Stop Press: A compositor’s life on Fleet Street

A conversation hosted online and at St Bride Library to offer insight into the trade of letterpress printing on Fleet Street as experienced by former compositor and ‘journeyman’ Michael Clayton. Fleet Street is known as the historic heart of British journalism, with major newspapers such as ‘The Times’, ‘The Daily Telegraph’ and the ‘Daily Express’ once based there. Below the floors of journalists were the printing presses and the strongly unionised industrial world of commercial newspaper composition and printing.

The conversation was semi-structured in that I had prepared questions around certain themes in advance, so that we could align our words to relevant images being screened as we spoke. The aim overall was to talk through the realities of working with letterpress in an industrial context so that a contemporary audience might better understand the significance of the knowledge held by the last generations of trained compositors.

The conversation explored:
. The economies of a 6-year apprenticeship and a trade education
. Cultures of bullying and ‘banging out’ ceremonies
. Precarious employment and working as a journeyman
. The ‘village’ of Fleet Street
. A typical day working on press
. Working with the news and stopping the press
. Camaraderie, community and printers’ slang
. Wapping and Unionization
. Legacy and the value of St Bride

Contribution to knowledge:
. to articulate of the lived-experiences of a Fleet Street ‘journeyman’ to inform contemporary understanding of letterpress history, and more especially, to counter an overly romanticised narrative of historical letterpress practices with the realities of a far more brutal account of an industrial and unionised trade.
. To situate the contemporary St Bride letterpress workshops within a wider and local history of printing that shaped the lives of those producing, as well as reading, the newspapers on press.
. to surface the complicit cultures of bullying – incredibly touching to witness

In summary this was a widely accessible event (with ongoing free access to the recording) which affirmed the ongoing contribution to typographic knowledge-building of a last generation compositors – those still able to operate the trade machinery that still survives and will outlast them. We need their knowledge to be able to maintain such machines and work with them going forwards. The positioning of this event in a wider design event beyond a specialist printing-history context also offered designers and illustrators, as well as contemporary letterpress practitioners, cultural insights on an era of letterpress history that is rarely discussed at such a human level.

• Organisation