There are six pages of Yorkshire Evening Press photos on Metal Type. Check the “Related Pages” menu to see the rest.
During my time at the Yorkshire Evening Press it was a tradition that the Archbishop of York visited the works every Christmas Eve to press a green button to start the presses rolling.
As you can see, we did our best to make the room look a little festive. I seem to recall one year we experimented with attaching the paper streamers to the second elevator arm on various machines, creating a random movement as lines were cast. The effect was short-lived as we were made to attach them elsewhere for safety reasons!
Christmas Eve afternoon was usually very hectic as we only produced the one edition on a “work and finish” basis.
The fact that we could go home as soon as we’d finished the paper, coupled with most members of the composing room staff enjoying a generous “liquid lunch” made the single-edition Christmas Eve paper a bit of a shoddy effort!
Only the most glaring of errors were corrected, the rest ignored in the interest of getting an early finish!
At the time the photo was taken, being only a first or second year apprentice, I was not actually trained on the linecasters. I think I was just placed there to make the photo look more interesting! I don’t recall what weighty matters I was discussing with the Archbishop!