PAPERmaking! FROM THE PUBLISHERS OF PAPER TECHNOLOGY Volume 6, Number 2, 2020
punctuated between 1965 and 1970 and then for occasional issues in the early 1970s with photographic images. Then, in 1975 it changed name to Paper Technology & Industry (for reasons explained later in this article), and from the June/July edition of 1976 there was a design change with colour images on the front surrounded by a strong orange border that has been its signature colour ever since. Indeed, since that date, it only changed colour for a couple of issues: May/June 1977 when it was silver to mark the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, and May/June 1978 when it was coloured green in an edition majoring upon waste paper and environmental issues.
Figure 6:
Montage of magazine covers from 1960s to 1990s.
Industry Past and Present Early in the period under discussion, in 1963, Prime Minister Harold Wilson gave his “white heat of technology” speech, and hopes were high that science and engineering, which had been a strong focus since the formation of the Technical Section in 1920, 39 would become ever more important, displacing the old ‘art of papermaking’ . Hot topics in the magazine at this time were computers and automation, both then in their infancy but ready to assume massive importance in the years to come; metrification (articles started to appear in the early sixties, almost a decade before the change would take place nationally); recycling and deinking; paper-machine design and technology; and testing. Indeed, seen in retrospect this was the last golden period for building new mills, which included: Thames Board Workington (1966 – now Iggesund); Wiggins Teape Fort William (1966); Bowater-Scott Corporation Barrow (1968 – now Kimberly Clark); Kimberly Clark Prudhoe (1971); UPM Shotton (1983); UPM Caledonian (1989), and Leicester Paper Company (1998 – now Sofidel). In addition, the number of new machines installed in pre-existing mills, and machine rebuilds, was legion. But as one manufacturer of environmental chambers ruefully once remarked to me : “every silver lining h as a cloud.” New mills were built, and new machines installed, but old mills were closing at a more rapid rate. We started the period will well over 200 manufacturing sites; in the forty years covered by this article, we lost over half (Figure 7). The ‘white heat’ of the 1960s gave way to the ‘lame ducks’ of the 1970s, which Edward Heath tried to keep afloat, before Margaret Thatcher allowed market forces free reign during the 1980s, and UK manufacturing industry reacted accordingly by closing in large swathes. 40 In particular it was the old, small,
Article 16 – PITA History Parts 1-3
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