I used to work for a fairly big printing company in New Zealand, based in Wellington. One of the jobs we printed every fortnight was a newspaper called Soviet News for the information office of the Soviet embassy that was based in Wellington. Every fortnight, I would regularly pick up the artwork, which was just pasted down – remember, this was before the days of digital work – and we’d print the job and deliver it.

It was generally just a 12-page tabloid, printed black and red. However, for the anniversary of the great Soviet Revolution, which was in November, we printed a special edition that had a four-page cover printed in four colour. On the back page were two photographs: one of Mr Gorbachev and one of a lizard. So we printed the job and delivered the job, and it went to libraries and schools and subscribers. Copies also obviously went back to the Soviet Union.

Anyway, not long after I delivered it, I had a frantic message from the chief information officer, who I suspect was possibly a KGB colonel. He called me in and demanded to know if New Zealand was trying to take the mickey out of Russia. I said, “Not that I’m aware of.” And he replied, “Well you’d better get in here straight away.”

So I drove in frantically and parked and went in to see him. He was absolutely steaming and said, “Have you seen this?” He turned over to the back page and there were the two pictures. Unfortunately, the captions had been transposed, so under the picture of Mr Gorbachev were words to the effect that this was a mould-eating lizard and under the picture of the mould-eating lizard was a caption saying this was Mr Gorbachev.

Of course they weren’t too pleased and it ended with the ambassador ringing the chairman of Independent Newspapers, who rang the managing director, who rang my general manager, and we had to write an official letter of apology to the ambassador. We also had to reprint the job, get the old copies back and replace them. That was quite an interesting episode.

I suspect someone in the processing department just lifted the two captions and transposed them before they shot the film. But nobody owned up to the crime, as it were, so to this day I don’t really know what happened. I have my suspicions, but I won’t say any more.

Colin Chappell

Print’s Past excerpts are drawn from interviews held by Benjamin Thorn, curator of the Armidale Museum of  Printing.

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