By now you know that the news is university students want to go to university and not pay any fees. I think this is a real tragedy. This is so because no longer will students have to work to make money to go to university.
I have said that it is important that this column of mine does not turn into an anecdotal description of my past life. But in this instalment and in subsequent instalments I am going to do exactly that. I had to pay all university fees myself. This meant I could not go to university on a continuous basis – every so often, I dropped out and went to work somewhere. So, here and, in a few weeks to come, I am going to tell you what I learned while I was working to make money to go to university.
The first job I had was at the Star newspaper. I phoned up and asked them for the name of their engineer. Harvey Lambie, they told me. So I wrote a letter to Lambie, asking if I could have a job for three months. He wrote back and said yes. I arrived on November 15 and met Lambie. He put me in the charge of a very nice American electronics technician, Don Merganthal, who explained that I should always come to work in overalls and boots, and thereafter I did.
At the time, I had no idea how a newspaper was produced. But I found out that reporters wrote stories on typewriters, which were then given to people called copy boys, who gave them to editors, who decided if they were to be printed or not. If they were, they were loosely laid out on a page of paper roughly the size of the newspaper page. These pages were sent to the typesetters, who copied the stories out using a machine with a keyboard that produced lead type, row by row, which was then set into a frame, and a piece of paper run over the type to reproduce the stories and the page which was then checked by a subeditor. After this, a piece of stiff cardboard was pressed into the frame and used to cast a circular lead cylinder that had the content of the page now cast into it. This was put into the printing press, along with all the other pages, and the newspaper was printed on one long strip of paper, which was automatically collated, folded and sent up a conveyor belt to distribution. The artisans and printers were all classed as being members of ‘the works’.
I found that I was a member of ‘the works’, and not ‘the editorial’, and was automatically cast into the class of people who were recognised as being necessary (like a useful ballast on a ship) but to whom the editorial staff did not have to speak. Pretty young woman journalists whisked past me in the corridor without a glance.
I also found that my fellow ‘works staff’, with the exception of Merganthal, had a whole code of conduct of their own. If the editorial staff despised them, they returned their scorn in full measure. They did not regard journalists as having a proper job and they were slightly resentful of the fact that the Star newspaper continually disagreed with the National Party government, which, they believed, should have had full newspaper support.
This class distinction I had not thought about but now I found out all about it. The week before I left, there was a Christmas party, called a ‘wet stone’. Everybody, works and editorial, was invited. We did not wear overalls but smart clothes. At the party, one of the pretty journalists accosted me and asked who I was. Truthfully, I said I was a student, an engineering student. Golly, she said, why had she not seen me before? Well, I said, you do actually see me every work day; you walk past me on the way to the canteen, you and your friends. Oh, she said, that is not true! I have never seen you. And, I thought, that is true enough. You only saw the overall.