Inspired by the news

This was a writing challenge to create a piece of up to 500 words inspired by something we heard on the radio.  Except this was on TV.  Whatever.

One by one Terri pulled open the drawers and checked the contents. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. It was so disappointing that this 1960s classic was yielding nothing of interest. Not so much as a sheet of newsprint to line the old pine.  As a furniture recycler she was used to finding odd and interesting things in the pieces she bought. Over the years she’d found postcards, old coins, leaky pens, ancient stationery and all kinds of cheap trinkets that previous owners had clearly not wanted when the furniture went for sale.

Just as she was giving up on this hunt the final drawer put up a fight and refused to open. There was no lock, so it couldn’t be that, it had to be that it was sticky, that’s all.  And so she put all her effort into hauling on the handles. Sixties design looked cool, but it was a case of form over function. It was almost impossible to get a good grip on the smoothly polished block of wood but that only served to make her more determined. There must be another way.

Taking a good look at the sides of the piece she realized she could probably get something sharp behind the drawer front, if only she had the right tool. Rifling through the toolbox she came across a screwdriver with a sturdy handle. She remembered the object from when she inherited the box from her dad and she’d thought at the time that she’d never have a use for it. She couldn’t imagine ever having to unscrew anything so big, and really didn’t believe she would have the strength to use it, even if she did have the need.  But she had faithfully kept the tool all these years because it had been her dad’s and she couldn’t bear to part with it. This box of treasured tools was one of the reasons she’d taken up restoration as a new career.

“Thanks Dad,” she said as she hefted the chunky piece of iron and placed it carefully on the line that separated the drawer edge from the frame, “It’s the next best thing to a jemmy.”

She pushed carefully and managed to insert the very edge of the screwdriver in the crack, then levered gently at first to see if there was any movement. Gradually she increased the pressure, then suddenly the crack widened and the drawer shot forward several inches. Excitedly she pulled the drawer forward and saw inside a printed leaflet. It had a photograph of a pretty girl who looked as if she was in her teens or early twenties with the tragic words “In memoriam” printed beneath it. Terri’s eyes immediately filled with tears.

RIP

Christmas is tough enough for people who have lost loved ones; so imagine how awful it must feel when someone passes on Christmas Day. This year I heard of such a death. Not of someone I know, although I recognise his face; I know his name; and thanks to social media I know he married his long-time love six months ago. A fit man in his early 40s, he should not have died, and certainly not of something so mundane as a heart attack - triggered by a blood clot. Clearly fate did not support his team; his family and friends left devastated by an unavoidable tragic incident. Or perhaps, as the outpourings on social media have claimed, heaven truly wanted their angel back.

Whatever the reason, I am in mourning. Not for him, exactly, but for those I have lost in the past. For the beautiful souls I have known and no longer see. Their spirits accompany me, as his will follow the ones grieving now, but I can no longer speak with them or hold them or see them, except in memory.

Death is cruel. But life is crueller for those still living.

Not Nano 18 November 15

One of the things I always promised myself was that I would never work for a newspaper that didn’t print on the premises. I couldn’t keep that pledge because times changed and printing was very quickly outsourced to other places, some even as far away as the Netherlands because it was cheaper than doing it at home.

However, when I first started working at Lincoln the print machines were still on the premises at Waterside North. It seems odd that the printing system, the network of huge rollers, was called the web. It was because it looked like a spider’s web, and had nothing to do with today’s world wide web. But I find it odd that the same word has ended up being used for two very different forms of communication.

The machinery was actually called web offset, because the printing rollers were inked and then rolled on to an intermediate felt covered one which then rolled against the paper. This means that the original roller is the right way round – you could read it normally. So the offset bit on the intermediate roller was back to front, as if you were looking at it in a mirror, then it transferred onto the paper the right way round.

What you also need to know is that when you create type on a lino type machine you can’t just fit them onto a circular roller. Imagine you have a pack of cards and you try to roll them into a cylinder. Unless they are very well fixed at the central point you will have a shower of cards.  And that’s what happens to the lines of type if you try to set them up then curve them around. So what happened was that the slugs of lead with the words on them were set up into a flat tray – called a form – and then a slab of wet card was pressed onto it to take the shape of the words.

Once that dried it could be lifted off and curled round to create a new mould. That was used to create a curved metal shape that could be fixed onto a roller to begin the offset process. It was a very complex series of actions and it was needed for every page. 

One of the things about ‘hot metal’ was the smell. There was a distinctive aroma around the print works. It was the kind of smell that triggers amazing memories. It wasn’t like any other hot metal smell I’ve ever experienced.  You might be familiar with the smell you get from steam engines and the hot metal print smell was almost but not quite the same. It was distinctive and if I ever smell it these days I will be straight back in the building at Waterside, wandering through the print works.

And something else about having the web on site was the noise. You didn’t quite hear so much as feel the machines starting up. They were huge and heavy and had to start up gradually but built up slowly to a fast, rumbling  spin. Knowing that the web had wound up was a really exciting time. Everything was finalised. It was too late even to add ‘stop press’ by then, In spite of what it was called it never happened. You had to have everything ready for when the switch was thrown.  

It was the final stage of getting newspapers ready for delivery. A proper web offset machine would have cutting and folding systems at the end of the run. So we put news in one end and papers came out the other.  I loved it. And I swore  I would never work anywhere that didn’t have the print works on site.  Sadly, Lincoln was the last place I worked that had printers in the same building. And we soon moved out of Waterside and into offices over a local supermarket. It was never the same and I missed it desperately.

Sometimes we helped ourselves to a freshly printed paper off the end of the web to be among the first to read it, Genuinely they were still warm from the presses.

Not NaNo 17 November 14

So it turns out I’m still about a thousand words behind even though I knocked out 1800 or so before I went to work this morning. I know why. It’s because I gave in yesterday evening and went out for dinner, and by the time I got back I was past doing anything very much except sleeping.  I fell asleep in front of the tv, would you believe?  Hence my word count grew by just the 600 or so that I wrote before we went out. Perhaps I can keep up the totals tonight with another 1000 words.  |Not that I’m sure what I shall say.

I was talking about the courts and I told you the tale of Charlie the shoplifter. Maybe there are a few other characters I can drag out of my distant memory. Strangely the faces that stand out most are all solicitors. There was one guy, not in Lincoln, who represented most of the reprobates in town. In fact you could be pretty certain that anyone he appeared for was probably guilty and his main function was to ensure that the sentence was as low as possible. He could tell a sad tale and pull at the magistrates’ heart strings and mostly got his own way.

He appeared almost every week and we became quite good friends. In fact in breaks between cases we would often chat over a cigarette or two in the waiting area. Then there was another rising star who had his own business with his name over the door. He earned quite a reputation for being able to secure a not guilty verdict and so some of the worst types in town were on his books. There was a huge outcry some time later when it turned out he was making money on the side and he was charged with fraud, found guilty and sent down for a couple of years. Perhaps magistrates have long memories!

One thing I should discuss while I’m writing about Lincoln is the Coroner’s Court at the castle. As I said a while ago, the part of the building that was the court is now the souvenir shop, but back then it was a proper court room with high wooden railings around the sides of the witness box. It felt old and quite depressing really. Over the years it must have heard some horrible stories. Coroners hear some disturbing facts and need to be tough people. That’s why they’re often medical people in their day jobs.  In fact our coroner in Lincoln was a GP and one of the people on his books was a colleague of mine.  She said it was deeply worrying when she went to see him because he recognised her from the court and would sometimes talk about his cases. (Without giving away anything he shouldn’t, of course.) She reckoned he was always measuring her up silently as a potential inquest. I was registered at a different surgery, thank heavens.

The thing about courts was that the press were often allowed to stay when members of the public were asked to leave. It was understood that we wouldn’t ever use anything we heard while we were allowed to stay. But sometimes it helped us understand the background and that helped us to write a better story in the long term.  It also meant that we heard some really gruesome stuff sometimes. actually, swapping inquest stories and trying to out gross each other was a common journalistic past time. The kind of pub conversation that could clear a room! Motorcyclists were always a source of stunning tales.  Like the one who rode into the back of a bus, head down, and caused a lot of consternation among the police who couldn’t find his head.

They took what was available of him to the mortuary where the pathologist began a post mortem while the search for the head continued. The doctor found it for them. When he opened up the chest wall he found the head, still wearing its crash helmet, inside. The impact was so strong it broke his neck and pushed the head downwards. He wouldn’t have felt much, apparently. Unlike another guy who was cleaning out a grain silo when his work mates decided to fill it without checking where he was. The corn was poured in on top of him and he drowned in it.

Then there was another guy who was working in a factory where they boiled down animal waste to make glue, among other things.  He was walking past a boiler when the seal failed and the door sprang open, spraying hot animal innards all over him and boiling him to death.  There were car crashes where drivers were thrown out of their seats, electrocutions, runaway lorries that ploughed into houses .  You couldn’t make these up. Well, I couldn’t, and I’ve noticed over the years that I’ve been taking part in NaNoWriNo that I can dream up some pretty creative ways to kill off my characters.

They weren’t all awful, although obviously they all involved a death, someone’s loved one gone, and there were grieving relatives to be considered in every case. You had to be careful how you discussed the details, nothing too gory and definitely not sensationalist. But you can see why I would spend time staring out of the window at the  virginia creeper on the crown court walls. On sunny days it positively glowed, and it helped take away the pain of dealing with an unpleasant topic.
One thing you had to remember was that Coroner’s Court had special rules. It wasn’t reported in quite the same way. Under certain circumstances coroners had findings, not verdicts. The official terms were different and you had to keep the right bits in the right places.

Not NaNo 16 November 14

Once I started work at Lincoln I realised quite how wrong I’d been about my image of the job.  Far from being an ambulance chaser and dealing with corruption every day, I was faced with a great deal of routine that everyone had to do to make sure all the bases were covered.
For example, one of the first jobs every day was known as ‘calls’ and it involved phoning the emergency services to check whether there had been any incidents during the night. It wasn’t the big stuff: if the cathedral had burned down during the night we’d have been called out to it to watch the flames and gather local response. No, this was the everyday small stuff that happens all over the country. It’s a big thing to the people involved, but to the rest of us it’s just a chance to gloat and think, rather them than me.
It was the small fires like when someone let their frying pan overheat. The fire brigade wee called out, the kitchen’s a mess, but the house is still there. Needs decorating and smells of burned chips, but everyone is OK and there’s no structural damage. Don’t get me wrong – a chip pan fire that someone’s daft enough to throw water on will explode and you’re lucky if all you get is a black ceiling. No, that kind of fire gets out of hand quickly and your house burns down.
 But there are all kinds of other fire that need professional attention but don’t threaten life and limb. Someone has a bonfire and builds it too close to the fence.  Pretty soon the fence catches light and then half the garden’s in flames. That kind of story was a great opportunity for the fire brigade to issue a warning about having safe bonfires. and we’d duly oblige y passing the advice on as part of our coverage. You’ve probably read similar things or heard them on TV: The fire brigade has issued a warning to people who are planning to burn their garden rubbish. Make sure you construct your bonfire well away from fences and other flammable items. Have a bucket of water or sand close by in case the flames start to spread, and don’t try to burn too much at once. I can still write those in my sleep.

Then there’s the ambulance call. They didn’t tell us about the ordinary, everyday crises that people face. No heart attacks, no food poisoning, but perhaps if someone fell off a roof while clearing their gutters. Yet another warning to the public to take care.”If you aren’t confident about heights and ladders, perhaps consider calling in a professional”. That kind of thing.

Of course they’d tell us about car crashes they’d attended, and chances are we already knew about them from calling the fire brigade if anyone had been trapped.  They didn’t call them car crashes, of course.  The official term was RTA or RTC, which stood for road traffic accident, or road traffic collision.  And pretty soon you got used to using the jargon when you spoke to the pros. But you made sure to talk about collisions and accidents when you wrote the story.

Technically a collision is an impact between two moving bodies. So two cars can collide but a car can’t collide with a wall. Not unless the wall was collapsing at the time! So you had to take care how you phrased things just in case it appeared in court later. No word or phrase should imply blame on anyone because if you wrote a story, however small and innocuous it seemed at the time, and you made it sound like one party was at fault when they weren’t, that was libellous and you could face a prosecution of your own. 

Last call was, predictably, to the police. They would tell you about all kinds of things that had happened since the previous morning. They would have been involved in many f the things the other two had already told you, of course, but they also knew about street robberies, shop raids, suspicious looking people hanging around old folks’ homes. Usually they wanted your help. “Police are asking anyone with information...” You know the stuff.  They often wanted witnesses to accidents, because no-one was sure who was to blame and there might be careless driving charges pending.
This was the bread and butter stuff that filled the pages and that the majority of people wanted to know about. Perhaps they’d seen ambulances tearing off along their street.  A couple of days later they read about a three car pile-up in a nearby area and so they know a little bit more about what has gone on in the town.  I’m not sure people still care about that sort of stuff unless the ambulance is parked outside a neighbour’s home, then they want every little detail. But we didn’t tell them that. Calls were very formulaic and mostly you could write them up without much effort. They were good on days you had a hangover. They were also how most junior reporters cut their teeth. Meaty stories but a safe area to learn on.  Most were only a couple of paragraphs long, but they were your copy. You knew you’d done them.  They were also small enough to cut out and send to your parents to say “Look what I did!”
Another easy way to start a junior reporter, or someone who just joined the firm, was Magistrates’ Court. You didn’t need to find your way around town. You just had to turn up, sit down and take notes. Preferably shorthand notes, in case you ever had to defend what you wrote later.  I only ever had to do that once and it was Crown Court and many years later when I was an old hand. If I remember I’ll tell you about it later.

Magistrates’ Court handled small time crimes and petty cases. (Petty is, of course, derived from ’petit’ meaning small in French. ) Sometimes the court sittings were even called ‘petty sessions’ but there’s a whole law lecture on why that happens and I’m not going to start it here. If you really  care, go look it up on Google.

So the stories at Magistrates’ were bigger than calls yielded, but they were rarely page leads. Although they could be, in a slow news week. They were governed by a whole host of rules that we’d learned during the pre-entry course. You had to understand the rules of defamation, of course, because you could defame somebody remarkably easily if you didn’t take care how you write about things. But Magistrates’ Court was a minefield. Accuracy was priority. That’s why they taught us shorthand. If you got the facts wrong you could be in trouble from all directions, including the court itself. Magistrates and judges have remarkable powers if they think you’ve held them or their proceedings in court. Contempt is the only offence left on the statute books that still holds an indefinite sentence. In theory you can be put in jail and left to rot until the offended person decides you’ve suffered enough.  That doesn’t happen, of course. In effect you’re sent down to cool your heels then hauled back before the beak in a couple of hours to apologise. And as long as you are contrite enough you’re sent away with a few sharp words ringing in your ears.

It never happened to me, but I did once see a magistrate lock up a member of the public for being unruly. He warned the guy several times and called the ‘officers of the court’ (that’s a couple of local bobbies in case you didn’t know) to be on hand for the final warning. The idiot continued to shout about the injustice that was going on to his mate and so he was dragged kicking and screaming down to the cells. There are always cells under Magistrates’ Courts and iften they link directly to the local police station by means of tunnels. Sometimes they even are the police cells. At the end of that day’s session they brought the bloke back up, now quite restrained and looking deeply ashamed of himself, and he apologised profusely, admitted he’d been an idiot and promised not to do it again. Heaven knows what they did to him in the cells. I’d like to think that all they did was talk to him harshly and point out the error of his ways but I’m a cynic after years of journalism and I know that police officers are human like the rest of us.  I know I’d have been tempted to give him a thick ear if I’d been in charge of him (which is why I’m a writer and not a law officer!) so I doubt if he got away completely unbruised. He might well have bumped against a doorway or two on the way down.  But I digress again, and risk a charge of contempt of court myself for talking like that!

When you covered Magistrates regularly you got to know the returning customers. In a later job, where I became unofficial court reporter, just because I always enjoyed it,  I found a lovely bloke who was homeless.  Without an address to give he was always remanded in custody, because that was how the world worked back then. I’m not sure if it still would, but there you go. Charlie (Let’s call him Charlie for want of a better name and because I can’t remember his proper one. I can still see his face, but his name escapes me.) would wait till about mid-to-late November and would walk into Tesco, where he would pick up a very large, not particularly expensive item, tuck it under his coat, and attempt to walk out.

He made it so obvious that he was picked up by the store detectives every time. At least I assume he was. Maybe they missed him, or chose to ignore him, a couple of times.  He’d be escorted to the police station and put in the cells, where he was fed regularly and kept warm, then sent up before the bench at the next court session.  With no fixed abode he had to be remanded in custody so he spent most of the winter indoors, warm, safe and well fed, awaiting trial.  Some time in spring his case would come up, he’d be sentenced to three months prison but allowed out straight away because he’d already served his time on remand.

What should have happened is that he should have been helped by social services, but e seemed happy with his lot and went on like that for five or six years that I knew of.

Not NaNo15 November 13

So Lincoln was my first proper job as a journalist.  I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with the city. I’d visited it a few times in my childhood because it was one of my Dad’s favourite places. We’d seen teh cathedral more than once and I could remember an area called The Glory Hole where swans gather under a bridge in the centre of town.  And no-one who’s ever walked up it will ever forget Steep Hill/. It didn’t gain its name lightly. It even has railings part ay up so that walkers can haul their way up the cobbled street.

But when I moved there it suddenly became a new place. There were lots of little corners that I had no recollection of. There were museums I didn’t know. And perhaps the best thing was that I had a flat at the top of town and I had a picturesque walk through the old town, past the cathedral, under teh medieval gate and down Steep Hill to waterside. Sometimes when I walked past the Minster the choir were singing and you could hear them for quite some distance.

Of all the ways to start your working life there are many worse. It was July and the weather was glorious that year. IT’s on record as being one of the warmest in recent decades. It’s easy to fall in love with a place when you have  great conditions.  Summer, new job, a working income for the first time ever, new places, new people and new challenges.

I quickly made friends with a couple of other young journalists who joined around the same time as me, and we became a firm clique for a number of years. Our jobs gave us a certain status. It was kind of impressive to tell people you worked on the local paper as a reporter.

One of my first stories was the kind that most of us dread. It was an obit about a young man who died after a very long illness. He’d been in a motor cycle accident a few years before and had been in bed in a semi conscious state ever since. Sometimes he could talk to his mum, but others he was more or less a vegetable. He died from complications of his injuries at a relatively early age in his mid 20s. And it was my job to talk to his mum and write his life story. To make matters worse he used to work for us as a printer and so we owed him a good write up.

I was dreading talking to his mother, but the day went far better than I expected. I thought she’s hate me for intruding into her grief, but she welcomed me, asked me in and made me a cup of tea. She took sympathy on me when I said it was my first week and she was almost my first story. She was the first death story I’d ever covered. She was so kind to me and wished me luck working for the company.  She even donated a kettle to me when I told her I’d just moved into my first flat and was having to make tea and coffee by boiling water in a pan.  I kept that kettle for years.  It was a proper old fashioned one that worked on the gas hob. And it had a whistle.

It was so homely and felt such a lovely, welcoming act to start my working life on. I’d been so worried about upsetting that woman, but she turned out to be one of the kindest, most forgiving people I met in my whole career. She deserved better than to lose her son that way.

Not NaNo14 November 12

The first office I worked in at Lincoln was what I call a proper old fashioned newsroom. It was small, and dark. There were no windows and we spent all day in artificial light, unless we had to go out on a story. That was when journalists still went out on stories and didn’t spend all day at a computer screen emailing, phoning and rewriting press releases.  There were six reporters, or thereabouts. I’ve been trying to picture the exact layout of the office to determine how many of us there were.

We all sat round a large table that was divided into ‘personal space’ by means of very low battens fixed to the surface.  They weren’t high enough to stop anything drifting over from your neighbour’s space and there were frequent squabbles over people who didn’t keep control of their paperwork.
Everything was on paper back then, especially the stories we wrote, so there was a great deal of scruffiness going on. Life was quite hectic on the days running up to the deadline. The Chronicle – or The Chron as everyone called it – was a weekly paper, so it went to press every seven days. For a couple of days after that we were reasonably quiet, but the pace picked up as the week went along and the day before deadline was busy. Far too busy to let anyone tidy up.

We sat around the table, two down each side and one at each end, with a typewriter in front of us and surrounded by bits of paper. There were phones on the desk, of course, so we could contact the outside world if we needed to, and there were low-slung lights hanging from the ceiling, with cone shaped shades so they cast all their light downwards towards our work area.

If you needed space to work by hand, such as when you made a phone call and were taking shorthand notes of the conversation, you tipped your computer up onto its back and pushed it towards the centre of the table to make room. Consequently the space between the typewriters, at the centre of the literal ‘newsdesk’ became stuffed with crumpled sheets of paper from a huge variety of sources.

Once in a while we would have a sort out and throw some of it away, but mostly it was a tip. I can’t imagine how anyone would get away with it these days because we all smoked back then. It was common for a work place to be shrouded in a thick fug of smoke. No going outside for a ciggie back then. Ashtrays overflowed into the paper pile at the centre and it’s a miracle that no-one went up in flames.  In fact the only time I ever saw an actual fire was when somebody decided to empty an ashtray into a waste paper basket.  It was a metal one, and some quick-thinking person threw the remains of a cold cup of tea over it and doused the conflagration.

There was another pretty serious hazard in the old days too. Everyone had a lethal piece of kit on their part of the desk called a ‘spike’, because that’s precisely what it was. It consisted of a long, thick wire, sharpened at one end and set into something heavy at the other end. The sophisticated ones could be unscrewed from their base so that you could reach the blunt end easily but others were just set into something heavy, like a lump of lead. The purpose of this ridiculous item was to serve as a filing system. If you had a sheet of paper such as a press release that had important details on it, like how to contact someone, or figures that you’d used in a story, you would slam the paper down onto the spike so it could be stored on your desk.

Sensible people bent the top of their spike over so they had to ease filed papers onto it gently, rather than risk putting the wire through their hands. It also meant that if anyone tripped over something and landed on the desk (not as unlikely as it sounds – we were quite unruly people!) they didn’t end up with a sharp needle through the chest! Everyone’s spike was personal. You wouldn’t dream of filing something you’d used on someone else’s spike, and you wouldn’t dream of looking through the old papers on anyone else’s spike without their permission.  I used to fold papers up before I spiked them and put them on carefully so they didn’t take up much space. Others just spiked them flat, so the surface area of desk they took up was about A4 by A4. To make matters worse we still had a few people using foolscap back then for officialdom, so an occasional piece stuck out even further.

But I folded mine and left them neatly arranged parallel with each other. It meant  that I could find information easily and didn’t have to take anything off the spike to get at what I wanted to know. Letter heads would have addresses and phone numbers and even logos neatly in the  top right corner, so I could sift quickly through the folded bits to get to what I needed.  Of course once in a while you had to get at the rest of the information on the page – especially if it was a letter or a press release. That was when the scruffies had the advantage because they could ease the upper items away from the paper and read across, ignoring the wire through the middle. With my scheme I had to take the paper off the spike and unfold it.

That was where the unscrewable base came in handy, because you took off the base and slid all the papers down the  wire and off the bottom until you got to the piece you needed. (Or you slid them upwards if it was a more recent paper.) But at least with a removable base you had a choice.  If you were really in a hurry you’d just rip the thing away, remembering to ‘keep the place’ by creating a gap where the old thing was. And if you were sensible you put it back when you were done, because you never knew when you’d need that information again!

When you wrote a story back then it was put onto small pieces of paper. They were about two thirds the size of modern A5 and they were used landscape, not portrait. That was to make it easy to fit onto the printer’s compositor machines.  The ‘comps’ as we called them, had clips on their machines to fix the paper at eye level and copy type into the mechanism.  Their keyboards were a mystical arrangement based on the old drawers of loose type from centuries ago when type was first invented. The commonest letters “ETOIN SHRDLU” were closest to the bottom of the keyboard, just as they were in a drawer of type, and the less common ones like Q, X and Z were around the edges.

A modern ‘Qwerty’ keyboard uses a similar system, except the arrangement includes a mechanical dodge to prevent the typewriter from jamming. The keys are arranged so that the commonest are close to the centre, but they are also set up so that the mechanical arms were less likely to get in each other’s way.  So S and H, for example, are on opposite sides of the keyboard so you use opposite hands and they have time to return to their proper places whenever you type ‘sh’, which happens more than you’d think.  None of this is relevant in a modern computer keyboard, but the existing qwerty layout is a throw back to mechanical typewriter days.

So, when you wrote a news story it was set out in a special way to help everyone who handled it after you. If you look at a newspaper you might find that the first word in a story is in all capital letters. If it’s a main story on the page you might also find that the first one or two paragraphs are in a larger type face.  (Font size. That’s another hangover from the old days. A ‘font’ was what they called the complete set of letters in the drawer of type. It’s also why they call it upper and lower case. Because the capital letters, which weren’t used as often, were placed above the little letters. Imagine a type setter having to reach out for each individual letter to set out a line. The ones that were most used were near the front. The lesser used capitals were further up. To save on the arm movement.  This bracket should really have been a footnote because it’s a lot longer than I planned!)

In order for the typesetter to know which font size to use he had to have instructions written on the bit of paper with the text on. It was the sub-editor’s job to plan pages and work out the layout. An upper page or lead story was probably in a larger font than lower down the page. Often the first two paragraphs were in a different, larger size than the rest of the story.  The sub would write on the paper an instruction that said something like “first par 14 point first word all caps” Par 2 12 point”.
The journalist would never put more than two paragraphs on the first piece of paper so the sub had room to write and the comp had clear instructions.  Paragraph three and beyond went on to another piece of paper.

There were two other things that needed to be traceable along the line through the print system. One was who wrote the story, the second was which paragraphs went together, in which order. Your name (in full so that they knew how to spell it if you got a byline!) went  in the top left hand corner. In the top right hand corner you put a single word that summed up what the story was about.  For example, if I was doing it with what I’m currently writing I might use Lincoln.  So, the first sheet was labelled Lincoln 1, the second sheet was Lincoln 2 and so on.  You had to choose a word that wasn’t being used elsewhere, so a four page pull out about the city of Lincoln would get very confusing if everyone used that. So I might use layout, or newsroom, or something like that. If it was desperate I could use Lincoln newsroom, but two word catchlines were frowned upon.

The phrase was set with the text by the compositor and continued the journey until the pages were laid out close to the end of the process. In theory the setter removed them all once the type was in place, but sometimes they were missed. And that’s when you realised why they drummed into you from the very beginning not to use anyting comical, offensive or potentially defamatory. Because you could be sure it would be the one time it got left in and was seen by the thousands of readers.