Prince Charles visits St Bride Foundation

The other week we were delighted to welcome The Prince of Wales for a tour of the Foundation. HRH was taken around the building by CEO Glyn Farrow in order to showcase the charity’s ongoing services to the cultural heritage of London.

St Bride Foundation has had a connection with royalty since its inception. An ornamented stone on the wall in reception states that Prince Edward VII officially opened the charity in 1893. The current Prince of Wales has also been here before, visiting in 2002 to mark the 300th anniversary of newspaper production.

Nevertheless, arrivals of this esteem remain a rare privilege and so are still met with a nervous excitement. They are a royal anomaly to the typical week at work, where ‘nerves’ are only ever really caused by the risk of ink spillage.

The tour was divided into numerous sections to reflect the many functions of the Foundation. The first of these was the library and archives. St Bride Library opened in 1894 as part of the printing school. It quickly became one of the leading sources of information on printing and typography in the world.

Library manager, Bob Richardson, meets HRH in the Passmore Edwards room.

In the weeks prior to the event, thousands of books took part in a rigorous audition process for a chance to meet The Prince. The lucky winners included Dr Johnsons’ dictionary, the Kelmscott Chaucer, and a beautifully bound edition of Macbeth. The diversity of our collection is  something that we were keen to portray. Each of these publications offer their own unique contribution to the history of the printed word and the book.

The special occasion was also used to show off our newly restored William Blades’ library, where other famous works from Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde were on display.

Simon Eccles shows a beauitfully bound edition of Macbeth

Books weren’t the only things exhibited. In the archives, the building’s architecture was also given attention. Here a small square of the ceiling had been taken out, allowing a narrow glimpse of the original wood and glass frame above. In the future, we hope to strip back the building to its original Victorian skeleton.

Original architectural drawings of the Foundation.

The architecture is a core feature of what the Foundation represents and thus a huge element of our central mission. It’s ultimately another way of displaying the cultural and historical legacy of printing, Fleet Street, and Victorian London in general. So although showing the heir to the throne our ceiling may appear to be strange, we assure you that it was an important part of the visit and not because we ran out of books.

CEO Glyn Farrow discusses future plans

Wood engraver, Peter Smith, talks about his craft.

Next stop was the workshop. An underlying debate in the days prior to the royal visit regarded royal etiquette. How does one greet the Prince of Wales? Do you handshake? Do you bow? During this part of the tour, it became apparent that a certain someone (Mick Clayton) clearly wasn’t intimidated by such protocol. Before showing Prince Charles how to pull a print on the Duerer, the ex-compositor cheekily requested a union card. Mick’s ice breaking question received the biggest laugh of the day and also earned him a mention in the Telegraph. The picture below captures the moment quite well.

Mick Clayton teaches a bit of letterpress.

Back in 2002, HRH printed on the Albion. This time he used our latest acquisition, the Duerer Press, which was built by Alan May in collaboration with the Duerer Press Group. If we are lucky enough to host more royal visitors in the future, then we’ll be sure to have another press lined up.

The finished print.

An enthusiastic expedition around the four walls of the workshop soon followed. Guided around by Mick, the visiting party was given an education on the history of printing and the processes of newspaper making. Our resident wood engraver, Peter Smith, was also there to show HRH some of his latest work. Preserving these crafts and incorporating them with contemporary art and design is ongoing aim of the Foundation.

Coincidentally, Prince Charles visited on a day when we were running a one day Adana course. Meeting Prince Charles wasn’t actually included in the lesson brief, but our student seemed pretty happy. Unfortunately, we do not offer royalty at any of our other classes.

Before leaving the workshop, Prince Charles was shown The Bridewell Theatre through a secret door at the rear of the room. The upper rear gallery provides a top down view of this unique space, which has been used for the performing arts since 1994. At the time, our current theatre-dwellers, LAMDA, were busy building the set for their upcoming show, ‘Rent’.

The tour concluded with some tea and coffee in the Bridewell Hall. Around thirty guests from various industries mingled, all subtly crossing their fingers in the hope that HRH would make it to them. Meanwhile, a military operation was underway in the kitchen to ensure that the Prince’s drink was timed perfectly for his arrival. After all, we pride ourselves as also being a fine venue for events; serving cold tea would have contradicted this. Once Prince Charles entered the hall, he took the time to talk with everyone in the room (the scene was described by Darrel Danielli, editor of Print Week, as a ‘ networking masterclass’).

Before departing, HRH left a signature in our visitors book. His print and signature will be kept safely as a record of what was a very special day for everyone involved. The visit also attracted a bit of media attention, so we may now also be able to pride ourselves as the first group of people to get letterpress printing into Hello! Magazine. This in itself is evidence of our services to the cultural heritage of London. Although looking back at this day, as well as the future ahead, we’re sure that St Bride Foundation will continue to do quite a lot more.

You can read more on the day on our press page here. Photographs in this article are by Rick Bronks.

St Bride Foundation is a registered charity (no.207607), which relies on regular donations in order to provide its many different services. If you wish to help us, then head over to our donation page here.

The Life of Edward Lloyd – An article to commemorate 200 years since his birth.

To commemorate the 200th birthday of Edward Lloyd, we have a special guest article, written by Joy Vick. Joy is a member of a collaborative research project on the life and legacy of Edward Lloyd. 

Everyone’s heard of Lord Northcliffe. He published the first popular newspaper, the Daily Mail in July 1896. What’s not so well known is the history of the newspapers that paved the way for Northcliffe’s success.

As is so often the case, those in power write history the way they’d like it told. Lloyd’s Weekly, the most popular newspaper in Victorian Britain, barely gets a mention in press history. Yet on this day in 1896 it was the first newspaper printed on Fleet Street to sell over a million copies. And coincidentally, on this day two hundred years ago, 16 February 1815, its founder Edward Lloyd was born.

There is currently no mention of Edward Lloyd on Fleet Street or the names of his two popular papers, Lloyd’s Weekly and The Daily Chronicle. Neither the history of printing in Magpie Alley, nor the one in St Bride’s Crypt, mention him.

When Lloyd’s Weekly is mentioned in the history of the press it appears to have been misrepresented. For instance, Geoffrey Best writes in ‘Mid-Victorian Britain (1851-75)’ that the mass circulation Sunday paper Lloyd’s Weekly contained spicy melodrama. He goes on to say that whilst the Observer hovered on the line of respectability, some like Lloyd’s Weekly were definitely below it.

Close reading of albeit a small sample of Lloyd’s Weekly and The Daily Chronicle has revealed very different papers to those described by historians.  Both papers assume a calm and reasoned reader with interests in politics, world news, sports and the arts.  They also assume a reader interested in the need for fundamental social change, in particular the eradication of poverty and injustice through constitutional means rather than revolution.  To be fair to historians with limited access to the newspapers, it’s possible that assumptions about them were based on the books Lloyd published in his youth, yet even they were not salacious.

Born in Thornton Heath, Lloyd left school at 14 (relatively late in those days) but his working life was spent entirely in London.  He claims to have started selling his own printed works at the age of 14, cards, song sheets, cartoons, anything the newsagents could sell for him. Clerkenwell, around which he lived and worked, was a hotbed of radicalism at the time and Lloyd published political cartoons – some are now in The British Museum’s collection.

Lloyd hit gold when he started publishing penny versions of the works of Dickens such as “The Penny Pickwick” and “Oliver Twiss”, selling as many as 50,000 a week. In 1837, Dickens’s publishers Chapman & Hall sued Lloyd for stealing their readership and thus their profits with his cheap imitations.

They lost the case and Dickens reputedly said “I was made to feel like the robber instead of the robbed”. Lloyd’s defence: his books were so bad no one could mistake them for the real thing.

The Dickens versions were just a small part of his output. Lloyd also published a huge number of ‘romances’ featuring highwaymen, pirates and vampires, later termed ‘Penny Dreadfuls’ or ‘Penny Bloods.’ The most famous are “String of Pearls” that introduced Sweeny Todd to the world and “Varney the Vampyre.”   Between 1836 and 1856 Lloyd published more than 200 stories of varying lengths. Many of his books were targeted at a female readership.

At this time stringent taxation levied on newspapers, so called ‘taxes on knowledge’, effectively put them out of the reach of the poor.  When Lloyd decided to start a newspaper he had to be creative and resourceful.

Seeing the success of The Illustrated London News launched in May 1842 that cost 6d, Lloyd decided to bring out a cheap version, inserting the name Lloyd’s and calling it Lloyd’s Illustrated London News (he even used the same backdrop at the masthead.) It was launched in the Autumn of 1842.

To keep the price down and avoid the ‘tax on knowledge’ sometimes called the ‘tax on seditious literature’ the newspaper contained no news.  It was purely a work of fiction – or news from centuries before.  But after just 6 editions Lloyd was told he had to pay the tax or shut down his newspaper.  He opted to pay the tax.

Lloyd must have guessed the Government was going to have to concede the taxes that put the price of newspapers beyond the reach of the poor eventually.  Keeping Lloyds Weekly going during the first seven years was very hard.  However once the taxes had gone Lloyd was ideally placed to expand circulation.

Another consequence of the taxes was that they held back the speed and efficiency of newspaper production in Britain because the presses had to be fed with cut sheets rather than reels of paper.  The development of machines to print newspapers fed by reels of paper had forged ahead in the USA and Lloyd lost no time in importing the first Hoe machine.  The first issue of ‘Lloyd’s Weekly’ to be printed with it was on 6 July 1856.  It wasn’t until the tax on paper was dropped in 1861 that Lloyd could sell his paper for 1d, as was his dream from the outset.  This led to a dramatic increase in circulation from 170k in 1861 to 500k in 1863.

Circulation of Lloyd’s Weekly continued to rise after the death of Edward Lloyd in 1890.  Two of Edward Lloyd’s sons, Frank and Arthur, took over the papers. On 16 February 1896 Lloyd’s Weekly finally broke the million mark.  It was the first Fleet Street newspaper to do so.

In 1918, just before the end of the war, Frank Lloyd sold both The Daily Chronicle and Lloyd’s Weekly. Ironically, the man who was effectively its new owner also had the name Lloyd; David Lloyd George – but that, as they say, is another story.

Much of the information here about Lloyd’s Weekly comes from Thomas Catling’s autobiography ‘My Life’s Pilgrimage’ (1911). Catling joined the paper as an apprentice and worked his way up to become its editor.

A young Catling

The story of Edward Lloyd has special relevance to St Bride’s Foundation as Lloyd spent much of his working life in Salisbury Square. Another connection is that Catling’s farewell party, after working at Lloyd’s Weekly for over 50 years took place at St Bride’s Institute (1 Jan 1907).

Thank you to Joy Vick for the words. You can read more about Edward Llloyd here.