List of contents

Introduction   posted 3/05/19

Chronology   posted 1/05/19

Photograph of Bembridge School, c.1960  posted 22/07/19

J.H. Whitehouse and ‘creative education’  posted 2/12/19

The society of the printing room   posted 6/06/19

Premises and equipment to 1940   posted 3/05/19

Production to 1940   posted 7/05/19

Early exhibitions   posted 13/05/19

The inspections of 1932 and 1949  posted 14/05/19

‘An unorthodox visitor’: Joseph Thorp   posted 7/07/19

A defection: Ronald Muirhead   posted 1/05/19

‘Printed for the Yellowsands Press’: the 1930s nativity plays

     posted 14/05/19

Evacuation: printing at Coniston  posted 9/05/19

Some aspects of printing practice   posted 26/09/19

Reform and renewal: printing after 1958   posted 15/10/19

Conclusion   posted 6/12/19

Appendix: Photographs of printing at Bembridge School and other images of        the press   posted 30/04/19

Appendix: A list of the Yellowsands Press collection at the Ruskin Library,        Lancaster University   posted 29/04/19

List of sources   posted 19/09/19

Acknowledgements   posted 11/06/19

Conclusion

The printing room at Bembridge School was never intended to produce professional printers, or even lasting hobby printers (though it did both), and most people’s memories of it aren’t really of printing at all, but of good companionship and a sense of healthy exertion in getting a useful job done on time. The techniques involved only engaged a few participants closely - and scarcely interested some, who stuck with printing nonetheless, appreciating that the demands of the printing room were often much simpler and easier to negotiate than those in the art and woodwork rooms. In this there was a certain degree of failure, in educational terms, in the organisation - but a lesson in tolerance and broad-mindedness, I suppose, as well. (Another structural weakness was that as a timetabled subject aimed mainly at the lower forms, printing was widely seen simply as something one grew out of.)

After the post-war decline of the Guild system (which there isn’t the evidence to evaluate, it must be said, with any precision) there was no clear framework of progression against which boys could measure their developing skills and understanding. It was very much up to the individual to motivate himself - and the amateur printer’s pursuit of  ‘correct composition’ at the expense of consistent press-work was writ large. All but a cursory understanding of make-ready and press-work was beyond the reach of most printers.

 

Neither does there ever seem to have been much sense of the importance of design apart from printing practice (this was flagged by inspectors as early as 1932), an approach which while it accorded with the Press’s origins in the arts and crafts movement, left Yellowsands isolated from later developments in twentieth-century printing and unable to adapt and evolve as it otherwise might have done. (There is a certain pathos attached to this: as I’ve written already, I believe italic types, only acquired by Yellowsands in the early 1960s, never really sat comfortably in the pages of Bembridge School Newspaper, and it’s extraordinary to reflect how, humble as it was, that publication was still in the 1990s carrying forward a pure strain of typographic idealism with a direct line connecting it to the golden age of the private press movement.)

   

When the flowering came, with the arrival of the first jobbing platen press, Yellowsands actually took a step backwards in terms of design. The visual vocabulary of the Nine Lessons and Carols service orders derived from the world of Victorian illumination and late nineteenth-century ‘old style’. But there was nothing precious about this. For all its limitations, printing at Yellowsands never lacked point and purpose. In this case, the care lavished on the service orders was to glorify an occasion which, though it may not have been recognised at the time, had a special historical resonance at Bembridge School.

Always the energetic publicist, Whitehouse planted a publishing imperative in Bembridge printing which was difficult to challenge, the strength of the tradition of collective effort in producing the newspaper tending to marginalise individual work (much printing of interest produced at Yellowsands, including that done privately by Jim Dearden and (non-pupil) Simon Rendall, working in the holidays, is tangential, at best, to the history of the school press).

Just as Whitehouse’s discipleship exceeded anything the real Ruskin asked of his followers, so the continuing use of the Albion to print a volume (quantity) publication such as the school newspaper was highly eccentric, going far beyond what William Morris intended in his (qualified) criticism of the machine-made.

 

Most of what was printed at Yellowsands, having served its purpose in the community for which it was made, has just disappeared. But the hard work should not be forgotten. As well as Bembridge School Newspaper, over seven decades that’s hundreds and hundreds of items of mainly ephemeral printing: play, concert and Foundation Day programmes, sports fixture lists, score cards, form lists, staff lists, posters, invitation cards, headed notepaper, library index cards, bookplates, the school prospectus (in eight editions, a substantial pamphlet), greetings cards, exhibition catalogues, ‘Arrangements’ (school term schedules) lists, calendars, clothing lists, certificates, printers’ keepsakes – not to mention the numerous orders of service, which became a Bembridge speciality, including latterly, as one leafs through the old office guard-books, a most melancholy procession of staff memorials: Niel Rocke, David Mackersie, Edward Daws, F.W. Sander, Tom Stedman.

In almost every decade of its existence the Yellowsands Press inspired individuals who would make printing their career, and there is a much wider circle of former pupils, including journalists and booksellers, art teachers and architects, who would acknowledge a specific debt to their time in the printing room.

Since the school closed in 1996 the fate of its records has not been entirely happy: a good deal of historically valuable material has been lost, though the attention prompted by the recent centenary celebrations has improved the prospects for the preservation of what’s survived. In Bembridge School Newspaper, however, there remains one near-continuous record – incomplete and inconsistent in its coverage as it is - of the life of Whitehouse’s liberal and humane experiment in educational reform. 

J.H. Whitehouse and 'creative education'

‘A site [for a summer camp] should first be secured, preferably on the coast…Here should be erected a rough wooden cook-house and lavatories, and perhaps, a wooden shelter and mess-room combined.’

J.H. Whitehouse, Problems of a Scottish provincial town, 1905, p.109

In 1923, four years after the school’s foundation, John Howard Whitehouse published Bembridge: An historical and general survey by members of Bembridge School. ‘The record’, he declared (with a characteristic sweep), ‘of a co-operative experiment, voluntarily undertaken’, it is a wide-ranging study by staff and pupils of the history, natural history, geology, geography and current socio-politics of the area. In his own contribution, ‘Bembridge Today’, he doesn’t shy from making various proposals for improvements, such as a new secondary school ‘with generous facilities for creative work’, a youth club for older boys, and a craftsmen’s guild, as ‘a scientific attempt to organise crafts as a village industry’. In these, and other things, the local well-to-do are invited to realise their civic responsibilities – and one can’t help wondering how they received the suggestion. But the book’s most substantial article is more closely focused: it’s a detailed account, by the arts and crafts master Ronald Muirhead, of ‘The physical history of Yar Island’.

The name refers to the predominantly high ground, upon which Bembridge is the main settlement, to the east of the river Yar (including its ancient southern arm debouching between Yaverland and Sandown), which forms the easternmost land mass of the Isle of Wight. On the map it makes a rough parallelogram whose four corners are, to the north-west, Bembridge Point, to the north-east, the Forelands, to the south-east, Culver Cliff and Whitecliff Ledge, and to the south-west, Yarbridge, at the end of Bembridge Down. Up until the middle ages it was, at least at high tide, a separate island (Brading, as is well known, was a Roman port) and from a suitable vantage point, in the right conditions - the top of the green at St Helens, say, looking south-east on a bright winter’s morning, blue sky above, a blanket of mist covering the marshland below - it can still be seen plainly as such. ‘Lord of the valleys of peace,’ wrote Whitehouse in 1938, ‘Guard Thou our sea-girt school’.

Muirhead’s article is illustrated with a striking photograph. It shows a large-scale model, it must be several feet long, of Yar Island, made by the boys. Carefully raised from a scaled-up contour map it renders the overall shape and form of the landscape with wonderful fidelity. It would have provided a focus for learning across the curriculum and must have been fun to build and, possibly, play with. It was produced, undoubtedly, under the supervision of Ernest Baggaley, who had very recently joined the staff. A Reading science graduate, he had been employed to teach physics and chemistry, but his passion was geography (and especially, polar exploration). He, Muirhead, Whitehouse and Whitehouse’s deputy, Edward Daws, were the principal pioneers of the experiment in reformed public school education begun at Bembridge in 1919.

Daws, later head of Lindisfarne College, is sometimes described as a Christian evangelical. He was a native of the Island, from Shanklin. How he met Whitehouse isn’t known but it was Daws who in 1914 noticed a small tract of land for sale overlooking Whitecliff Bay. This Whitehouse bought (probably with funds from the philanthropist Claude Roden Buxton) at first for the use of the secondary boys’ summer camp he had been running for several years, most recently at a site near Weymouth. But with the additional purchase, a year later, of the nearby Whitecliff Bay House, formerly a hotel, he acquired the premises for the school he had been contemplating.

*

Whitehouse’s early career as a social worker and as a Liberal MP is admirably outlined in Dearden’s DNB article and can be examined in more detail in the chapter devoted to him in Stuart Eagles’s study of Ruskin’s cultural legacy, After Ruskin. Born in 1873, of modest background and with only an elementary formal education (though this would be later extended by intensive evening class studies) he had in the 1890s successfully established himself in the prosperous Birmingham Quaker milieu of the Cadburys. As an employee of their company, over a period of several years, he introduced many of the elements of a recognisably modern social welfare organisation, including the pensions scheme, a library, a youth club and works magazine. It was also at this time that he came under the influence of the writings of John Ruskin. He became committed to the furtherance of Ruskin’s work, remaining a steadfast disciple and memorialist even as the great Victorian’s reputation waned in the twentieth century. Eventually, Whitehouse assembled at Bembridge the leading collection of Ruskin’s books, letters, manuscripts and drawings.

From his time in Birmingham there emerges a man of singular self-possession (as all the portraits show), armed with unusual organisational and managerial skills (including financial control) - also an uncommon gift for persuading men of status and influence to endorse his ideas and, in a few cases, provide material support for the causes to which he would become attached. In this, we can see perhaps how an essentially Victorian habit of Carlyleian hero-worship combined with something much newer: the deliberate cultivation of public profile, using especially, alongside the older forms of the printed word, modern newspaper publicity.

Whitehouse grew up with the New Journalism and would be part of one of the first British governments known for its exploitation of the power of the popular press. All four of the men who would give their names to the Houses of Bembridge School – Fridtjof Nansen, John Masefield, H.W. Nevinson and William Inge - were well-known as authors, and the latter two were noted journalists (even if in Dean Inge’s case, it was a secondary vocation). Though as a libertarian he would always strive to instil resistance to the ‘mass mind’ (which might so easily be turned into the ‘war mind’), Whitehouse was quite at home with some of the contemporary means by which it was influenced. The range of the contacts he developed among the political, social and cultural elite of his day was remarkable, though as social relationships most of them appear to have been strictly limited and transactional in character, and in fact he had very few friends (and hardly seems to have valued, for himself, close friendship). One of them, C.K. Organ, who knew Whitehouse from childhood, described him as ‘a lonely soul’.

Between 1903, when Whitehouse left Birmingham, and 1910, when he entered the House of Commons as Liberal MP for Mid-Lanarck, his career is characterised by the relative brevity of his appointments, not infrequent conflict with his employers and colleagues, and as he advanced himself, principally in the area of boys’ welfare, the improving social and economic status of those served by the youth organisations with which he was mainly associated. Though his interest in and commitment to the welfare of young people is not in doubt, it might not be unduly cynical to observe that for Whitehouse a little front-line work with the seriously disadvantaged went a long way. At any rate, it was on the threshold of what was perceived to be potentially his most decisive intervention in the field of active social work, as warden of the University Settlement at Ancoats, Manchester (his experience there would provide him with one of his most striking Bembridge chapel addresses) that he turned to politics.

A promising career beckoned and although he never achieved ministerial office himself he was parliamentary private secretary to various ministers in the socially reforming Liberal governments of Asquith and Lloyd George. He concerned himself in particular with issues of child employment and, increasingly, the plight of refugees. But at that crucial turning point in the history of the old Liberal party, the conscription crisis at the beginning of 1916, he joined the small minority opposed to Lloyd George. This opposition, born of libertarian insistence on the primacy of individual conscience, together with his belief in the integrity of the family (and an element, surely, of Quaker anti-militarism), cost him his political career (though his support for women’s suffrage is also cited in this context).

A common thread in accounts of the civics and current affairs classes Whitehouse conducted at Bembridge is his evident love of parliament, in all its aspects - and perhaps its then very masculine club atmosphere of equality within hierarchy was particularly congenial to him. If the loss of his seat in 1918 gave him the opportunity to proceed with his idea of founding a boys’ boarding school, he wasn’t exactly moving on: he fought every subsequent general election, up to and including that of 1935 - with ‘equal unsuccess’ as he told Tom Stedman. (The earliest extant school prospectus, which dates from the beginning of the 1920s, has Daws not as sub-warden but headmaster: it appears Whitehouse was planning for his own frequent absence from Bembridge.)

*

That prospectus is also notable for the school motto on its front cover: ‘There is no wealth but life’, which just a little later was replaced by the less politically contentious (but also Ruskin-derived) ‘Today’. Whitehouse’s plan for Bembridge School drew on various ideas and models, most of them influenced by John Ruskin, directly or indirectly. Ruskin’s proposals, in Fors Clavigera, for the schools attached to his unrealised St George settlements provided a definite, if partial, template. The pattern of the educational extensions in Whitehouse’s model, first set forth in 1905, of a secondary boys’ summer camp - and especially the investigation of aspects of the immediate locality we see in Bembridge: An historical and general survey - provided another. More generally, there were the many current ideas for a reformed curriculum and social organisation, arising from a developing public critique of the older public schools. To this debate, in 1919, Whitehouse had contributed The English Public School: A symposium, a direct response to the revelations, particularly of homosexual practice, in Alec Waugh’s Loom of Youth.

Directly from Ruskin’s St George’s Schools comes the vision of a village-like community including as well as school rooms and living quarters a library, laboratory, productive gardens and craft workshops (specifically a carpentry shop and pottery, both of which were established early on at Bembridge); from Ruskin, too, comes the idea of liberal space for self-education in a rich and beautiful learning environment, much of it outdoors; also a minimally-competitive, mutually supportive and (perhaps unrealistically) familial spirit in the conduct of daily life. Beyond this broad enclosure lay the diverse opportunities for study, service and exploration available in the wider locality of the school, with its neighbouring settlements, its distinctive topography, its engrossing natural environment.

Whitehouse favoured modern languages and history, English literature and the use of translations, challenging the traditional role of the classics (though Latin, as a requirement for university entrance, was retained). Art, woodwork and printing were established in the curriculum as timetabled subjects, as well as being part of a broad range of activities designed to engage boys in their spare time, addressing ‘the problem of leisure’ while avoiding the fetishisation of sport. The discipline of manual work was celebrated, and the dignity of labour recognised. The cruelties of fagging and excessive corporal punishment were rejected, as well as all perceived incursions into school life of militarism (though Whitehouse became less emphatic here, as the 1930s progressed). Instead, senior boys were required to lead juniors, in kindness and chivalry, to ideals of service and cooperation, and the pursuit of noble character (well, that was the idea). Citizenship was taught from a broad base of investigation into political and social economy, of how government worked, and in the context of international affairs.

Has there been some embarrassment in Bembridge School historiography over the extent of Whitehouse’s inter-war pacifism? In itself, it was hardly unusual for the time. At least two pre-war witnesses to his chapel addresses – Robin Day and John Heath-Stubbs - had no doubt they were listening to a pacifist and it’s clear that – as Stuart Eagles’s research has confirmed – Whitehouse came to accept the need for armed conflict only with extreme reluctance, and at the last moment.

Whitehouse’s debt to Quakerism, acknowledged by Stedman, still needs to be explored. Figures of Quaker and other Protestant dissident rhetoric emerge strongly in some of his writing in the 1930s, and in the ideas of the so-called Quaker Renaissance of the late nineteenth-century there may lie a framework for understanding the peculiar nature of the liberal, non-denominational Christianity he established at Bembridge. These ideas were a reaction to the severe, scripture-based, evangelical Quakerism that had become dominant earlier in the century, and represented both a modernisation - in the acceptance of Darwinism and modern biblical criticism - and a return to what were perceived as the sect’s mystical roots in the seventeenth century. The life of Christ was seen principally as a call to social action, and the doctrine of atonement, together with the imagery of the crucifixion, conspicuously downplayed. This latter aspect spoke especially to that commonly-felt revulsion, shared by Whitehouse, following the unprecedented destruction of human life in the first world war.

As one of the contributors to The English Public School declared: ‘We have passed through a supreme agony and we have found the church inadequate’. There was no cross in the school chapel Whitehouse built at Bembridge and the main Christian festival celebrated there would be that of the Nativity. The inward-facing seating surely owes something to a Quaker meeting-house - though there is another, more bizarre resemblance (not lost on the young John Heath-Stubbs as he sat listening to Warden holding forth), which is to the chamber of the House of Commons.

*

By the time Bembridge School opened Whitehouse was already the author or editor of several books, mainly on matters of education and social welfare, and had some experience as a journal editor and publisher, as well. The stream of writing would continue (and broaden in subject-matter) but after 1919 there is a change in the character of his output: his style begins to fragment somewhat, as if there were a loosening of the bonds within the body of his thought and beliefs.

To a great extent this was a product of the changing composition of his audience and those to whom he was accountable (and occasionally it’s simply a matter of excessive haste, as he tumbles into print without sufficient thought or research - The Craftsmanship of Books (1929) is a case in point here) but perhaps most of all it reflects the new scope afforded the benevolent despot in him. Removed from the parliament he loved, he’d perhaps somewhat unexpectedly found himself with a single, over-riding course and identity, that of Warden of Bembridge School. As Tom Stedman observed, this had two sides: there was the humane and kindly ‘Warden’, but there was also ‘The Warden’, who was very much a Victorian autocrat.

Next to the energetic organiser, the competent manager and campaigner, henceforth we see more of a much less worldly figure, who can only be described as Whitehouse the fabulist, embarked upon an apparently open-ended quest to assimilate the world of human affairs to a kind of Ruskin-inspired pageant of progress and becoming. It was a process which would take him eventually, in some of his writing, out of touch with reality (Eagles casts a cruel light on the later Whitehouse in the extremity of his uncritical devotion to Ruskin). But at the beginning of the Bembridge experiment there was little sign of this, and indeed, in response to that first sense of relaxation and enlarged opportunity, as he reflected on the early years of putting into practice his own and Ruskin’s educational ideas, he produced one of his best books, Creative education at an English school (1928).

*

Whitehouse’s ideas about the educational value of printing are set out in Chapter 5 (and they’re restated, sometimes word for word, in Education (1935), the volume he contributed to Rich & Cowan’s ‘In our time’ series). ‘Of the manual activities for boys,’ he wrote, ‘I should place very high those associated with the printing press’. It was ‘an engine of creative literacy’ which at Bembridge was mainly engaged in the  production of the school newspaper. This was entirely set up and printed by the boys, and illustrated with their wood-cuts, and this experience, he maintained, unconsciously improved boys’ spelling and literary style, as well as stimulating the creative spirit in English composition.

The second element in Whitehouse’s justification of school printing is his notion of the value of the experience of an ‘historic method’ of craftsmanship, through which boys might ‘acquire…a certain standard, simple as it may be, of taste and criticism’. This he believed might have ‘an influence far beyond the limited subject of printing’. It’s a bold claim which makes most sense in the context of a learning environment well furnished with fine examples of the historical printed book, as well as other crafts – which was certainly the case in the early life of the school. 

Finally, and perhaps least controversially, Whitehouse held that the practice of printing enabled boys ‘to look through a window upon the great world of industry’. It was an observation whose truth could only become more apparent as printing was established above all in the role of service at Bembridge School. 

Reform and renewal: printing after 1958

When Whitehouse died in 1955 his controlling share in the Education Trust Ltd, owners of Bembridge School, was inherited by R.G. Lloyd and it was he who invited James Dearden, who as a boy at Bembridge had occasionally worked closely with the Warden (and whose family knew him socially, to some extent, as well), to return and assist in sorting out Whitehouse’s papers. These were in some disorder: every year around Foundation Day Whitehouse would sweep the accumulation of unfiled material on his desk – this might include anything from the most ephemeral piece of administrative paperwork to a half-opened packet of Ruskin purchases received from his agent - into a tea-chest which would be put into storage. But although the post, which began in May 1957, was only supposed to be temporary, it was apparent – not least in the number of scholarly enquiries about the Ruskin collection now finding their way to the school - that there was an opening for a curatorial position of much broader scope than the job originally envisaged, and that given the value and likely historical importance of Whitehouse’s collections, it would be of long-term significance.

Tom Stedman, the much over-burdened Second Master, was keen to give up the position of Printer which he had held since 1935. With this in mind, Dearden suggested to the school Board that if he was given a permanent job as Curator, then he would be prepared, in addition, to teach printing. His offer was accepted and Stedman stood down as Printer (but he retained the editorship of the school newspaper, which  had fallen to him after Whitehouse’s death).

Looking back one can see that a certain neglect in the printing room had been evident for some time. In the decade or so after 1945 there are several signs of what is, at best, an irregularity of oversight. It’s most likely that this was the result of the extra work Stedman had had to take on elsewhere in the school both before and after the accident, in 1953, that incapacitated Whitehouse, and from which he never really recovered. Stedman may often have been relying on older boys, in his absence, who were of varying competence. One senses, too, that the Guild hierarchy was no longer the socially cohesive force it may once have been, and had become less effective in developing the range of printing skills amongst all those using the printing room. Ever erratic (except during some exceptional periods of concentrated effort), the quality of presswork of the school newspaper once or twice plumbs the depths during this period. For the first time there are long spells of no news at all in the newspaper of the activities of the Guild, and although the printers were still quite capable of rising to occasions such as the 100th issue, or the Whitehouse memorial issue, towards the mid-1950s serious mistakes in production start to crop up: for example, in the summer issue, 1955, there is a basic error of imposition, something previously unheard of, and the problem recurs in the spring of 1957, resulting in deletions by hand to the table of contents. Finally, in the summer of 1958 – and perhaps with the new Printer now in sight – we find the printers having to resort to abject apology: they’ve been unable to complete their make-ready. It’s odd that the resources weren’t available to solve their problem:

We apologise for not being able to print any wood engravings. The blocks themselves were not type high and it proved impossible to make them up sufficiently for them to print well and also to allow the type to print.

(In mitigation, it might be added that throughout this period the standard of correction had remained high.)

The first issue of the school newspaper under Dearden’s direction was that of the autumn (then styled Michaelmas) term, 1958, where it is recorded that ‘he has already begun operations in the printing room and will soon have qualified to discard his L’. He had spent some time in the summer term learning the craft from Stedman, while printing the pamphlet Printing at Coniston. He had already made an impression at New House where it was noted that ‘the Ruskin Galleries have been brought increasingly into the life of the school’. There he had begun, the previous autumn, with an exhibition of private press books, creating ‘a great interest in book production’.

Another show from the beginning of his curatorship was an exhibition devoted to the school’s connection with the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof  Nansen. In the autumn of 1959 the subject was the Yellowsands Press itself, its history surveyed in forty exhibits, from Whitehouse’s Ruskin Centenary Council circular of January 1919, printed at 13 Hammersmith Terrace, to the latest edition of the school newspaper. Two years later there was a month-long exhibition of illuminated manuscripts and calligraphy (including items from Dearden’s own collection). One of the highlights was the illuminated address to Ruskin on his 80th birthday which Whitehouse had presented personally at Brantwood in 1899.

At least one of these early shows was formally visited by pupils, masters bringing their classes by appointment, and one is reminded in all this of the conduct of the pre-war exhibitions, something of whose spirit it was doubtless the intention to revive as the fortieth anniversary brought with it a deepened sense of the school’s historical identity.

From the point of view of the printers, however, what stands out here is Dearden’s interest in formal manuscript and its decoration. While his first work in the printing room is (not surprisingly) largely indistinguishable from his predecessor’s, a passion for visual enrichment soon makes itself felt. From it, over the next few years, would emerge the antiquarian style of decorative jobbing which was his distinctive contribution to Bembridge printing. The long austerity into which the Yellowsands Press had settled was at an end. Henceforth there would be a place for colour, pattern and ornament, and a real opportunity for a revival in wood-engraving. There would be a new sense of ambition and self-confidence in the printing room, and a fresh enthusiasm in which many would be caught up (and a few find a vocation). It took only a modest new investment in type and other equipment to effect a wide-ranging impact.

The acquisition of a treadle-operated, vertical platen press was originally the idea of the new headmaster Peter Rendall who took up his duties at the beginning of the autumn term, 1959. The tradition of printing the school newspaper on the Albion hand-press was unshakeable (and not questioned by Dearden) but the new press would vastly increase the range and quantity of smaller jobbing work which could be undertaken. It would also facilitate more individual pupil projects and, if only implicitly, provide a new focus for care in craftsmanship in the printing room.

But the process of renewal began before that. The startlingly crisp and bright impression of the Spring (Lent) 1959 issue of the newspaper shows that a great deal of worn type had been replaced (it was the first new type for twenty years) and with it comes a marked improvement, for a time, in presswork.

A foolscap folio treadle platen press by Jardine of Nottingham, built c.1940, was installed in 1961, and from then on the now regular notes on the printers’ Guild usually contain an impressive statistic of jobs completed each term. The stiff grey wrapper (described by Dearden as ‘peacock blue’; but perhaps they were different shades), which had had to be abandoned during the war, was restored to the newspaper (the wrapper was now printed on the new press). After forty years of printing without any at all, fonts of 12 and 18pt Caslon italic were obtained and the worn 18pt roman used for headings was replaced (it was no longer available on a 16pt body). Some 36pt Caslon, roman and italic, was bought and this, the main phase of the expansion of the typographical resources at Bembridge, was completed by the acquisition of three sizes of Stephenson Blakes’s Old Face Open (12pt – a mistake, surely, and rarely used - 18, and 30pt). (A little later there came a few other typefaces, notably Perpetua Light Titling, used mainly as a drop initial, and Poliphilus and Blado. The former was very seldom used, but the strongly calligraphic Blado italic, stocked eventually in both text and display sizes, became the standard face for a particularly luxe style of printed order of service evolved later in the decade.)

The outstanding product of the new order, however, and to many now emblematic of Bembridge School printing in its post-war reformation, is the series of annual Nine Lessons and Carols service orders, booklets of up to sixteen pages, which was begun in 1962. The design - typically including wood-engravings and ornamental initials, printers’ flower arrangements and sometimes extensive use of colour – proved long-lived, the last example being produced in 1986. These are perhaps the most potent of all Yellowsands ephemera in their power to evoke a particular time, place and atmosphere, and to those who took part in printing them, they were objects of pride.

The quality of the wood-engravings available would naturally vary but the basic typographic arrangement altered little from year to year. The first carol service order was printed entirely in black, but thereafter the decorative elements were elaborated, with the introduction of red and blue ink (requiring, of course, multiple pressings), and in 1964 the addition, for the first time, of a gold initial. This was printed cold, on a new Adana 85, from a foil which was actually a stationer’s product intended for writing with a biro - and while the newspaper’s claim that the process ‘not only breaks new ground for the Press but has almost certainly never been used before in the printing industry’ was overblown, there’s no doubt that it worked (after half a century there’s been no loss of adhesion, and the gilding remains bright)*.

*In the 1970s and 80s the wrapper of the carol service orders was dropped, which was a pity, but they perhaps gained from the use of a soft white wove instead of the Yellowsands standard, Abbey Mills Antique Laid, which was a rather brittle-surfaced esparto paper and not always easy to print.

*

The printing requirements for the celebrations around the school’s fiftieth anniversary in 1969 created a flurry of activity in the printing room. They included various programmes, a richly-worked order for the main chapel service of thanksgiving, and a traditional printers’ keepsake for the visit of Earl Mountbatten. The occasion was marked also by the publication of A Yellowsands bibliography 1919-1969 (two years before, Dearden had put out a call for information from old boys about fugitive pieces). But after forty years at the school, Tom Stedman retired (no-one had given more to Bembridge School) and the editorship of the newspaper passed to Harold Carnell, the first of several, relatively short-lived incumbents in a voluntary role it would become increasingly difficult for the school to fill.

Various attempts were made over the next twenty years to broaden the appeal of what was now perceived as a somewhat out-moded stiffness and formality both in the look and content of the school newspaper, but few made much impact on its essential character. Most noticeably, the notes on arts and crafts which had been prominent from the beginning were dropped entirely by the new editor and only restored in 1978 (as a consequence, there are no printers’ Guild notes during this period). There were a few excellent innovations: the interviews with older members of staff, for instance, though they’re much too short. But some mistakes, as well: the pointed substitution, for example, of (very coarse-screened) photographs for wood-engravings (which might not always have been very accomplished, but were at least pupils’ own work). There was a crossword - even, briefly (and much disapproved of by the Printer) advertising. The old grey cover was replaced by light pastel shades intended to reflect the seasons. From 1983, one of the Press’s miscellaneous type collections, a very Victorian gothic was dusted off for the title on what became a plain white cover, in a gesture that looks rather too self-consciously ‘retro’, and puts one in mind of nothing so much as how they might have printed at St Custard’s or St Trinian’s - but as the new age of desk-top publishing loomed there was a stubborn continuity in the typography within.

The unprecedented concentration of writing found in the newspaper in its latter years, about the tradition of printing at Bembridge, is partly a matter of the proximity of anniversaries and the memories these prompted, but also suggests defensiveness in what feels like an increasingly unsympathetic school environment. As late as 1986, however, it’s reported that in a general review of the arts and crafts curriculum the Governors’ external consultant had vindicated the educational practice of printing. I have been unable to establish exactly when printing ceased to be a timetabled subject (here Bembridge had been very unusual, if not unique, among school presses, which were mostly run as extra-curricular societies), but the consequences of the serious illness which temporarily removed Dearden from school in the mid-1980s seem to have made it inevitable. (In the summer of 1984, for the first time in its history, responsibility for the completion of the newspaper fell entirely on the shoulders of a boy, Mason Salmon, and the colophon of the Nine Lessons and Carols order of service that year states that it was ‘printed by M.J. Harrison’.)

Latterly, a sixth-form printing group appears to have met for a time - and right up to the last, a small number of individual devotees were drawn to the printing room. In 1988 it had been forced to move (to make way for a metal-working class) from the original, purpose-built premises, to two rooms in the old stable-block near Old House. The composing frames and treadle platens fitted in but the ceiling there was too low to open the frisket of the Albion.

Some aspects of printing practice

The second number of Bembridge School Newspaper, published in the Spring 1920, records that the printers’ first work that term had been ‘to distribute the type of last term’s magazine’. One hopes they took care. ‘Dissing’ was always a chore, for the printing enthusiasts as much as for everyone else. It was often dirty work, as the type may not have been particularly well cleaned and might even be still wet with paraffin. In this condition a full stick of type for dissing was grim to contemplate. But the work had to be done accurately. Even then, confidence in dissing letters and punctuation well might not extend to spacing material. Thick spaces were easy enough but I can remember as a boy the effort of will, sometimes, required to distinguish thin and middle: I think the space boxes were often the first part of a type-case to get into disarray. But when one considers how perhaps fifty individual third and fourth formers, variously motivated (to say the least), were at different times using the same half dozen or so type-cases, the scope for muddle starts to become apparent. I can remember wandering with a last-minute job from frame to frame trying to find the least ‘foul’ case. (In an emergency, one might be given access to the office and the Printer’s private case and experience there the extraordinary luxury of finding that every sort one picked up was the right one.)

Extreme responses to the frustration and boredom of dissing included on one occasion, I recall, a boy simply picking up handfuls of type from his stick and sprinkling them like broadcast seed over the type-case. Another witness remembers seeing a boy quietly pocketing handfuls of type from his stick and at the end of the session walking over the football field and hurling them in disgust over the cliff. The type-cases used the most often – 12pt Caslon  – were commonly in a more or less foul state. For the conscientious compositor, this meant slow work, as every second or third sort had to be replaced in the right compartment before another attempt was made to secure the right one. But where the boy compositor had been (perhaps) happily chatting to his neighbour as he worked (the motto ‘A still tongue makes a full stick’ adorned the printing room wall before the war) the extent of his mistakes might only become apparent when his work was proofed.

‘The setting-up is exceedingly well done though the sorting still needs greater accuracy,’ remarks the school newspaper in the Spring 1923. But then in the Summer 1924: ‘This term has been chiefly notable for the much greater skill in distribution’. How long did it last? It would be quite wrong to assume that the fact that the matter is not mentioned again in the school newspaper for another three decades means that it did not continue to be an issue; more likely, it was so well established a problem as to be no longer worthy of comment. The Christmas 1960 number reports that the lower forms of the senior school had then been reorganised, allowing ‘more periods of printing [in] much smaller groups’ and there had been in consequence a notable improvement in workmanship, except distribution: ‘Here much more care must be taken, for bad distribution means a great deal of correction in the galley if the compositor does not take great care with his work’.

In 1959, while visiting Oxford as part of the arrangements for the publication of Ruskin’s Diaries, edited by Joan Evans, Jim Dearden became acquainted with the antiques dealer and private press bibliographer William Ridler and for a dozen years or so from the mid-1960s sent him for his collection an annual packet of Yellowsands proofs, trials and dummies, etc. These are now in the John Johnson Collection. They contain some spectacular examples of careless schoolboy setting. (The sheer number of mistakes often reminds one of the specimens of corrected setting which usually accompany the table of proof correctors’ marks in printers’ manuals or authors’ guides to printing - to which a note is sometimes added reminding the reader that this is of course not the frequency of error which will ever be found in practice.)

Occasionally, the compounding of error with misplaced skill achieves a kind of sublimity. In one proof, the text of a hymn, the first lines have been methodically indented, at first glance to accommodate a drop initial letter to be inserted later – except that, carefully centred in the space created there is a small figure in parenthesis: it’s the number of the piece of copy being set. The parentheses are as close as the compositor has been able to get to the circle in the manuscript indicating that the matter within it is not to be set.

Five years in to his long tenure as Printer Dearden compiled some Notes & Rules for Compositors at the Yellowsands Press (1964) which appears to be the only surviving such reference work produced by the Press. It’s a sixteen-page style guide cum printers’ glossary cum index of common errors, and provides an interesting (and not wholly predictable) reflection of some of the problems and potential mishaps of composing room practice.

Accented letters: When setting accented letters, it must be remembered that the accent is reversed on the type.

Confused letters: The following pairs of letters are frequently confused, especially in distributing: b d, p q. The letter on the actual piece of type is reversed, so that when the type is examined, the nick being downwards, the ‘b’ looks like a ‘d’, ‘p’ like ‘q’, and vice versa.

The letters ‘u’ and ‘n’ are frequently inverted and used in place of each other. This, too, should be avoided…

Care should be taken to differentiate between o (oh) and 0 (nought). Study the examples to see the different shapes…

Leads & reglets: Care should be taken to use leads and reglets that are the same length as the line of type.

Spacing: To justify a line of type the spaces must be changed working outwards from the centre using (when spacing up) combinations of spaces in the correct sequence as shown in the table of comparative spaces. It is not permissible to put in an extra space to fill up a line.

Spaces may be put at the end of a line only if it is the last line of a paragraph or a line of verse. In these cases the largest space used should be put at the end of the line.

There is no space between a word and the punctuation following it.

Titles: must be set in the type specified on the manuscript.

Correcting poorly spaced setting could be particularly demanding, lacking the reward of the immediate clarification of language. One vice was the impatient forcing-in of spacing material. In the worst cases, the compositor might actually contrive to gradually increase the line length to which his composing stick had been adjusted. Sometimes it was quicker just to start again.

It’s remarkable, looking through Bembridge School Newspaper over the seven decades of its existence, how few typos there are – and how few indications, in the notes on the activities of the printing room, of the extraordinary feat of proof-reading and correction that lay behind the exclusion of error. But the consequence of this was that the common, amateur printer’s bias in favour of accuracy in composition, over careful presswork, was entrenched.

Doubtless there were boys – there must have been many of them over the years - who interested themselves in the arts of making ready and achieving a consistent quality of impression on the Albion, but such was the vigour of the publishing imperative at Bembridge, conditions in the printing room were frequently against them. As one observer has noted, working the hand press was often treated as a kind of sport, ceasing, at times, to be a printing exercise at all. In the fifty-four years of printing before the Newspaper was finally put on machine*, phases of sustained improvement in presswork tend to coincide with either the arrival of a new Printer, obviously intent on making his mark, or (an even rarer event) the purchase of new type. Certainly, in the 1960s - perhaps the high point of printing at Bembridge School - such tasks as the preparation of the tympan or the adjustment of the platen, were largely the province of the Printer. There being no general investment in them on the part of the boys, standards of presswork might easily slip. Nevertheless, term after term, the Newspaper was got out. Though it was still then the custom for masters to address even the most junior boys in the senior school as young adults, somehow expecting them thereby to behave as such, we were most of us still children, and we were having fun.

*Spring number, 1973. It was a change Dearden always regretted, but as he explained, it had became necessary because in the busy final weeks of term the availability of a team of four printers, as and when each forme was ready, could no longer be relied upon. The printing of the Newspaper was transferred to a Furnival vertical platen acquired from Lightbown’s, of Ryde, a few years before.

List of sources

Collections and archives

Bembridge Heritage Centre, Bembridge. Two files of material relating to Bembridge School assembled by local historian John Woodward.

Bodleian Library, Oxford. John Johnson Collection. 99/00-37 Yellowsands Press. Packets of proofs, trial pages, dummies, etc., mainly relating to the Nine Lessons & Carols service books of the 1960s and 70s. Originally collected by the private press bibliographer William Ridler.

Isle of Wight County Records Office, Newport. Whitehouse Archive. AC96/52. An index compiled by Jim Dearden covers about one third of the archive.

Oxford University Press archives. Correspondence of John Johnson.

Ruskin Library, University of Lancaster. Yellowsands Press collection, including a complete set of Bembridge School Newspaper. Not catalogued but a checklist is appended to this article.

Ryde School, Bembridge Boarding House. Bembridge School archives stored mainly in the common room, formerly the Lower Gallery, New House. Material formerly in the attic was transferred to Ryde, 2018-19.

Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, Toronto. Yellowsands Press collection. 35 boxes, including a complete set of Bembridge School Newspaper, otherwise material mainly from c.1960 on. A box list is available from the library.

Books and articles

Bembridge School Newspaper 1:1 – 74:220, 1919-92.

DAY (Robin) Grand inquisitor: memoirs. London: Weidenfeld, 1989.

Dearden (J.S.) ‘John Howard Whitehouse, 1973-1955’, article, first published in 2004, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

______ Notes & rules for compositors at the Yellowsands Press. Bembridge: Yellowsands Press, Summer 1964.

______ Printing at Bembridge School. Totland Bay: M.J. Conder, January 1965.

______ Printing at Coniston. Bembridge: Yellowsands Press, June 1958.

______ Rambling reminiscences. A Ruskinian’s recollections. London: Pallas Athene, 2014.

______ Ruskin, Bembridge and Brantwood: the growth of the Whitehouse Collection. Keele: Ryburn Publishing, 1994.

[Dearden (J.S.)] A Yellowsands bibliography, 1919-1969. Bembridge: Yellowsands Press, 1969.

EAGLES (Stuart) ‘Ruskin’s ‘true disciple’?: John Howard Whitehouse (1873-1955) and Ruskin’s legacy’, pp. 232-61, in After Ruskin. The social and political legacies of a Victorian prophet, 1870-1920. Oxford: OUP, 2011.

HEATH-STUBBS (John) Hindsights. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993.

MORGAN (M.C.) Bryanston 1928-1978. Blandford, 1978.

RIDLER (William) British modern press books. A descriptive checklist of unrecorded items. New ed. 1975.

STEDMAN (T.M.) Bembridge School. The first forty years. Bembridge: Yellowsands Press, June 1959.

STEWART (W.A.C.) The educational innovators. Volume II: progressive schools 1881-1967. London: Macmillan, 1968.

WAKEFORD (Brian) Today well lived. The Bembridge School story, 1919-1994. Bembridge, [1994].

WHITEHOUSE (J. Howard) An account of the Yellowsands Press. Edited by James S. Dearden. Bembridge: Yellowsands Press, 1961.

______ Ed. Bembridge. An historical and general survey by members of Bembridge School. Oxford: Printed at the UP, 1923.

______ Creative education at an English school. Cambridge: Printed at the UP, 1928.

______ The craftsmanship of books. London: Allen & Unwin, 1929.

______ Education. London: Rich & Cowan, 1935. A volume in the ‘In my time’ series. Others included Marriage by Marie Stopes, Music by Hubert J. Foss, Literature by Compton Mackenzie and Art by Frank Rutter.

______  Ed. The English public school. A symposium. 1919.

______ Thy youth and cause. Cambridge: Printed at the UP for the Yellowsands Press, 1934.

WILDMAN (Stephen) [Compiler] Keeper of the flame. John Howard Whitehouse 1873-1955. [Catalogue of an exhibition at the] Ruskin Library, Lancaster University, 30 April – 2 October 2005. Includes essays by J.S. Dearden and Stuart Eagles.

Bembridge School, c.1960

Part of an aerial photograph of Bembridge School, c.1960. Central row of buildings, left to right: the gym, the science block, the form block, the woodwork room (originally the Yellowsands camp mess, then the Arts and Crafts Room), the printing room (steeply sloping roof), the squash court and the sports pavilion.