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Bare
Facts
The weekly student newspaper
Brought to you hot off the
press, every Friday by skilled teams of Printers.....
Each week about 1200 copies were printed on Roneo duplicators,
that were never intended for that sort of excitement. For a typical edition
about 10,000 sheets went through.
Setting up each run, took a long time,
involving reels of masking tape and the spilling of large quantities of ink.
However things could be speeded up, by removing the side panels of the
duplicator and dismantling the governor. This made the machine run much faster,
but the resulting paper jams had to be cleared while it was
printing.
Stuffers
As you can see from the clock, it's nearly midnight and the
stuffers are hard at work. If the organisation was working properly, we printed
from the middle pages out. There was a fearsome machine that folded the pages,
but then it had to be assembled by hand (stuffers).
Publishing BF took a
team of about thirty people, from 7pm on Thursday to 2am on
Friday.
Paste-up
Each page was typed, drawn,
slapped together and glued onto a sheet of A4, with a separate sheet for each
colour.
But for this we needed
Typists.
These were the days before everybody used computers, so
students that could type reasonably accurately, were valuable and cosseted. (In
fact they often ended up as cosseted as a newt. (Hello Anne))
The Editors
A very
old copy of Bare Facts from 1968 - click here
My part in the production of this comic, was that I
could operate the Scan'o'line. This was a drum scanner that cut stencils from
pasted up pages, very badly. I also worked for a Letraset agent during the
holidays and so could get loads of part used sheets (with no X's on
them).
This was all very low tech printing, on equipment that was designed
for much lighter duty. It was very unusual for both of the Roneo duplicators to
be operating at the same time. 'Bare Facts' was often hard to read and full of
typos, but it did have a certain anarchic charm. This was soon to be lost, with
the introduction of offset printing and higher production values.
These
days when you visit the University, you are handed copies of 'Bare Facts' by
the authorities. In the goodolddays they wouldn't have dared. One of the
reasons was :
Grapevine
Work on 'Bare Facts' tended not to start until
Thursday evening and finished with 1200 copies, typed, printed, stuffed and
distributed by Friday morning. So there was no opportunity to read the thing
through, in the 'cold light of day'.
Production was fueled by regular trips
to the bar and occasionally, the conditions were just right for the printing of
the notorious article called Grapevine.
It consisted of base
level gossip, libel, rumors and anything that was funny, true or not. Pressure
from the university authorities, eventually lead to its demise.
This was
probably for the best, as legal action had been threatened a few times and the
editor was feed up with having to flee the campus for a few days, while people
calmed down.
Mary Parsons (She was never mentioned in
Grapevine)
There was also
This House
Current issues
of Bare Facts can be found on the UniS Students
Union web site.
Articles from Spring 2003 issues. Written
by Alumni who graduated between 1956 & 1976.
Click Here
This includes a history of
Bare Facts, from editions 1 to 100.
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