How The News Has Changed Its Face (26 August 1978)

Learning Pitman’s shorthand, old edition (which many old reporters believe was actually faster than any revised edition brought out since).  The first things to learn about abbreviated longhand was what not to abbreviate, chief of which were the words `not’, `no’ and `never’.  It was hoped this would help to prevent disasters such as “He said he had shot her” for “He said he had not shot her.”  Nor was it permissible to abbreviate any words which were not on the accepted list, however sensible it might seem to do so in the context.

Each letter or combination of letters represented one word only.  Thus `w’ was always `with’, never `will’ or `well’, and `wh’ was always `which’ never `where’ or whether’.  Any word of more than two syllables finishing with `ing’ (excepting proper nouns) could be written with just a `g’ for the `ing’.  Any word of more than two syllables ending in `tion’ could be written with just an underscored `n’ for the `tion’.  The word `the’ was in full where it began a sentence, otherwise it was written with a downstroke impossible to duplicate on a typewriter, the nearest thing to it being `l’.  The ampersand was already an abbreviation but could be further abbreviated in various understood ways.

The result of all this was that a sentence such as “It was said of him that he preferred handwriting, with which he would have been more familiar”.  Seventeen words, 11 of them abbreviated.

The compositors (known as “comps”) were clever men – as they still are, though in different ways.  Lashings of abbreviated copy showered on them in all kinds of fists, but they took it all in their stride.

In my early days copy was still ordered to be written not in so many words or inches, but in so many “sticks.”  This was a terminological relic of the old hand-setting days.

What a “stick” boiled down to was 20 lines of the newspaper’s body type at a single column’s width.  Very hard to assess in abbreviated handwriting but easy in full-out typewriting, which can be done at much the same speed and is now the rule.

Talking about comps being clever men, I remember one extreme case on a northern daily newspaper.  One night it found itself without financial sub-editors, who are specialists in that line.  Then it was remembered that Mr. Bright in the case room had been dealing with the financial pages at the setting machine and on the stone for the past 20 years.  After rapid consultations, he was set down at the subs’ table still in his printer’s apron and made such a good job of it that he remained there up to his retirement and always in his apron.

The newspaper trade is apt to be compartmentalised, but it has always paid me – if nothing more – to know my printer colleagues, their outside interests and so forth.  Even this post-retirement column has benefitted.  My article on the old Town Band was checked for technical details with a comp who I knew to be a bandsman elsewhere.  And when I wrote about the Salvation Army I was helped by a Salvationist proof-reader.  I have known reporters to go “all round the moon” when the information they wanted resided in some person in the next room.

And I remember with affection the days when the Gazette was published by Bletchley Printers Ltd in the Central Gardens approach road. With people like Mr. Harold Price and Mr. Ron Staniford among the “white collar” jobs and half a dozen others like Mr. Doug Dimmock and Mr. Bert Culley among the printing jobs, all living in the town and all popping their heads into the Gazette cubby-hole from time to time with “Have you heard that …..” there was little wonder that on the general release of newsprint after the war the Gazette’s sales quickly exceeded the number of houses in the district.