Tribune stalwart marks 50 years of service through seismic change
It was the noises and the smells of the printing works that remain engrained forever – the monotype machines clattering in the corner, the linotypes belting away in a peculiar sort of harmony, each with its own particular sound; the smell of the ink, the heat of the pots of molten metal.
And the laughter.
Fifty years ago, a fifteen-year-old from Ashe Road in Shantalla walked in the side gate of the old Connacht Tribune offices on Market Street ‘in trepidation’ – early for his first day of what turned out to be his one and only job.
The first person that Philip Smyth met inside the door was John Robinson – with no dilution of his Geordie accent despite his many years living around the corner from this new recruit in Shantalla – who greeted him with “Mr Smyth, how you keeping?”
“There was no one else there – but then he brought me out to John O’Donnell who was the foreman of the composing area,” Philip recalls, reflecting on a remarkable 50-year career with the same Connacht Tribune.
Last week, the Connacht Tribune directors and staff gathered to honour a colleague and to mark that rare achievement – and that brought back memories of that very first day on August 26, 1974.
“The noise; the smell of the inks mixing on the machine as the paper was printed; the molten metal – all new experiences for a youngster of fifteen,” he says.
“From the compositing area, you could see the printing works – and what it was all about. You could see the linotypes, the hot metal. On the far side was all the machinery and that was one noisy spot; the rumbling of the web printing the paper, mixed with the presses printing commercial jobs at the same time; the bindery collating that jobbing work.”
That was the start of a career that continues – through decades of unparallelled changes in the industry – with Philip now heading up the production department he’d joined as an apprentice at 15.
Caption: Philip Smyth with Connacht Tribune staff and directors at a special event to mark his 50 years of service.
Get the full story in this week’s Connacht Tribune, on sale in shops now, or you can download the digital edition from www.connachttribune.ie. You can also download our Connacht Tribune App from Apple’s App Store or get the Android Version from Google Play.