Pegasus Print and Display,
Standard Trading Estate,
Lewis Rd,
Mitcham
My introduction to the print industry came through my mum, she used to work in the finishing department of Pegasus. They used to screen print and make point of sale products, stickers and advertising. When we were young, mum used to bring homework, normally collating and packing the various stickers and printed materials, she made it fun and we all got paid for our endeavours.
One time they were short of someone in the print shop, and I ended up getting a job there, mainly after school, and when I wasn't working at the butchers.
I used to do 3-4 hours every day after school and sometimes more, the money was decent, especially for a 14 year old. The work I had to do was varied, mainly checking the prints for spoils as they came out of the drier, racking for a printer working on a handbench, and cleaning off the screens when they were done with. Using all kinds of solvents for removing the ink, bleach to dissolve the stencils from the screens, finally blasting the screens with a jetwash, what a filthy dirty, smelly and wet job that was, I used to stink of ink when I came home, but I loved the work and the money of course.
People at Pegasus
Pegasus was owned by John Ward and Bill Haddon. There were a couple of people in the office, Bob Everest, who we called "Superman", a girl called Lorraine and a salesman called Cliff Brewer who used to go out on the road.They also employed a photographer called Rod Gould who used to prepare the positives that the stencils could then be made from.
Print Shop
Similar print factory to Pegasus
The print department was run by two Paul`s, Bates and Blythman, they were in charge of up to10 printers, print checkers and me. They kept the factory turning over and were quite involved in the lunchtime drinking culture phenomenon too.
Bates's nephew Gary was one of the printers, and owned a Kawasaki S1C triple which was pretty cool to me. The other printers there were Steve Thompson, who was the first person I ever saw with "fuck" tattooed on the inside of his lip. Peter Benton who lived down Ashtree Avenue, Peter Snadden and John Eden. They were all pretty young really, and there was a lot of fucking about going on, but the work got done and we all got paid.
And times when the work was done, we played hard, Coolie truck racing through the factory, running the forklift out and looking over the park, cutting up sheets of card into little squares and having battles all over the factory, like kung fu ninja star battles, and many more..
Finishing department
This was run by an old fella called John Sage, who had half a dozen women working for him. I can't remember their names but I know that there were two Mollies, my mum being one, Betty and one they called fag ash Lil. The finishing department used to collate, assemble and pack all the print jobs when they came back from the cutters.
Machinery
I'm only talking about printshop really, we had a couple of hand benches, with maybe about half a dozen racks for these hand benches. Pegasus also used to run a couple of Svecia semi automatic print machines and dryers. These were really the bread-and-butter machines of the whole operation and churn out thousands and thousands of prints, and we did. There was an area with racking for all the ink and where they used to colour match mix ink for various jobs.
Jobs
We did some really big jobs for companies like American express, printing window stickers, door stickers and point of sale printing. Everyone that walked into a shop or restaurant that took American Express, walked past one of our stickers. We used to do a lot of work for post office telecom as it was called then and printing things like stickers for their vans and we also printed Busby stickers.