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

Premises and equipment to 1940

In the spring of 1924, at what was probably the printers’ Guild Tea, it is recorded that ‘The President [Whitehouse]…gave an amusing account of the early history of our press’. By the time he wrote it down, in 1936, in celebration of the fiftieth number of the school newspaper, it may already have acquired the aspect of a traditional school tale.

Part of the background to the story has been frequently examined by scholars and is consequently well known to students of printing history. This is the notorious rift between the private press partners T.J. Cobden-Sanderson and Sir Emery Walker over the fate of the Doves Press type. Whitehouse’s treatment of it reminds us that as an historical witness he is not always to be relied upon.

The facts are well established. Contracted to transfer the Doves Press materials to Walker following the dissolution of their partnership, Cobden-Sanderson reneged on his promise and instead, in what he saw as a kind of religious sacrifice, threw (in instalments, over several days) the punches, matrices and type off Hammersmith Bridge into the Thames. (He never regretted doing this, despite the loss of his reputation, and his Journals reveal the boyish glee and exquisite fear of being caught red-handed with which he carried out the destruction.)

Here is Whitehouse’s version, as edited for An Account of the Yellowsands Press (1961):

Cobden-Sanderson was very anxious that the type used by the Doves Press should not be used for any other purpose so he had a kind of brick cave built somewhere in the bed of the Thames. Into this was poured one night the whole of the type of the Doves Press. No one knows the exact site. To this day the Thames remains the custodian…

It is not for me to pronounce any opinion on the estrangement between the two men. Such things are common to the life of humanity…

(The original actually gives more credence to the brick cave by dwelling on the breadth of the mudbanks and narrowness of the stream at low tide.)

It’s an extraordinary fabulation. What was Whitehouse thinking? The best explanation seems to be that he was trying to avoid fatally undermining Cobden-Sanderson whom he thought of as an heroic figure. His absolute culpability is concealed in the teasing fiction of the type’s possible recovery, which presents a kind of romantic quest. It follows that the falling-out might be seen as much less serious than it was, like a passing, youthful clash of personalities, over which Whitehouse rises magnanimously. He thought he was protecting his boys.

*

There is no reason to doubt the essentials of Whitehouse’s story. Cobden-Sanderson and Walker were his near neighbours at 13 Hammersmith Terrace. He had been living there, with his friend Edward Daws as his guest, at least since the beginning of the First World War. Whitehouse became friendly with both neighbours, though he never saw them together, and both gave him advice on setting up a press. But he found Cobden-Sanderson ‘particularly inspiring’, with ‘the spirit of a brave adventurer’. That he should have been drawn to him is perhaps not altogether surprising. Cobden-Sanderson’s high idealism would have appealed to Whitehouse’s ready instinct for hero-worship and of the two former partners in the Doves Press he is likely to have been much the more ardent Ruskinian. (He had bound the illuminated address to Ruskin on his 80th birthday which Whitehouse had delivered personally on behalf of the Birmingham Ruskin Society in 1900, the one occasion on which Whitehouse met Ruskin). However, it would be Emery Walker, reputation intact, whom Whitehouse would enlist to the new Bembridge School advisory board.

It was at the ‘special advice’ of Cobden-Sanderson that probably in 1917 Whitehouse acquired second-hand a hand-press ‘the same…both in size and make, as that upon which Morris printed his Kelmscott books.’  It was installed - with considerable difficulty and damage to the staircase – on the first floor at 13 Hammersmith Terrace. A quantity of their Old Face type was bought from Caslon (which looks more like Walker’s recommendation, though this isn’t acknowledged) and a composing room of sorts established on the top floor. Daws attended ‘the works of a friendly firm’ to learn the rudiments of the printing art.

The press, a Hopkinson & Cope Albion, no. 4878, built in 1866, was moved to Bembridge towards the end of the first, summer term, in 1919, and set up at the beginning in a room near the back stairs in Old House. Among the school staff then there was an assistant master who, as fate would have it, was to become one of the most renowned twentieth-century typographic historians. As his biographers relate:

The transport of the press and its associated type and equipment must have been a major task, and would have caused great excitement in such a small community [there were only five boys at the outset]; it seems certain than the eighteen-year-old Harry Carter would have been fully involved with this exercise and with the first printing done on the press in its new home.

Carter, who had been educated at Bedales, was the son of the headmaster of one of the East London Schools which Whitehouse earlier in his career had managed. Temporarily at a loose end, he was helping Whitehouse set up his new school before going up to Queen’s College, Oxford, in October 1919.

Carter’s biographers give no clue that he had done any practical printing before this (the Bedales school newspaper he’d edited was printed commercially). Many years later, as a guest at an Old Bembridgians’ dinner, he was found to be disappointingly shy and unforthcoming on the matter, and there is unfortunately no record of his impressions of his brief time at Bembridge. But it might be noted in passing that there is a probable, half-conscious reference to it in the amateur manual Printing Explained he wrote with Herbert Simon. This appeared in 1931 and was for many years the only modern guide to printing with an Albion. At the end there is a specimen setting for a library issue record sheet, with the heading ‘The White House School Library’. More importantly, the text of the first chapter, ‘A Craft for Schools’ is almost certainly indebted to Whitehouse’s justification of school printing in Creative Education (1928), especially his notion of printing providing a transferable ‘standard of taste’.

Specimen setting from Printing Explained, 1931

It would be very satisfactory to be able to point to a piece of Yellowsands printing in which Harry Carter definitely had a hand, but it’s not possible. By the time the first, eight-page, number of the school newspaper appeared at the end of the autumn term, 1919, he would have been long gone. By then the press had been moved to a small shed near the squash court, and part of the far end of the arts and crafts room turned into a composing room (a little later this was partitioned off). This arrangement continued until 1922 when press and composing room were united in part of a wooden sports pavilion, where they remained for the next nine years. ‘Our new printing room and its equipment mark a great advance and have enabled us to become much more methodical craftsmen,’ Muirhead wrote in the spring of 1922. But according to Whitehouse, although

this arrangement was an improvement on the former plans [it was] far from satisfactory. [The pavilion] was a long way off, the roof was sometimes leaky, the floor was not strong enough to bear the press satisfactorily and became rickety. The room was heated by a coke stove which was chiefly successful in emitting smoke, and there was consequently a large amount of dust to contend with.

*

The stubs of two purchase order books from 1922 and 1923 survive in the Whitehouse Archive and they include details of various printing items ordered from H.W. Caslon: an 8” press roller, an upper case, quoins, sidesticks, reglets and other spacing material, as well as several orders for individual sorts, in short supply for whatever reason. Another order is for a substantial stock of the entire range of (six) f ligatures: had someone thought perhaps at the outset that these weren’t necessary? But recourse to outside suppliers wasn’t always required. From time to time the Guild of Woodworkers would come fraternally to the printers’ aid, for instance in the spring of 1925, when they made ‘a pair of compositor’s cases and frame for the printing room’. (In the beginning lower cases seem to have been simply placed on tables and upper cases propped against the wall.)

The printing room in 1936

For what was quite a substantial building, the new printing room - designed by Muirhead, built according to Whitehouse by ‘direct labour’ (which is misleading as it seems unlikely that boys took part as was the case with the dark room a decade earlier) and occupied from the summer of 1931 – emerges from the record with an odd lack of fanfare. This is probably because, important as it was to the printers, in the broader scheme of Whitehouse’s plans for the growth of his school, and the concurrent evolution of his commitment to the cause of Ruskin, both as collector (some of his most substantial purchases date from this period, including the Diaries) and advocate, it was really no more than a by-product. There is no announcement, fund-raising, or progress report, just a fait accompli - and the celebration of increased productivity: ‘The new printing room has made an enormous difference to the comfort and efficiency of our work,’ reports the school newspaper, ‘and the increased bulkiness of this number…is a direct result’.

Should an historically curious printer then have been browsing the earliest numbers of Bembridge School Newspaper he might have been surprised by the following, from the spring of 1920: ‘Our compositors are becoming so expert that the editors found it very difficult to keep them supplied with “copy”’. By the early 1930s there was no doubt that Whitehouse and his editorial committee of senior boys would be keeping the printers busy. But if the printing room, at least in the final weeks of each term, now may have looked and felt to some more like the manufacturing base of a publishing enterprise than a craft workshop, there was no question of challenging the continuing suitability of a nineteenth-century hand-press to meet the task in hand.

For a while, from his appointment in May 1935, Stedman was able to bring  about a noticeable improvement in technical standards, especially press-work. This was gratefully acknowledged by Whitehouse who that term gave the printing room a guillotine which, among other things, enabled the printers to trim flush work in wrappers, including the newspaper, greatly enhancing its finished appearance. Methods and procedures, and to some extent design, all seem to have come under examination as part of a general rationalisation. The main aim was to relieve the pressure of the final weeks by moving as much work as possible on the newspaper to earlier in the term, though exactly what all this involved in practice is frequently unclear. There was undoubtedly a new sense of focus and discipline in the printing room, however. The Guild hierarchy seems galvanised. By the spring of 1938 the improvement in the work of the third and lower fourth formers is being singled out for praise.

But the hard work took its toll on equipment. The Guild notes in the newspaper that autumn report that

The great event in the printing room this term has been the installation of another press similar in design to the old one which has been used by the Guild since its inception.

Stedman was in whimsical mood:

Joy felt at this was tinged with regret for the old hero of fifty-seven copies of the school newspaper. He had been ailing for some time and only constant nursing had latterly kept him fit for the great task he had to perform. But that the end was near was plain to all and many a figurative tear was shed when he passed noisily away one Sunday morning early in October…

In consequence we have been devoting ourselves to preparing and getting used to his successor, who is built on rather more generous lines…

The piston of the old Albion was retained, and with ‘passed noisily away’ engraved upon it, hung on the printing room wall.

A defection: Ronald Muirhead

Occasionally the example of the Yellowsands Press travelled with the school’s influence, and in one notable case we can trace how it took root elsewhere.

The new atmosphere of egalitarianism in the 1960s naturally led some boys at Bembridge to ask themselves what was meant by ‘progressive education’ and, given certain facts of the school’s history (notoriously, for some, the absence of the OTC), even perhaps to wonder if they themselves were attending a ‘progressive’ school. Addressing the matter in an article contributed to a short-lived sixth-form magazine of the time, Peter Rendall, then headmaster, was quick to scotch the notion, should it have arisen, that pupil-staff relations had ever been established on any basis of equality. Freedom, based on discipline, had to be earned, and that had always been the way at Bembridge. Moreover,

the Warden knew best and was ready to tell boys what they should do, not to leave the full choice to them. If they were in his school they had to accept the ideas for which he founded the school and those who kicked against his rulings or his discipline were punished or asked to leave.

But though there was now little to distinguish Bembridge from many other schools which had adopted broadly similar aims to Whitehouse (and in particular his belief in the value of providing for a wide range of extra-curricular opportunities), in 1919 he had certainly been a pioneer, and was perceived as an innovator: interestingly, Rendall cites two other foundations of the inter-war period, Canford and Bryanston, which were directly influenced by Whitehouse’s principles worked out at Bembridge.

In the case of Bryanston School, however, it was rather more than a transfer of ideas and methods. In short, according to Whitehouse, the new Bryanston head, Thorold Coade, appointed in 1932 in succession to the founder J.G. Jeffreys (who had fallen out with his governors), had gone behind his back, poaching Bembridge staff, and even perhaps deviously despatched his (Coade’s) wife to Bembridge to be shown ‘as far as possible every detail of our life and work here and the principles we were carrying out’. Particularly galling was the resignation of Muirhead, who had led arts and crafts teaching at Bembridge and only a year or two previously built the new printing room. It is his defection to Bryanston, and before him that of the art teacher and junior house master Reginald Hughes, that lies behind the curious outburst of defiance and bravado which ends Whitehouse’s account of the Press published in 1936. ‘We are the oldest school press in the kingdom,’ he declared (a dubious claim; already in 1919 there were presses at both Abbotsholme and Bedales), ‘our private press and our newspaper have long been known in a national sense.’

We have numberless enquiries by post and in person for advice and help. We have always been glad to respond to the extent of our ability. To those who have acknowledged with courtesy any help we have been able to give them in starting experiments themselves, we extend our felicitations...to those who borrow our ideas and methods (and more besides) without acknowledgement…seeking to reap where they have not sown, we offer our sympathy. Their destiny is to follow and we shall keep them on the run.

The Bryanston prospectus published in January 1934 lists R. Hughes as art master (he appears to have started his employment there in the autumn of 1932) and under the heading ‘Arts and Crafts’ notes that ‘it is hoped in the near future to attempt textiles, bookbinding and printing’.

Bryanston’s historian M.C. Morgan, writing in 1978, found that of the twenty or so hobbies set up at the school in its first decade, from 1928, printing and sculpture ‘made their mark and [in a short time] reached an astonishingly high standard’, unmatched by that achieved in ‘drawing, painting or other graphic arts’.

The Printing Club, formed in the winter of 1934, set itself under the eye of Ronald Muirhead professional standards. From the first it…produced work that was not only technically sound but aesthetically satisfying. It had the further advantage that the boys knew that what they were doing was of direct benefit to the school: chits, play programmes and service sheets were all witness to its achievement. With the profits of Bryanston Sampler (1937) it was able to buy three new founts of Gill Sans type…

For Whitehouse, who felt that he had always gone out of his way to look after Muirhead, this was a personal betrayal. ‘Let me remind you,’ he wrote to him, ‘in no spirit of bitterness but only in friendship of our past connection’.

When you came to me in 1919 you were unemployed. There was great prejudice against you and others similarly situated for their action relating to war service [conscientious objection]. Your local authority had dismissed you. It was an extraordinary pleasure to me to be able to help you. The school suffered many attacks in consequence, and you well know how I met them and the support you always had from me.

You have had as you have told me yourself a very happy life here. You have been able to work in freedom and you have had this experience in a school worked on its own distinctive methods where arts and crafts have been given an equal place of honour with other things. You have been able to see how a school could and should be run on modern lines, where peace in all things is pursued, and this great training has I think helped you in every way as well as at your own subjects.

A house had been built for Muirhead. His son had been educated free. No limit had been set on his position at Bembridge.

I mention these things in no unworthy spirit but only to ask you whether I have been treated quite fairly. You hear of a new school which as you know is copying our methods in every way possible. You enter into negotiations, and accept an offer, without taking me into your confidence at all, or telling me anything about the matter until it was settled. I have therefore not even had the opportunity of telling you of the special arrangements I had made for your future when you retired at the ordinary retiring age – an arrangement I believe far better than the offer you have accepted.

I shall be in all today and shall be glad to see you.

*

One can never quite take Whitehouse at face value: he is often embellishing or exaggerating or striking an attitude; but much of this letter can be substantiated. A manuscript list of staff salaries dated June 1925 shows that only the teacher W.A. Grace (who left Bembridge for Wakefield Grammar School where he was followed by Ernest Baggaley in 1941) was paid more than Muirhead who in the early days at least seems to have cut a distinctly odd figure, drawing occasionally unwelcome attention and speculation. ‘The one weak spot at Bembridge is one of your staff who wears ill-fitting clothes, very long curly hair and sandals’, wrote Alex Devine to Whitehouse, only partly in jest, in May 1922: a prospective parent, trying to choose between Bembridge and Clayesmore School (of which Devine was head) was concerned at the degree of influence Muirhead seemed to wield at Bembridge. William Inge (Dean Inge, of St Paul’s), a lifelong admirer of Whitehouse (and sometime school President), though himself a ‘hardened old Tory’, said later that ‘there was a time, when the school was very young, when certain people tried to represent it as a seminary for young Bolshevists’. But ‘nothing could be more absurd to anybody who knew the Warden…’

A Chronology of the Yellowsands Press, 1919-1993

Titles in italic are Yellowsands printings unless otherwise indicated. Entries in small type refer to matters of general school history.

1914  Purchase by J.H. Whitehouse, probably with funds provided by the philanthropist Charles Roden Buxton, of a field overlooking Whitecliff Bay on the eastern tip of the Isle of Wight, as a site for a secondary boys’ summer camp. In 1915 purchase of nearby former hotel.

c.1917  Vintage Albion hand-press installed at 13 Hammersmith Terrace, London, home of Liberal MP and founder of Bembridge School, John Howard Whitehouse.

1919  J.H.Whitehouse, ed., The English Public School: A Symposium. OUP.

1919  May. Bembridge School opens with five pupils and five staff.

1919  End of summer term. Press and equipment installed near back stairs in Old House, almost certainly with the assistance of the eighteen-year-old Harry Carter.

1919  Autumn. Press moved to shed near arts and crafts room (formerly the campsite mess room, and which those who remember the school before 1965 will recognise as the woodwork room) one end of which became the composing area.

First number of Bembridge School Newspaper, eight pages, measuring 11 ½  x 9”. After nine issues this was reduced to 10 x 7 ½”, crown quarto (most Yellowsands pamphlets are 7 ½  x 5”, or crown octavo).

1920  John Masefield, John Ruskin. Completed 8th April. The text of an address forming part of the Ruskin Centenary Celebrations, 1919, to which Whitehouse was honorary secretary.

1920  Summer. First wood-block printed in Newspaper, by Dickson Guest. Printers' Guild established by autumn.

1922  Press and composing room reunited in room in sports pavilion.

1925   Spring. Wood-blocks introduced as a regular feature of the Newspaper. First issue with grey paper cover.

1925  Autumn. First ‘Illustrated Supplement’ to Bembridge School Newspaper. These half-tone sections of photographs were printed by the Isle of Wight County Press (and at Coniston, by the Westmoreland Gazette). Discontinued as a regular feature after issue of Autumn 1955.

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

1929  J.H. Whitehouse, The Craftsmanship of Books. London: Allen & Unwin.

R.G. Lloyd and T.M. Stedman appointed assistant masters.

1930  Ruskin Galleries completed.

1931  Purpose-built printing room, designed by R.D. Muirhead, first occupied in the summer term. Vacated by the printers in 1988 to make way for metal-work class.

Departure of Edward Daws, Sub-Warden.

1932  Brantwood, near Coniston, Ruskin’s former home, bought by Whitehouse. The Ruskin Society, whose membership was mainly by invitation, formed by Whitehouse.

1933  Spring. ‘Book Exhibition’, illustrating the history of book production.

1933  Autumn. Printing completed of Bembridge School Hymn Book. Bound by Oxford University Press. Work had begun in 1930.

1934  Inauguration of school chapel.

1935  Ronald Muirhead departs to teach woodwork and printing at Bryanston School. T.M. Stedman becomes Printer.

T.M. Stedman’s compilation, Bembridge School Records, printed in June (2nd edition, 1939).

1936  Spring. Fiftieth number of Newspaper, including Whitehouse’s account of the early history of the Yellowsands Press. Eric Gill exhibition reviewed by Stedman.

1936  Whitehouse founds the ‘Order of Companions’, his school version of Ruskin’s Guild of St George.

1938  Hopkinson & Cope demy Albion hand-press, c.1870, replaces original school Albion, now worn out.

1940  Summer term. School closed early to prepare for evacuation to Coniston. Press and equipment moved after initial decision to leave them at Bembridge is reversed.

1940  Christmas. First ‘overseas’ number of Newspaper. Sixteen issues in all were printed at Coniston.

1941  Departure of Ernest Baggaley, Second Master, to Wakefield Grammar School.

1942  Spring. J.H. Whitehouse, Wartime Christmas.

1945  Autumn term. School re-established at a Bembridge site much damaged by army occupation.

Printing resumed at Bembridge by wholly Coniston-trained core group of printers.

1952  Christmas. One hundredth number of Newspaper.

1953  Summer term. Whitehouse struck in the eye by a cricket ball during the annual Old Bembridgians match, an accident from he never fully recovers.

1955  28^th September, death of John Howard Whitehouse (b. 8 June 1873).

1955  Autumn (Michaelmas) term. Whitehouse memorial number of Newspaper.

1958  Summer. J.S. Dearden, Printing at Coniston, printed in June.

Autumn. Dearden takes over from T.M. Stedman as Printer.

1959  Spring term. New type (Caslon Old Face) brought into use, the first bought since before the war.

Summer. T.M. Stedman, Bembridge School: The first forty years printed in June, but not issued until the autumn, the printing of the illustrations having been delayed by a printers’ strike.

Revival of pupil Geoffrey Eyles’s Yellowsands Alphabet of ornamental initials cut in the early 1920s.

1959  Autumn term. Peter Rendall takes up his duties as the new headmaster.

1960  Christmas term. Reorganisation of lower senior school classes results in more periods of printing, in smaller groups, increasing output in form time.

1961  Spring. One hundred and twenty-fifth number of Newspaper, including ‘The Yellowsands Press’, pp. 19-27, reprinted in the summer as  J.H. Whitehouse, An Account of the Yellowsands Press.

1961  Installation of foolscap folio treadle platen press, by Jardine of Nottingham, built c.1940. In some records this is referred to as the Franklin press. Produces up to 25 copies per minute. Albion henceforth used only for Newspaper and posters.

1962  Summer. Visit from Charles L. Pickering, Her Majesty’s Inspector of Printing.

Christmas term. Service of Nine Lessons and Carols held in Bembridge School Chapel at Christmas 1962. Blue wrappers. The first of twenty-four such orders of service decorated with wood-engravings and  reaching a peak of typographic elaboration in the late 1960s, the last printed in 1986.

Restoration of stiff grey wrapper to Newspaper, dropped in 1940.

Replacement of stock of 18pt Caslon Old Face (on an 18pt body, the 18/16pt long since discontinued by Stephenson, Blake). First italic founts installed: 12 and 18pt Caslon Old Face.

1964  Spring term. Press acquires large quantity of wood letter from                  P. Saunders of Shanklin, twelve founts ranging in size from ‘48pt to 4 ½ ins.’. Some type cases from the same source are filled with new type: 36pt Caslon Old Face and 12, 18 and 30pt Old Face Open (Stephenson, Blake). Some 6pt Caslon OF was also acquired around this time.

Acquisition of Adana 85 hand-press (no. S1150), obtained new. Mike Conder was using a similar press at home on the Island and had brought it in to show Dearden who decided that the school should have one. Used to print from foil, gold initial in 1964 Nine Lessons and Carols service order.

Summer. J.S. Dearden, Notes & Rules for Compositors at the Yellowsands Press.

P.G. Rendall, Bembridge School Prospectus, revised edition. The first of eight editions printed in school, the last in the mid-1980s.

Christmas term. Senior Printers listed among school officers in Newspaper.

1965  January. J.S. Dearden, Printing at Bembridge School. Totland Bay: Printed by M.J. Conder.

1965  Spring term. About half-term, move into extension provided by completion of adjoining Whitehouse Memorial Building. Printer’s corner office, including stone, built as part of rearranged floor plan. Composing frames placed in extension. Albion now to right of entrance, in front of sinks. Loss of gas fire. Hot water and central heating reach the printing room.

1966  Summer term. Acquisition of 24pt Blado. Wooden racks  accommodating 21 galleys made for Printer’s office by George Ibars.

1969  [J.S. Dearden]  A Yellowsands Bibliography, 1919-1969, printed for the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the school.

Foundation Weekend printed ephemera include traditional keepsake for visit of Earl Mountbatten and elaborate, gilt-blocked booklet for Sunday Service of Thanksgiving.

Summer term. Stedman’s last number of Newspaper as editor. He had been a contributor since 1931, printer from 1935 to 1958, and editor from 1953 to 1969.

Christmas term. New editor of Newspaper H.H. Carnell. Light blue cover introduced.

1973  Easter term. First number of Newspaper printed on the Furnival treadle platen press acquired from Lightbown’s of Ryde a few years earlier.

Summer term. Woodcut illustrations replaced by photographs in Newspaper.

1975  Spring term. With new editor light pastel coloured covers to Newspaper introduced, to match seasons.

1976  Autumn term. First girls admitted to Bembridge School.

1977  Summer term. Yellowsands Press awarded third place, out of 35 entrants, in National Printing in Schools competition organised by the Department of Printing, Watford College, and the British Printing Industries Federation

.

1978  Summer term. Reintroduction of Arts and Crafts section in Newspaper, dropped in 1970.

1979  Summer term. Yellowsands Press wins second place, out of 38 entrants, in National Printing in Schools competition.

1982  Christmas term. Printing room hosts sixth-form ‘printing company’ as part of national Young Enterprise scheme.

1983  Summer term. Token issue only of Newspaper, work on new school prospectus taking inordinate amount of printing room time.

1983  Christmas term. Newspaper cover title henceforth printed in Victorian gothic type.

1984  Summer term. In Dearden’s absence, due to illness, production of the school newspaper overseen by sixth-former Mason Salmon. Formal teaching of printing comes to an end.

1986  Easter term. Two hundredth number of Newspaper. In his foreword R.G. Lloyd (now Lord Kilgerran) notes that in a general review of the arts and crafts curriculum conducted in the early 1980s the practice of printing had been vindicated by the consultant employed by the school governors.

1988  Eviction of printers from the purpose-built printing room of 1931, to make way for Craft, Design and Technology metal-working class. Printers occupy two rooms in old stable block near Old House, where the ceiling is too low to operate the Albion.

1991  Christmas term. Dearden’s hundredth number as printer of Newspaper (Vol. 73, No. 217).

1992  Easter term. A note in the Newspaper about the new fortnightly school newsletter Today which employs the ‘latest…technology’.

1992  Last letterpress number of Bembridge School Newspaper, Vol. 74, No. 220, an eight-page token issue consisting largely of Dearden’s history of the school chapel.

1993  The Dream Alive. Tennyson Anthology for People in Prison. Printed in the autumn term. The last work printed at the Yellowsands Press. Unfinished. A collection of poems by local prisoners following a competition organised by Isle of Wight Independent Arts.

1993-94  Bembridge School Newspaper, 75 th  Anniversary [edition]. Typed and printed on Apple Mackintosh LC475 and Hewlett Packard DeskWriter 550C. ‘This newspaper hopefully heralds the rebirth…’

1996  Closure of Bembridge School.