In the spring of 1924, at what was probably the printers’
Guild Tea, it is recorded that ‘The President [Whitehouse]…gave an amusing
account of the early history of our press’. By the time he wrote it down, in 1936,
in celebration of the fiftieth number of the school newspaper, it may already have
acquired the aspect of a traditional school tale.
Part of the background to the story has been frequently
examined by scholars and is consequently well known to students of printing
history. This is the notorious rift between the private press partners T.J.
Cobden-Sanderson and Sir Emery Walker over the fate of the Doves Press type. Whitehouse’s
treatment of it reminds us that as an historical witness he is not always to be
relied upon.
The facts are well established. Contracted to transfer the
Doves Press materials to Walker following the dissolution of their partnership,
Cobden-Sanderson reneged on his promise and instead, in what he saw as a kind
of religious sacrifice, threw (in instalments, over several days) the punches,
matrices and type off Hammersmith Bridge into the Thames. (He never regretted
doing this, despite the loss of his reputation, and his Journals reveal the boyish glee and exquisite fear of being caught
red-handed with which he carried out the destruction.)
Here is Whitehouse’s version, as edited for An Account of the Yellowsands Press
(1961):
Cobden-Sanderson was very anxious that the type used by the
Doves Press should not be used for any other purpose so he had a kind of brick
cave built somewhere in the bed of the Thames. Into this was poured one night
the whole of the type of the Doves Press. No one knows the exact site. To this
day the Thames remains the custodian…
It is not for me to pronounce any opinion on the estrangement
between the two men. Such things are common to the life of humanity…
(The original actually gives more credence to the brick cave
by dwelling on the breadth of the mudbanks and narrowness of the stream at low
tide.)
It’s an extraordinary fabulation. What was Whitehouse
thinking? The best explanation seems to be that he was trying to avoid fatally undermining
Cobden-Sanderson whom he thought of as an heroic figure. His absolute
culpability is concealed in the teasing fiction of the type’s possible recovery,
which presents a kind of romantic quest. It follows that the falling-out might be
seen as much less serious than it was, like a passing, youthful clash of
personalities, over which Whitehouse rises magnanimously. He thought he was
protecting his boys.
*
There is no reason to doubt the essentials of Whitehouse’s story.
Cobden-Sanderson and Walker were his near neighbours at 13 Hammersmith Terrace.
He had been living there, with his friend Edward Daws as his guest, at least
since the beginning of the First World War. Whitehouse became friendly with
both neighbours, though he never saw them together, and both gave him advice on
setting up a press. But he found Cobden-Sanderson ‘particularly inspiring’,
with ‘the spirit of a brave adventurer’. That he should have been drawn to him
is perhaps not altogether surprising. Cobden-Sanderson’s high idealism would
have appealed to Whitehouse’s ready instinct for hero-worship and of the two
former partners in the Doves Press he is likely to have been much the more
ardent Ruskinian. (He had bound the illuminated address to Ruskin on his 80th birthday which Whitehouse had delivered personally on behalf of the Birmingham
Ruskin Society in 1900, the one occasion on which Whitehouse met Ruskin). However,
it would be Emery Walker, reputation intact, whom Whitehouse would enlist to
the new Bembridge School advisory board.
It was at the ‘special advice’ of Cobden-Sanderson that
probably in 1917 Whitehouse acquired second-hand a hand-press ‘the same…both in
size and make, as that upon which Morris printed his Kelmscott books.’ It was installed - with considerable difficulty
and damage to the staircase – on the first floor at 13 Hammersmith Terrace. A
quantity of their Old Face type was bought from Caslon (which looks more like
Walker’s recommendation, though this isn’t acknowledged) and a composing room
of sorts established on the top floor. Daws attended ‘the works of a friendly
firm’ to learn the rudiments of the printing art.
The press, a Hopkinson & Cope Albion, no. 4878, built in
1866, was moved to Bembridge towards the end of the first, summer term, in 1919,
and set up at the beginning in a room near the back stairs in Old House. Among
the school staff then there was an assistant master who, as fate would have it,
was to become one of the most renowned twentieth-century typographic
historians. As his biographers relate:
The transport of the press and its associated type and
equipment must have been a major task, and would have caused great excitement
in such a small community [there were only five boys at the outset]; it seems
certain than the eighteen-year-old Harry Carter would have been fully involved
with this exercise and with the first printing done on the press in its new
home.
Carter, who had been educated at Bedales, was the son of the
headmaster of one of the East London Schools which Whitehouse earlier in his
career had managed. Temporarily at a loose end, he was helping Whitehouse set
up his new school before going up to Queen’s College, Oxford, in October 1919.
Carter’s biographers give no clue that he had done any
practical printing before this (the Bedales school newspaper he’d edited was
printed commercially). Many years later, as a guest at an Old Bembridgians’
dinner, he was found to be disappointingly shy and unforthcoming on the matter,
and there is unfortunately no record of his impressions of his brief time at
Bembridge. But it might be noted in passing that there is a probable, half-conscious
reference to it in the amateur manual Printing
Explained he wrote with Herbert Simon. This appeared in 1931 and was for
many years the only modern guide to printing with an Albion. At the end there
is a specimen setting for a library issue record sheet, with the heading ‘The
White House School Library’. More importantly, the text of the first chapter,
‘A Craft for Schools’ is almost certainly indebted to Whitehouse’s
justification of school printing in Creative
Education (1928), especially his notion of printing providing a transferable
‘standard of taste’.
 |
| Specimen setting from Printing Explained, 1931 |
It would be very satisfactory to be able to point to a piece
of Yellowsands printing in which Harry Carter definitely had a hand, but it’s
not possible. By the time the first, eight-page, number of the school newspaper
appeared at the end of the autumn term, 1919, he would have been long gone. By
then the press had been moved to a small shed near the squash court, and part
of the far end of the arts and crafts room turned into a composing room (a
little later this was partitioned off). This arrangement continued until 1922
when press and composing room were united in part of a wooden sports pavilion,
where they remained for the next nine years. ‘Our new printing room and its
equipment mark a great advance and have enabled us to become much more
methodical craftsmen,’ Muirhead wrote in the spring of 1922. But according to
Whitehouse, although
this arrangement was an improvement on the former plans [it
was] far from satisfactory. [The pavilion] was a long way off, the roof was
sometimes leaky, the floor was not strong enough to bear the press
satisfactorily and became rickety. The room was heated by a coke stove which
was chiefly successful in emitting smoke, and there was consequently a large
amount of dust to contend with.
*
The stubs of two purchase order books from 1922 and 1923
survive in the Whitehouse Archive and they include details of various printing
items ordered from H.W. Caslon: an 8” press roller, an upper case, quoins,
sidesticks, reglets and other spacing material, as well as several orders for individual
sorts, in short supply for whatever reason. Another order is for a substantial
stock of the entire range of (six) f ligatures: had someone thought perhaps at
the outset that these weren’t necessary? But recourse to outside suppliers
wasn’t always required. From time to time the Guild of Woodworkers would come
fraternally to the printers’ aid, for instance in the spring of 1925, when they
made ‘a pair of compositor’s cases and frame for the printing room’. (In the
beginning lower cases seem to have been simply placed on tables and upper cases
propped against the wall.)
 |
| The printing room in 1936 |
For what was quite a substantial building, the new printing
room - designed by Muirhead, built according to Whitehouse by ‘direct labour’ (which
is misleading as it seems unlikely that boys took part as was the case with the
dark room a decade earlier) and occupied from the summer of 1931 – emerges from
the record with an odd lack of fanfare. This is probably because, important as
it was to the printers, in the broader scheme of Whitehouse’s plans for the
growth of his school, and the concurrent evolution of his commitment to the
cause of Ruskin, both as collector (some of his most substantial purchases date
from this period, including the Diaries) and advocate, it was really no more
than a by-product. There is no announcement, fund-raising, or progress report, just
a fait accompli - and the celebration
of increased productivity: ‘The new
printing room has made an enormous difference to the comfort and efficiency of
our work,’ reports the school newspaper, ‘and the increased bulkiness of this
number…is a direct result’.
Should an historically curious printer then have been browsing
the earliest numbers of Bembridge School
Newspaper he might have been surprised by the following, from the spring of
1920: ‘Our compositors are becoming so expert that the editors found it very
difficult to keep them supplied with “copy”’. By the early 1930s there was no
doubt that Whitehouse and his editorial committee of senior boys would be
keeping the printers busy. But if the printing room, at least in the final
weeks of each term, now may have looked and felt to some more like the
manufacturing base of a publishing enterprise than a craft workshop, there was
no question of challenging the continuing suitability of a nineteenth-century
hand-press to meet the task in hand.
For a while, from his appointment in May 1935, Stedman was able to bring about a noticeable improvement
in technical standards, especially press-work. This was gratefully acknowledged
by Whitehouse who that term gave the printing room a guillotine which, among
other things, enabled the printers to trim flush work in wrappers, including
the newspaper, greatly enhancing its finished appearance. Methods and
procedures, and to some extent design, all seem to have come under examination
as part of a general rationalisation. The main aim was to relieve the pressure
of the final weeks by moving as much work as possible on the newspaper to
earlier in the term, though exactly what all this involved in practice is frequently
unclear. There was undoubtedly a new sense of focus and discipline in the
printing room, however. The Guild hierarchy seems galvanised. By the spring of
1938 the improvement in the work of the third and lower fourth formers is being
singled out for praise.
But the hard work took its toll on equipment. The Guild notes
in the newspaper that autumn report that
The great event in the printing room this term has been the
installation of another press similar in design to the old one which has been
used by the Guild since its inception.
Stedman was in whimsical mood:
Joy felt at this was tinged with regret for the old hero of
fifty-seven copies of the school newspaper. He had been ailing for some time
and only constant nursing had latterly kept him fit for the great task he had
to perform. But that the end was near was plain to all and many a figurative
tear was shed when he passed noisily away one Sunday morning early in October…
In consequence we have been devoting ourselves to preparing
and getting used to his successor, who is built on rather more generous lines…
The piston of the old Albion was retained, and with ‘passed
noisily away’ engraved upon it, hung on the printing room wall.
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