Introduction

‘There are some boys to whom [printing] makes a special appeal, who are always to be found doing useful things in the printing room, printing things they have written or that others have written, and finding a source of great education and joy in consequence.’

J.H. Whitehouse, Creative Education at an English School, 1928, p.15

My interest in printing began fifty years ago at Bembridge School, Isle of Wight, where as a third former (the lowest form in the senior school) I learned the rudiments of letterpress under the instruction of James Dearden. (Then, of course, it was ‘Mr Dearden’ -  it’s ‘Jim’ today, and in this introduction I’ll stick with Jim, if I may, even if it sounds anachronistic.)

In the printing room I found that there were fewer opportunities for embarrassment than in the nearby art and woodwork rooms, though I’m sure I never felt, like some boys (sometimes too many) that printing was a soft option. I liked the look and atmosphere of the printing room at once: the intriguing cell-structure of the type-cases, the business-like machines, the sense of purposeful industry where team-work made sense (I couldn’t be bothered on the sports field where like many public school boys – too few speak up - I learned a lifelong dislike of organised games and, more particularly, a loathing for the strutting of what are now called ‘elite’ athletes). In the printing room I found myself caught up in the rhythm of real work leading to tangible ends. I discovered the deadline.

Jim was at that time still near the beginning of the career of curatorship, scholarly (but always readable) writing and research, collecting and bibliophily, which would lead to his present eminence in the field of Ruskin studies: no-one has made more contribution to an understanding of the variety of John Ruskin’s life and interests. But it was clear then, and his memoirs have confirmed, that Jim didn’t really like teaching. In my experience he was frequently preoccupied and almost always pressed for time; he could be prickly – and perhaps there was a fastidiousness not suited to the schoolroom. He would sweep in with barely a word, proceed to the glassed-in office he’d had made for himself in the corner of the printing room (which was in fact a small, formerly detached, single-storey brick building at the end of the classroom block at Bembridge), stub out his cigarette and set about arranging the distribution of the work to be done.

However, once we got down to it something else became equally clear: that he enjoyed the activity of printing itself. An infectious enthusiasm emerged and one realized he had time for boys who wanted to learn.

He was then in his mid-thirties, though had I been asked to guess his age I would probably have said he was a decade older: a boy himself at Bembridge in the late 1940s, he was just too old to have been touched by the then new, burgeoning, post-war youth culture.

Nonetheless, Jim cut a certain dash. To begin with, there was the keen presence of a lively, directed intelligence. He wore a distinctive flared jacket over a yellow waistcoat, with a gold watch-chain. He was a swift and deft practical worker and in whatever he was doing, correcting a proof, lifting blocks of type from stick to galley, locking up a forme, adjusting the platen of the Albion, there was to be found an example of meticulousness and diligence which struck home (in fact, he’d never printed as a boy at Bembridge, and was still learning himself, sometimes from the boys who were his charges).

That edge of flamboyance wasn’t confined to dress-sense. The heavy, imitation-parchment wrappers he favoured for his most sumptuous style of printed church service he would describe in his 1969 bibliography of Bembridge printing as figured ivory covers. I think the Caslon italic swash capitals, which are a late Victorian addition to Caslon Old Face, might have been made for him.

Jim wasn’t like the other masters. This was because he wasn’t really a master at all: his official title was Curator of the Ruskin Galleries, Bembridge, the rather splendid rooms (generally out of bounds) in New House which housed the internationally-important collection of Ruskin drawings, books, diaries, letters and assorted memorabilia, assembled by the school’s founder and ardent Ruskin disciple, John Howard Whitehouse. This was the elsewhere that set Jim apart – a seat of significant activity, indeed identity, within the school, which was, however, for most boys, most of the time (and despite the aspirations of the founder) very much a closed book. His office gave Jim something of the character of an outsider - a visiting specialist – compared to the other staff. But this had its own value, as an antidote to the early adolescent ego: with Jim you could see clearly the limits of the adults’ obligations to the boys in their care, and you started to grow up.

It was more than likely, as he strode fast into the printing room, cigarette in hand, that Jim had just come from the Galleries. If there was a visiting scholar there, he might be annoyed at not having had enough time to settle them properly. If it was towards the end of term perhaps he’d stopped, on the way to the printing room, at the little wooden chalet, the ‘Studio’, to collect some late copy for the school newspaper. The ‘Studio’ was the singularly modest and unprepossessing accommodation Bembridge School afforded its long-serving, stalwart Second Master, the overworked and irascible T.M. (Tom) Stedman, who was the newspaper’s editor (and former printer). The copy would be marked up in the same tiny red biro script Tom used to mark boys’ exercise books.

I enjoyed the intricacies of hand composition. I’d become a fast and proficient compositor – nowhere near 1000 ens an hour, which was what was expected of the trade compositor (about 20 lines of Bembridge School Newspaper text), but quick and accurate enough to find myself, towards the end of my time at Bembridge, often charged with correcting other boys’ work (and there was always a lot of correcting to do, as every boy was given his chance in the printing room) and doing last-minute jobs. In due course I was made Senior Printer, one of two boys with that title. I think this was the only distinction I ever achieved at Bembridge as regards membership of the school community.

Although I can’t claim to have been among the leaders I see now the printing room always so desperately needed - such was the burden at times of the work undertaken - for the three years and a term during which I was a member of Bembridge senior school I think I can say I was always a committed printer: from the third form, when (if I remember rightly) for a year printing was a curriculum subject for most, if not all boys (one double-period per week), through the fourth and fifth forms (one of two subjects chosen from printing, woodwork and art), up until the end of my first term in the sixth form (when I left Bembridge), by which time printing was a settled option in filling my free time.

I think it’s probably true to say that to the boys the printing room was almost always seen as just ‘the printing room’, rarely if ever the home of the Yellowsands Press. When I began researching this article I was surprised to discover that even the smallest piece of ephemeral jobbing work produced at Bembridge in my time usually bears the Yellowsands imprint (one of very few uses found for the 6pt size of Caslon Old Face). But then, why was this a surprise? I realised that I had always thought of the imprint as somehow belonging to a higher authority, as something reserved for special occasions – an idea which I think now is perhaps not entirely without foundation. As it was, printing was simply part of the school landscape and we had no notion of how unusual it was (though in fact it was far from unique) for a school to have its own private press (what was unusual was the printing by hand of the school newspaper).

Writing about a school press seems to demand a special degree of caution. The bibliography is surely the easy part - and in this case seems to me to provide a much more than usually inadequate basis for understanding what printing meant at Bembridge. That requires consideration of the broader liberal experiment in creative education of which printing was a part - also the peculiar character of John Howard Whitehouse. But to represent fairly the various experience of the hundreds of boys (and, latterly, some girls) who passed through the printing room over the years seems impossible, let alone to assess the educational value of what they did there, and I have not attempted either task. It’s hard enough to tell the truth in adult hindsight about one’s own experience of being young.

I’m aware that what follows has been put together from the most incomplete of materials (especially concerning the two final decades, when printing was in decline at Bembridge). I just hope that it is of sufficient interest to stimulate other people who were there to set down their own memories - and from their knowledge to set straight my mistakes, of which there will doubtless be more than a few.

The historical notes published in the 50th, 100th, 125th  (reissued in pamphlet form as An Account of the Yellowsands Press in 1961), 200th and 217th (Jim Dearden’s 100thas printer) numbers of the Bembridge School Newspaper, together with the Bibliography of 1969, provide the basis of what follows, and as regards the external facts there is not a great deal that can be added to them. They have been collated with the items of printing room news which appeared (with varying frequency) in the Newspaper over the years, and supplemented by material from Whitehouse’s papers, Bembridge School records, and one or  two other sources – together with the memories of a number of former    members of the school. The highly idiosyncratic figure of Whitehouse himself, in many respects so remote, in others much less so (in his realisation, for instance, of the epoch-defining experience of the refugee) is difficult to pull into focus, but much of his character and personality can be found in his writings which though rarely autobiographical contain many echoes of his formative influences: in his strange apotheosis at Bembridge he remains fascinating. The establishment of a printing press was central to his idea of the foundation of Bembridge School, and indeed precedes it. In the event, the practice of printing became one of the school’s most enduring traditions.

There may be found online a scant few seconds of footage, part of a promotional video for the school dated 1993/94, showing type being composed by hand in the printing room. But to all intents and purposes printing at Bembridge ended in 1993, three years before the school itself closed. The last number of the school newspaper, which had been printed by members of the school every term since the autumn of 1919, appeared in 1992, and the last piece of printing of all, of which just a single copy was completed, the following year. At the time of its demise the Yellowsands Press must have been among the oldest established of school presses in Britain. It was begun by a remarkable social and educational reformer, an autodidact of robustly independent outlook, who as a Liberal MP living in Hammersmith in the second decade of the twentieth century was the neighbour of the two most celebrated living figures in the English private press movement.

May, 2019