MY ANCESTOR WAS A... PRINTER
Anthony Burton remembers the workers who earned their wages by putting words on pages
Anthony Burton remembers the workers who earned their wages putting words on pages
The development of typesetting and printing as we know it dates back to the days of Johann Gutenberg who is credited with developing the first presses and William Caxton who brought the technology to Britain in the middle of the 15th century.
The basics that they developed remained more or less unchanged for the next four centuries. At its heart was the process of moveable type. The first job in any printing office in the early days was to make the individual pieces of type by pouring molten lead into a mould. Among the earliest jobs printed was the 42-line Bible and, as two pages were printed at a time while other pages were being set, it would require about 20,000 pieces of type to be made for the day’s work. In later years, printers could buy in type from specialist type founders.
The first stage in printing was composition. The type to be set was contained in two cases, the top one for capital letters, other letters in the lower, hence the names “upper case” and “lower case”, still in use today. The compositor worked with a ‘stick’ in one hand, while with the other he picked out the appropriate letters and characters and added them until he had a full line of type. This was then transferred to a case – the form – and the process repeated until a full page had been laid out. This was a highly skilled occupation as the compositor had to work in reverse so that the text would come out the right way round when
Printing’s basics went almost unchanged for four centuries
printed. Once a page was completed, the form was locked tight and it was ready for the press.
The flat bed presses
The earliest and simplest presses were similar to wine presses, in that the print and paper were arranged on a flat bed. The type was inked with ink balls, made from leather and kept supple by soaking in urine. The flat bed was then moved under the press, which was screwed down to create the impression.
The wooden press was first replaced in 1800 by a cast-iron press invented by the aristocratic amateur scientist Earl Stanhope. By using a combination of screw and lever, far greater pressure could be exerted and larger areas printed at any one time.
This was a boon for newspaper proprietors and William Bulmer installed a whole battery of Stanhopes for The
Times. Later improvements were made in America with the Columbian Press, which was worked entirely using a lever and counterbalances. It was very accurate and required far less manual effort than the old screw press versions.
After printing, the type had to be broken up and redistributed back to the cases in the right order. This was time consuming, because, like everything else in printing, accuracy was essential.
The major changes in the industry came in the 1800s, first with the development of presses, in which a cylinder, carrying the paper, rolled over the inked type. This concept was developed throughout the 19th century and in later models was adapted to create the rotary press with one massive central cylinder and smaller printing cylinders grouped round it. One set of men or boys fed in the paper while another set took out the printed pages. One of these machines was displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and
The Times installed a massive machine requiring a staff of 25 to feed it which could produce 20,000 impressions an hour.
Even at the beginning of the 19th century compositors were still setting by hand – as some printers still are to this day. There were numerous attempts to mechanise typesetting. The first really successful version began when a Washington lawyer James Clephane employed an inventor Charles Moore to devise a method of producing type using a papier mâché mould.
This was improved upon by the German watchmaker, Ottmar Mergenthaler, who had emigrated to America.
In its finished version this consisted of two components.
The first was the composing machine, operated by a giant keyboard, usually with 90 keys. Instead of directly producing words on paper, it moved a matrix into position. This was rather like an individual piece of type, but not inverted and cut into the body instead of standing proud. It was the mould into which molten lead would be poured. The machine contains all the matrices necessary for the job in hand, and a separate series of wedges was used for spacing.
Once the compositor felt the line was almost full he depressed the casting lever and metal was poured. The machine produced a complete line automatically. It got its name from a visitor to the inventor, who was astonished and cried out – “You’ve made a line of type!” – and so the Linotype machine was christened.
It proved particularly popular with newspaper printers, but book printers preferred a slightly different version that produced characters one at a time, the Monotype. They felt it gave them greater control and finesse, luxuries not always available in the busy world of newspapers where deadlines are all important.
Illustrations could also be added to publications. At first these were all produced by wood engravers and could be things of great beauty.
At the end of the 19th century, a new technique was developed using the newly discovered processes of photography. The artist would produce his drawing, which was then photographed. The negative was then placed on a lightsensitive zinc plate, lightly rolled with ink. After exposure and cleaning, the artists’ lines were left, which could then be engraved for printing. A more sophisticated photographic process was also developed at the end of the last century, in which a picture was broken up into thousands of dots of different density to give subtle gradations – the half-tone process.
A skilled workforce
Printing was a highly skilled occupation and workers were usually among the better-paid members of the community, but conditions differed tremendously from one printer to the next. At one end of the scale was the jobbing printer, providing everything his local community needed, from wedding invitations to posters advertising local events and, in many cases, printing small runs of local newspapers. Often these would be quite small concerns, operated perhaps by just one man and an apprentice – a boy who was given all the worst and dirtiest jobs and was known as the “printer’s devil”.
Although wages were considered good in the larger print firms, it was an industry in which unemployment was a constant threat. In the 19th century, apprenticeships generally lasted for seven years. Long before that period was over, the apprentice would have been a capable operator and was regarded by unscrupulous employers as cheap labour.
There was no guarantee that an apprentice would be kept on as a fully paid journeyman at the end of his seven years. The old guilds that had controlled the industry had, by this time, been largely replaced by trade unions.
There were no national unions during this period, but a multiplicity of smaller local unions: there were at least 10 separate print unions in London alone in the 19th century. It was only in the 20th century that there was any real move to unification.
The industry changed dramatically in the latter part of the 20th century, triggered by News International moving out of Fleet Street to new premises in Wapping. They traded letter press printing for new electronic technology, but not without a long and bitter dispute with the unions. However, letter press printing hasn’t died. In fact, it has become more common in small presses, where quality is of paramount importance. A tradition that has lasted for over 500 years is still alive and well.
A good 19th century compositor, working by hand, could have set and imposed a whole page of the Caxton Bible – around 2,750 characters – in little
more than three hours.
Albert Holcombe, aged 81, operates the printing press for the South Devon Weekly Express – a newspaper he owned
and produced single-handedly – in September 1952
Rolls of newsprint are fed through the presses at the Morning Post print works in London, 1920
A compositor makes up a line of text at the Cambridge University Press