The Star: July 05, 2018

10
CELEBRATING 150 YEARS 1868 – 2018
Connecting Christchurch
for 150 years
The Star
A great
industry
Sub-editor Ross Kiddie is The Star’s longest
serving staff member. But he started his
newspaper career in a far different role
I STARTED at the Christchurch Star on January 21,
1971, in the printing industry as an apprentice hand
compositor/typographer.
Ultimately, my job would be collating galleys of lead
slugs and laying them out into columns using large
broadsheet formes that were the newspaper pages. In
those days the composing room was a mix of both
machine operators and hand compositors, the machines
were the large line-casting Linotypes and Ludlows.
Around 100 men were employed on the composing
floor, part of around 450 staff at the time I started, and
we were based in a purpose-built building in Kilmore St.
I was part of an annual intake of apprentices and the mix
of youth and experience made for major differences of
opinion and, of course, humour.
Almost everybody on the composing room floor had
a nickname, most were types of animals. On my first day
I was asked where I lived, I said: “Rolleston, on a farm.’’
The next question was: “What type of farm?’’ I said: “We
breed horses.’’ That was followed by a statement – “your
name is going to be Horse.’’ And from that moment on
I joined a host of other creatures – Cat, Snake, Frog,
Tadpole (Frog’s brother), Ant, Stork, and the list went on.
It took time to learn the intricate skills needed to
put the newspaper together. We were guided by the
knowledge of the tradesmen and generally they were
helpful. There was one real grumpy compositor – Charlie
Campbell - he was strict and didn’t suffer fools, but if you
appealed to his better nature you could learn a lot from
him.
Other notable mentors on the page make-up floor were
my good friends Syd Cairney, Bernie Hammond and
Cliff O’Brien. They were long-standing employees and
very knowledgeable. The front, back and page 3 of the
Christchurch Star each required two compositors, one at
the top of the page and one at the bottom, it was a thrill
to be chosen by one of the tradesman to work on any of
those.
Friday night overtime was always a certainty as we
pieced together the huge Saturday paper, loaded with
classified advertisements; often there were so many
situation vacant ads that many had to be left out, we
simply didn’t have printing capacity. Long queues of
people lined the Kilmore St footpath on any given
Ross Kiddie over the years (from left) with Ken Howat, Tom Keown;
(centre) Neil Baker and James Mackenzie; (right) 2018 Mike Hansen.
Saturday as they waited for the bumper edition to go
on sale.
As Friday evening work came to a close and the bosses
had left, it was time to unwind at the New Albion Tavern,
on Colombo St. The New Albion was a popular place for
Star employees, and was the venue for the very rowdy,
annual journalists v printers carol-singing contest on
Christmas Eve.
The Christchurch Star building was interconnected
through an elaborate network of pneumatic Lamson
tubes. Simply, they were vacuum-powered and
cylindrical, and used for transporting canisters of copy
from one department to another. On the composing
floor a central copy box was the collecting point, and it
was manned by the head of the department known as
the printer. Brian Butts was in charge and he had Abe
Mallouk as a deputy.
The tubes were also great for sucking in Coca Cola
cans, the apprentices often had a contest to see whose
can would travel the longest distance before the clatter
through the ceilings alerted Butts or Mallouk.
Another trick was to place a smouldering piece of
cloth beneath the tubes, smoke would also pass through
from the composing room to any other department. That
prank was often met with discontent from the head proof
reader, Ray Dawe.
In later years, Murray Wood and Barry Wendelborn
took on the role as head printer. Compositor Wood was a
comedian and prankster in his own right, he would often
discretely flick his cigarette butt into the pocket of an
apprentice’s apron, a garment we used to wear to protect
our clothes, smoke was generally a good indication that
fire was imminent.
My worst experience was three months into my
apprenticeship. As a junior, one of my jobs was to
wheel the morning tea trolley from the cafeteria to the
composing room. It was laden with two tea urns, buckets
of cups, milk and sugar. It was heavy, and the wheels of
the trolley obviously weren’t engineered for the weight.
As I passed over the stairway on the first floor, one of the
wheels suddenly broke off and the trolley over-balanced.
I managed to save one tea turn but the other toppled
down the stairs, spewing its contents; cups and sugar
followed. The noise was so loud it even alerted editor
Ben Mair who was located in a second floor office. The
cafeteria lady, Heather Hatton, was furious, and the men
were faced with a long wait for their morning tea before a
replacement surfaced.
As my apprenticeship came to a close I was assigned
sole charge of the Star Sports which later became the
Weekend Star. It was a small team headed by editor Alan
Doney, with sub-editors Tony O’Brien and Tony Ford.
Reporters Colin Bryant and Don (Scoop) Grady filed
the copy. A young reporter Barry Clarke joined the team
some time later as a sports reporter, today Clarke is Star
Media’s editor-in-chief. The Weekend Star period was by
far my most enjoyable period at the newspaper. It was a
busy role, but one I embraced, the satisfaction gleaned
from the time the paper rolled off the presses on Saturday
evening was something rather special.
Technology at that time was changing, computerisation
was being introduced into newspapers globally. Simply
known as cold type, phototypesetting spelt the end of the
Linotype machines. Linotype operators were retrained
and all the compositors learnt how to operate a Qwerty
keyboard. Columns of type were produced on film paper
which was then applied with a layer of wax and pasted
onto graph sheets which became our newspaper pages.
Hence the term paste-up evolved. Printing plates were
created through another photographic process – photolithography
- lead plates being replaced with aluminium.
The Weekend Star was the first of the Christchurch
Star’s publications to transfer to paste-up. Paste-up
eventually gave way to full computerisation and with
the creation of page-making programs, the days of
typography were fast coming to an end, so I was then
consigned to page make-up using a mouse and keyboard.
Today, I’m employed as a sub-editor, but I prefer to
see my job as having changed little, I create newspaper
pages for Star Media’s raft of community titles and, of
course, The Star. I’m a great believer in recognising those
traditional typographical skills and transferring them
into today’s technology.
It’s a vibrant industry, and one which, every day, still
presents new challenges. I wouldn’t have changed my
career for anything.
PHONE: 03 943 4523