THIS is a long service silver tea service that The Northern Echo gave to printer George Hayman in 1918, when he had completed 25 years with the company.

The Northern Echo:

Mr Hayman lived with his family in Bells Place in Darlington, which is now the car park between High Row and Skinnergate, and began working with the Echo in Priestgate in 1892.

The Northern Echo: The Northern Echo:

“He died in 1950 when I was about 11 or 12, and I think he was a typesetter,” says his grandson, John Hayman, who treasures the memento.

Mr Hayman can be seen on a photo of an 1890s printers’ waygooze setting out from Priestgate to Scarborough.

The Northern Echo:

A wayzgoose was an annual printers’ day-out, paid for by the boss, which was usually held around St Bartholomew’s Day (August 24). This was traditionally the day that printers noticed the evening was drawing in before the end of their shift and so, for the first time that autumn, they had to light a candle. To mark the start of candlelit working, the printers’ boss took them on an all expenses paid daytrip known as a “wayzgoose”.

No one can satisfactorily explain this weird word. Some sources suggest that a roast goose was the highlight of the day-out; other sources say that a “wase” was a 14th Century word meaning “a bundle of straw that could be used as a torch”.

In the caption that goes with the wayzgoose photo, Mr Hayman is called a “stereo”.

So, the typesetter placed all the letters – known as type – in a case – known as a chase – to build up a page (which was known as a forme). The forme was then placed on the press, covered in ink and pressed onto a piece of paper.

But this meant all of the printers’ expensive metal type hanging around in a forme waiting for all the other pages to be created.

It was therefore more convenient to create an identical copy of the forme – a stereotype – so that the type could be used to create another page.

A papier-mache or plaster cast of the forme was taken – it was known as a flong – and it was used as a mould from which a hot metal plate was made to go on the press. This plate was identical to the forme, and so the word stereotype, thanks to printers like Mr Hayman, entered the English language.