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NICPRINT-50 Being some account of the history of the printing, packaging and newspaper industry of South Africa, and of the National Industrial Council for Printing, prepared to mark the Jubilee of the Council 1919-1969. Town by L.J. PICTON Cape Presented to the University ofof Cape To1r,n in satisfaction of requirements for the degree of M.A.(Econ.) University This edition of 150 copies was printed offset on Croxley Script by ES & A Robinson ·(Pty) Ltd and bound.by John Dickinson & Co Ltd in collaboration with Cape & Transvaal Printers Ltd. 1969 The copyright •f this thesis is held lty the University cf Czp Town. UCT LIBRARIES Reproduction of t~e whole er any i-art C000013192X may be made for study i-urpeses enly, anti not for publication. The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derivedTown from it is to be published without full acknowledgement of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposesCape only. of Published by the University of Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University Acknowledgments (i) Introduction (iii) Abbreviations (viii) l. Cape Printing 1780-1825 l 2. Cape Town 1825-1850 12 3. Mission presses before 1850 22 4. Cape Town 1850-1900 33 5. Eastern Province 1850-1900 50 6. Natal 67 7. O.F.S. and Kimberley 76 8. Transvaal 84 9. Mission presses after 1850 102 lOo A Technical Revolution llO 11. The Twentieth Century I 121 12. The Twentieth Century II 141 13. The Newspaper Press Union 151 14. The S.A. Typographical Union 160 15. Early Employers' Associations 167 16. The Federation of Master Printers 189 l 7. The National Industrial Council 199 18. The Joint Board System 207 19. Working Rules 213· 20. The Council and the Bantu 223 21. Welfare 232 22. Productivity 239 23. Postscript 244 Illustrations 24~ Appendices 275 Book List and Sources 295 References 302 AUTHOR'S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Max Cohen inspired this work. When the Federation of Master Printers of South Africa was about to celebrate its jubilee he made a plea through the Cape Chamber of Printing that the history of the Federation be recorded as a tribute to its achievements. Ernest Weeden and others attempted to set the wheels in motion but obstacles too great to be overcome in the time available caused the project to be abandoned. I was then reminded that the National Industrial Council for Printing would celebrate its jubilee in 1969 and it seemed that as South Africa's oldest Industrial Council it would be regrettable if such an event was allowed to pass unrecorded; moreover it ap­ peared that if an account of the Council's work was accompa­ nied by reference to the origin of the parties to the Council the earlier omission to record something of the origins of the F.M.P. might to some extent be remedied. An approach was made to the University of Cape Town and Professor H.M. Robertson, M.A., Ph.D., Jagger Professor of Economics, kindly agreed to supervise and to accept this work as a thesis for degree purposes. My grateful thanks are due to him for the unfailing guidance and direction which he has given and the helpful suggestions he has made. My thanks are also due to Mr L.E.A. Slater, the Chairman of the Council, to the Joint Honorary Secretaries, to the Secretariat, and to the Standing Committee who authorised research in the Council's files as well as giving help and encouragement. Dr A.M. Lewin Robinson of the South African Public Library gave me research facilities in the Africana Library, and many others both in South Africa and overseas freely gave assistance which, as far ( i) as possible, is acknowledged in the references. If through inad­ vertence or oversight there has been any failure to acknowledge assistance or to authenticate sources I hope I may be forgiven. My thanks are due to Mrs A. Crathorne for typing several drafts as well as completing the fair copy, to Mr F.J. Paterson for help with the illustrations, and to friends too numerous to mention by name in ES & A Robinson (Pty) Ltd., Cape & Transvaal Printers Ltd., and John Dickinso~ & Co (Pty) Ltd. who undertook the printing and binding. L.J. PICTON CAPE TOWN August 1969 (ii) INTRODUCTION The National Industrial Council of the Printing and Newspaper Industry of South Africa celebrates its Golden Jubilee in 1969 and this thesis was undertaken primarily to examine and record the Socio-economic effects of its work. To set the achievements of the Council in perspective it was proposed to preface the re­ cord with a brief sketch of the industry itself, but what was in­ tended as an introduction has grown into a major part of the fi­ nished work which therefore contains more history and less eco- nomics than originally planned. It is hoped that the work will be no less acceptable for this change of emphasis. Printing and the making of books are inseparable from civi­ lised existence as Professor T. Reavely Glover pointed out some years ago when he dated the foundation of the modern world "from the year in which the first Greek wrote a book 111 ). When the art of printing from movable type made possible the multiplication of books an unknown seventeenth century writer made bold to say 112 "with twenty-six soldiers of lead I have conquered the world ). Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote "the mass of people must be barbarous where there is no printing113 ), and Thomas Carlyle spoke hope­ fully of printing as "disbanding hired armies, cashiering most 114 kings and senates, and creating a whole new democratic world l. Printing reached South Africa in the closing years of the eighteenth century and for some time commercial printing remained a Government monopoly. The fight for a free press at the Cape is now accepted as a part of the general history of South Africa and is treated as such in the standard works of Cory and of Walker and more recently by Hattersley. Bird foresaw the coming struggle (iii) in 1822 and Suasso de Lima thought it of sufficient moment to give it a place in his Geschiedenis of 1825. Meurant left a lively eye-witness account not less valuable for having been written sixty years after the event. Men of the Times, a Who's Who of 1906, describes the early history of printing and sketches the biography of many people then living who were con- nected with the press. Ian Calvin's introduction to Mendelssohn's Bibliography of 1910 is another valuable source of information. All subsequent students are indebted to the several distinguished librarians, A.CoG. Lloyd, DoH. Varley, RoF.M. Immelman, Dr. A.M. Lewin Robinson, Miss Anna Smith, Dr. B.J"T. Leverton, and others, who have enriched our knowledge of the press. An account of the development of the press in South Africi is contained in the ca­ talogue of an exhibition of books held at Cape Town in 1952 in connection with the van Riebeeck Festival and to D.H. Varley we owe a short but lively account of the newspaper press 1652-1952. Rosenthal 1 s history of Cape printing 1800-1960 is now out of print: unfortunately for subsequent students it made no mention of its sources and as a record of the industry it stopped short at the first decade of the twentieth century. Volume I of the Dictionary of South African Biography treats the lives of several early printers in some detail but, although selected for inclu­ sion, the lives of others such as Archbell, Bridekirk, Culling­ worth, Davis, Godlonton, Moll, Poortermans and van de Sandt have not yet been published. In spite of this wealth of material, together with two monographs from the State Library and some published accounts of printing in Pretoria, Potchefstroom, Graaff-Reinet, East London, Kimberley and Natal, there is no one single volume which looks at the industry as a whole; there is next to nothing covering the expansion of the industry in the twentieth century, and there is nothing at all about packaging (iv) which now accounts for about one third in value of the output of the industry. Most of the published work is written by people outside the industry mainly concerned with the products of the press: the present author is possibly the first since Meurant to write from the standpoint of a man who sees the industry from the inside and has for half a lifetime earned his living pro­ ducing print. The National Industrial Council being the focal point of this work, the printing industry will be taken to embrace the one thou­ sand five hundred and nine firms registered with the Councils) and the term printing will be taken to cover all activities for which working rules and wage rates are prescribed in the Coun­ cil's Agreements. These definitions are wider than the meaning applied to the word printing in layman's language and cover many products of the industry such as plain packaging and private sta­ tionery which are not printed in the commonly accepted meaning of the word. This work falls into two parts of approximately equal length: the first part sketches the history of the industry and the se- cond, the establishment and work of the Council. The Council was the first of its kind, formed as a national body only nine years after the Act of Union and five years before the Industrial Conci­ liation Act of 1924 made provision for the registration of Indus­ trial Councils and for legal force and effect to be gi~en to their Agreements.

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