Background

In 1878 Thomas Yen­dall took over a print­ing busi­ness start­ed by John Tay­lor eight years ear­li­er. The firm became a lim­it­ed com­pa­ny in 1911. By 1925 type cast­ing had start­ed under the name ​‘Riscatype’. Ten years lat­er print­ing stopped and Yen­dall con­cen­trat­ed on the man­u­fac­ture of type. In 1984 Yen­dall and Co. went into vol­un­tary liq­ui­da­tion.

The firm had cast type using Mono­type machines, housed in a cramped green met­al build­ing in Risca, South Wales. Mr Williams — at one time an appren­tice at Riscatype — let me know that theirs was one of the largest foundries in the world with 11 Mono­type Super­cast­ers and 20 Mono­type Com­po­si­tion cast­ers. Only Mould­type could match their qual­i­ty.

Steve Nash Recollections

Your pho­to [above] is indeed the entrance to the Lon­don Office. Red Lion Court EC4.

The ground floor entrance led to a ​“Trade Counter” manned by Joe Pegg, Char­lie some­one and Joe Beau­mont, who han­dled the orders which includ­ed the famous ​“sorts” ser­vice — maybe a ref to ​“liquorice all­sorts” as the requests came in thick and fast (inc an all night ser­vice obvi­ous­ly sup­ply­ing to nation­al news­pa­per dead­lines) for orders large and small of type that was either need­ed sim­ply because they’d run out of a par­tic­u­lar fount; maybe just a Cap H, an accent­ed char­ac­ter, maybe just some ​‘scream­ers’ (excla­ma­tion marks!) or for whole blocks of founts.

These piles of heavy met­al type filled the stock room next door manned by Peter Braith­waite. Next to that was the Despatch Depart­ment run by John Red­ding, anoth­er ridicu­lous­ly busy area full to the ceil­ing with Postage and Rail (BRS) pack­ages and ship­ments to and from the foundry in Risca, ​“New­port Mon” as it was known. Van dri­vers com­ing and going as well — any­way you get the pic­ture. It was the hey­day of the print­ing era of Lon­don and Fleet Street, and great old pubs and char­ac­ters.

In your pho­to you’ll see the floors above — they housed the type­set­ting on one floor and the ​“cast­ers” (type­cast­ers that I recall were real­ly loud in oper­a­tion and you could hard­ly hear any­one above the con­stant din) on anoth­er floor above that.

For one day a week I was the most pop­u­lar per­son in the whole of the build­ing, as I toured the many depart­ments with the wage pack­ets (cash of course) hav­ing myself done all the cal­cu­la­tions as offi­cial wages clerk. I was in trou­ble though if I got someone’s over­time wrong or over­looked their hol­i­day pay! It was a use­ful man­u­al­ly cal­cu­lat­ed skill and long before com­put­ers, taught to me by ​“old man” Williams, father of the David I men­tioned ear­li­er. He was the Lon­don ​“big boss”, in his own plush office (with padded walls for sound­proof­ing for board meet­ings) which opened out into the much smarter area of Crane Court, which today still runs par­al­lel to Red Lion Court. Yen­dalls occu­pied the whole build­ing front to back.

The Print­ing & Esti­mat­ing man­ag­er who gave me my first job (as his assis­tant) was Peter Broughton, to whom I am eter­nal­ly grate­ful and with­out whom I wouldn’t be typ­ing this. Start­ing salary: Thir­teen pounds, ten shillings per week. I was there from 1969–1973, when my broth­er lured me away by start­ing an adver­tis­ing stu­dio in the West End which need­ed an Office manager/Costing & Esti­ma­tor — so it was a ​“no brain­er” to car­ry my Yen­dalls expe­ri­ence for­ward, albeit sor­ry to leave Fleet Street and my work­mates.

I often still vis­it the area and see the old offices, even if the local water­ing hole The Red Lion, long since demol­ished, is now just a mem­o­ry of Fri­day nights.

I was sad­dened to read that Riscatype/Yendall And Co went into liq­ui­da­tion in 1984. On reflec­tion, my guess on the source of your Mr Williams quote may have been Bryn Williams, who for many years was the Sales Direc­tor or pos­si­bly MD of the Risca foundry. I dealt with him via teleprint­er* direct link between the Wales and Lon­don Offices along with anoth­er ​‘big boss’ Jack Yen­dall. When ​“Mr Jack” as he was known got on the phone, or paid a vis­it to Lon­don, we all had to be on our absolute­ly best behav­iour.

I’ll have a look to see if I can find my old book of type­faces. A collector’s item accord­ing to Google/AI. Hold my mem­o­ries for now, I’d love to track down that book first…

*Teleprint­er (now called a Vidiprint­er or vide­print­er): They still as I’m sure you know use these on foot­ball scores being punched in live on TV from Press Offices/Agencies. It was always a nervy job hav­ing live chats with Risca as my every typ­ing error (and obvi­ous lack of speed) was cru­el­ly exposed. That’s where I recall Bryn Williams, as he used it quite a lot (much cheap­er than phone calls back then) and was miles faster than me and every time I had to reply, usu­al­ly because our trained touch typist/receptionist was on her lunch break, I knew he was sit­ting there in South Wales think­ing he should put the ket­tle on wait­ing for my mes­sage to final­ly arrive.

Credits

Thanks to Steve Nash for shar­ing his mem­o­ries to pub­lish here.

Head­er Image: ​“Riscatype type spec­i­men book” flickr pho­to by Nick Sher­man https://flickr.com/photos/nicksherman/8271679053 shared under a Cre­ative Com­mons (BY-NC-SA 2.0) license