I was employed at the HMSO as a Linotype Operator on individual piece work, on nights, from 1958 until 1972.
We worked on Hansard, which was all that was said in the House of Commons and Lords, the House of Commons was 48 pages and the Lords 36. The setting measure was 15 ems 10pt Times roman and italic. The night rate cover was £7 10s. corrected, and you had to set 1492 lines to achieve this. The price per thousand ens was governed by The London Scale of prices, which was drawn up by our union, The London Society of Compositors.
I worked on the night shift in Drury Lane, until we were transferred to Pocock Street in the 1960s. At Drury Lane, there were 17 operators and we set Hansard, both Commons and Lords, all done and printed by midnight. If you were quick and clean you could cover by midnight, some feat. Today’s computers could not keep up, as nowadays, no one actually uses the shift key. On the Linotype keyboard there are 90 keys, which incorporate all punctuation, which makes it a lot faster to set, having said that we had a lot to contend with, hot metal splashes and matrixes jamming in the machine, to slow you down.
After finishing Hansard and the committees we would start on The London Gazette, which was easier to set 17 ems 8pt Period. Today it is not proper print, with all the terrible word breaks and the type arranged on the left, it looks as though the machine’s quader had been left on, a very technical point.
Still, I had the best print experience that anyone could have. We worked very hard and had good times. We worked four nights a week, Monday to Friday, 40 hours a week. In 1960, we all had three weeks holiday, two in the summer and one in the winter, with all the Bank holidays taken as extra days, thanks to the best union in the world The London Society of Compositors. Everyone served 7 or 6 years apprenticeship. Ended up on the Daily Mirror, just saw the computer age start. Ended up being shafted by Maxwell but that’s another story.
Hello Roy, Thank you for your most interesting email which I have copied to a few others who will be familiar with those far-off days in Print. Some of my own relatives worked on the newspapers during the 1950s – mainly machine-minding. When I worked for HMSO in Atlantic House in the 1960s the Maxwell empire moved the offices of the Daily Mirror to Holborn. A friend of mine worked in the London office of the Southampton Evening News, and Fleet Street was alive in those days.
Best wishes, Reg Walker.