was seriously wrong . My father took me to the Royal Hospital for X-Rays . They showed that the joints were still dislocated and the third bone in the little finger had been broken close to the main knuckle and had been forced between the knuckle of the little finger and the knuckle of the next finger and it had set in this position . Nearly twelve months and two operations later my finger looked reasonable . The tendon had been attached to the tendon of the next finger to give it movement .

What had caused all the damage was that my hand had gone between the chain and the gear wheel and the spikes of the gear wheel had punctured between each knuckle.

After getting over my cycling accident I asked my mother could I cycle to Banham to stay with my Gran in her cottage. She agreed to let me go and on the first day I reached a little village called Bingham close to Grantham.

It was in the evening and I had nowhere to stay . I stopped a policeman and asked him if he knew of someone to put me up for the night, he said "come with me son ", and took me to his house for the night, gave me breakfast in the morning and charged me nothing. Now that's kindness .

The next day it was sweltering hot and as I got near Kings Lynn the tar had melted on the road . Passing cars and lorries splashed the melted tar up onto my legs and shoes ! I reached Banham about three o'clock in the afternoon.

I had a lovely holiday, and remember setting off back home early one morning with everywhere shrouded in mist .

Getting work

At a little over sixteen I left school, and like today, jobs were hard to come by. The government in those days already had a scheme to help school leavers to improve their prospects for work by putting the unemployed youths onto a further education scheme.

I was put onto this scheme but with my education I was far in advance of most of the other students . I was only on this course for about three weeks when I obtained a job in a cotton broker's office as a clerk . The firm was called Whitehead & Lunt .It was a dingy little office with high desks and high stools, a bit Dickensian . I was introduced to ledger work, was sent to the Customs House to have Bills of Laden approved by the authorities, sent off occasionally to the Cotton Exchange with a message for one of the partners who would be doing business with other brokers or cotton growers around the world. I also had to make tea and brush up the office. Cotton samples were kept in this office. They were rolls of raw cotton rolled into brown paper and labelled with the growers name and the place where the cotton was grown . They stood about three feet high and were about nine inches in diameter .

I hadn't worked there long when I was asked to fetch one of these samples . Having never lifted one of these before, I was prepared to lift something quite weighty, I jerked it up and hit myself under the chin with it. It was as light as a feather !

My father knew I wanted to do something in the Art line, so he contacted a company named S.C.Peacock, an advertising agency in the town, and asked them if they had any vacancies or apprenticeships . They said there would be a trainee Production worker and layout artist's position available in a couple of weeks time, so I left the Cotton Brokers and started work at Peacocks .

This was another world ! I was involved with artists and I was ready to absorb all the tricks of the trade and learn how working artists did things. On the production side I was sent to various suppliers to take copy for type houses to set, and was able to watch what they did and see all the type styles etc .

One of the type-houses was Tinlings, which was part of the Liverpool Echo, The Daily Post and The Evening Express . The building was ancient and had little narrow winding staircases, I would go up to the composing floor where there were lots of compositors, some working on the monotype machines for casting and setting printing type in individual letters, and others setting by hand with individual Slugs ( a single letter on top of a thin piece of metal, the metal being an amalgam of lead and antimony ) . When the type was set in the column width of the Echo it was placed in a ' form ' the page size of the Echo, which held the type together and when the page was complete they would make a matrix. This was a sort of thick wet blotting- type paper which was pounded onto the metal type to get all the impressions of the type . It was then baked in a curved shape so that a metal plate could be made to fit the rollers of the Echo printing machinery . This plate was called a stereo . All very interesting to watch and learn about !
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