Spitalfields Life

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Last week I learnt belatedly that my friend Gary Arber – the legendary printer of the Roman Rd – died three years ago. Here is my account of my last visit to his print works before it closed forever.

Gary Arber

Four years passed since I first walked eastward through the freshly fallen snow across Weavers’ Fields on my way to visit Gary Arber, third generation incumbent of W.F. Arber & Co Ltd, the printing works in the Roman Rd opened by Gary’s grandfather Walter Francis Arber in 1897. Captivated by this apparent time capsule of a shop where little had changed in over a century, I was tempted to believe that it would always be there, yet I also knew it could not continue for ever.

“In October, I couldn’t find enough money from my takings to pay my business rates,” Gary admitted to me then, “and that’s when I decided it was time to call it a day.” As the last in the family business, Gary had been pleasing himself for years. After three generations, the metal type was all worn out and so Gary let the machines run down, taking on less and less printing. Then he put the building up for sale and set a date that coincided with when his insurance ran out, as his date to vacate the premises.

Bearing the responsibility of being the custodian of the contents, a major question for Gary was to find a home for his collection of six printing presses which are of historic significance. He has gave them to  the Cat’s Eye Press in Happisburgh, Norfolk, who agreed to restore them all to working order and put them to use again. Since he made his decision, Gary had been at work clearing up the sea of boxes and detritus that had accumulated to conceal the machines and I took advantage of this brief moment to see the presses in their glory before the process of taking them apart and transferring them to Norfolk commences later that week.

“It’s good to see them again after thirty years,” declared Gary, as he led me down the narrow staircase to the small basement print workshop where the six gleaming beasts were newly revealed from beneath the litter. In the far corner was the Wharfdale of 1900 that has not moved since it was installed brand new and, at the foot of the stairs, sat the Golding, also installed in 1900. The Wharfdale was a heavy rectangular machine that famously was used to print the Suffragettes’ posters while the more nimble Golding was employed to print their handbills. At WF Arber & Co Ltd it had not been forgotten that Gary’s grandmother Emily would not permit his grandfather to charge Mrs Pankhurst for this work.

The Heidelberg of 1939 was the last press still in full working order and Gary informed me that since World War II broke out after it was delivered, his father (also Walter Francis) had to pay the British Government for the cost of it, although he never discovered if the money was passed on to the Germans afterwards. Next to it, stood the eccentrically-shaped Lagonda of 1946 which we were informed by its future owner was believed to be the last working example in existence.

In between these two pairs, sat the big boys – two large post-war presses, a Mercedes Glockner of 1952 and Supermatic of 1950. Gazing around at these monstrous machines, sprouting pipes and spindles and knobs, Gary could recall them all working. In his mind, he could hear the fierce din and see those long-gone printers – Fred Carter, Alfie Watts,  Stan Barton & Harry Harris among others – who worked there and wrote their names in pencil underneath the staircase. Sometime in the mid-fifties, alongside their names and dates, Gary wrote his name too, but instead of the date he wrote “all the time” – a statement amply confirmed by his continued presence more than half a century later.

Yet Gary never set out to be a printer. He set out to fly Lincoln Bombers, only sacrificing his life as a pilot after his father’s premature death, in order to take over the family print works. “I bought myself out in 1954, but I would be dead by now if I had stayed on, retired and grown fat like all the rest,” he confided to me, rationalising his loss, “I’m the only one surviving of my crew and I can still lift a hundredweight.”

“I remember when I first came here to visit the toy shop upstairs as a child but I didn’t get a toy except for my birthday and at Christmas,” Gary informed me, <“My grandfather always had his bowler hat on. He had two, his work bowler and his best bowler. He was a very strict and moral man, he raised money for hospitals and he was a governor of hospitals.”

We all missed WF Arber & Co Ltd, but it was far better that Gary chose to dispose of the business as it suited him, and wrapped it up to his satisfaction, than being forced into it by external circumstances. After all those years, Gary Arber could rest in the knowledge that he had fulfilled his obligation in a way that paid due respect to both the Walter Francis Arbers that preceded him.

The Wharfdale & The Glockner

The 1900 Golding that printed the Suffragettes’ handbills

The 1900 Wharfdale that printed the Suffragettes’ posters

The 1952 Mercedes Glockner

Gary was printing with this 1939 Heidelberg last week

The last known working Lagonda in the world, 1946

The 1950 Supermatic

Gary found his Uncle Albert’s helmet under one of the machines while clearing up. Albert was killed while in the fire service during World War II.

The printers wrote their names and dates in the fifties but Gary wrote “[here] all the time”

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So Long, Gary Arber

At W. F. Arber & Co, Printing Works

Gary Arber at Home

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This week I learnt belatedly that my friend Gary Arber – the legendary printer of the Roman Rd – died three years ago. Here is my account of my second visit to his print works at the time I first got to know him.

Before

After

Six months later, there had been changes at W.F.Arber & Co Ltd (the printing works opened by Gary Arber’s grandfather in 1897 in the Roman Rd) since I first visited. At that time, Gary was repairing sash windows on the upper floors, replacing rotten timber and reassembling the frames with superlative skill. Unexpectedly, Gary was the recipient of a small grant from the Olympic fund for the refurbishment of his shop front, which had not seen a lick of new paint since Gary last painted it in 1965.

The contractors were responsible for the fresh coat of green but Gary climbed up a ladder and repainted the elegant lettering himself with a fine brush, delicately tracing the outline of the letters from the originals, just visible through the new paint. This was exactly what he did once before, in 1965, tracing the lettering from its first incarnation in 1947 when the frontage was spruced up to repair damage sustained during the war.

No doubt the Olympic committee could sleep peacefully in their beds, confident that the reputation of our nation would not be brought down by shabby paintwork on the front of W.F.Arber’s Printing Shop, glimpsed by international athletes making their way along the Roman Rd to compete in the Olympics at Stratford in 2012. Equally, Gary was happy with his nifty new paint job and so all parties were pleased with this textbook example of the fulfilment of the ambitious rhetoric of  regeneration in East London which the Olympics promised.

If you look closely, you will see that the glass bricks in the pavement had been concreted over. When Gary found they were cracking and there was a risk of some passerby falling eight feet down into the subterranean printing works, he obtained quotes from builders to repair them. Unwilling to pay the price of over five thousand pounds suggested, with astounding initiative Gary did the work himself. He set up a concrete mixer in the basement printing shop, filled the void beneath the glass bricks with rubble, constructed a new wall between the building and the street, and carried all the materials down the narrow wooden cellar stairs in a bucket, alone. Gary’s accomplishments filled me with awe, for his enterprising nature, undaunted resilience and repertoire of skills.

“I shouldn’t be alive,” said Gary with a wry melancholic smile, referring not to his advanced years but to a close encounter with a doodle bug, while walking on his way down the road to school during the war, “The engine cut, which means it was about to explode and I could see it was coming straight for me, but then the wind caught it and blew it to one side. We lost all the glass in the explosion! Another day, my friend David Strudwick and I were eyeballed by the pilots of two Fokker Wolf 190s. We saw them looking down at us but they didn’t fire. – David joined the airforce at the same time I did, he flew Nimrods and died many years later, while making a home run during a cricket match in Devon.”

These thoughts of mortality were a sombre counterpoint to the benign weather at that time. Leading Gary to recall the happy day his father and grandfather walked out of the printing works at dawn one Summer’s morning and, in their enthusiasm for walking, did not stop until they got to Brighton where they caught the train home, having walked sixty miles in approximately twelve hours.

In those days, Gary’s uncles Len and Albert, worked alongside Gary’s father and grandfather in the print shop, when it was a going concern with six printing presses operating at once. Albert was an auxiliary reserve fireman who was killed in the London blitz and never lived to see his baby daughter born. Gary told me how Albert worked as a printer by day and as a fireman every night, until he was buried hastily in the City of London in an eight person grave. “I don’t know when he slept!” added Gary contemplatively. There was no trace of the grave when Gary went back to look for it, but Albert is commemorated by a plaque at the corner of Althelstan Grove and St Stephen’s Rd.

Whenever I had the privilege of speaking with Gary, his conversation always spiralled off in fascinating tangents that coloured my experience of contemporary life, proposing a broad new perspective upon the petty obsessions of the day. My sense of proportion was restored. This was why I found it such a consolation to visit and it led me to understand why Gary never wanted to retire. Each of Gary’s resonant tales served to explain why his printing shop was special, as the location of so much family and professional life, connected intimately to the great events of history, all of which remained present for Gary in this charmed location.

Once Gary became a sole operator, with only one press functional, he began scaling back the printing operations. And I joined him as he was taking down the printing samples from the wall where they had been for over half a century, since somebody pasted them onto some cheap paper as a temporary measure. It was the scrutiny of these printing specimens that occasioned the reminiscences outlined above. Although these few samples comprised the only archive of Arber’s printing works, even these modest scraps of paper had stories to tell, of businesses long gone, because Gary remembered many of the proprietors vividly as his erstwhile customers.

I was fascinated by the letters ADV, indicating the Bethnal Green exchange, which prefixed the telephone numbers on many of these papers. Gary explained this was created when smart people who lived in the big houses in Bow Rd objected to having BET for Bethnal Green – which they thought was rather lower class – on their notepaper. There were letters to the Times and a standoff with the Post Office, until the local schoolmaster worked out that dialling BET was the same as dialling ADV – which might be taken to stand for ‘advance’ indicating a widely-held optimistic belief in progress, which everyone could embrace. So just like Gary’s Olympic paint job, all parties were satisfied and looked to the future with hope.

“Bill Newman of  Advance Insulation used to be covered in white asbestos powder. The whole place was like a flour mill! He smoked a fat cigar which we thought was the cause of the cancer that killed him, but later we learnt the truth. The Victoria Box Company closed in the nineteen sixties after a woman had her fingers cut off by a tin pressing machine and the compensation claim shut the company down. Mr Courcha was around in the nineteen fifties, he had a huge lump on his bald head like something out of a comic. We had three generations of Meggs chimney sweeps until the introduction of the smokeless zone finished them off.”

“Sollash made boxes, the factory took up four or five shops in the Hackney Rd but they packed up when Mr Sollash got old. You see that bull on the Bull Hotel notepaper, that was the bull we used on butcher’s bills! ‘Dr.’ means ‘debtor’, it was standard on invoices then.”

“This is a World War II ration card from Osborne the Butcher. Harry Osborne was a German who changed his name during World War I, his son Len ran the business until he retired in the nineteen seventies.”

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So Long, Gary Arber

Gary Arber at Home

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Only this week, have I learnt that my friend Gary Arber – the legendary printer of the Roman Rd – died three years ago. Gary lived a reclusive existence in Romford and, since I had not received any response from my messages, I had assumed that he might have passed but, nevertheless, I am sad to learn that he is gone from the world. Below is my account of how we first met.

I set out early from Spitalfields, crossing the freshly fallen snow in Weavers’ Fields and walking due East until I came to the premises of Arber & Co Ltd at 459 Roman Rd. Once I rang the bell, Gary Arber appeared from the warren of boxes inside, explaining that he did not have much time because he had to do his accounts. So, without delay, I took the photo above and Gary told to me that his grandfather Walter Francis Arber first opened the shop in 1897, as a printer and stationer that also sold toys. The business was continued by Gary’s father who was also called Walter Francis Arber and it is this name that remains on the stationery today.

“I’m here under duress because I’m an airman,” said Gary, explaining that he took over the business, sacrificing his career as a pilot flying Lincoln Bombers when his father died, because his mother relied upon the income of the printing works. “I left the beautiful Air Force forever in 1954,” he revealed wistfully. It is not hard to envisage Gary as a handsome flying ace, he has that charismatically nonchalant professionalism. Gary retains the Air Force moustache over half a century later, so you only have to imagine a flight suit in place of the overall to complete the picture. There is no doubt Gary saw life before he swapped the flight suit for an overall and vanished into the print shop. He was there at Christmas Island in 1946 to witness one of the first nuclear tests, though thankfully Gary was not one of those pilots who flew through the dust cloud to collect samples. “We were guests of the day, watching from a boat, we had bits of dark glass and they told us to shut our eyes when the countdown reached two and open our eyes to look through the glass when it reached minus five – but you saw it through your eyelids. Then you felt the shock, the turbulence and the heat. It was great fun.” Mercifully, Gary appeared to have suffered no ill-effects, still driving daily from his home in Romford.

In those days, Gary’s shop became something of a magnet for artists who loved his old-school letterpress printing but, as a sole operator, Gary only undertook these jobs “under pressure.” “The quality is rubbish,” he said, grabbing a pad of taxi receipts and turning one over to reveal the impress of the type, embossed into the paper – the only way he could get a clear print from the worn type then. “It should be smooth, like a baby’s bottom,” he sighed, running a single finger across the reverse of the page before tossing it back onto the pile. I was concerned upon Gary’s behalf until he disarmed me, “I don’t make any money, I’m just pottering about and enjoying myself!” he confided gleefully. Owning his premises, Gary enjoyed complete security and the freedom to carry on in his own sweet way.

I heard a rumour that the Suffragettes’ handbills were printed there and Gary confirmed this. “My grandmother, Emily Arber, was a friend of Mrs Pankhurst and she wouldn’t let my grandfather charge for the printing. A ferocious woman, she ruled everyone – the women, my grandmother and aunt, ran the toys’ side of the business.” And although the toys side was wrapped up long ago when Gary’s aunt (also called Emily) died, the signs remained everywhere. Lifting your eyes above the suspended fluorescents, you discovered beautifully coloured posters produced by toy manufacturers pasted to the ceiling. “If I removed those the roof would probably collapse!” quipped Gary with a grin. Then, indicating the glass-fronted cases that were used to display dolls, “All the shopfittings are a hundred years old, nothing’s been touched.” he said proudly, and pointed to an enigmatic line with scruffy ends of string hanging down, each carrying more dust than you would have thought possible, “Those bits of string had board games hanging from them once.”

Moving a stack of boxes to one side, Gary uncovered some printing samples for customers to select their preferred options. What a selection!  There was a ration card from a butcher round the corner, a dance ticket for December 30th 1939 at Wilmot St School, Bethnal Green, and one for an ATS Social with the helpful text “You will be informed in the event of an air raid,” just in case you got seduced by Glenn Miller and do not hear the siren. There was a crazy humour about these things being there. I turned to confront an advert for a Chopper bicycle portraying a winsome lady with big hair, exhorting me to “Be a trendy shopper.” I turned back to Gary, “This is a shop not a museum,” he said sternly. You could have fooled me.

Aware that I was keeping Gary from his chores, I was on the brink of taking my leave, when Gary confessed that he was no longer in the mood for doing accounts. Instead he took me down to the cellar where six printers worked once. “This is where it used to happen,” he announced with bathos, as we descended the wooden staircase into a subterranean space where six oily black beasts of printing presses crouched, artfully camouflaged beneath a morass of waste paper, old boxes and packets with the occasional antique tin toy, left over from stock, to complete the mix. Here was a printing shop from a century ago, an untidy time capsule – where the twentieth century passed through like a furious whirlwind, demanding printing for the Suffragettes and printing for the Government through two World Wars, and whisking Gary away to Christmas Island to witness a nuclear explosion. And this what was what was left. I was completely overawed at the spectacle, as Gary began removing boxes to reveal more of the machines, enthusiastically explaining their different qualities, capabilities and operating systems. He pointed out the two that were used for the Suffragettes’ handbills and I stood in a moment of silent reverence to register the historical significance of these old hulks, a Wharfdale and a Golding Jobber.

Gary made a beeline for the Heidelberg, the only one that still worked, and began tinkering with the type that he used to print the taxi receipt I saw earlier. This was the heart of it all. I joined him and, standing together in the quiet, we both became absorbed by the magic of the press. Gary was explaining the technical names for the parts of the printer’s pie, when an unexpected wave of emotion overcame me there in this gloomy cellar, on that cold morning in February, up to my ankles in rubbish surrounded by historic printing presses.

I doubt very much that Gary did his accounts that day, but Gary is a sociable man with a generous spirit – even if he strikes an unconvincingly gruff posture occasionally – and if you chose to pay a visit yourself, then it is highly possible that you will have learnt – as I did – about the Roman sarcophagus that was discovered in the Roman Rd, or the woman who was the inspiration for the character of Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion, or Gary’s adventures on steam trains in India, or when Gary was invited to the National Physics Laboratory in the fifties see an early computer, as big as four houses, that could play chess.

One word of caution, “Printers are either highly religious or wicked,” declared Gary, adding “- and I don’t go to church!” with melodramatic irony. So if you decided to go round, you had to be sure to pay Gary due respect by buying something, even if it was only a modest thing. You needed to bear in mind, as you purchased your box of paperclips, that Gary was there under duress – he would rather be flying Lincoln Bombers – and then, once this subterfuge was achieved, it was appropriate to widen the nature of discourse.

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Gary Arber at Home