FJ Parsons Printworks / Observer Building

Served my apprenticeship here. There was a picture gallery of past employees all the way up the walls of the stair well in this building.

Served my apprenticeship here too from 1956. Happy memories!

August 1978. 40 years since I started on reception at the Observer doing jumble sale ads and running errands to the comp room. A great building which holds many happy memories. Bumped into CJ Sherwoods secretary Linda Camburm this morning which reminded me.

I served a 5yr apprenticeship from August 1966 to August 1971 in the Monotype Casting Dept. with Dick Merryfield as Overseer. A really nice guy.
We had four types of caster in the department :-
Sorts Caster, which produced individual pieces of type from 6point to 12point for the compositors type trays. We had a lot of compositors and they each had many type trays for them to make corrections. All apprentices started on this particular caster as it was fairly basic and produced individual pieces of type, be it caps, lowercase, punctuation or numbers.

Composition Caster. This was a much more advanced semi automatic caster that was fed by a pre perforated paper roll. - From the Monotype Keyboards Dept. Each perforation would dictate where the matrix would be positioned over the mould for the character to be cast, and this would be done at speed. You would not want to get your fingers anywhere near the workings without looking at what you were doing. The composition caster also produced type, from 6point to 12point in various typefaces such as Times New Roman, Plantin, Universe etc. One person would normally operate two casters, and we had nine in the department. So that was a lot of noise, and no ear defenders. We all learnt to lip-read or sign most of the time. You certainly wouldn’t get away with those conditions today (2026)

Super Caster. This caster was for the production of type from 14point to 72point to refill compositors type cases. A much slower and quieter caster and operated by one person.

Lead and Rule Caster. This caster was similar to the Super Caster, but produced lengths of material for compositors to space out between lines of type, or create printable boarders.

All of these casters had smelting pots and were fed by lead ingots weighing 16lb plus. These had to be lifted up on a regular basis, and hooked on to automatically feed the smelting pot. Hence it was known as ‘hot metal printing.’ And it gave you pretty good upper body strength as well.

I sat my City & Guilds Intermediate practical on the Composition Caster, and my Finals, on Composition Caster and Super Caster. 98% on the latter.

That was 60yrs ago, and in a way, good memories - but not of the volume of noise.

The last time I looked, you could still see a Monotype Composition Caster working on YouTube.

After leaving the Monotype Casting Dept I moved to the Newsroom Floor and operated two TTS Linotype Casters for the newspapers that we printed. These were also fed by lead ingots.

I could see the way in which printing was going, and the practical side of it would be gone before too long. So in 1979 I left ‘the print’ and started a new career in Telecommunications. …. And now, very much enjoying RETIREMENT at 76.