Evacuation: printing at Coniston

With the fall of France in 1940 the south coast became the front line, the nearby Portsmouth naval base and dockyard were that much closer to a confident enemy, and what may have been regarded up until then as a precautionary measure was now deemed a necessity. Whitehouse’s adventure island at the end of an island, field of youthful chivalry, fastness of the old Liberalism, where Ruskin’s flame had been safe from the various gales of the twentieth century: modernism, psychoanalysis, Bloomsbury, revolutionary socialism – was physically threatened. According to Stedman, the challenge of the evacuation of Bembridge School to Coniston gave the ageing Whitehouse a new lease of life.

The Waterhead Hotel at Coniston had come on the market just at the right moment. It would provide the school’s base for the duration of the war. Although capacious, Ruskin’s old home Brantwood, bought by Whitehouse in 1932, lacked the basic sanitary facilities for conversion to a school building, though it might have accommodated some staff. But it would be Whitehouse alone who would make his quarters there.

The carriers he employed weren’t removal men: it was remembered that most of the work involved in preparing the three lorry-loads of school equipment which made their way north in the summer of 1940 was done by the staff. Neither were the carriers able to cope alone with the printing press. Following the arrival of the main transport, Stedman had to return to Bembridge to organise evacuation of the printing room, an earlier decision not to do so having been reversed. All the type in galley was dissed and the two formes for the eight-page, token edition of the Newspaper, put together before the end of the (much fore-shortened) summer term, were wrapped up in corrugated cardboard. He dismantled and packed the Albion himself and to secure the type-cases for removal screwed them together one upon another – a stack of about ten he says – using an empty one as a cover.

The new printing room at Coniston was the smaller of two garages [belonging to the Waterhead Hotel] which had once been coach houses. Two big swing doors ran the full height of the room, the walls were of unsurfaced slate and the floor, liberally covered with oil from its previous occupants, was of uneven slate flags. To get a level site for the press part of this was dug up, two sleepers were laid parallel to one another and the feet of the press rested on them. Lighting was installed, the cases were set up and rough benches were constructed [by the printers themselves] for the guillotine and for the correction of galleys and formes.

But the printers’ difficulties were by no means at an end:

The blackout presented a great problem for after we had evolved a successful system for blacking out the room there was still the difficulty that to open the door would let out a great flood of light into the courtyard outside. So a ‘light boy’ had to be appointed whose job was to put out all the lights whenever anyone wanted to go in or out of the room, a most tedious and tiresome proceeding for all concerned but one for which we could find no other solution.

The dry-stone walls of the garage were unsurfaced, making the work space extremely draughty. It was

almost impossible for the press worker putting on the paper to get the individual sheets into the pins. But with time and ingenuity this was overcome, though never completely eliminated.

There’s no mention of cold. There are in the records some wonderful summer photographs of the school at Coniston: parties hiking on the Old Man; long-limbed youths in front of skiffs and sailing dinghies drawn up Swallows and Amazons-like on the shore at what must be the bottom of the meadow below Brantwood - but for a largely southern-based school population, as they returned each autumn, the lake village must have seemed very far away - something like seven and a half hours of wartime stopping train from Euston, with only the refreshment you took with you, Stedman recalled.

Resilience, ingenuity, improvisation and adaptability were the order of the day. Besides the privations of their draughty garage (later remembered as ‘the old building opposite the old cowshed’), for the printers this mainly meant getting used to wartime paper shortages. The length and print-run of the Newspaper had to be severely restricted. The grey cover paper used became unobtainable so the wrapper was abandoned (only to be restored some two decades later when Dearden became Printer). Instead of the cream, antique laid papers of ordinary times the printers had to make do with whatever was available, frequently characterless, machine-finished stock of inferior colour and opacity. Inking and pressure needed constant review and adjustment.

Looking back in 1959 on the Coniston experience as a whole, Stedman saw it as the core-test of the school’s fitness for post-war growth. But the process wasn’t, perhaps, without loss. The beginning of the end of the Guild system in the printing room may be traceable to this time. The rather small group of entirely Coniston-trained printers who returned to Bembridge in the autumn of 1945 must have felt a special bond.

One change associated with printing in the Coniston years is the addition of the Foundation Day programme to the normal round of school jobbing work. Before the war Whitehouse had always had this done commercially – a reflection of his caution and circumspection when it came to the matter of the school’s public image. But this increase was exceptional in what were generally much reduced circumstances.

Just one pamphlet was printed in Coniston, Wartime Christmas, the text of Whitehouse’s address at the school carol service in 1941. The Newspaper suggests that printing was completed the following spring (though according to Dearden in Printing at Coniston the work was largely set and printed by pupil A.C. Birkett over the Christmas holiday).

Wartime Christmas is among the most poignant and compelling of all Yellowsands printings - and a gem of the pre-Dearden era of typographic austerity. Though one comes to see Stedman as above all the rationalist in the printing room, in another sense his leadership had embraced the limited resources (though in the continuing absence of italic he had wisely added versatile small caps to the palette), and he came as close as anyone to establishing the unaffected art of grace and simplicity Whitehouse envisaged there. A meditation on the meaning of the Nativity in the midst of war, Wartime Christmas looks to the coming new world, setting forth the requirements for the settlement in ‘the extension of peace’. It combines something of the public mood behind the then imminent Beveridge Report with a memorably succinct statement of several of Whitehouse’s long-held ideas on social and educational reform, and national security. All this couched in his inimitable, at times Utopian rhetoric, with its unmistakable dash of Protestant mysticism. ‘The first divine message to mankind at the Nativity was the proclamation of peace on earth, and goodwill to all men’. ‘Christmas,’ he told the boys

gives us all the same opportunity for thought. We are able to link our lives to the unseen.

Beyond the thought of waiting presents, goodness knows what they made of this.