The addiction of ink and paperFor me. the art of printing was a hobby and an interest long before it became my trade. At the age of 12 or 13, I awoke one Christmas morning to find a brand new printing machine at the foot of my bed. There is no doubt at all that this shrewd choice of present shaped the rest of my life. It prepared me for a vocation that would result in my working in several parts of the world which at that time, I had never even heard of. I had the opportunity of joining a printing club which was attached to the Art Department at my school. This enabled me to learn more about printing and avoid some of the lessons that were of less interest to me, like history.
After my parents discontinued running the family home as a guest house, my father had his own insurance agency dealing mostly in car insurance. He got to see a lot of people and was in a position to bring home orders for small printing jobs. He then became an Royal Automobile Club Road Patrol which resulted in even more work coming in. These orders would start with business cards; sometimes a run of 100 sometimes 200. As time progressed, orders for thousands were being received. I would set the type meticulously by hand and print the items one at a time, sometimes late into the night. Some of the orders were quite complex, involving numbering and perforating. and multicoloured line work. Initially, all the supplies were purchased from the Adana Printing Machinery Company in Grays Inn Road, East London. It was later discovered that we could save money by buying larger quantities from other companies and card and paper offcuts from local printers. It wasn't too long before a second, larger Adana machine - an 8 x 5 was purchased to cope with the large amount of work although I could only use one at a time! An office area was built in our sitting room and it was here that the work was carried out. Business cards, invitations, billheads, holiday brochures, the list of work was endless and seemed to continue forever. The second Adana that was bought in the late 1950's continued to be used for business cards until 1975. It proved to be the easiest and cheapest way to produce small letterpress orders and as it only cost about £20 new, must have paid for itself a thousand times. We named our business "Greenacre Graphics" and had a double 'G' logo. The choice of name was rather prophetic in that some years later, my parents sold the house and moved to a property in the country known as "The Acre" due to its size. Many years after that, my parents finally retired to a coastal cul de sac in Walmer, Kent called Greenacre Drive. All coincidence of course but it felt as if the name had lived on. As time progressed, my father was well established at the RAC and he never liked to see things thrown away especially if he could foresee a use for them. We therefore inherited a couple of unwanted blue exhibition caravans and one of these became our new printing workshop. The letterpress Adanas were supplemented with a Multilith 1250 offset press and a large guillotine. We had a Varityper to produce our typesetting (in retrospect, this was not very good), a diffusion transfer platemaker and all in all, were virtually self sufficient. Typesetting and platemaking for quality work was bought in from trade houses. |
The larger Adana 8 x 5 proved to be a real earner
At the age of 15 I left school and started work at local printers Eyre and Spottiswoode as a copy holder in their Reading Department. Having a minimal grasp of the English language I found myself sitting with a qualified reader whilst I read aloud from letterpress galley proofs for such periodicals as "The British Journal of Industrial Medicine", "GUT", and "History Today" etc., all riveting stuff. I found this interesting at first but the subject matter was extremely boring and many of the technical and medical words unpronounceable. I was constantly yawning much to the annoyance of the 'olde school' readers, many of whom were close to retirement. The company had the distinction of being "The Queen's Printers". This meant that they were the only printer in the UK who could print the Bible without the Queen's permission although I never saw a Bible whilst there. However, whilst rummaging in the office one day I did discover some proofs of a Playboy type magazine called "Razzle" which really opened my eyes to colour printing. Six months after joining my first employer, I took the trade examination which permitted me to take up a 6 year trade apprenticeship as a Letterpress Machine printer finishing up on their only rotary press which was manufactured by Dawson, Payne and Elliott, a historic name in the trade. At the end of this, I was lucky enough to be re-trained in the new field of Offset Lithography before emigrating to Trinidad to work in printing and production management at the ripe old age of 22. There's more on the Thanet Press here. I continued to print for a living in the UK, Caribbean and Middle East in various capacities and even had my own printing business again for a while and never tired of the craft and think that it is every bit as interesting now as it was when I first started, maybe even more so. I have attended large trade exhibitions such as DRUPA in Germany (this was like Mecca for me) either at other people's expense or, if that was not possible, at my own. The sound of the machinery and the smell of the ink and paper would always excite me. Some years after getting that most unusual of Christmas presents I have now semi-retired but whenever I pick up a new book, I close my eyes, poke my nose into it and smell the paper and the ink again . . . |