Today 14th April 2009, has had me thinking of my working life from the year 1980, the year I started work, to the year 2002 when I had to stop working because of medical reasons.When I was still at school, I was fortunate enough to have a father that was in a position to help me choose a profession to go into. A few options were available for me to choose from, from office clerical work as either accounts or in buying or as a printer. The local printing trade was what would be described as rather successful at the time. The footwear industry ranging from slippers to boots and shoes plus pumps and trainers. As such, the local footwear manufacturers decided to group together and form a printing company which in essence was owned by the local footwear companies but at the same time, was run independently. So much jobbing work was done to supply all industry including footwear printed products for office stationery, labels, tags, fax stationery and so the list goes on, plus footwear boxes, inner and outer packaging.
I was pretty good at Maths, Music and fair to middling at English & what one would describe as average in all other subjects. Although because of my poor health from about the age of four through to fifteen and beyond, prevented me from being at school for lengthy periods of time, continuing to the present day at the age of Forty-five. Some of my school-time was completed at home whilst recovering from several operations. Surprisingly my exam results were rather good and I left school with 6 GCSE’s. My Uncle Harold at the time of starting in work as a printer, was a printer at the time and is what grasped my imagination of what the process was to transfer ink to paper via metal slugs, little did I know what changes were ahead for the Printing Industry as a whole even within a union led profession.
Back in 1980’s the full pay for a qualified printer working a 40 hour week, was somewhere in the region of £80:00, not what printers were believed to earn as they did on Fleet Street on the newspapers. The job was apprenticeship based which took 4 years on a day release, each week. The education at Blackburn College covered a wide range of printing processes from letterpress, flexography, lithography, gravure and letterpress. In the early 12 months to 20 months, at work we only had letterpress printing machines and as such was at a slight advantage, for letterpress, but for the other processes was at a great disadvantage. For this reason I decided to knuckle down and learn as much about all the printing processes that were about across the range.
During the next pages to come I will try to explain the achievements and qualifications I gained and the great offer which I received from a mysterious caller.
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