Gerry worked in the printing industry for 50 years and talks about his experiences from being taken on as a young apprentice compositor and how the industry changed during his working life.
Applying to be an apprentice
Why the printing industry? I was due to leave school in July 1962 without any real thoughts of what trade interested me. My uncle was a compositor in the printing industry, so it was suggested that it might be an ideal choice for me, as the prospects were good. Consequently, I decided to pursue applying for an apprenticeship as a compositor.
At that time you didn’t just wander down the road to the nearest printer and bang on the door. I discovered that the trade was much more organised than that! There was a body called the Joint Industrial Council (JIC), and, in those days the JIC was to be found in all the major towns or cities of each county. There was a JIC that covered the printing industry in both Norwich and Ipswich, so I first applied to Norwich. There was an annual entry process and unfortunately, I had just missed the cut-off date. I then contacted Ipswich, to be told that although the entry date had been passed, they were short of applications for compositors, so they would consider my late application. I promptly wrote off, hoping that they would just give me a chance.
The procedure at that time was as follows, based on the satisfactory information you’d provided in your letter of application you would be invited for a first interview to assess your overall suitability. If this was successful you would then progress to the examination stage. The entrance exam for getting an apprenticeship in the printing industry in those days was very similar to the exam you’d take for entering a technical college. There was an intelligence test, and tests in English, comprehension and maths which lasted a whole day. Following the first interview and the examination I received a letter inviting me to a second interview.
The second interview, was at 2pm and to be held at Cowells, the major printers in Ipswich. At that time, I was attending a boarding school in Holt, in North Norfolk. So my dear old Dad had to take the day off work, drive from our home in Diss up to Holt to pick, me up and then drive me to Ipswich. He parked up nearby, and off I went expecting an interview with a panel of assessors, only to find myself in a room of about 40 or so applicants who’d all also been invited for a two o’clock interview!
We were called for in alphabetical order, my surname is Morris, so I’m always well down the alphabet. At the end of the interview we were asked to return to the waiting room and then recalled in alphabetical order. The first recalled candidate came out and announced: ’Ooh, I’ve got a job at ‘YXZ’ Press and I’m starting on the 8th of August. So, we candidates took it for granted we’d all been successful and were about to be given details of our employment. I remember an applicant called Adrian who came out after his recall in tears, and said: ‘I haven’t got a job’. So suddenly, as you can imagine, the atmosphere in that waiting room changed quite dramatically.
Eventually I was called in, and they asked me a few final question and was then given an eye test to ensure that I wasn’t colour blind. I was then informed: ‘You have reached the required standard and you’ve been selected to work at the East Anglian Daily Times, Ipswich and they will write to you with further details.
I didn’t realise at the time that the selection process was a bit of a stitch up, because the chairman of the JIC for the printing industry in Ipswich also happened to be the chairman of Cowells printers, and the secretary of the JIC was also the Finance Director of the East Anglian Daily Times! I also discovered that based on the examination alone, the first and second highest passes were automatically selected as compositors for Cowells, and the third and fourth went to the East Anglian Daily Times. So, ‘Mr non-academic’ (that’s me), was quite chuffed to find that I’d come somewhere in the top four.
After about three and a half hours, I eventually got back to where Dad was parked. If you gave him an opportunity to have a nap, he’d soon be asleep. When I opened his van door, he woke up and said: ‘Where the hell have you been?’ I replied: ’For an interview’. ‘For three and a half hours, I don’t think so’. He then asked: ‘How did you get on?’ and I replied: ‘I’ve got a job at the East Anglian Daily Times and they’ll write to me with details.’ This was in early July. The weeks went by, I had heard nothing, but I found out later that the East Anglian Daily Times’ policy was to start their new apprentices in the first week of September, whereas the guys that were offered jobs at most of the other companies were starting within a couple of weeks. I remember during August Dad said to me: ‘You got it wrong again boy, you always do and there’s no job coming’.
Starting my apprenticeship
Eventually the letter came, and I set out on my journey in the printing industry. I’m rather embarrassed to admit that, when I started out, I wasn’t sure what a compositor was! So for the benefit of this tale, a compositor is a person who sets type, but the job is much more than just that. Compositors don’t just set type, they also process the type once it’s been set. It has to be made up into pages, adverts, brochures, books or magazines, and then imposed. Imposition is when the pages are laid out to a specific layout to ensure that when the printed sheets of paper are folded and trimmed the pages will read in chronological order.
It was not a lightweight job and often involved heavy lifting. Type is an alloy of lead, and to prepare it for printing it is locked up in a cast iron frame called a forme (correct spelling), and the whole thing is very heavy. So, it’s manual labour to a certain extent, but necessary within a craft industry.
The days were varied and interesting. In those days, printing was the best paid craft industry. It was a good industry to be part of, and I felt very fortunate to have made it through the application process. The apprenticeship scheme was run in association with the City and Guilds system. We were released from work to technical college one day a week and also attended evening classes on two evenings for vocational studies that and were totally printing industry related.
My vocational studies were as a compositor within the print industry, but it embraced all the other aspects of printing, incorporating, origination, printing, binding, estimating and technical studies. Through these processes, you completed the circle of producing print, whether it be for a leaflet, a magazine or a full-blown book. You learned all these things though practical experience as well as technical training during your apprenticeship.
City and Guilds investigators visited the print firms to make sure that they were keeping their end of the bargain. The whole system was extremely well-managed, which is why most of the apprentice-trained workers came out with a really good grounding. I feel privileged to have gone through this system, although I wasn’t aware of it at the time. My apprenticeship lasted six years and during the first 3 months I had to go through a probation period during which time the print firm could decide if you were the right material for the job, and that you were happy your choice of career.
After the probation period, you’d sign your indentures. and that really fixed you in for the next six years. There were one or two guys who decided after a year or two it wasn’t for them, and their employers tended to not hold them to their indenture. However, most of us were satisfied that it was worth seeing the apprenticeship through, and coming out fully qualified.
On the day that I started, there were about a dozen of us, compositors, printers and binders, maybe more than that. I was taken on as a compositor on the newspaper section, but they also had a magazine department and a general print side and during my apprenticeship I was trained in all the departments. It was a big company and employed a lot of people, hence the large apprentice intake.
During my vocational studies, I started looking at the new technologies that were emerging. Within a couple of years, I realised that I was almost being trained for obsolescence. The printing industry, as we understand it, started in about 1450, and a lot of the techniques hadn’t changed greatly from then. Obviously there had been advances, specifically with mechanical typesetting, techniques had greatly improved, but the actual process hadn’t changed much.
By the middle 1960s change was on the horizon. For over 400 years all typesetting was produced by hand, with mechanical typesetting first emerging in the late 19th century. The first computerised typesetting systems arrived in the mid-60s but it did not hit the industry big time until the early 70s.
Life as an apprentice
Printing was very much a factory environment. Although we were producing quality items, the working conditions were very much what you would find in any factory, and that in itself was an experience. On my first day at work, the most shocking thing I discovered was that grown-up men used bad language! I thought that was the preserve of naughty schoolboys behind the bike shed! I didn’t hear my dad use bad language and adults at my home didn’t either. But they certainly did at work.
It was also a noisy environment, because we worked amongst the mechanical type setting machines. In the composing area, we had machines that would cast display lines of type, and they were also very noisy. With so many men working together it was never a quiet environment, there was always a bit of cat calling. Because newspaper production was expected within short timescales, the night shift produced the daily paper, and the day shift produced the evening paper. On both of those shifts, the staff were working towards the cut-off time when the printing would take place. You could feel the atmosphere growing in the anticipation of getting that paper out on the streets.
Back in those days, most publications went out mostly error-free. Something you rarely see today! We had an active reading department and everything was checked. For a newspaper, all the news type setting would be done mechanically. All setting was proofed, and everything went into the reading box, where the readers would check through the proofs for errors. The marked proof would go back to the operator for him to correct his mistakes. The corrected lines of type would then go to the correcting rack, and the corrector would drop them in replacing incorrect lines with corrected ones.
As you got closer to press printing time, you would have the correctors competing with the compositors who made up the pages, because of the time pressure there was always competition as they both had a job to do before the pages could go to press. The corrector had to ensure that what was going to press got corrected, so you had to stand your ground!
As correcting was often done by an apprentice, there’d be a journeyman (someone who has completed an apprenticeship) trying to push you out of the way, so you’d elbow your way in as the corrections had to be done. It was all accepted as part and parcel of the process, but it was an interesting experience and sort of prepared you for life, there’s was no doubt about that. The journeyman realised the job had got to be done, but if they could scare you off, it would make their life easier. You’d get their respect if you stood your ground.
Time pressures of producing a newspaper
As a daily paper, the EADT schedule was a bit more relaxed than the evening newspaper. Preparing the paper started at 6.30pm and the printing started at about one in the morning. The papers came off the press, folded, finished, counted and wrapped in quires (twenty fives). They’d be distributed by van and train across Suffolk, Norfolk and Essex from 2am. Papers would be in the shops from around 4am. As the EADT would be read across a large area the papers would go out on the early trains, or in vans to places the trains didn’t reach.
The evening paper was produced by the day shift and was more up to the minute regarding news. In 1962 on the Home Service, you would get the eight o’clock news in the morning, the one o’clock news at lunchtime and the six o’clock news in the evening. You could also pick up a few newscasts on the Light Programme, but you couldn’t scroll down your phone and see the latest news. So the newspapers were very much the immediate providers of national and local news. The first edition of the evening paper would be on the streets and in the shops at 1pm.
If you liked a little bit of a bet, you’d have to wait for a later edition for the racing results. There would be several edition changes in the afternoon so the very keenest guys would be out there for each print run change to see how their gee-gees had done! I don’t gamble, but I do know that if you went to the bookies in those days, you would find the latest editions of the racing pages from the Evening Star pinned up on the wall so punters could go in and see how the results went.
Newspapers were cheap then. I think a daily newspaper sold for four pence whereas the evening paper was still only three pence, so people who had read the morning paper with their breakfast, could pick up the first edition of the evening paper when they went out for lunch at 1 o’clock or the last on their way home. There was half a column on the back page of the paper headed, ‘Latest news.’ For instance, if it came down the wire that an important politician had died or something similar, you couldn’t stop the paper going out because it was running to a timetable, but what you could do was add information via the ‘Latest News’ column, often a blank half column on the back page.
If you were in the main production room where type was set and made up into pages you may hear a shout, ‘Fudge up!’ I didn’t mean, ‘If you come over here, I’ll give you a bit of chocolate Fudge’, It meant a Linotype Operator had got some ‘Latest News’ copy, so you would immediately jump to it. There were several fudge boxes. The lines of type of ‘Latest News’ would be positioned in the boxes by the compositor, locked up, then run down to the Press Room where they would be clicked into the Press. The Fudge Boxes were geared to go at the same speed as the machine and printed accurately onto the blank column. That was how they achieved immediacy using technology of the day.
Apprentice rituals
There were ‘initiation ceremonies’ for the apprentices, which would vary and quite often involved printing ink. Printing ink is like lard, in that it’s not runny. In preparation for printing, you would put printing ink onto a rolling system, (either by hand or mechanically), and the friction of the rollers working in tandem reduced the viscosity of the ink to make it spreadable and usable. But in its raw form, it’s like a paste, and it wasn’t uncommon for a new apprentice to have the ink, shall we say, ‘applied’. That pair of pants would never come clean again! Of course, it could be quite a visual thing, so the bindery girls would like to come up and see the ritual! However, as an initiation ritual it was dying out, I think there was a lot of objection to it at the time. After I started my apprenticeship these practices disappeared, but not soon enough for me, I’m afraid that I was caught! One of the last, I suppose.
Being an apprentice was a bit of a pantomime on occasions, but great fun, and I met some amazing characters. There were a number of snuff takers amongst the older generation in the industry, and I thought this was the most unpleasant habit you could ever entertain! It was bad enough that we all smoked in those days, although many of us saw sense and gave up. There was an apprenticeship pecking order. If the most senior apprentice came in one day smoking the new cigarette of the day, which back then was Embassy, suddenly all the apprentices smoked them! It might then change to smoking Senior Service.
The other thing I remember is that the night shift would finish at, say, two in the morning. If there were holidays, and the day shift was a bit short on workers, the foreman would leave a note to ask if anybody on nights would like to come in and do a few hours on days, as we’d be desperate for Linotype operators, or compositors. They’d would ring up and book a starting time, because they might not have got home until about three in the morning they wouldn’t be in at eight thirty, but probably nearer 10, and work on until the middle of the afternoon. The minute anyone from nights stepped on to the shop floor, everyone would start singing, ‘Night and day, you are the one.’ I think it’s from the film ‘Top Hat’. It never failed to amuse, and it was just another thing that happened in our work environment. Most of those fantastic characters are no longer with us, but they certainly marked our lives and they taught us a lot.
At noon on the last day of your apprenticeship, you collected your indentures and this was accompanied with being ‘Banged Out’. In those days, there was a lot of metal in the building, the galleys and a lot of the frames were made from it. Everybody would get hold of something metal, and bang loudly on other metal items hence the expression ‘Banged Out.’ That was an extremely noisy acknowledgement that your apprenticeship was finished.
Apprentices were paid a percentage of the journeyman’s weekly pay which increased each year to two thirds in year 6. The first year I earned three pounds, five shillings a week. By the end of my apprenticeship, I was earning about 14 quid. For a twenty year-old apprentice in 1968 this was quite good money so sticking with the apprenticeship was worth it.
Moving on
I finished my apprenticeship in 1968 after 6 years and I was already getting a bit disillusioned with the way the trade was moving. Instead of working with three-dimensional type which is how letterpress printing works, we were expected to use a two-dimension product. It would either be paper bromides to paste up, or film to impose. I found this to be less appealing, so I started to ponder on what else I might like to do. I was pretty knowledgeable about the industry and had acquired good qualification and there was a lot about the industry that I liked. So I looked at the prospects of coming off the shop floor, but the problem was, that for those vacancies, they wanted people with experience, and of course I didn’t have any. I decided that one way I could obtain experience was by joining Her Majesty’s Stationery Office (HMSO), the government printers. HMSO decentralised the majority of its operation from central London to Norwich. During my time there I learned much about administrative skills but found the rigid procedures and contract purchasing system very restricting and after a year I decided it was time to move on.
Joining the BBC
I was sitting at my desk at the HMSO thinking, ‘What have I done, this HMSO job is not what I signed up for.’? Then a colleague of mine showed me a job advertisement and said: ‘If I was your age, this is the sort of job that I would apply for.’ It was a print buying job at BBC Publications in London. They were effectively publishers, and of course famously they published the Radio Times and The Listener. But as an aside to that they also published lots of educational leaflets and brochures to go alongside both TV and radio programmes, they also produced a lot of general books. A successful TV programme would often be accompanied by a book. Cookery became a very big thing, with people like Delia Smith and others. They also published do-it-yourself books, tailoring books, historical information and a whole host of subjects. ‘Civilisation’ (a TV documentary series) was also big at that time as well. From the outside, it looked like quite a small production department, but it produced an awful lot of work.
I applied for and got the job, and moved to the BBC as a buyer. For all the very varied work that crossed the desks of the print buyers, we had to look for suitable printers. If you’ve got a big run of a four-colour book, you’re not going to place it with a little printer around the corner. You’d actually approach printers that specialised in that area and ask the suitable ones for quotations, and you would normally accept the best quote, bearing in mind that the lowest prices may not always be the best. You’d think to yourself ‘does this company produces really good quality and service?’, you could not afford to be let down. A printer may come in with a cheap price and you’d think,’ I’m going to ignore that quote, because last time we didn’t have a very good experience’. But you always had to justify the reason for why you’d place the job at a certain price.
The reps who came in from the printing companies would be trying to convince you that they were the people that you should deal with. But, of course, it went a bit deeper than that, because at the end of the day, you might have a very good printer but the rep who came in was a right idiot, or unreliable. Some would come in and say; ‘It’s almost lunchtime, do you fancy a quick beer across the road in the pub?’ Well, it would have be rude to say no, wouldn’t it? I have to say that in those days the printing industry had a really healthy attitude towards entertainment. So, yes, that was quite interesting, as I quite liked spending time with people, and I certainly liked having a beer!
BBC Publications was keen to attract young people with trade experience and train them on the job. This was probably because they weren’t the best payers. However, if you stayed with the BBC it was well known that you would come out with a good pension and lots of other fringe benefits. The standing joke then was that you had to go to work ‘suited and booted’ and the suits had to be of a particular design; they had to be small checks – just like the salaries! But through promotion, you could actually find yourself some very good jobs there. I worked for the BBC for two years and had a great time there. The thing is if you joined the BBC, you didn’t become established for two years, which was when you would start to get all the benefits. However, instead of giving a months’ notice you had to give three months, and I had already decided that as much as I enjoyed the BBC, sales was the career I wanted to be in. I had, and still have, a lot of friends at the BBC.
I talked earlier about the opportunities at the BBC. The Sports and Social Club had a wide range of wonderful sports facilities and lots of sections to join. I played rugby for the BBC, but there was a cricket club, a football club, tennis and squash club, well maintained were available and the tennis courts were covered for all-weather use. There was also a flying club, which owned its own plane and a sailing club with yachts available so people could learn and utilise skills. Many of the large organisations in those days offered similar facilities, so we would find that the BBC rugby club would be competing against one of the major banks, insurance companies, or big corporations. All these organisations had their own wonderful sports facilities, and most of them were dotted around south-west London. We were privileged to play against all these wonderful clubs which were funded by organisations who had the money to spend. It was a fantastic experience.
Moving into print sales
I learned a lot at the BBC, and had a great time. I discovered that virtually every printer in the land would like to have a BBC imprint on a job that they had produced. So as a consequence, we saw a daily stream of sales representatives coming in. I realised quite quickly that these reps would be wearing another new suit and driving 1.6 Cortina company car and I thought: ‘They know something that I don’t?’
Prior to joining the BBC, I was not sure if I wanted to work in London but thought I’d give it a go for a couple of years to gain some experience. In fact, I stayed for 42 years. I decided I wanted to move into sales most printing firms wanted salesmen with experience. This was a bit of a problem for me, but I managed to pick up a job at a city printer. They serviced the city of London financial areas, and they mostly did short runs, quick turn round jobs, many being produced overnight. Sadly my choice of printer was not a good one as they didn’t not keep up with modern technology. The industry had always been about high investments in the new equipment, and they weren’t not doing that. In fact, after I left them, they went into administration.
Next, I applied for a job with a big colour printer, Chorley and Pickersgill in Leeds. Sometimes, it’s not about what you know but who you know, and the advert for the job said to apply to the Sales Director and I recognised that name. When I was on day release at college as an apprentice, if you were interested in a career in teaching or becoming a lecturer you could work as a technical assistant and you would work at the college while studying for the necessary qualifications. The Sales Director had actually taken that route at Colchester Technical College where I studied during my apprenticeship. I was right about the name as I found out when I applied for the position. I didn’t actually get that job as they employed someone with more experience. Six months later he phoned me out of the blue and said: ’We’ve got a vacancy for a more junior sales guy. Would you be interested?’ I said I definitely would be, and he said, ‘We’ve already gone through all the interview process and I’ve just spoken to the Managing Director who said if that if I was available, why don’t we just go with him’. So it got nodded through, and I started in January 1974. I stayed with this company for 17 years, and eventually became their sales Director so this proved to be a good career move. When I first joined, the company was a general commercial printer. I discovered they had one publishing account with Schofield and Simms, an educational publisher, probably because they were based only a few miles from Chorley’s. I suggested that with my publishing experience I should concentrate on the publishing industry as most of it was based in London and the south. The majority of publishers produce black and white books but there was valuable turnover to be had from those publishers specialising in colour printing. The company was prepared to back my success in the publishing centre by investing in new bindery equipment suitable for volume bookwork. I built a large customer base with educational publishers, plus others who specialised in colour and ‘coffee table’ type publications.
I decided in the early 90s it was time to move on and joined a London-based colour printer as their sales and marketing director and after a couple of years decided I would prefer to work as a self-employed salesperson, earning on a commission only basis. The company was so keen to retain my services that they provided me with free office space and secretarial support even though I did not sell exclusively for them. I spent the rest of my working career as a self-employed salesman which turned out to be very lucrative and tax efficient!
Changes in the industry
A lot of the knowledge and experience I’d gained in the industry was really beneficial throughout my career. As the industry changed, and because I was working with printers who were embracing the new technology, it was much easier for me to grasp these new innovations because I understood all the basics. While computerisation took over the setting and origination side of the industry very rapidly, the industry was still very much about putting ink on paper. The big swing from letterpress to litho printing continued at pace from the early 70s.
The physicality of the job changed with computerisation. Instead of having to make up 4 separate heavy forms of lead for each colour for the letterpress process the industry moved to working with 4 pieces of film for the offset litho printing process, a much lighter to handle option. The printing presses were much more modern, but paper is a heavy commodity and still had to be manhandled. Generally, both the compositors and printers had less heavy lifting to do.
I had a 50-year career 40 in print sales and during that time saw the introduction of much new technology. Letterpress printing reigned supreme for almost 600 years but couldn’t compete with computerisation and the quality and speed of the offset litho process.
Towards the end of my career, digital printing was appearing on the horizon, and is now very prominent. This brought about more rapid change to the industry but will never compete with litho printing when producing large quantities.
During the 20 odd years I was self-employed I would regularly check and pass my own jobs on press to ensure high quality control. I knew how to read colour and this served me well throughout my whole career.
Colour printing is achieved from the combination 3 secondary colours, magenta, cyan and yellow. In theory if you add those three colours together you should get a perfect black. But the graphs aren’t quite right so black is added to correct the colour. It also allows black text to be printed as a separate part of the 4 colour process.
Interestingly, Beatrix Potter liked soft colours, and she published her books with Frederick Warne. Warne apparently instructed their printers to produce her illustrations without the black because it gave the softer the image she pr.eferred.
And In the end
I finally decided to retire at Christmas 2011 following 49 years and 4 months in the printing industry. I’m sure I’ll be forgiven when I say I had a 50 years career in printing. Online trading had almost made my type of selling redundant as customers embraced company to company communication and on-line tendering. The writing had been on the wall for a few years so I was fortunate to have customers who still preferred the old way, but I knew it wouldn’t last.
I consider myself to have been very fortunate. I acquired an apprenticeship slightly against the odds, had wonderful employment opportunities, met some fantastic people and enjoyed a lucrative and varied career.
Gerry Morris talking to WISEArchive on 11 August 2025 in Bodham. © 2025 WISEArchive. All Rights Reserved.
