BIRTH OF A NEWSPAPER

ON A MURKY night at the beginning of December, 1836, two men and a boy were standing by a hand press in the poky back room of a small printing office in Aylesbury. A forme of type-small handset type, for there were no linotypes in those days-had been lifted and laid flat on the bed of the press, and one of the men and the boy were busy inking it with a large roller.

The other man stood watching. A master man by the look of him; he was short and rather thick set. He was partly bald and had a Churchillian type of face. His choker collar, stock and sober dress made him look more mature than his years, for in those days men looked elderly before their time.

He watched while a sheet of paper, damp and already printed on one side, was laid on the type. He watched the bed slide under, the lever pulled and the impression made, then as the bed swung out again he leaned forward, peeled the sheet off the type and began to study it.

After a few moments, he nodded to the man and the boy to carryon with the rest of the sheets. He turned and slipped into an adjoining room. There he sat down at his table, and warmed the sheet in front of the fire till the steam rose from it and it crackled under his fingers.

Then he took a quill from the table, sharpened it, dipped it in the ink and wrote carefully on the top left-hand corner of the dry hard sheet, "The first paper printed: JG: Decr. 2nd, 1836."

He folded it and locked it carefully away in the drawer where he kept his cherished papers. [This sheet, with its faded brown handwriting in the top left-hand corner, is framed and hanging in the office at Luton.]

He went out and got another sheet, took it into his room and began to read. The handpress creaked rhythmically from the next room and the clock ticked on. As he read, never missing a word in that damp and smelling sheet, there welled up in his heart a great feeling of pride and satisfaction. He had created a newspaper. He was its editor and proprietor. Here was a new life in a changing world, the child of his brain, the creature of his moods and judgments.

The fascination of it gripped him. He leaned back in his chair and his thoughts ranged over the past and far into the future. He was tired and he dozed. Then he woke with a start. This would never do. He must concentrate on next week's issue, and the next, and the next. . . For how long?

John Gibbs of Aylesbury was never a newspaperman before that night, but from then on he was a newspaperman to the end of his days. He was by profession an auctioneer and appraiser (as they called them in those days) and he had an insurance agency. By some queer chance he had some years before become a printer as well, with a small bookseller's and stationer's shop. His two brothers had learnt the trade of printing with him, but they had moved to St. Albans some time earlier.

Family Group, 1952