of copy and keyboard

Operator having a smoke

A bank of linecasters

Between editions

Linecaster with guards

A quiet corner

Democrat and Chronicle article with a photo of Bill himself!

Women Linotype operators and a proofreader

A Ludlow Typograph

More Ludlow action

Ad makeup. My father at left.

Page make-up

First computer system to convert “idiot” TTS tape into justified tape for Linotype Electrons

A Linotype Elektron

Elrod material caster

Stereotype “mat roller”

Hand type cabinet

Tools I took home: Page chase, pica gauge, type stick, chase crank, Xacto knife, chicken pluckers and makeup tools

Slug cutter

Various galleys

Page chase

Pages from a Font book used for character count for ad markup

The post Rochester, NY Newspapers appeared first on Metal Type.

A regular contributor to Metal Type, Graeme How,  got in touch to tell me about his local newspaper, The Wairoa Star, celebrating its centenary.

We have five pages of articles about the Wairoa Star sent in by Graeme, check the “Related Pages” menu to see the others.

Said Graham: “I started my apprenticeship there in January 1969 and retired in December 2016.”

Here Graeme tells us how production of the newspaper has changed over the years.

Graeme added: “I still do the odd day’s work there filling in.

“It’s amazing how technology has progressed from black and white to the modern era of colour graphics and photographs. To think I started with hot type and ended up operating an internet based newspaper production system.”

The post Wairoa Star Centenary September 2021 appeared first on Metal Type.

A superb documentary with interviews from ex Fleet Street workers, produced by digital:works.

The interviewees give a real insight into what it was like to work in the UK national newspaper industry in those days.

“Banging Out” ceremonies are discussed in some detail, as well as Murdoch’s disgraceful treatment of his workforce.

I’m surprised none of the interviewees described the indelible red dye spraying that I witnessed. Some officers carried pressurised spraying equipment and sprayed copious amounts of dye.

Indelible Red Dye

They sprayed the indelible red dye on pickets clothing. As well as ruining the clothing, it also acted as a marker enabling pickets to be identified on their way home. This often led to them being arrested on trumped up charges of being “drunk and disorderly,” etc.

Overall, though the film is a very heart-warming account of the UK national newspaper industry, described by some as “one big party.”

The post Banging Out – Fleet Street Remembered appeared first on Metal Type.

The date is Sunday, July 2, 1978, the last time that the New York Times was printed using hot metal.

David Loeb Weiss, then a proofreader and Carl Schlesinger a Linotype operator filmed and narrated this film to record the occasion.

Retirement Day

As well as a detailed look at the production process there are interviews with workers including a lucky man whose retirement coincided with the end of the era.

Towards the end of the film we take a look at the “clean area” where the new technology was already in use producing the vast majority of the paper.

The post Farewell etaoin shrdlu appeared first on Metal Type.

We start with a look at the county of Sussex, which the newspaper serves.

On to the Evening Argus building in Brighton where we see Press Association news reports being received on a VDU.

We see journalists at work in the field, with one taking shorthand notes. We also see the photographers out taking pictures.

On to the Sports Desk where we see journalists at work on VDUs. Then short interviews with the editor, the environment reporter who tells us about a scheme to replace trees blown down in the 1987 gale, and the editor of the “Argos Woman” supplement.

We see pages being “pasted up” from bromide photographic output.

Then we take a look at an advertising rep visiting a business to sell advertising, then on to the art studio where the adverts are designed.

Tele ad operatives are seen taking classified advertising over the phone, and inputting to VDUs. We see a huge computer that operates the photosetter, which produces output on bromide paper.

Polymer Plates

We see the Pagemaster camera producing full page negatives. These negatives are then sent to a Letterplex machine to produce polymer letterpress plates.

We then move to the machine room where we see a plate being put on the press and reels moved about. The press, which can produce 40,000 papers per hour is seen running.

From there to the despatch department, where we see the papers being bundled up an put onto vans. After an explanation of the various newspaper editions we move to the accounts department, then the promotions department.

We take a look at the various “free sheets” that the Argus produced, and then a look at the Pearson Group’s operations (of which the Brighton Argus is a part).

The post Brighton Argus (UK) 1990 – video appeared first on Metal Type.

The film starts with a look at Brighton sea front and other towns in the Brighton Argus circulation area, accompanied by the obligatory cheesy music recorded on a very stretchy tape.

We then take a quick look at a management meeting before going to the news desk. Here we see the reporters at work on their typewriters, some very impressively typing while holding a lit cigarette!

Then on to the wire room where we see the teleprinters and photographs being received over phone lines.

Next we see the sub-editors desks before the copy is sent by a conveyor to the composing room.

In the composing room we start with an overview of how the linecasters work, followed by setting headlines on the Ludlow.

Tele ad “girls”

In the advertising department we see tele-ad “girls” typing out copy while on the phone. There is another conveyor taking the copy to the composing room.

A quick look at the artists before going into the production process for producing a halftone block.

From there we go to the stone where we see full pages being made up.

The page then goes to a “mangle” where we see a flong being made. Then we go to the stereo department where we see a plate being cast and finished before being put on a conveyor for transport to the press room.

We then see the last plate being secured before the press is started up. We see a “fudge box” being added, for some “stop press” news.

The film ends with the despatch department and papers being loaded onto vans.

The post Brighton Argus (UK) 1973 – video appeared first on Metal Type.

It tells the story of Rupert Murdoch’s move to Wapping through the eyes of a journalist who made the move.

Make sure you also take a look at “Fortress Wapping” written by award-winning journalist John Pilger. The Forum also has a great video on the dispute called “Wapping and The Wire.”

IT started with the mysterious “Wapping cough” and ended when Rupert Murdoch’s moonlight flit revolutionised an industry.

In January 1986 the editor of the Sun, Kelvin MacKenzie, called me into his office. I knew it was serious because he asked me to close the door, which was somewhat unusual, and then spoke almost in a whisper, which was virtually unprecedented.

After asking me to swear not to tell a soul about our conversation, he told me to put every important item from my desk and filing cabinets into two black plastic bags and take them to his waiting chauffeur at the front entrance. “He knows where to take you,” he said, “and you won’t be coming back.”

It was hardly a surprise. I was about to join a select band of executives who had vanished from the Sun’s office months before. Their disappearances had been explained away with a range of cover stories, some almost believable – such as the mooted launch of a London paper – and some hopelessly far-fetched. Who would believe that the feted night editor had really taken early retirement?

It was an open secret among the journalists that our colleagues had succumbed to the “Wapping cough” and were really learning how to operate the computers that were supposed to transform the way we produced newspapers. Not that many of us gave that plan much credence.

Newspaper owners had been talking about introducing what was laughably called “new technology” for years and several of them had even gone so far as to install computers in their offices only for the print unions to prevent them being used. Surely the unions would use their industrial muscle once again to prevent Rupert Murdoch from switching production of his four papers – the Sun, News of the World, Times and Sunday Times – away from the traditional headquarters?

An Embarrassing Farce

On the drive to Wapping I remember thinking I was due to take part in an embarrassing farce. I thought Murdoch would fail because I was imbued with a culture in which the print unions always seemed to come out as winners. It was true that the miners had been defeated two years before and there were new laws circumscribing industrial action, but the printers were invincible, were they not?

All my newspaper life, stretching back to the beginning of my apprenticeship on a local weekly in 1963, I had been overawed by the strength of the print unions. In Fleet Street I discovered that they ran the show. Indeed, throughout the 1970s I had been a militant member of the National Union of Journalists, so I had first-hand experience of wielding union power.

During the winter months of 1985 it was obvious that MacKenzie was convinced that the Big Bang was about to happen, often confiding to us that “the boss [Murdoch] is going to show those bastards”. On occasion he openly taunted compositors: “You lot haven’t got much f**king longer… You’re history.” The printers were baffled – was he just being his usual obnoxious self or did he know something they didn’t? Asked to explain, he would simply hold a finger to his lips and give an exaggerated wink.

The very idea of a wholesale sacking of the mechanical staff was too impossible to imagine. How could a paper be prepared without the linotype operators, compositors and proof readers? How could it be printed without the hundreds of skilled men who manned the presses? Even if it could be produced, how could it be distributed when the rail unions would support their printing brothers?

I soon changed my mind after entering the place that was soon to become known as Fortress Wapping. I stepped first into the clean, airy press hall to see shiny blue machines being tended by men in spotless overalls.

Upstairs, in what was to become the Sun’s rough and ready editorial office for the following couple of years, were lines of new desks. On each one sat a computer terminal and keyboard. A posse of electricians scurried around, tugging at wires snaking through open ducts in the floor. The Wapping vanguard of journalists under the guidance of the giant figure of a night desk executive, David Banks, were working frantically, readying themselves for the moment the unions walked into Murdoch’s trap and he ordered the moonlight flit from Bouverie Street and Gray’s Inn Road to Wapping.

Murdoch had prepared the ground well for his great revolution. First, he had the money, having benefited from the flotation of Reuters, and knew there was a lot more to come when he sold the Bouverie Street building. Second, the Conservative government’s Trade Union Act outlawed secondary picketing. Third, there was the parallel planning of a non-unionised paper by Eddy Shah, a diversion for the unions. Fourth, Murdoch’s managers had organised a distribution system, including the purchase of a fleet of lorries and vans, to avoid the need to use trains. Fifth, and most important of all, he had negotiated a deal with Eric Hammond, leader of the electricians’ union, the EETPU, to provide all the manual staff. Hundreds of electrical workers were then covertly trained to run the presses while many of their relatives were schooled in the composing room tasks that pre-dated the on-screen make-up now in use.

Murdoch opened the trap in the autumn of 1985 when he gave the print unions a three-month ultimatum to agree substantial staff cuts. Their response was a ballot giving them the right to call a strike if Murdoch tried to impose compulsory redundancies. In the following months Murdoch grew so confident that he dared, on January 18, to print a special section of the Sunday Times at Wapping.

At an edgy meeting with all the print unions five days later Murdoch told them that “the horse has bolted”. As he anticipated, the unions issued a strike threat and Murdoch closed his trap by ordering the wholesale move of the journalists on his four papers to Wapping.

The Sun and News of the World staff, with very few exceptions, quickly packed their bags. They were heavily influenced by a history of antagonism with printers who had refused to support them when they took industrial action. Journalists at the Times and Sunday Times, despite similar experiences, agonised longer and many more of them decided not to go, earning the nickname “refuseniks”.

But Murdoch’s calculated gamble paid off. Despite the problems inside, not least the need for sub-editors to learn how to use a computer with hardly any training, and hostility outside due to the rapid formation of picket lines, the papers were published.

Disturbing

In the following weeks and months going to work in Wapping was disturbing. I often glimpsed compositors I had known since 1969, some of whom I counted as friends, screaming behind the police barriers, mouthing my name and shaking their fists.

The resentment and anger of the strikers, whose crafts had been eliminated for ever, often boiled over into violence, especially when joined on Saturday nights by hundreds of workers from other industries. There was bad behaviour on both sides of the conflict, with examples of unacceptable police heavy-handedness matched by mindless violence from pickets.

On one night in February alone, eight policemen were injured and 58 people were arrested as 5,000 demonstrators tried to storm the printing plant.

Inside, we journalists revelled in the joys of doing as we pleased, though there were many frustrations as we struggled to make edition times. I once spotted a figure in a grey sweater stooped over a paste-up board who seemed to be taking ages to stick down a piece of copy. “For f**k’s sake,” I shouted. “Are you going to take all night with that?” He turned slowly and I was about to add another epithet when I realised it was Murdoch. He simply smiled.

Nothing could upset the man who had led a revolution. Some 13 months later, after 1,262 arrests and countless people injured, the unions relented by agreeing to accept redundancy deals.

Every other newspaper proprietor followed Murdoch’s lead, moving away from Fleet Street and dispensing with their unions. Profits flowed in. A new national title, the Independent, was founded. All papers expanded in size, adding supplements and magazines. Colour pictures became the norm. Nowadays, hot metal printing is a faint memory and many journalists nowadays, possibly the majority, know only a post-Wapping world.

However much we older hacks may yearn for the village that was Fleet Street none of us would really wish to turn the clock back to the days when we never knew whether our papers were going to be published. And that’s the measure of Murdoch’s industrial transformation.

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