Continuing our series of stories about our archive of historical newspapers, Joy Fulcher tells Beverly Abbs why her keepsake volume of the Worcester News from 1953 means so much to her

JOY Fulcher is so pleased to have a unique keepsake of the year her late husband, Eric, who started his working life as an apprentice with the Evening News and Times – forerunner of today's Worcester News.

Mrs Fulcher is one of the readers who have taken up our offer of a free month of bound copies of the paper since it was launched as the Evening News and Times in 1935. She has the volume for May, 1953.

These copies are no longer essential as they are now all stored on microfilm, but the large leather-and-linen bound volumes have all now gone to good homes – readers wanting them for a variety of reasons, from commemorating the day they were born to the year they moved to Worcester.

For Mrs Fulcher it's a case of remembering the exciting Hold The Front Page days when there were 32 newspapers going far and wide from the Worcester News printworks, and on Thursday night the papers were 'put to bed' .

Work went on through the night until every paper had been printed and was on the road to its destination, be it in Hereford, Wales, Dorset or Somerset, and Mr Fulcher would cycle home at 2am or 3am in the morning.

Mr Fulcher was born in July, 1938. He joined Berrow's Newspapers – then based in The Trinity – in 1953 at the age of 15.

His apprenticeship was for four years. He then went into the RAF for two years, serving as a medical officer in Germany.

He returned to the newspaper at the age of 21 and worked as a compositor in the days of hot metal.

He married Joy, who is a member of Hallow History Group, in 1963.

She said:"I never ceased to be amazed at how much was achieved in those days.

"News stories would arrive in the office via ticker tape from the many dedicated journalists with their notepads out and about.

"The pages were all composed manually with hot metal, and the advertisements were designed in aluminium plates.

"The compositors quickly learned how to read mirror image print as quickly as ordinary print, and a room full of readers would read every page to check for mistakes – no computers, no e-mails, no spell-checks.

"It was an exciting time for the workers there, a bit like the old movie Hold The Front Page.

"The Evening News would be in the shops by tea time with the latest news coverage, events that had happened only a few hours before would be on the front page.

"By about 7pm on a Saturday the Green Un would appear, the sports paper that had all the results for the national and local matches.

"It was also an exciting time when everything went over to computers some years later and Eric was involved in the programming of the procedures."

Mr Fulcher died at Christmas 2014, and Worcester News reporter Mike Pryce wrote "a lovely" obituary to him.

Mrs Fulcher said: "We had a good living from Eric's time with the newspapers, after all when we first married it was the highest-paid trade in the country, leading to much unrest and strikes, but we did well on £15 a week when we were first married.

"Hold The Front Page – those were the days!"