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A REPUTATION FOR EXCELLENCE
A History of the Aberdeen and Northern Counties Printing
Industry
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Stornoway
Youngest among the newspapers included in this booklet is The Stornoway
Gazette, founded in 1917 by William Grant. An Inverness man, he
arrived in Stornoway as a reporter for The Highland News. During
his early working life he was first employed as a printer’s
devil before entering an architect’s office where he acquired
a knowledge of shorthand, typing and bookkeeping. Those skills enabled
him to obtain a post as The Highland News representative in Stornoway.
William Grant quickly settled into the life of the island and for
many years combined the duties of reporter with part-time work at
the Nicolson Institute as well as with the roles of official short-hand
writer to the Sheriff Court, local observer for the Meteorological
Office, and for a period Burgh Treasurer.
Despite the multiplicity of jobs, he was unable to acquire sufficient
capital to a start a Lewis newspaper, which was one of his ambitions.
However, the opportunity to found The Stornoway Gazette came when
his brother Duncan, who had been employed as a printer in Nuneaton,
returned to the Highlands and went into partnership with Norman
Macrae, the editor of The North Star in Dingwall. This family link
with a mainland news-paper made possible a local paper for Lewis,
and William Grant decided to sever his connection of nearly a quarter
of a century with The Highland News and launch his own paper. In
the first week of 1917 The Stornoway Gazette appeared.
For the next thirty years or more the Gazette was printed in Dingwall
or Inverness by The North Star, The Highland News, The Inverness
Courier and the defunct Inverness Citizen.
When William Grant died in 1932 at the early age of fifty-nine,
his widow became proprietor and his younger son editor. James Shaw
Grant had just graduated at Glasgow University when he was recalled
to Stornoway. He continued to edit the newspaper until his appointment
as Chairman of the Crofters Commission in 1963. The editorship of
father and son covered more than 46 years of the paper’s history.
Shortly before the outbreak of war in 1939 plans were made to print
the Gazette in Stornoway and some machinery was purchased for that
purpose. However, the national emergency caused those plans to be
deferred and it was not until 1948 that the news-paper was printed
and published in Stornoway.
The capital required to invest in new plant and machinery was not
readily available and this is evident from a comment by James Grant
that ‘my early printing office was a museum of industrial archaeology’.
One of the two Linotype machines installed was over seventy years
old and the news-paper was printed on a flat bed press and folder
which required each copy to be fed in by hand three times.
The installation of this first press was not without moments of
crisis. First of all it had to be dismantled in Dingwall, shipped
to Stornoway, and then re-erected and running in time for the next
weekly issue. The only access to the ex-naval canteen which served
as a printing office was through a narrow close, so the printing
press had to be reduced practically to nuts and bolts to get it
in. That episode was not the end of the story as the press had to
be dismantled again when the Gazette moved to its present headquarters.
The Gazette is now produced on a semi-rotary press from a continuous
web of paper, in marked contrast to the early period when sheets
were fed by hand. Additional modern plant has been installed to
cater for the needs of local industry.
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Volume 3 published 1996
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