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Edinburgh Evening News machine and case rooms

Edinburgh Evening News machine and case rooms
Edinburgh Evening News machine and case rooms
These images come from the family of the late Bill Rae, former Edinburgh Evening News and United News Agency journalist. In his personal writing he recalled his early days working at the Edinburgh Evening News offices.

We're honoured to publish some of his writing here alongside pictures of the 1920s machine room and the 1940s case room - the place where the newspaper took shape. The case room was overseen for a time in the 1940s by Bill's grandfather, John Henderson who was an avid photographer and we believe these photos to be taken by John.

Bill began work as a copy boy on the Evening News at the age of 17 and his career as a reporter began after he returned from National Service at the age of 20. In his reminiscences he referred to the newspaper as the 'old' Edinburgh Evening News:

'I use the word "old" because in 1945 the dear old News was a world away from the slick colour tabloid it is today....

In those days, working on an evening newspaper was probably the most stressful form of journalism one could choose. Talk about working against the clock! The eyes of evening newspapermen were never off the clock. Perhaps that is why, even today, sixty years later, I glance needlessly at my watch several hundred times a day.

You see, evening papers in those days published news that had happened THAT DAY! By God, that AFTERNOON! And yet the vendors on the corners of Princes Street were able to offer the Late City [edition] (for 1 penny) as office workers spilled onto the streets at 5 o'clock!

Every man and woman who worked inside the Evening News building at 18 Market Street reflected now and again that this was a daily miracle, performed with much sweat, and occasionally tears, by a couple of hundred skilled people.

There were four editions each day Monday to Friday... Between each edition there was barely one hour, so no sooner had one edition gone to press than everyone was working for the next, sweating at a typewriter and glancing at that newsroom clock again.

The offices on the corner of Market Street and Cockburn Street were a clear architectural graft of the old and the new. Stand at that end of Waverley Bridge and look skywards... On the top floor, at the very corner of the Victorian building, is the Turret Window, a drawing of which appeared inside every issue. If your eyesight is good, you will see a tiny door. This was where the News carrier pigeons entered the building. My grandfather, who for many years was caseroom overseer, told me that as the pigeons alighted an electric bell rang downstairs in the caseroom, and a boy was dispatched to retrieve the brief message from the bird's leg."

[The pigeon message was often a football result. When a reporter went to a football match, he was inevitably accompanied by a boy carrying a wicker basket of pigeons!]

"There were a number of stories handed down about these carrier pigeons. One legend, which I never believed, was of an unsuccessful attempt to cross the carrier pigeons with talking parrots.

When a reporter had been sent to, let's say, a press conference, the normal form of communications was to find a telephone (no mobile phones in those days) and read a selection of quotes from one's uncertain shorthand notes to a copytaker in the newsroom. Mission accomplished, subside and light a cigarette.

....On an evening paper, who had time to re-write anything? Correct the grammar, and punctuate: that was about it. Add a heading. Get it to the caseroom, quick! This was accomplished either by pneumatic Lamson tube, or by a gently clattering overhead railway which moved across the newsroom unendingly before disappearing in the wall: that railway hypnotised visitors.

The machine room, with its great presses, was to me the most awesome in the building. It was rather frightening. When the presses were in full throttle, speech was impossible... It was always a relief to step outside the machine room, into the much less noisy Despatch Department, with men bundling up the orders with great rolls of hairy string. In Market Street stood the line of distinctive silver and copper delivery vans...."