The first thing you did with the Ludlow was look at it before you’d light it up. If it had lead on it, you’d be very careful if the safety mechanism wasn’t working. If the table’s up, there’s a safety mechanism that stops the plunger coming down and squirting lead straight up. So you can run it through its cycle with the table up. Well, this guy didn’t check it and he was looking over it and, thunk, right up the nostril. I don’t know how they got it out.

I used to dig a lot of guillotine operators’ fingers out of machines. That used to be a specialty in the old days because they never had guards on them, like they have now. The old guillotines – you’d pull a handle and they’d have all these tubes that used to come down and block off the blade. That was the first type of safety mechanism that they had. Then they had the magic eye and that sort of thing.

Underneath the old horizontal presses were cylinders and a valving arrangement so that when the press went up one end, or the bed went up the end on its runners or came back this end, big leather covered pistons went into this cylinder.

Then there was a valve in the cylinder that let so much air out. That slowed it  down a bit so that you didn’t get a knocking motion. It sort of dampened the motion. These were at both ends of the presses, and if you were sitting under the press on the floor, your head would be at about the same height as this cylinder.

One guy was fixing the machine and he lost his head inside the cylinder. The piston came along and took his head off right into the cylinder.

Col Hutchinson

Print’s Past excerpts are drawn from interviews held by Benjamin Thorn, curator of the Armidale Museum of  Printing, and are due to be published in a forthcoming book.

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