Tools of the Trade

We all used them - click on an item to bring up a window describing it - click on the picture in the popup window to close it. Not highlighted is the chinagraph which eventually replaced the laundry marker and Pentel™.

All pictures and equipment courtesy of Stan Pow, Howard Dell,
Sam Upton & Chris Booth

And then there was the 'petrol' that we used to clean the machines with in those halcyon days. This bottle was kindly donated by Sam Upton at a recent Oldboys lunch at Guildford - it still has some 'liquid' in it! This fluid continued to be used until the firemen at Lime Grove took some for a "test", returning white faced and shaking - we went to Freon after that, which, of course, produced its own 'legends' .

And there was also the editors stopwatch. Geoff Taylor supplied the picture (he still has the watch!) and Howard Dell tells the story:-

It was issued before the days when a stopwatch function on a wristwatch was commonplace and we needed to time bits of quarter inch tape, voiced script passages, etc.
We had fondly hoped, when the request for a stopwatch each was made, that one similar to those splendid beasts used by the PAs might be forthcoming.
No such luck, and the given cheapo device with its 30 second rotation was near useless due to the difficulty in working out the duration for anything over 30 seconds.
Fortunately, wristwatches with proper stopwatches soon became affordable and my BBC stopwatch languished for some time in the depths of my briefcase, quite unused, until I generously surrendered it to Doug for some other unfortunate to play with. Chris Booth also recalls a similar attempt by Malcolm Banthorpe and others to issue editors with the Casio calculators that not only had an inbuilt stopwatch but would also add and subtract times - it failed.........

Also associated with the Tools of the Trade was all the paperwork needed for a smooth running operation