Yesterday’s Technology . . . Today!
Award-winning journalist John Pilger tells the real story of Rupert Murdoch’s introduction of new technology in the 1980s.
The following piece is taken from John Pilger’s book “Hidden Agendas” which is available for viewing, downloading or purchase from his website http://www.johnpilger.com/
George Clark takes us back to London’s Fleet Street, from the 1960s onwards.
FIRSTLY, there is something which I think I should explain. I have been as guilty of this as much as anyone else. In referring to a “Ship” I have failed to precede the word with an apostrophe. It is in fact an abbreviation of “Companionship”. When I entered Print in the 1930s printers had their own vocabulary, a layman would have been mystified to hear Compositors conversing in those days. A body of Compositors were known as a Companionship.
George Clark tells us about his 22 years on the Sunday Telegraph and takes issue with a couple of points made in Malcolm Gregory’s “Fleet Street Piecework” story.
MALCOLM GREGORY paints a very black picture of the S.T. Grass Ship, as one who served on this Ship from April 1964 retiring as a “Regular” on 29th March 1986 I feel I should give a clearer picture.
Malcolm Gregory describes his time working on the Daily Telegraph in London’s Fleet Street from the early 70s to the closure in 1987.
I WAS working on an Intertype at the Walthamstow Guardian when I managed to get a ‘Grass’ on the Sunday Telegraph (this meant working the Saturday as a casual operator) through a fellow operator who put in a word, knowhatimean?
George Clark sent in this very interesting list of old printing trade terms.
A Chapel.-A meeting of compositors is called a chapel, and the members of the chapel form a companionship (shortened to ‘ship) pledged to watch over the interests of the London Society of Compositors (L.S.C.) and its members in the chapel.
Dave Hughes tells of his time on the Yorkshire Evening Press and South London Press, UK.
I WAS first introduced to the Linotype machine in the mid 1970s when I started work as an Apprentice Compositor at the Yorkshire Evening Press, then located in Coney Street, York.
Many thanks to John Nixon for sending in this article. Says John: “The attached article appeared in The Imprint magazine, which was a printing union publication in New Zealand.
“The contributor, Tom Atkinson, was the Deputy Day Printer when I started my apprenticeship in 1970.
Thanks to Richard Goodwin for sending in these photographs taken at the Quincy Patriot Ledger between 1969 and 1975.
Thanks to Kevin Brown for sending these pictures in. Kevin says: “I did my apprenticeship for the Dominion Newspaper, it was a morning paper in Wellington, New Zealand, printed six days a week and we also printed a Sunday paper called the Sunday Times. Copies were sent to most places in the north and south island every day, a truck left Wellington every morning with the first edition and drove up to Auckland.
I took a lot of the pics in 1975, I was working on the day shift, but on the last night that the paper was going to be printed in the old Mercer Street Dominion building I went in and took some pics, that’s why you see people gathering together for me to take the shots and that was 1976.
