The day the basement went silent
Longtime staffers salute the magnificent press
LONG-serving Daily Dispatch employee Sharonne Dewing remembers the day the monolithic Harris Litho Press was installed in the bowels of the newspaper’s Caxton Street building in June 1981. The press went on to conscientiously print the stories that reflected the grim days of apartheid, followed by the glory days of transformation and then the turbulent era of democracy building as South Africa tried to find its feet.
Dewing recalls the moment when, in March 2012, the same American-assembled press breathed its last and was mothballed forever.
“I was 18 and secretary to the production editor when it went in,” said Dewing, now clerical supervisor of the facilities department.
“I remember American men wearing stetsons and shoestring neckties, and that we had a breakfast in the press room on the day of its first run. And, because Elco was such a big advertiser in those days, the manageress pressed the button.”
Thirty-one years later, Dewing witnessed the Harris being dismantled by a contractor, hoisted from underground to street level in pieces, packed onto trucks and hauled off to the scrapyard.
The Daily Dispatch editor at the time, the late Gavin Stewart, said the end of the press was a sad day for the Dispatch, which had printed its own paper for close to 140 years.
Brendan Boyle, the editor who oversaw the operation, said the Harris press had reached the end of its life and that the company had invested in a new high-quality press in Port Elizabeth, which is now responsible for printing the Daily Dispatch and the Saturday Dispatch.
“A newspaper like the Daily Dispatch can no longer support a press that runs for just a few hours every day,” wrote Boyle in the Dispatch’s 140th anniversary edition just six months after the Harris ground to a halt. “Our business requires economies of scale to stay viable.”
And so, the basement that housed the clattering press is now a dark and soundless abyss.
Soon the rest of the building will also no longer be buzzing with tomorrow’s news as the Dispatch moves to its new, custom-built home in Beacon Bay at the end of November.
The Harris was the last in a long line of presses that go back to when the first edition was produced in a West Bank kitchen in September 1872.
According to a speech made by former Daily Dispatch production/plant manager Chris van Heerden at the last Harris print run, the paper mirrored global technological changes in the printing of newspapers. “From flatbed hot metal presses which had all the type composed by hand, to modern rotary offset lithographic presses, to computer to plate (CTP) technology”.
Van Heerden, who joined the Dispatch 36 years ago, remembers switching off the Harris that final time.
“When I started at the Dispatch as a compositor, the Harris was a state-ofthe-art press – the first time we could print in colour,” he recalled. “Although I could see technology was improving, it was also a sad day, because I spent so many years there and I had such fond memories of running that press and the camaraderie of the staff.”
By the time the press was dismantled, Van Heerden had moved to Port Elizabeth, where he now runs the Goss Community Press at the Times Printing company in Hunter’s Retreat, which produces the Daily Dispatch, Saturday Dispatch and Times Media’s other Eastern Cape publications.
Van Heerden explained that the Dispatch now sends pdf formats of the pages to Port Elizabeth where they are transferred onto a printing plate.
“I didn’t see the demolition but when I went back a short while later, all I saw [in the basement] was empty walls. It was just a big, echoing space. I felt quite nostalgic.”