The name Yellowsands was not given to the press until after
the opening of Bembridge School in 1919. The earliest imprints, which appear on
school entry forms the first of which would have been printed at 13 Hammersmith
Terrace, say (somewhat misleadingly) ‘Printed at Bembridge School Press’, or ‘Printed
at the private press of Bembridge School’ (copies of these seem to have run out
quite quickly, as some contemporary examples of completed forms are clearly
commercially printed, though they follow the original design, such as it is).
The other surviving ephemera from the press’s pre-Bembridge
days are simple letterheads, one for 13 Hammersmith Terrace, and another from
the same setting, but with ‘Ruskin Centenary Council’ added. An apparently more
substantial item, mentioned in An Account
and recorded as shown in an exhibition in 1959 celebrating the first forty
years of the Yellowsands Press, is a circular letter printed for the Ruskin
Centenary Council, signed by Whitehouse (who was the driving force) as
Secretary, dated January 1919. This, alas, I have been unable to find.
All these pieces were printed in 12-point Caslon Old Face
roman, which at first may have been all the type Daws and Whitehouse possessed.
Once the press was established at Bembridge, 18-point (cast, curiously, on a
16-point body – was it cheaper?) was added to stock for headings, and for the
next forty years these two sizes of Caslon would remain the extent of the
press’s working resources as regards type. In the best private press tradition,
unsightly italic was eschewed – and it’s worth noting that although it was
occasionally used in Bembridge School
Newspaper after the early 1960s when fonts were finally acquired, italic
never really sat comfortably there, only coming into its own in the press’s
smaller jobbing work.
These first efforts of Daws and Whitehouse are artlessly done
– unmediated settings in type of what
must have been at best hastily written-out roughs - but they serve their
purpose, and they remain the earliest products of the Yellowsands Press, before
it was called that. So far as I can see, the Yellowsands imprint first appears
on the fourth number of the school newspaper, at Christmas 1920.
Other than the Newspaper,
very little of the press’s jobbing output before about 1940 has been preserved.
From then until at least the mid-1970s copies of most pieces were pasted into a
series of guard-books, maintained by the school office (they include
office-generated printed matter as well). Fortunately several of these still
exist (a separate series of guard-books kept in the printing room and going
back much further, have disappeared) as does the collection Dearden formed
privately (starting with material he collected as a boy at Bembridge), which is
now in Toronto.
The first references to non-newspaper jobs (as distinct from
pamphlets and booklets) are notes on the production of greetings cards and
notepaper. The Christmas 1920 number of the Newspaper
reports 250 Christmas cards sold at the school exhibition, generating £25
(probably donated to the Famine Hospitality Fund). The following summer we
learn that Cuthbert Scott, who was the first Bembridge pupil ‘Master Printer’,
had printed 1000 sheets of headed notepaper, incorporating a wood-cut block by
Kenneth Barker showing School House (later Old House) at the edge of the cliff.
These would have been sold to boys (nothing was given away) and again, the
proceeds given to a charitable cause (as the decade wore on usually the School
Chapel Fund). The same issue, Summer 1921, carries the following notice: ‘A
syllabus of the academic work done this term is being printed and sent to all
parents’. What prompted this? Were the boys having too much fun?
In the autumn of 1922, we learn that a school Christmas card
was printed by Benbow and Wright ‘on their own initiative’.
The range of the jobbing work undertaken was gradually
increasing. The report on the school exhibition in the newspaper printed in the
summer of 1927, notes that ‘the booklets, note paper, programmes and score
cards printed by [David] Rendall and [John] Pearce were especially
praiseworthy’ (both boys would make careers in the printing and allied
industries). Rendall was one of the more prolific early printers. The previous
summer the newspaper had reported that he had ‘added to the booklets he has
printed, two addresses given before the Scientific Society by Alan Thomas and
Desmond Weatherhead’, though copies of neither of these pieces seem to have
survived.
As the extent, and with the growing school roll, the
print-run, of the newspaper grew (to which we will return), so the printing of
it took up more and more of the printers’ time, and from the mid-1920s a
familiar pattern starts to emerge of work on smaller jobs and pamphlets being
confined to the earlier part of each term while production of the newspaper
dominates the final weeks. But before the coming of such structure and routine,
there is a brief, vital phase of enthusiastic self-discovery and it’s embodied
in the first pamphlet printed by the Yellowsands Press, in the spring of 1920, John Ruskin by John Masefield.
This is the text of a lecture delivered at the Ruskin
Centenary Exhibition held at the Royal Academy in the autumn of 1919. It’s the
only piece of Yellowsands printing in which Whitehouse, working with Daws and a
group of named boys, avowedly took part, and was clearly intended as a
foundational document, with elements of a manifesto. Casting himself as a
‘simple man’ Masefield turns on the great Victorian prophet’s detractors, new
and old:
He spent his life telling men that they would be happy if they
thought rightly and did justly and with mercy and with beauty and generosity.
People said that he talked great nonsense and that he better leave it to
experts. Competitive commercialism triumphed and ended in the Great War. Some
of the results are before us. It would be better not to blame his theories till
they’ve been tried…
150 copies were printed, twelve of them signed by Masefield.
‘In future days we have no doubt that collectors will compete with eagerness
for copies of this first edition of Masefield’, commented the school newspaper,
and there are delighted reports subsequently of the work making extravagant
sums in the antiquarian market (at the time of writing, a copy is listed for
sale online at £150). At the exhibition of arts and crafts held in the school
museum in the autumn of 1921 John Ruskin was
shown alongside Whitehouse’s copies of the two great private press editions of
Ruskin: the Kelmscott Press The Nature of
Gothic, and the Doves Press Unto This
Last.
The following summer, in 1921, Masefield was invited to
deliver the Foundation Day speech and this was duly printed, one of several
such addresses from summer-visiting luminaries, including Dean Inge, Stanley
Baldwin and Walter de la Mare, which characterise the first decade of
Yellowsands bibliography. Some of them were issued simply as quires, i.e.
folded printed sheets, neither sewn nor covered, which while it can be argued
(at a stretch) was intended to enable the recipient to choose for themselves
the binding they required, looks in reality more like over-hastiness and an
excessive focus on process over product, qualities which would continue to mark
Bembridge printing.
The spring number of the newspaper that year reports the start
of a much more ambitious project, at least as regards length, the school song
book: ‘We hope to include…all the great school songs and many folk songs’. By
the end of the summer the first sixteen pages have been set up and are ready to
be printed. But no more is heard of this project, and no existing publication
corresponds to these records. The printers may have simply decided that they
had over-reached themselves, or perhaps Whitehouse had run into problems of
copyright (the kind of issue he was prone to brush aside but which may have
come home to roost).
By far the longest work - both in extent and the time it took
to complete - ever undertaken by the
Yellowsands Press was the school Hymn
Book edited by Whitehouse. Work began in 1930 and continued at a rate of
what must have been one or two sixteen-page sections per term for the next
three years. The book was bound in blue cloth by the Oxford University Press
bindery in the autumn of 1933. It was first seen by the school as a whole at
the inauguration of the chapel on 18th March 1934, an important
early milestone.
In Whitehouse’s address on that occasion celebration is shot
through with deep disquiet over the condition of Europe:
The blackest party of the tragedy of the world is that so many
of its youth are striving to perfect their own powers, to contend with others,
and to extend the kingdom of violence.
But here before the school lay an example and beacon of the
virtue of service for the good of all:
I record…with great appreciation that the hymn book we use for
the first time today, which contains many hymns which are also poems, has been
printed by boys in the school, including not only some of the older boys, but
some of the younger ones…
I remember with gratitude that when this school was founded it
possessed from the first day its own printing press.
The two copies of Bembridge
School Hymn Book I’ve seen vary considerably in the number of pages. There
would appear to have been at least one further binding order (unfortunately the
Oxford bindery records are inaccessible) as printing of the work continued
after 1934. A note in the school newspaper in the summer of 1935 records
another sixteen-page section had been completed. In November 1951, a separate
48-page Supplement appeared in
wrappers. When was use of the school Hymn
Book discontinued? By the early 1960s, as I recall, the copies in chapel of
Songs of Praise (or was it Hymns Ancient and Modern?) were already well worn.
It must have been very soon after taking over from Ronald
Muirhead as Printer, in the spring of 1935, that Tom Stedman and the school
printers began work on his compilation, Bembridge
School Records. It was completed in June, and its thirty-six pages of
lists, facts and statistics concerning the school’s first decade and a half are
distinctly, and surely deliberately, boy-friendly. It must have provided a
welcome break as work on the Hymn Book ground
on. A second edition, with a foreword by Whitehouse acknowledging the
pamphlet’s popularity, was printed in 1939.
By the 1990s the activities of the printing room, long since
removed from the general curriculum, seem to have been at best the object of
indifference to most staff at Bembridge, and to many if not most pupils were
largely unknown; but in the beginning things were quite otherwise - for one
thing printing loomed large simply because of the small size of the school (by
1922 the school roll had reached only 77, and for most of the 1920s was settled
around 100), and though by Christmas 1919 the press itself was still occupying part
of a nearby shed, the composing department was there for all to see at the end
of the busy arts and crafts room.
 |
| Bembridge School Newspaper, 1:1, Christmas 1919 |
Some of the early numbers of Bembridge School Newspaper have immense charm, particularly in the handful
of experiments in the early days in integrating wood-blocks and text matter, and
these are recognisably products of the Arts and Crafts movement. But as the
extent of the type-matter grew under Whitehouse’s energetic editorship such
experiments became impracticable. (Similar effects weren’t explored again until
the 1960s and the decorative jobbing work which defines the Dearden era.)
 |
| Bembridge School Newspaper, 4:2, Spring 1923 |
Whitehouse often liked to work with
small groups of senior boys in an ostensibly egalitarian and inclusive spirit
of leadership, examining matters like a parliamentary committee, and so it was
supposed to be when it came to editing the school newspaper. In practice,
however, considering the paper’s content in the 1930s, John Heath-Stubbs’s
somewhat jaundiced view does not seem too wide of the mark:
The [leading] contributions were either written by Whitehouse or
specifically commissioned by him from the older boys. Although the school
theoretically believed in self-expression, it was…a monolithic and dictatorial
regime.
The Newspaper was begun with the best of intentions, the hope being to achieve a
broadly-based content, combining school news with a high proportion of boys’ creative work. But by the 1930s its role had narrowed into that of an editorial mouthpiece for Whitehouse, set in what
was essentially a journal of record, which is what it remained. Wood-blocks or
linocuts became largely a matter of cover decoration, or were confined (later)
to an art paper wrap-around between text pages and cover. The enthusiasm for
wood-block cutting noted in the mid-1920s was by the 1940s much diminished resulting
in a poverty of inspiration which was singled out for criticism at the school
inspection in 1949.
 |
| Bembridge School Newspaper, 36:45, Stedman's first number. |
As a practical printer Stedman never seems to have been much
interested in graphic illustration, and perhaps recognising what he had
inherited for what it was, and also to try and contain the workload, he set
about his task in a rather severe spirit of rationalisation (which to some
extent reflects his personality, too). It certainly brought a new visual
clarity to the school newspapers of the late 1930s, and with his best printers he
achieved a consummate, plain typographic style, which is easy
to overlook when one considers what came after with the arrival of the first
jobbing platen press. But it perhaps had another less fortunate effect, fixing
once and for all the image of Bembridge
School Newspaper as somewhat worthy and dull, with its Quaker grey cover
and often bristly impression, an unmistakably official publication, rather hard
to love, or invest in creatively.
 |
| Bembridge School Newspaper, contents spread, mid-1930s |
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