By Harry Mottram: Not only a lost age for graphics but a lost age for many offices and studios when you could smoke at your desk, drink three pints at lunchtime and ring the speaking clock to see how long it was before going home time. When that age ended is hard to say but for me it was around the millennium when smoking was banned in the office but allowed in the smoking room. It was a depressing room as there was no ventilation although the idea did spawn a 2003 BBC TV sitcom which featured a fair reflection of the conversations held there. The one topic never mentioned was of course work. Soon the smoking room was closed and smoking areas, booths and bike sheds – along with the pavement – were the places to have drag on a Benson and Hedges for a few minutes of peace from office politics. Lunch time booze ups became a thing of the past or only reserved for Fridays – and mobile phones slowly replaced most idol activities such as checking on the Test Match score.
Before that like many people I had an ash tray on my desk, plus assorted coffee mugs and a copy of a daily paper – apart from any items needed for actually working. Until the mid 1990s I was an ‘all rounder’ in graphic design and advertising agencies. Someone who could create artwork using Rotring pens, 3M Spray Mount glue and CS10 artboard, and able to cast off type, use Letraset and create PMT prints (photo-mechanical transfers.) PMTs were essentially photos on a large machine camera in the dark room that took photos of logos, images and various graphics to the required size to be pasted onto art board. These are now almost lost as skills – using ink pens, applying Letraset, pasting typeset copy onto a page and overlaying colour separations – all sliced by scalpels and pasted into position with Cow Gum – known as camera ready artwork. Today artwork is on a computer and artworks are sent to production as pdfs.
My first job was in the dark room turning out PMTs for the paste up artists in the studio before graduating to become one of the last of the paste up artists and eventually taking on a role of creative director in an advertising agency. It was a rather grand title for someone who wrote copy for adverts and drew layouts in pencil or drew visuals with Magic Marker pens for paste up artists to follow.
In the 1980s and early 1990s creating artwork for brochures, posters, adverts and various leaflets had hardly changed since the 1960s with a number of people involve meaning graphics was a large employer with two or more trade unions for the workers. I had a union stamp from the National Graphics Association (NGA) and without it my artwork would be rejected by the relevant union chapel at the printers or newspaper. But in 1980 Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative Government won the general election and soon began to dismantle the power of the trade unions at a time when new technology was beginning to make redundant some of the old skills. Desk top publishing in the form of Apple Macs meant typesetting could be brought in-house, and fax machines meant communications were speeded up leading to the demise of many motorcycle couriers.
Most graphics studios would have a radio on all day which led to those wanting Radio One on clashing with advocates of Capital Radio or even Jazz FM. Whole afternoons were dominated by the likes of the DJ Steve Wright performing his comedy voices or at one place I worked at in Bristol the afternoon play on BBC Radio 4. It was one size fits all in an era before mobile phones when who controlled the transistor radio held a level of influence on his or her fellow workers.
Women were in the minority in a business that had a bloke type image – there were more female art directors and illustrators – but for some reason – and there were exceptions – female graphics staff were fewer in number. Now it would be seen as incredible that some studio walls would be adorned with posters of glamour models or Pirelli calendars on the pretext they were art. There’s no denying in the 1970s and 1980s there was also an unspoken prejudice against anyone suspected of being gay or ‘foreign’ – certainly in the studios I worked in. At one ad agency in Bristol the manager would discard anyone applying for a job if their name wasn’t ‘British’ – while clients who were mostly white men – would make casual racist remarks all the time along with racist jokes.
One reoccurring aspect of life working in graphic design studios and advertising agencies was (and is) the insecurity of employment. At one place I was ‘let go’ when business fell away but then asked back when in picked up a few weeks later. Three times I worked for companies that went bust leaving staff high and dry while I sometimes wondered if I was a jinx as the advertising agencies collapsed soon after I was taken on. And I promise it wasn’t my fault! Worse still was not being paid as a freelancer – more than half of my working life was as (and remains) a self employed worker – a vulnerable situation when clients spun out payment to 60, 90 or more than 120 days. And many times they simply didn’t pay – or went bust and then there was no hope of payment. The worst one was ironically a mortgage company – which left me with £20,000 in unpaid invoices – which meant I had to re-mortgage the house and take a bank loan to survive. Such was the climate of business in the 1980s and 1990s when the Conservative’s boom and bust policies led to high inflation and even higher interest rates. No wonder they lost the 1997 election.
This insecurity made me wonder if their was a different form of employment for me as I had a wife and four children to care for by the end of the 1990s. At a lunchtime visit to Bristol Central Library I saw a book called ‘How to be a Feature Writer.’ I read it and thought that’s me. I followed the author’s advice and started writing features and stories and sending them off to newspapers and magazines. It wasn’t long before I was offered a job. But this time in an editorial office where there were no ash trays and despite the reputations of journalists there were no lunchtime booze ups. The world had changed and so had I.
The main image is of Mark, Dave and Frank – my colleagues at JTA advertising in Yeovil in 1982
Rapscallion Magazine is an online publication and is edited by Harry Mottram and is published his own interest.
Harry is a freelance journalist. Follow him on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube etc
Email:harryfmottram@gmail.com
Website:www.harrymottram.co.uk
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