At the nick I’d go through the crime books with the PCs who manned the front desk.

In those days, Freddie Wilde (known, inevitably, as Oscar), Neville Durrant and the eccentric bee-keeper Tom Davis alternated.

On the way back to the office, I popped in to the local vehicle recovery firm, National Rescue, which was then based beside Kingston’s Cambridge Estate.

I built up a good relationship with Geoff and Andy Lambert, who ran the firm. We supplied them with rolls of film, and they took pictures of the often spectacular accidents which they were called to – day and night – on the A3.

Naturally, a National Rescue truck, bearing the company’s telephone number, was always in a prominent position!

It explains why so many editions of the Comet in the late-1970s and early-1980s feature photos of dramatic car smashes.

I always made a point of travelling to and from the office on the top deck of the bus. The gossip was always better, and you could peer over fences to get glimpses of things that might turn into future news stories.

Back in 1975, the Surrey Comet editorial department was huge – and maintained at full strength thanks to beady-eyed monitoring from the union chapel.

In addition to the managing editor and editor, there were two full-time photographers, five sub-editors, a news editor and deputy, a chief reporter and deputy, a features editor, a showpage editor, a dozen news reporters and a dogsbody called Bill Jeffries, a silver-haired retired bus inspector who made the tea, double-checked the black and white photographs which were sent off each day to be made into metal plates, and generally made a nuisance of himself.

The luxury of a lot of people meant there was always cover for holidays, time for wise old owls such as chief reporter Mike Hains to pass on their tips and hints, and even time for regular copy clinics, when junior reporters would be taken to a side office and have blacks (carbon copies) of their typed articles dissected by more senior writers.
Traffic still raced along Clarence Street in those pre-pedestrianised days, except on Monday mornings when everything briefly ground to a halt as the Reeds juggernaut delivered the massive rolls of paper for the Comet’s printing presses, housed on the site of Boots’ current shop.

The editorial department was up on the first floor. A staircase climbed from the back of the front shop to a half landing, where a smart left turn and three downward steps led to a half-glazed swing door marked EDITORIAL – STAFF ONLY.

Metal and wooden desks were grouped in clumps according to geographical area, and the whole room was parquet-floored.

The only electronic items in the room were the primitive Commodore calculators kept in reporters’ top drawers to work out the all-important weekly expenses, or “exes” as they were always called.

Expense sheets were filed in a tray wittily marked “Fiction department” on the news editor’s desk.

All work was done on clunky manual typewriters, with stories written on sheets of A5 - one par (paragraph) per sheet.

The catchline (a word such as “attack” or “gnome” or “flowers” to identify the story and ensure all sheets remained together) was typed in the top right-hand corner, the reporter’s initials and the designated area added to the top of the first sheet, and “mf” (more follows) bashed out, bottom right. The final sheet concluded with “ends”.

Held together with a paperclip (distributed weekly by Bill Jeffries into each reporter’s individual container), the story was placed in wire baskets in front of the news editor. Later a sturdier wooden trough was used.

Copy was sorted into compartments, marked Royal (for Kingston borough), Thames (for Teddington, Twickenham and Hampton), Surrey (the Elmbridge area), Pics (for stories which had to be married up with photographs) and Features.

In many ways it was the perfect system. The old wooden copy trough never crashed or froze, never became corrupted and never required the visit of a “techie”.

At a glance the news editor could see if copy was light in one area, and bark suitable words of encouragement to the relevant reporters.
Smoking wasn’t merely tolerated, it was compulsory. All a reporter needed 30 years ago was a notebook, pen, typewriter, plentiful supply of paper and paperclips, and an ashtray.

An alarming fug of Embassy and No6 hovered in the newsroom at about waist-height.

Occasionally a window was propped open, but it was invariably closed to keep out the shouts and songs from the derelicts who congregated in the adjoining Gardens for the Blind, or Gardens for the Blind Drunk as they were usually known.

Spellchecks were achieved by leafing through books called dictionaries, which listed words in alphabetical order. Ah, happy days. Those well-thumbed volumes never once tried to insist that “specialise” is spelt “specialize”, or that travelling only has one “l”.

From the newsdesk, copy was handed across to the subs’ desk, right alongside. Chief sub John Vivian, a roly-poly Welshman with the unnerving habit of sitting in the newsroom wearing just trousers and a string vest on warm days, distributed the copy to the sub-editors ranged around him.

They drew up the pages using pencils and ems rules – strange, long rulers which helped calculate precise measurements.

Photographs (black and white only) were sized by holding them up to the light and marking the required portion on the back.

You always knew when JV – as everyone called him – was happy because he would suddenly burst into a loud and lusty rendition of a bawdy rugby song, startling anyone unfamiliar with the habit.
The subbed copy was carried by Bill Jeffries into “the works”, where the linotype operators would set the words into lines of metal, before the compositors made up the pages on the stone – the sturdy reinforced tables.

Proofs of each story, called galley pulls, were taken back to the newsroom for the subs, editor and news editor to check, and in those far-off days there was also a room full of readers, who would solemnly go through everything to check for errors. What a luxury that sounds today.

The photographers (in my early days, Jeff Edwards and John McDonnell) worked in a hot, cramped attic room, reached by a rickety wooden staircase.

They always exuded a distinctive smell, part developer, part whisky.
I used to enjoy popping into the works, with all its noise, banter and practical joking. Experienced compositors (comps) possessed the curious ability to be able to read copy on the metal versions of each page, despite it being upside-down and backwards. I was always amazed to see them looking at the gobbledegook and taking it all in.

The presses would roll in Church Street on Friday evenings, by which time the editorial staff had reconvened in the Griffin to put the world to rights.

As the office junior in the mid- 1970s, I was dispatched at 9pm to cross the Market Place and ask one of the printers for a couple of early copies.

“CAN I HAVE A COUPLE OF COPIES?” I'd bellow over the shattering sound of the giant Webb printing presses, but the infernal din always won and I had to resort to the printers’ own communication system of mouthing, pointing and gesticulating.

Then I’d take the papers back to the pub for the post mortem on that week’s issue. I learnt more at those beery sessions than I ever did at journalist college.

Life on the paper was also regularly punctuated by the printers’ “banging out” ceremonies where, to mark the end of every seven-year apprenticeship, the newly qualified printers were dressed in outlandish clothing, daubed in foul-smelling mixtures, invariably containing old fish heads from the market stalls, and led through the building while everyone banged whatever lumps of wood or metal were to hand.

I remember feeling very sorry for the young men who went through the whole “hot metal” apprenticeships at the time when all the old crafts and skills were suddenly swept away by the computer revolution.

Comparing life on local newspapers today with how it was back in the 1970s involves taking a deep breath, putting on a Walter Matthau-style hangdog expression and gently shaking the head. Sometimes it seems that the only thing the eras have in common is that we wore flares then too.

But despite the contractions in staff numbers, the greatly reduced average age in most offices and the fact that reporters so rarely leave their perches in front of the flickering screens, it’s still all about keeping the community informed, entertained. . . and intact.