Conclusion

The printing room at Bembridge School was never intended to produce professional printers, or even lasting hobby printers (though it did both), and most people’s memories of it aren’t really of printing at all, but of good companionship and a sense of healthy exertion in getting a useful job done on time. The techniques involved only engaged a few participants closely - and scarcely interested some, who stuck with printing nonetheless, appreciating that the demands of the printing room were often much simpler and easier to negotiate than those in the art and woodwork rooms. In this there was a certain degree of failure, in educational terms, in the organisation - but a lesson in tolerance and broad-mindedness, I suppose, as well. (Another structural weakness was that as a timetabled subject aimed mainly at the lower forms, printing was widely seen simply as something one grew out of.)

After the post-war decline of the Guild system (which there isn’t the evidence to evaluate, it must be said, with any precision) there was no clear framework of progression against which boys could measure their developing skills and understanding. It was very much up to the individual to motivate himself - and the amateur printer’s pursuit of  ‘correct composition’ at the expense of consistent press-work was writ large. All but a cursory understanding of make-ready and press-work was beyond the reach of most printers.

 

Neither does there ever seem to have been much sense of the importance of design apart from printing practice (this was flagged by inspectors as early as 1932), an approach which while it accorded with the Press’s origins in the arts and crafts movement, left Yellowsands isolated from later developments in twentieth-century printing and unable to adapt and evolve as it otherwise might have done. (There is a certain pathos attached to this: as I’ve written already, I believe italic types, only acquired by Yellowsands in the early 1960s, never really sat comfortably in the pages of Bembridge School Newspaper, and it’s extraordinary to reflect how, humble as it was, that publication was still in the 1990s carrying forward a pure strain of typographic idealism with a direct line connecting it to the golden age of the private press movement.)

   

When the flowering came, with the arrival of the first jobbing platen press, Yellowsands actually took a step backwards in terms of design. The visual vocabulary of the Nine Lessons and Carols service orders derived from the world of Victorian illumination and late nineteenth-century ‘old style’. But there was nothing precious about this. For all its limitations, printing at Yellowsands never lacked point and purpose. In this case, the care lavished on the service orders was to glorify an occasion which, though it may not have been recognised at the time, had a special historical resonance at Bembridge School.

Always the energetic publicist, Whitehouse planted a publishing imperative in Bembridge printing which was difficult to challenge, the strength of the tradition of collective effort in producing the newspaper tending to marginalise individual work (much printing of interest produced at Yellowsands, including that done privately by Jim Dearden and (non-pupil) Simon Rendall, working in the holidays, is tangential, at best, to the history of the school press).

Just as Whitehouse’s discipleship exceeded anything the real Ruskin asked of his followers, so the continuing use of the Albion to print a volume (quantity) publication such as the school newspaper was highly eccentric, going far beyond what William Morris intended in his (qualified) criticism of the machine-made.

 

Most of what was printed at Yellowsands, having served its purpose in the community for which it was made, has just disappeared. But the hard work should not be forgotten. As well as Bembridge School Newspaper, over seven decades that’s hundreds and hundreds of items of mainly ephemeral printing: play, concert and Foundation Day programmes, sports fixture lists, score cards, form lists, staff lists, posters, invitation cards, headed notepaper, library index cards, bookplates, the school prospectus (in eight editions, a substantial pamphlet), greetings cards, exhibition catalogues, ‘Arrangements’ (school term schedules) lists, calendars, clothing lists, certificates, printers’ keepsakes – not to mention the numerous orders of service, which became a Bembridge speciality, including latterly, as one leafs through the old office guard-books, a most melancholy procession of staff memorials: Niel Rocke, David Mackersie, Edward Daws, F.W. Sander, Tom Stedman.

In almost every decade of its existence the Yellowsands Press inspired individuals who would make printing their career, and there is a much wider circle of former pupils, including journalists and booksellers, art teachers and architects, who would acknowledge a specific debt to their time in the printing room.

Since the school closed in 1996 the fate of its records has not been entirely happy: a good deal of historically valuable material has been lost, though the attention prompted by the recent centenary celebrations has improved the prospects for the preservation of what’s survived. In Bembridge School Newspaper, however, there remains one near-continuous record – incomplete and inconsistent in its coverage as it is - of the life of Whitehouse’s liberal and humane experiment in educational reform.