Ink in their blood

Tovil’s printing Passmores

Paul Tritton

TOVIL and the neighbouring lower half mile of the Loose Valley are now predominantly residential and rural but until as recently as the mid-1990s this was one of Maidstone's busiest industrial areas.

The last factory to survive from the papermaking empire founded in Tovil in 1894 by Albert E. Reed closed in 1996. Over the next few years the site was redeveloped but street names like Bridge Mill Way on the new housing estates remind us that 'Reed's' sprawled all the way from Farleigh Hill to the Medway.

Tovil's other major industry was printing, with Alabaster Passmore & Sons Ltd, nationally renowned fine colour printers, occupying 4.5 acres of land between the south side of Farleigh Hill and the face of a disused ragstone quarry.

The redevelopment of the AP&S site completes the de-industrialisation of Tovil. Passmore Way, the name given in 2005 to the road into the residential estate that stands there now, reminds us of the site's former owners, but nothing remains to evoke its former use. For a time the estate was called The Printing Works but that name now seems to have been dropped.

The Alabaster Passmore story began in 1844 when Joseph Passmore set up his own business in Southwark, after completing a nine-year apprenticeship in the printing trade. Joseph was a close friend of Dr Charles Spurgeon, a charismatic pastor at New Park Street Baptist Chapel, and in 1855 Joseph began printing and publishing Spurgeon's sermons in a weekly publication called The New Park Street Pulpit.

'Penny sermons' were in great demand during the Victorian religious revival and Spurgeon's became so popular that Joseph had to ask a friend, James Alabaster, to help him run his publishing department. Alabaster the publisher and Passmore the printer linked their names into what became a formidable partnership.

When Joseph died in 1895, having outlived Spurgeon by three years, his sons Joseph jnr, James and Alfred, and Alabaster, carried on the business. And what a business it was! The firm sold one hundred million penny sermons during Spurgeon's lifetime and 400,000 copies of one of his books alone, John Ploughman's Talk. In 1899, 20,000 of Spurgeon's books and sermons were sold every week. One religious society ordered one million volumes of his sermons; another 500,000 volumes were exported to the USA.

Fortunately, the Passmore brothers did not let this phenomenal success and resultant prosperity distract them from other opportunities. They diversified into, among other things, printing high quality mail order fashion catalogues for Liberty & Co. and other posh shops.

They rapidly outgrew their original works and over a period of nearly 50 years moved time and again to ever larger premises. By the turn of the century their factory, offices and showrooms occupied an entire eight-storey building in Whitecross Street, in the City of London. When they outgrew these premises they decided to open a printing works 'in the country', where rents and transport costs would be cheaper. The move became possible in 1907 when Albert E. Reed, a friend of Alfred Passmore, sold him a plot of land alongside his paper mill at Tovil for £300.

Reed probably hoped the Passmores would buy paper from him for their mail order catalogues and other 'long run' publications, but that was not to be. The catalogues contained hundreds of pages, and hundreds of thousands of copies of every edition were printed. Each copy off the press had to weigh exactly the same as the previous one, otherwise they would all have to be weighed individually to ensure they carried the correct postage. However, the weight of Reed's printing paper varied from batch to batch, so supplies had to be bought from other manufacturers. A 'coals to Newcastle' situation developed, in which paper was transported from faraway mills to a printing works opposite a paper mill!

In 1910 the publishing division was sold and from then on the firm concentrated solely on contract printing, using letterpress and stone litho machines. In 1911 it became a limited private company. Its directors were James and Alfred Passmore; James's sons Wilfred and Arthur; and Fredrick Elstone and Harry Algar. Alabaster was a shareholder but not a director.

The First World War brought hard times. Annual profits slumped by £10,000; Arthur Passmore was killed in action while serving in the Army; hopes of obtaining Government printing contracts were not realized; and a Russian customer failed to pay for a considerable amount of work. After the war prospects improved, Alfred Passmore's son, Brian, joined the business, and Alabaster sold his shares in the company - though his splendid surname was retained in its title.

Some production of litho and letterpress publications continued in London until the early 1920s, when the Whitecross Street property was sold and the head office moved to Cannon Street. Then, litho printing was discontinued and all letterpress work was transferred to Tovil, where the original single-storey premises had grown to 28,000 square feet. Several more extensions were built during the next 60 years. Always self-sufficient, the firm had Monotype and Linotype typesetting machines, huge presses in vast machine rooms, bindery departments, and warehouses.

Tovil was usually working flat-out, producing millions of mail order catalogues for Liberty's, Selfridges, Dickens and Jones, the 'Army and Navy', Swan and Edgar, D.H. Evans and Kays. Cigarette cards, calendars, chocolate box lids … these and many other items rolled incessantly off the Passmore presses.

In about 1936 the firm embarked on an unusual venture with the artist and writer Donald Maxwell, who lived at East Farleigh. Together they published Maxwell's series of County Prints, comprising 54 tinted pen and ink sketches. These became very popular and are now highly collectable. The Southern Railway became a good customer and displayed the prints in its carriages and under the glass tabletops on its Isle of Wight ferries.

Another joint venture was Maxwell's The New Domesday of Kent, a pictorial and topographical survey of the county, with a separate sheet for each village or town. Maxwell also wanted to publish a set of William Turner sketches on blue grey hand-made paper matching that used by Turner himself. After much trial and error, Maxwell and AP&S developed a suitable paper, perhaps with the assistance of Hayle Mill, hand-made paper specialists. However, Maxwell died before this project and The New Domesday of Kent could be completed.

AP&S weathered the Depression despite a drop in profits and when the Second World War broke out had nearly 400 employees. With Wilfred's sons, Roy, and Dennis, now on board, three generations of the family were working for the firm, but Dennis and Brian were called up in September 1939. Within a year the war had caused such a reduction in orders that Alfred and Wilfred, the joint managing directors, decided not to draw their salaries. Emergency Government contracts, transferred from London printers whose premises had been bombed, saved the day. In 1942 the historic Beveridge Report was printed in Tovil.

After the war the works and the company went through many changes. Wilfred Passmore died, Alfred retired, Roy and Dennis became joint managing directors and Brian was elected chairman. The mail order catalogue trade declined but any slack was soon taken up by contracts won from advertising agencies and house journal publishers.

In the 1950s the factory was extended, to cover 42,000 square feet; houses were bought for key workers; and a sports field was opened in Aylesford. When most of the workforce reluctantly joined a national strike for a shorter working week and higher wages, the directors and their wives, together with the apprentices, worked together on the shop floor to fulfil urgent orders.

New processes were quickly adopted, an example being offset litho. By the early 1960s this was proving to be a faster and cheaper way of producing high quality colour work, so an extension for litho presses and associated photographic and platemaking equipment was built. In 1972 the company was running six sheet-fed offset litho presses for catalogues, leaflets and brochures and had installed the first of many web offset machines. Between 1970 and 1980 nearly every machine in the works was replaced.

House journal printing led to contracts with publishers of more than 40 trade, leisure and professional magazines, including What Car?, Anglers' Mail, Practical Caravan, The Grocer and The Lancet.

Dennis Passmore died in 1970 and was succeeded as managing director by Brian's son, Michael. He and Roy, who had been chairman since 1966, were the fourth generation of the 'printing Passmores'. The fifth, and last, generation consisted of Michael's sons Stephen and Christopher; Roy's son, Nigel; and Dennis's sons, Tony and Colin.

More jobs were created at Tovil in 1973, when most head office functions - estimating, paper-buying, invoicing and accounts - were transferred from London. The new office block needed for these departments just about filled the Tovil site, leaving no room to expand production. This problem was solved in 1982 by taking-over Ambassador Press, a company with two web offset presses in Radlett. AP&S and Ambassador then traded as autonomous but wholly owned subsidiaries of a new holding company, The Passmore Print Group, with Michael Passmore as chairman.

Ironically, in 1983, nearly 80 years after AP&S bought their site from Albert E. Reed, they were able to buy another plot from Reed's, close to the mills' two chimneys.

Michael Passmore retired in 1989, after 40 years with the company, during which he had been largely responsible for introducing sheet-fed offset and web offset litho printing processes. He was succeeded by Tony Passmore.

In 1993, diversification plans, together with the purchase of additional capacity, overstretched AP&S’s resources and the company went into receivership. Its assets were sold to Duncan Web Offset, who soon afterwards moved to Park Wood. The site was then sold for residential development.

That, though, is not quite the end of the story of the printing Passmores. At his home two miles from Tovil, Michael runs one of the last working Monotype printing processes in the country. This consists of a Monotype keyboard, hot-metal caster and supercaster, and letterpresses, on which he produces items for friends and family.

	AP&S’s Tovil works in the 1960s, showing the extension built for the sheet feed litho printing shop


The site in 2006. Passmore Way, the road into the development, is on half way up the hill

James Alabaster		Joseph Passmore
		Apprenticeship indenture of Frank Jury, machine minder, of Milton Street, Maidstone, 1929
An advertisement published soon after the company opened its ‘country works’ at Tovil

Michael Passmore at home near Maidstone in 2006, with his Monotype caster		The company's first Monotype caster, installed at Tovil c. 1910