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Features
14th November 2023
Concrete (Mark I)’s 50th A n n iversar y! Matthew Stothard Co-Editor in Chief Concrete may have been in print for over 30 years now, but it is actually the second student newspaper with that name at UEA! This month marks the 50th anniversary of the first iteration of Concrete, which was first published on 8th November 1973.
Image: 1970s Issue 30: Autumn 1974, Image: UEA Archives
Image: UEA SU archive
The first UEA student newspaper was Mandate which launched in 1965, just two years after UEA opened. This was followed by Chips in 1966, which coexisted with Twice from 1970, and it was the merger of these two papers in 1973 which created Concrete. To celebrate this anniversary, Concrete’s 1974 – 75 Editor, Andy GambleBeresford, told me what it was like producing UEA’s student newspaper in the ‘70s. He explained that issues were “churned out every Thursday during term time by a small but dedicated group which varied in number between 10-20 people. The editorial/reporting team and the production team were one and the same group, so multi-tasking was very much the order of the day.” In terms of his own role as Editor, Andy said, “this was pretty much a title in name only. All editorial decisions were made jointly by the team who worked on the paper,” with his main role being taking the flak for any complaints that came in! In terms of their sources, Andy said that “Apart from obvious channels (UEASU, the University itself), we relied an awful lot on the student body in general to provide us with news stories and leads, and as a result the paper tended to have much more of a ‘local newsletter’ feel to it rather than an independent media channel.”
Image: PixaBay
Andy also gave me an overview of a typical Wednesday for the 1970s Concrete team, which shows a far more condensed schedule than the three week
cycle we work on today, and that, unlike today’s Concrete, the students were also responsible for the printing process: “1 2 : 0 0 – Ed i to ri al m e eting (inevitably in the Pub) to agree the rough format & content of the week’s issue. “14:00 – Whoever was available would turn up at the Concrete office just above the LCR and would be pressed into either typing up the news articles on the two archaic IBM Golfball typewriters in the office or creating the week’s ads for the paper using Letraset transfer print. “ 17 : 0 0 – of articles
Proofreading and ads.
“17:30 – Typed up articles and freshly created ads were cut into columns and laid out on large A0 pasteboards. Once we were satisfied with the layout, the col-
“Multi-tasking was very much the order of the day.”
umns and ads were affixed to the boards using Cow Gum (I can still smell the awful stuff even now…). 1900 – The process of turning the pasteboards into offset litho plates began. This required someone to stand in a darkened room working over the photolitho machine, which invariably turned the room into something like a sauna after the first few plates had been created. As it took around 10 minutes to create a litho plate for a single page, this was the least popular task of the whole process. “21:00 – Once all the litho plates were assembled, we moved to the actual printing process. In the room next door to the Concrete office sat a temperamental offset litho printer of indeterminate age, known to all and sundry as Doris. One plate at a time, we usually ran off around 300 copies of each page.
“2300 – Once the print run of all pages was complete, the great collation process began. Piles of the individual printed pages were set up in order along the length of one or two long tables (sometimes three if it was a big issue), and we would queue up and trudge along the line of pages, picking one at a time, so by the time you got to the end of the line, you had a complete edition in your hand. This was transferred to one of two poor souls whose job it was to staple the copies together. The process was repeated – and repeated – and repeated, until the week’s run of 300 newly minted copies were ready. “01:00 – We usually cadged one of the UEASU Transit vans plus whoever from the Exec was around and was a designated driver and hauled off to Mac’s 24 hr Café out on the Yarmouth Road for coffee and bacon sarnies. 0630 the following morning – One lucky soul each week was nominated to get back into the Concrete office, pick up the 300 copies and haul them over to Addenbrookes the (then) newsagent on the Street, so that we hit the streets as soon as the student population started to stir. As a result of this, the final product – even back then – looked very much like something that had been put together in a garden shed: and to be fair, that wasn’t far from the truth. However, we always sold out our print run, and it was always a source of pride to see people sitting around in the LCR or the Pub perusing and discussing that week’s issue.” The original run of Concrete lasted until 1975, when it was superseded by Phoenix, which lasted until 1987. Other 80s publications included Breezeblock between 1982 and 1986, and Broadly Speaking in 1986, whilst Insight (later Insite) was the final publication before the launch of the current Concrete in 1992. The choice of the same name as the 1970s paper was a coincidence, but I like to think we both sit as part of a wider legacy of student journalism at UEA.