From faxes to tweets, via Silk Cut

WHEN I first joined the as a teenager back in 1981, the paper’s past was as much a part of it as the fug of smoke that filled every room, the clatter of typewriters and the dust that settled on the piles of paper on every desk.

There was a library full of cuttings of yellowed newsprint, some of them dating back to the 19th century. There were several members of staff who had served for decades, including one in his eighties who had joined as a messenger boy aged 14, and shuffled into work nearly 70 years later, arriving once a week to check the diary that used to feature on the Judaism page. He would regale us with stories of the past, of delivering letters by hand to Anglo-Jewish luminaries as a messenger, to taking shorthand notes for hours to write verbatim reports of lengthy communal meetings.

As an editorial messenger in the 1980s, there were no letters to handdeliver, although I did have to go out to buy the editor’s cigarettes (Silk Cut). Mostly though I was employed to feed the one piece of technology that made the office of 1981 different from that of — say — 1941.

This was a huge facsimile machine — then such new technology that an article about the paper’s production, written for the 140th anniversary in November 1981 puts “fax” in quotation marks, and describes the machine as a “mechanical beast”. My job was to feed this monster by hand. Some copy and all pictures could be sent by motorcycle messenger, but most of my time was spent putting news stories and features slowly into the machine’s maw.

They arrived at the printers in Essex, where they were typeset, and I then had to collect the page proofs that it spat out in return to circulate to the editors and the art room, where the smell of smoke came from the art editor’s cigars, mixed with the heady aroma of cow gum used to paste copy galleys onto page layouts.

I turned down a place at university to stay at the as an apprentice

I turned down a place at university to stay here’