Hav­ing already pub­lished schemes to help the print­er cost his work and pro­vide accu­rate esti­mates, the British Fed­er­a­tion of Mas­ter Print­ers turned it’s atten­tion to office pro­ce­dure and in 1965 pro­duced Print­ing Office Pro­ce­dure, a six-vol­ume work to train those new to print­ing offices in the details of admin­is­ter­ing the work that passed over their desks.  Vol­ume 1 also includes a descrip­tion of the state of the print­ing indus­try at that time.  This arti­cle looks at the way the indus­try worked.

Before we look at print­ing, it’s worth get­ting a flavour of what Britain was like in 1965.  Things look opti­mistic: the Post Office Tow­er opens, the miniskirt is sold by Mary Quant, the Gov­ern­ment looks at intro­duc­ing a drink-dri­ve alco­hol lim­it and the death penal­ty for mur­der is abol­ished.  In terms of the print­ed word, the vast major­i­ty of what you’d see is still print­ed by a print­er: the only prac­ti­cal means of get­ting words on a page for the pub­lic is to hand-write or use a type­writer.

There were 4,000 firms in the British Fed­er­a­tion of Mas­ter Print­ers (the employ­ers’ organ­i­sa­tion).  The size of the firm was gen­er­al­ly small: 40% of those firms employed few­er than ten peo­ple; 22% few­er than 24 peo­ple.  Some 220,500 staff were employed in the indus­try, but most were engaged by firms between 100 and 500 peo­ple in size.  At the top end, only 60 firms had more than 500 peo­ple and just 20 had more than 1,000 staff.

Print­ing was pre­dom­i­nant­ly let­ter­press, with off­set lith­o­g­ra­phy begin­ning to make advances that would see it eclipse let­ter­press com­mer­cial­ly.  More than 3,500 of the 4,000 firms were ​‘main­ly let­ter­press’.  Because pho­to­type­set­ting and com­put­er type­set­ting were very much in their infan­cy, where print­ers did want to print off­set they need­ed a let­ter­press orig­i­nal.  This is a curi­ous peri­od in print­ing where a very pre­cise let­ter­press process was used to gen­er­ate a copy that could be pho­tographed to make a litho plate.  Only 10% of the firms were ​‘main­ly litho’, the remain­der being pho­togravure.  Some print­ers had more than one process in-house and some used addi­tion­al process­es: col­lo­type, die-stamp­ing, flex­o­graph­ic print­ing, for exam­ple.

The report notes that ​“Every town in Great Britain of rea­son­able size is served by a num­ber of small­er print­ers, orig­i­nal­ly estab­lished to meet the demand for gen­er­al print­ing in their own local­i­ty”.  There are some sig­nif­i­cant excep­tions, how­ev­er, where spe­cialised process­es or cen­tres are estab­lished to serve one par­tic­u­lar mar­ket.  There was also a ten­den­cy to move away from the cen­tre of cities since World War II when dam­age to build­ings forced some firms to relo­cate to oth­er areas.

Step­ping back at lit­tle and look­ing at these num­bers, it’s easy to see that a great sec­ondary indus­try was need­ed to sup­port these busi­ness­es and employ­ees.  While paper con­sump­tion may have changed lit­tle, it’s the ink mak­ers, print­ers’ engi­neers and fur­nish­ers, press mak­ers and type founders that would have relied on that mass of let­ter­press print­ers.

In terms of organ­i­sa­tion, the indus­try was gov­erned by a num­ber of organ­i­sa­tions — know­ing that they had been under some sort of organ­i­sa­tion since Eliz­a­bethan times.  Employ­ers were grouped in the News­pa­per Pro­pri­etors’ Asso­ci­a­tion and gen­er­al print­ers in the British Fed­er­a­tion of Mas­ter Print­ers.  Employ­ees unions were grouped in to the Print­ing and Kin­dred Trades Fed­er­a­tion with 386,000 mem­bers.

Print­ers were still keen to secure the best advice to improve the process and PIRA, the research organ­i­sa­tion for the paper and board, pack­ag­ing and print­ing, filled this role.  It was fund­ed by ​‘vol­un­tary sub­scrip­tions’ from firms but also a Gov­ern­ment grant.  They offered tech­ni­cal sup­port and car­ried out their own research with phys­i­cal, chem­i­cal, bio­log­i­cal and mechan­i­cal test­ing exper­tise.

Edu­ca­tion was some­thing encour­aged by employ­ers and employ­ees alike.  There were three major routes in to the indus­try: a tra­di­tion­al appren­tice with release to study part-time; entry to the office with qual­i­fi­ca­tions from the BFMP; and final­ly full-time study at one of the many local spe­cialised tech­ni­cal col­leges.  The key col­leges being Lon­don Col­lege of Print­ing, Man­ches­ter Col­lege of Art and Design, Leeds Col­lege of Tech­nol­o­gy, Wat­ford Col­lege of Tech­nol­o­gy, Edin­burgh’s Napi­er Tech­ni­cal Col­lege and Glas­gow Col­lege of Print­ing.  The Insti­tute of Print­ing was a body to set stan­dards for exam­i­na­tions in the craft side of the indus­try.

This ends our look at 1965: let­ter­press was still dom­i­nant, hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple worked in the indus­try all sup­port­ed by a vast web of sup­pli­ers and man­u­fac­tur­ers and print­ing was done local­ly in your own town.