10 Charmian Hearne describes how Wiplash was put together

Transcript:

When I was on the main committee, the first thing I became involved with was Wiplash.  And that was a monthly newsletter.  There was Liz somebody or other, somebody called Julie Miresh and myself.  We used to go round to each other’s houses.  And we’d always have supper.  It was a nice evening.

And people would send in articles, type-written articles and we would literally stick them on pieces of paper and then we’d type up some little thing and stick that.  It was Pritt sticks, glue and typewriters.

And we’d have a round-up of events.  We’d have book reviews.  We’d have, you know, a list of meetings and things and that was it.  I mean it was terribly home-made.  I mean it was laughable, really.

We’d flick through magazines to find nice little pictures and cut things out and stick it on.  It was like a child’s newsletter.  [Laughs]  It was!  It was so unprofessional.  But it had all the information you needed, though.

People would write stuff and it would have, you know, we’d have a review of Feminist Book Fortnight, or something like that.  And people would write a report on the meetings that had been; and we’d have a list of forthcoming meetings.

And we would stick it all together in page one, page two, page two  and then it was sent off, sent off to some long suffering fellow at Longman’s.  [Laughs]  And Paula Kahn…  It was always paid, the printing and postage was paid for by Longman’s  because Paula Kahn was very supportive of it.  So what she said, that Longman’s would pay for this, which they did.  I suppose it was just photocopied, basically, just photocopied, stapled and then bunged into envelopes and sent off.  People were glad to get it.  [Laughs] Very unprofessional in the way it looked, but actually it didn’t matter.