Getting Into Print

Well, I have started on a rambling recollection of my days at the London Water Closet, so I might as well continue.

  

 
It was after I left Junior House that I found a good way to skive out of most (if not all) of the compulsory sport: the College Press, aka the printing project. Hidden behind the school's admin bloc and the headmaster's office was the printing shop, a large room with a strong smell of ink and an old Cropper Minerva printing press. Don't let your fingers get squashed during printing - this is the origin of the phrase "To come a Cropper".  

  

I must confess

I love my press,

For when I print

I know no stint

Of joy.

 

 
Well, my joy was to get out of games. As well as teaching Latin, Mr. R.T. Davies, aka the Rather Tubby Dinosaur, was the master in charge of the College Press. R.T.D. was usually in a panic because some programmes had not been printed for the upcoming school play or there was some other printing job that needed to be done in a hurry, so my friend Malcolm and I would volunteer to do it if Roger got us out of games that afternoon.

 

 

That room with the old printing press, the wooden trays of lead type, the sticky (and stinky) old ink and the reek of Swarfega, became my haven, a refuge, almost a common room. My friend Malcom and I managed to get duplicate keys made, so we could come and go as we pleased. Printing became a hobby, something to keep me busy, a strange blend of the physical, the mechanical and the artistic. There was a certain frisson when I looked around the Gavin Hall and saw everyone reading their programmes for a school play, programmes that I had designed and printed. 

  

I think that it was in my Lower Sixth year that the Heidelberg press arrived, a gift from a wealthy parent. It was a splendid machine, much more modern and automated than the old Cropper: faster, powered by electricity and at first rather intimidating. My friend Malcolm loved this new machine. He and young Chris Blade were the only people who knew how to operate it. Incidentally, in case you are wondering, I can still remember the German for "fast printing machine". It is schnell pressen fabrik. Well, now you know.  

  

  
Yes, the Printing Shop was one of my favourite places at LWC and I certainly spent a lot of time there. At one point, I even considered doing an apprenticeship with a firm of printers in Southampton, but I think that my parents would never have agreed to this. In many ways, it was a good thing that I stayed at LWC, as this kind of printing has been a victim of computerization. Printing with letterpress, using technology that was much the same as in the days of Guttenberg, has almost completely disappeared today, like the making of illuminated manuscripts or cave painting, replaced in this IT age with MS Publisher and those dull, boring and efficient laser printers.

   

Here is a rather pompous and self-congratulatory piece that I wrote for the school magazine, The Sower. Well, I suppose it made a change from the interminable rugby reports and the dreary account of the CCF camp.