A snapshot of newspaper history
Finding his pictures spurred Jeff Wright to write about how papers were put together in the past
A
lot of older NUJ members have probably been there before. An elderly relative dies. The sad business follows of sorting out their possessions. Among them
are boxes of old photographs and no one really knows the answers to the who, what, where and when questions. Recently, I discovered a couple of boxes like this in my own loft. But I’m not dead yet – well, not at the time of writing. I really should do something about these photographs, I thought, before they end up in the post-mortem skip. So I did. I made a book. It won’t be on Amazon though, it’s just for family and friends. Two Kodak photographic paper boxes had
followed me through changes of job and address over about 60 years. I certainly hadn’t treasured them and nor had they been part of a clear-out. They just sort of survived. Inside the boxes were a jumble of old personal pictures and some memorabilia. And about forty 15 × 12 inch prints, most of which had decorated the front office of the Uxbridge Weekly Post in the early 1960s. After a short time up on the wall in reception, they had been put away in the boxes in my locker and never thrown away. These images from the early 1960s are the
only surviving photographs from my 15-year career as a press photographer. They aren’t the best I ever took and they aren’t great pictures – just some of the better published photographs that we used to display in the office now and again. Like many photographers in the past, we didn’t tend to keep our pictures for posterity. I went on working as a newspaper photographer for 10 years after these were published but never kept any more. While I worked on four of five newspapers in my career, none of their photographic archives have survived. All went into landfill. Thousands of images that my colleagues and I created, now of genuine historical value, are lost. I decided to use these survivors as the basis for a book that is a social historical resource, a memoir of what it was like to be a press photographer on a local weekly newspaper in
22 | theJournalist
the chemical photography and hot metal days of the 1960s. Much later, when I left newspapers and took a degree in history and politics, I spent two years doing postgraduate research into the origins of press photography in the late 19th century. The sort of evidence I found most difficult to trace was the basic nuts and bolts of how the job was done. Using the surviving photographs, I chose to go beyond simple captions to weave a wider context, which goes some way towards explaining why and how the images were created. At the time, every newspaper’s photographic department had its own way of getting pictures on a page. I set out to write a ‘manual’, an A- Z sequence of an imaginary typical job. I wanted to explain how we worked on the Weekly Post to get photographs in that week’s paper, and to capture the various stages in the process from job chit to the presses rolling. The terms ‘heyday’ or ‘golden age’ of the press are perhaps overstated. But time is against us as hot-metal journalists, and it’s not on the side of the local and regional newspaper. When I worked in my bit of Middlesex in the 1960s, a reader going into a local newsagents with threepence or fourpence to spend on their weekly local paper had the choice of about 14 newspapers across the different areas. Most towns or suburbs had at least two competing titles to choose from – one suburb, Hayes, had four options. Today, only one print newspaper of that era survives on my old patch. This represents a dramatic loss of skills: staff reporters, photographers, subs and the
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various printing trades of compositors, Linotype operators, machine minders and delivery drivers. My plan is to donate a copy of the book and the surviving photographs to Hillingdon local history archive, the area of the now defunct Weekly Post. It’s one small, specific contribution to recording the lost world of local news in a throwaway age, when what is real, what is true, seems constantly under assault. If there are other photographers out there
It’s a small, specific contribution to recording the lost world of local news in a throwaway age
who have wondered what to do with their personal archives, whether print or digital, I’d like to encourage them to think about donating their work to their local archives. In fact, any journalists from the hot metal days might consider laying down their memories of the job. I don’t mean yet another book like the ones
we’ve all read of the funny, quirky tales of local journalism. And definitely not stories of the great and good or death and disaster. Just the day-to-day stuff of how we did it – how we got pictures and stories on the page.
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