10:33am Friday 5th November 2004
Doreen Lockwood was a copy girl from 1967 to 1970
I joined the Surrey Comet aged 16 straight from Molesey County Secondary. I started off doing time and motion studies of the print workers.
I very quickly learned that the men didn't like being watched and timed and, after a month, decided to leave. By coincidence another girl from my school had started in the editorial department at the same time and also hated her job, mainly because she was scared of one of the subs, John Vivian.
Together we went to Mr Jenkins, who I think was one of the directors and asked to swap jobs, which we did. Mr Jenkins always wore dark suits, with a white shirt and braces, and was a rather tubby figure. He wore those little half glasses on the end of his nose.
He would be out on the stone helping to make the pages up with his jacket off but never his tie. He looked fierce the way he peered over his glasses but I found him charming.
My editorial job consisted of collecting very wet copy pulls from the print works, checking that corrections had been done and then taking them up to the editor, Brian West, for final approval.
I would then collect them from him and take them back to the works for the final making up on the stone. I knew when copy was waiting for me as there were two lights positioned over my desk, one for the works and one for the editor who was nicknamed Batman.
This was due to the speed at which he flung open the door to the editorial department, flew down the steps in one leap, and passed through the department into the works like a bat out of hell. I remember him having a bright, ginger beard.
The aforementioned John Vivian was a short tubby Welshman with a mop of grey curls and a wicked sense of humour.
I wasn't scared of him, although I think he did his best to scare me. He called me Florence, as in Nightingale, on account of the lamps above my desk, and would yell at me "Florence, your lamp's burning" whenever one went on.
As well as joining the regular pub crawls, I spent quite a bit of my free time with the two photographers, John McDonald and Jeff Edwards. John was a tall, dark, well-built man, while Jeff had a really bad curvature of the spine so was probably less than five feet tall. They were both great fun to be with.
One of the junior reporters at the time was Jill Arthurall who went on to become the womens page editor at the Comet. She lived with her sister on a houseboat on the Hogsmill River, and was always coming into work looking like she had been dragged through a bush backwards, due to spending the night baling water out of the boat all night.
During the late 1960s we all wore miniskirts but one press day Jill came in wearing just a rugby shirt as a dress. There she was bending over the page makeup table trying to hold her shirt down so as not to show her knickers she had quite an audience. In the end the editor sent her home to change as he said she was distracting the men.
Life at the Comet was never dull. When, at nineteen, I decided to move on, the editor offered to arrange for me to join the Surbiton Borough News as a junior reporter, which had been my ambition since a child.
Foolishly I declined his offer as I had just got married and my new husband didn't want me to work unsocial hours! I went to work as an invoice clerk at a local garage instead. There I found out that not all work was exciting and fun.
I never did become a reporter but I have written newsletters, community guides and PR material. I've even done work experience with the Surrey Comet/Guardian recently, as part of a journalism diploma course I'm studying at Birkbeck, University of London. See, it's never too late to qualify as a journalist!
I did enjoy my recent work experience but I'm afraid it could never come anywhere near the exhilaration of working in the noisy, dusty, bustling, haphazard Surrey Comet editorial department of the 1960s.
This concludes our memories of life at the Comet. For more memories visit www.surreycomet.
co.uk/comet150.
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