'Printed for the Yellowsands Press': the 1930s nativity plays

There are two published accounts by old boys of life at Bembridge in the 1920s and 30s, in the autobiographies of the journalist Robin Day (perhaps the school’s best-known alumnus) and the poet John Heath-Stubbs (both of whom, incidentally, received bursaries). Although for the school newspaper Day wrote with some affection of his time at Bembridge (much of it spent at Coniston), in Grand Inquisitor he strikes a brusquer note, especially regarding academic standards, which he thought were decidedly low (and having previously attended a grammar school he had a definite basis for comparison). He attributes his own success in getting to university mainly to the special interest shown in him by the masters Baggaley and Stedman, and even suggests that Whitehouse’s own lack of higher education led him to discount its benefit to others.

Heath-Stubbs’s more wide-ranging recollections are also very critical of the school, in fact rather relentlessly so. He recalls Whitehouse as a ‘monster of egotism’. His account is marked by his obvious unhappiness as a boy at Bembridge (there is some evidence from his contemporary Tony Doncaster confirming this) though he acknowledges that the Island itself, and particularly the natural history of Whitecliff Bay and Brading Marshes, made a lasting impression on him  -  and despite the sourness he can be an astute observer. An apparently somewhat old-maidish boy, of poor eye-sight, dyspraxic, and essentially intellectual, he was clearly in the wrong place. Reading him we miss entirely the sense of idyll evoked by Whitehouse in Creative Education, and elsewhere: propaganda, to be sure, but for many boys of a less academic bent close to reality. Heath-Stubbs does have a little to say about the printing room, however. The tone is characteristic:

In the printing classes we produced the school magazine…We also set up various works of Whitehouse himself. Every year he would write a Nativity play for the boys to perform. This was printed and sold, of course, for the chapel fund. It would have been much more sensible if he had encouraged the boys themselves to create these Nativity plays, but nothing of the sort ever happened.

This is interesting as a description of what one might expect to have occurred at a slightly earlier date (before 1930), but contains one notable inaccuracy. None of the nativity plays written by Whitehouse (ostensibly in collaboration with the current head boy) from 1932 on was actually printed in school, though some of them bear the imprint ‘for the Yellowsands Press’. What Heath-Stubbs was actually remembering were probably programmes or invitations.

The matter of the imprint is not insignificant. There are fewer than half a dozen books with Yellowsands as a publishing imprint. They all date from this period, and most were produced for Whitehouse by John Johnson, Oxford University Printer. They include the two nativity plays The Road to Bethlehem (1933) and The Mystic Spring (1935) and the miscellany (containing Whitehouse’s address at the inauguration of the school chapel) Thy Youth and Age (1934). They speak to the contemporary urgency of Whitehouse’s ambition to express his own and the school’s influence through works that, while it would have been good to have produced them at Bembridge, lay beyond the scope of his schoolboy printers.

Although after 1931 Yellowsands printing became more productive, mainly because the new printing room attracted many more boys working in their own time, as regards school printing this extra capacity was probably largely taken up by the expansion of the newspaper (while for much of the earlier part of each term the printers were tied up with work on the Hymn Book). There could be no question of interfering with production of what was one of the main points of contact between what one parent described quaintly, but aptly, as the ‘Commonwealth of School and the Home Circle’ - as well as a wider world including the growing number of Old Bembridgians (who automatically received a copy of the newspaper). 

The newspaper had also become important to Whitehouse in another (if largely symbolic) way, providing some compensation for what he must have increasingly realised was the permanent loss of his political career:

In the strange world we live in we find ourselves in disagreement with the principles and methods of many European governments. We find false and inadequate the methods of making mass opinion by radio, newspaper and politician. We rejoice therefore that we have had in our newspaper a medium for expressing our faith in the unchanging message of the Prince of Peace.

Faith and politics were inextricable. An alternative to the exercise of official political influence lay at hand in a kind of sacred drama. He had seen in the nativity play the possibility of reaching a potentially far wider audience than the community of his school, and to exert influence again on a broader stage, and perhaps even in a higher realm. As the lights began to dim over Europe, he saw an opportunity for his school to rise to the challenge of the age with specific spiritual action.

From 1936 the autumn number of Bembridge School Newspaper is changed to the Christmas number (it had been so named before, but not consistently). To Whitehouse Christmas was ‘the greatest of all festivals’ (there was no cross in the school chapel in Whitehouse’s day). Everything about it, its stories, its poetry, its carols, were to be delighted in. And as he told his boys it was ‘a home festival’:

The happiness of your home is your greatest inheritance, and this we realise at Christmas. Let it lead you to the happiness of the spiritual world and to the friendship of the Great Friend.

The story of the nativity, which he saw as the first refugee story, symbolised ‘all that was necessary to a civilised world’.

The nativity plays Whitehouse wrote in the years leading up to the second world war are not among his most engaging writings. Stilted and didactic, they show little ear for dialogue. They are essential to an understanding of the man, however. They are by no means straightforward variations on a theme, but responses (at whatever distance) to the pressure of real current events, and incorporate in places allegorical elements reflecting them. They should be seen, as well, as part of the developing crisis of a man who, as Stuart Eagles remarks, was deeply haunted by the prospect of war, and the vulnerability of all that he had created at Bembridge. This was not just the school and his boys  - his vital, living heroes - but his great collection and championing of John Ruskin, the public reputation of whose work was then perhaps at its lowest ebb.

The last of these plays is ‘The Peacemaker’. It appears never to have been printed. It was first produced at Bembridge in the autumn term, 1939, and performed again the following January in London at the Rudolf Steiner Hall, specially hired for the occasion, where it was played to an invited audience. The summary of the plot in the review published in the school newspaper has the following:

The three Magi travelling to find the Prince of Peace are challenged by Herod and his soldiers. They are unable to prevent their [the Magi] going on and when they have gone Herod’s soldiers refuse to carry out the deeds of further violence he would have them do.

The surviving guard-books of Yellowsands ephemera contain numerous programmes and cast-lists for ‘The Peacemaker’ which was revived in school again and again during the war and the years immediately following. Of the earlier, published plays The Road to Bethlehem did enjoy modest sales and was available from the Oxford University Press until well into the 1960s, though it never made much money for the school, as was discovered after Whitehouse’s death, the printer’s distribution and warehousing costs nearly wiping out any profit from the royalties.

The woodcut, by Geoffrey Eyles, was much favoured by Whitehouse.

The Inspections of 1932 and 1949

The inspectors who visited Bembridge on behalf of the Oxford and Cambridge Examination Board in 1928 found that ‘the curriculum seems well balanced upon modern lines’, the extra time in the timetable allotted to ‘manual work of various kinds’ being accounted for ‘by the bold excision of Greek and German…altogether’ (despite Whitehouse’s avowed preference for modern languages the only one taught was French, and this remained the case until at least the end of the 1960s).

During our stay the ‘school exhibition’ was in progress, and we were greatly impressed thereby. It consisted of specimens of the boys’ work, done in their spare time, in model-making, wood-work, illuminating, boat-building, painting, pottery, wood-cuts, even sculpture, and the like, together with examples of their school-work, note-books, translations, etc.

‘It not only reflected great credit on all concerned, but was a welcome indication of a varied and keen interest in creative work’. Furthermore,

It is to be noted that much of the actual work about the school, the building of a new pavilion, fittings in the dormitories, the printing of the School magazine (an excellent production), and so on, is carried out by the boys themselves.

By the turn of the decade and the arrival, in 1932, of the first government inspectors, the arts and crafts identity of the school, centred on the growing Ruskin collection, and kept well in the public eye by Whitehouse’s stream of published commentary, was firmly established. A certain disparity of provision didn’t escape notice, however. With regard to the school premises as a whole, the report remarks that

In comparison with the fine art galleries and the school museum the classrooms seem rather cramped and in the inclement weather which obtained during the week of the inspection they seemed inadequately warmed.

Many of the staff were found to be academically underqualified, though ‘they are earnest and sincere people’. The exceptions in terms of attainment were the science and arts and crafts teachers – Baggaley and Muirhead – who are specifically praised by the inspectors, having produced much ‘enterprising and successful work’. And more generally ‘though the requirements of external examinations are treated with no great deference the actual results in most subjects are quite satisfactory’. Only the achievement in French and Latin was found to be mediocre.

There are a number of references to school printing in the 1932 inspectors’ report. The introductory observations note that

In Form III and upwards all boys give three periods a week to Manual Instruction and two or three to art. Gardening, Script Writing [i.e. formal handwriting or calligraphy] and Printing also appear on the timetable, while out of school hours boys are constantly occupied in practical pursuits.

The work produced independently in woodwork, however, ‘does not seem to reach the same high plane as the out of school work in the Printing room’.

There is a detailed appraisal in the body of the report, under ‘Art and Craft’. The achievement in wood engraving is commended, and

the School is most fortunate in possessing an admirable building with equipment for printing. [Forms] IIA, III, LIV [Lower 4th] and Shell have one or two periods assigned to this subject in their curriculum, and the craft has proved to be very attractive to a number of boys who spend much of their spare time printing a variety of matter from notices and programmes to the School Magazine and some small books, many of these with woodcut illustrations. The enthusiastic Master in charge should be able to develop this craft further, specially in the direction of experiments in good design. The addition of some new faces of type, when possible, would clearly be a great help in that direction. [This would take some time.]

It might be observed…that a more systematic planning of the Art and Craft work on a progressive basis, with the closest collaboration between the various members of staff concerned, should add to the variety of the types of work that could be done, and should lead to some remarkable results in a school where Art and Craft receive so full a share of sympathy.

Nonetheless, it was noticed that ‘a larger proportion of boys from this school have passed on to well known art schools, or in some cases directly into artistic work as a means of earning their livelihood, than is the case in schools of a more conventional type’.

The popularity out of school hours of the printing room - the new building was then not yet a year old – was noted with approval, also the effectiveness of the guild system as a stimulus to progress, and the various creative opportunities provided by the school newspaper and museum. Neither was it felt that the ordinary academic subjects were being neglected, in fact the school was performing here surprisingly well given that, as the inspectors put it, ‘the boys are by no means picked material intellectually’.

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The 1932 inspectors recognised at Bembridge an unusual, ongoing educational experiment which they were prepared to view with a good deal of generosity:

It is held that it is through the arts and crafts that a boy can best gain the experience of absolute realisation of self in work, and that this experience has a beneficial effect upon the spirit in which he approaches any other kind of work. Up to what stage dependence can be placed upon the manual arts as affording a wide intellectual training, and how far it is possible to preserve this harmony of interest and activity when the other subjects of the curriculum come to be studied are problems of great interest and difficulty which are at any rate being faced here.

By 1949, in the radically altered circumstances of post-war austerity and the need for rapid reconstruction, and in an educational environment in which many of Whitehouse’s ideas were much less unfamiliar to the mainstream, this attitude had changed. The 1949 report is in places quite harsh, depicting a school failing in its key ideals, and while there is due respect for his pioneer work, there is no longer the deference to Whitehouse personally, detectable in 1932. In general, ‘the school is not well equipped for teaching purposes except in arts and crafts subjects’ and ‘except in history and crafts the standard of work is below the average to be found in schools which provide education for boys of similar ability’.

The teaching of science, in particular, where ‘no syllabus or records are available’, was found wanting, requiring especially the integration of biology, still covered in the curriculum by the relic of (essentially observational) ‘Nature Study’ which ‘has not been considered part of the real science course’.

The inspectors were understandably impatient, but perhaps occasionally they were unjust. They point to the school’s current failure to exploit its privileged location: ‘it is a disappointment that in a school with such excellent natural facilities so little use has been made of them for so long…in marine field work alone there are possibilities open to very few schools in the country’.  While it was true that four years had passed since the return from Coniston, there was a persistent underlying problem which was hardly confined to Bembridge: the shortage of suitably qualified staff.

The art master ‘had barely completed three weeks in the new and unequipped art room at the time of the inspection’.

The exhibition, illustrating the work of the past session and previous years, revealed a disappointingly low standard. In drawing and in painting there is no evidence of a tradition, and the very uneven quality indicates uncertain guidance in recent years…The virile quality of original and creative exercises has been replaced by a tendency to rely on derivation from existing sources. This is particularly noticeable in the woodcuts used in association with typography. It would no doubt help to regenerate a new and personal inspiration in the craft of wood-cutting and wood-engraving if this work could be linked more closely with creative design in the art room.

And there is a rather cutting conclusion, whose reference to his book of 1928 Whitehouse would not have missed: ‘there is a need for a vigorous…approach to the visual arts more in keeping with the original concept of a creative education’.

And yet amidst all this criticism the paragraph headed ‘Typography’ – the newly-infused word now used in place of ‘printing’, reflecting the mid-century emergence of the specialism of graphic design - is curiously muted, even a touch reverential, and not necessarily looking forward:

In the craft of hand-composition and printing with the hand-press the school has maintained an unbroken tradition. There is a good standard of craftsmanship in the various productions and the simple, unostentatious layout, enables boys to see, as they should, that the fascination of playing with movable type is not inconsistent with dignity and simplicity of design.

With its technical mystique, its clear reflection of the ‘real’ world of industry, its manifest purpose in the community in which it was set, the printing room in its heyday was ever apt to work its magic on the visitor, be they prospective parents being shown round by the Head, or boys’ families looking in on Foundation Day weekends (when the decks were cleared to show off the year’s work) – or hard-nosed school inspectors.

Early exhibitions

A note in the fourth number of the school newspaper, Christmas 1920, records a school exhibition in which were shown ‘rare and beautiful books collected by Warden, including Quala [sic], Kelmscott and Doves Presses’. The sheer depth of artistry and the technical finish of the books from the two latter presses might have been hard to relate to, but the Bembridge boy printers would surely have recognised the Caslon Old Face used by the homelier Cuala Press (of whose books Whitehouse possessed several examples), one of many presses which, like their own, had taken advice from Emery Walker.

The exhibition probably took place in the then newly-built Ruskin Museum. Only the second new building put up by Whitehouse at the school site it is the somewhat squat, white-painted structure immediately to the right inside the school gates. In my day, the mid-1960s, it served as an art room, but it was originally an exhibition room and was the principal such space at Bembridge before the Ruskin Galleries were built as part of New House in the late nineteen-twenties.

Exhibitions were central to Whitehouse’s project at Bembridge, both for their educational value and as a way of linking the school to the local community (hence the building’s position), and in addition to the annual, Foundation Day, show of school work, there were brought in over the years a number of notable exhibitions from outside. Generally, exhibitions were to provide, wherever possible, specific enhancement to the learning environment, being intended ‘to instruct and inspire, with particular regard to the needs of the boys who were definitely associated with the work to which the exhibition related’.

The two earliest exhibitions recorded in the school newspaper appear, however, to have been largely composed of items from Whitehouse’s own collection. As well as other arts and crafts, both included sections of books, and in a diary entry of Oct. 9th 1921, Whitehouse notes a ‘Printers Guild mtg. at the exhibition…at mid-day. We went through specimens of printing from early  times in the history of the art, and examined the books from private presses on view’. Perhaps the participants’ appetite had been whetted by the lecture on the history of printing delivered that spring by one Parsons who had illustrated his talk with reproductions obtained from the British Museum and elsewhere. In the early days at least, Bembridge printers appear to have had ready access to contemporary or historical models of book-making of a high order (and as Whitehouse’s Ruskin collecting gathered pace, there would be examples of manuscript illumination and incunabula from Ruskin’s own library). 

This inspiration, together with developing practical skill, was soon seen to be bearing fruit. By the summer of 1923 the Guild of Printers is boasting that a ‘real monument [to greater technical knowledge] is embodied in the pages of this newspaper – in the care, patience and thought…[given]…in order to make it a worthy example of a great craft’. There are other small tokens of pride: for a few issues beginning that autumn the school shield on the title of the newspaper is printed in red; the Guild note in the summer issue, 1924, records that the workshop has been adorned with a piece of lettering in gold leaf.

Two years later, in the autumn of 1926, we find the Warden addressing the printers’ Guild Tea on the history of printing and showing the assembled company a book of 1507 (this would have been a Book of Hours, printed in Paris), which had belonged to Ruskin. The printers are by now contributing substantially to the annual School Exhibition. ‘The booklets, note paper, programmes and score cards printed by Rendall and Pearce were especially praiseworthy’, notes Muirhead in the summer of 1927 (the pair were made Master Printers that autumn).

The following spring number records an exhibition of ‘Written and Printed Books’ in the Ruskin Museum, which breaks new ground in its scope. ‘The books exhibited included a First Folio [a facsimile], some wonderful early printed books, including a Virgil of great beauty, printed in Venice in the 19th [sic] century, some beautiful modern books by way of contrast’. Examples of the ‘written book’ are reported to have included thirteenth and fourteenth century manuscripts, incorporating fine miniatures and illuminated borders.

It was at this time that, following some correspondence to which he had contributed in the Times Literary Supplement, Whitehouse was moved to make his own, somewhat idiosyncratic, contribution to the then rapidly developing literature of modern book production. At the Guild Tea of December 5th 1929 we find him in vain and generous mood: ‘The Warden at the conclusion of his address presented every member with an autographed copy of his new book, The Craftsmanship of Books’.

During the 1930s two substantial exhibitions of typographical interest were mounted at Bembridge School. There is really no equivalent to them in the later life of the school. The first ran for most of the spring term in 1933. It would appear to have been a much expanded and enlarged restaging of the 1928 show, taking advantage of the splendid new galleries in New House, and doubtless including some of Whitehouse’s new Ruskin acquisitions. It was given an extensive notice in the school newspaper.

The motif underlying this term’s exhibition was the development of books through the ages, with particular reference to printing. In his opening remarks the Warden stressed the fact that no attempt was being made to take sides on the questions of who printed the first book or where it was printed. We were concerned only with the finished products in so far as they were examples of beauty in work and craftsmanship.

In a series of cases along one wall were exhibited a series of rare and valuable books. The arrangement was in chronological order and above the cases were charts showing the various authors who worked during that particular century and what advances were made in printing. With the aid of these charts…the arrangement of the books could be more easily understood and the scope of the exhibition the more fully grasped.

At the beginning there were books fashioned by hand, such as the Flaunden Missal, beautifully illuminated and marvellously preserved. Then we advanced to one of the earliest books printed, to a facsimile of Shakespeare’s first folio, to first editions of Scott and Dickens. Among the modern books were many examples of fine printing and binding by William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, by the Gregynog Press, the Grayhound Press and the Golden Cockerel Press.

The focus on the contemporary, well-made trade edition, is noteworthy:

There were also exhibited the processes by which half-tone plates and line-blocks were produced and methods employed in binding a book. The high standard of work combined with cheapness which many modern firms were maintaining could be seen in a display of cheap yet attractively produced books. On the walls were charts illustrating such subjects as the Stationers’ Company, the printing of the Bible,  illumination of manuscripts, all of which greatly assisted those examining the exhibition.

As seems also to have been the case in 1928, some of the items described here were lent by Oxford University Press. John Johnson, always ‘happy to oblige one who has been as good a friend to the Press as you’ – he was printing most of Whitehouse’s books at this period – had sent two boxes of material, one ‘containing seven books for exhibition purposes’ (probably including the First Folio, which looks like the facsimile of the Bridgewater Library copy, edited by Sidney Lee and published by the Clarendon Press in 1902), the other ‘the same gear for production that I sent you before’ (presumably referring to the 1928 exhibition), most likely relating to the exhibits concerning photo-mechanical processes and the techniques of book-binding.

The masters R.G. Lloyd and T.M. Stedman appear to have done a great deal of the preparatory work for the exhibition, Whitehouse’s contribution being presented as more that of the generous patron (as he often liked to be seen) than the instigator, though he was ‘ever ready to assist those working with him’. A number of boys, ‘enthusiastic workers…prepared charts and mounted illustrations’. Masters availed themselves of the opportunity to bring their classes to inspect the show and conduct question and answer sessions. The exhibition was held to be a great success.

In contrast to this is the remarkable one-man show dedicated to Eric Gill (by this date a widely-known public figure) mounted in the spring term, 1936, and reported by Stedman in the fiftieth number of the school newspaper. One longs to find some photographic record of this exhibition but, as in 1933, none seems to have been made. But although it’s not quite clear how much of Gill’s typographic work was shown other than the Golden Cockerel Four Gospels (to which Stedman, recent successor to Muirhead in the printing room, brings his printer’s eye), there was much else to interest the printers.

The aim of the show was to bring together a collection representing all aspects of Gill’s art and craft.

The exhibition gave a very good idea of the versatility of the man. There was one piece of sculpture, a piper surrounded by children. In addition to this there was a large number of photographs of the more important works he had executed. A group of photographs showed the Stations of the Cross, which are in Westminster Cathedral. Then there were the figures of Ariel and Prospero, which are over the entrance to Broadcasting House. The War memorial of Leeds University was very striking in its symbolic theme, Christ driving the money changers from the temple. On a smaller scale, but exquisite in its treatment, was the memorial to Winston Churchill’s daughter.

Another feature of the exhibition was a large number of woodcuts which had been used to illustrate books. These were remarkable for their firmness of line and for their design. The human figures were so fitted into their designs of leaves and stems that, although at first one commented on the absence of ornament, on closer examination one realised that the design and treatment were most elaborate. This was clearly shown in the capitals for the Four Gospels.

The actual woodblocks themselves had been filled with gesso which stood out white against the black of the block. In themselves they were of considerable beauty.

Gill had designed a number of founts of type and had set up a press upon which he printed with some of them. In some cases private firms had used his types to produce very beautiful books. A wonderful edition of the Four Gospels printed by the Golden Cockerel Press, and illustrated by Eric Gill was shown. We found at first that it was perhaps a little disturbing to see the uneven right hand side of the page, but apart from this and a few minor considerations in the shape of one or two letters, the type was easy to read and pleasing to the eye.

There was on exhibition a number of original drawings. The most elaborate was the preliminary full size drawing of the Crucifixion, which had been designed for the chapel of Rossall School. There was a small but very interesting group of pencil drawings of heads. These had not been shaded but were the hard lines the sculptor would employ…

There were some architectural drawings, too, one imagines from the beginning of Gill’s career. All in all, the show was ‘a very valuable contribution to the cultural life of the school, in that it has brought us into direct contact with the work of one of the foremost practising craftsmen of the day’. The Warden is thanked for obtaining the exhibits (but was his the original contact with the Gill studio?). He had been assisted in arranging the exhibition by the staff brothers Basil and Niel Rocke.  

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.

Production to 1940

The name Yellowsands, referring to Whitecliff Bay uncovered at low tide, is sometimes thought to have been Whitehouse’s own invention, but comes in fact from the original name of the former hotel that became the first school building (and eventually, Old House). This was built sometime between 1890 and 1895. The year following his purchase in 1914 of a field overlooking the bay for a secondary boys’ campsite (to which he also gave the name Yellowsands) he acquired the nearby Whitecliff Bay House, which was the renamed Yellowsands Hotel.

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

  

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