My first visit to Fleet Street was in 1954 as an apprentice stereotyper (we made printing plates from
hot metal which was an alloy of lead, tin and antimony and our workshops were called foundries).
One day a week I attended the London School of Printing in Stamford Street, from there I would
walk past Fleet Street to Back Hill in Clerkenwell where we studied metallurgy.
My apprenticeship which was in Watford where I was living, finished in 1960 and I wanted to work
in London, so I took a vacancy at Fleetway Press in Southwark, working on magazines and
comics, I think my wages were about £18-19 per week. The journey to work from Watford sometimes
took about two hours so I moved to a bedsit in Clapham South and from there I could get to work
in about half an hour.
I left Fleetway in 1961 and took a job at Crawford Foundry in Turnmill Street Clerkenwell,
a trade house making plates of pictures and ads that were used in magazines and newspapers.
At that time there was no shortage of work and I remember one man starting a job on Monday
morning and leaving at lunchtime to find another job in the afternoon. Clerkenwell was an interesting
area to work in, there were good pubs, Italian cafes, Leather Lane market and second hand book
stalls in Farringdon Road. I worked in several trade houses but during the 1960s other processes
became more competitive, much of our work was lost and I was unemployed in 1966.
However casual shifts were available on newspapers. These shifts were called grasses, and could
vary in hours and wages - usually about £5-9, more on Saturdays as the shifts were longer.
I worked on most of the papers including smaller ones such as the Greyhound Express,
Morning Star and Hansard where I had to sign the official secrets act!
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The grasses were allocated by the London branch office of our union and could be from
about 2-5 days or nights per week. Most of the newspaper buildings were old and working
conditions were not good, but we did get plenty of breaks between pages and editions and the
Fleet Street pubs were good where you could often meet friends working on other papers.
In 1970 I obtained a permanent job on the People working Saturdays from 4pm-11.30pm. The
People was part of the IPC group which included the Daily and Sunday Mirror, Sporting Life
and Reveille, if you had a job on the People there was a progression list for applying for
vacancies within the group, so in 1973 I came up for a job on the Sporting Life, the job
consisted of four nights on the Sporting Life in the Mirror building at Holborn Circus
and Saturday on the People at Northcliffe House in Tudor Street. At that time the Mirror
group was owned by Reed International, a very good company to work for but in 1984 the papers
were sold to Robert Maxwell and from then things began to go downhill, Maxwell quickly seized
control of our pension fund and treated it as his own despite paying nothing into it.
Hot metal was replaced by photo polymer around 1986 which made a big change to our way of platemaking and although I had been working with hot metal (which consisted mostly of lead) on a daily basis for over 30 years, breathing in lead dust and fumes especially when cleaning (drossing) the metal which had to be done every day, when I had a blood test it did not show more than a normal level of lead and I think my workmates were the same.
In 1988 printing moved from Holborn to Stamford Street and Watford, we had been invited to apply for our jobs under less favourable conditions but I decided to take redundancy instead and retrained in Litho platemaking. So ended my working life in Fleet Street.
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