ABSTRACT
In the autumn and winter of 1973/4, as the coal miners geared up to take on UK Prime Minister Edward Heath, an alternative to the pro-Conservative Party Yorkshire Evening Post was being prepared in Leeds. According to Mat, one of those centrally involved: ‘We didn’t have a media outlet to publicise the things we were involved in or to help people involved in community action or industrial action to make links. None of what we were involved in got coverage from the established press, or else it got hostile coverage.’ At the time, Mat was also involved in a claimants’ union in Leeds. Along with a
group of anarchists and libertarian socialists, mostly ex-students, he helped create that outlet by founding Leeds Other Paper – or LOP. A discussion paper for a meeting on 10 September 1973, which decided to go ahead with an alternative newspaper, noted: ‘The precise content is unimportant … It can be more community based one week, more strike based the second, heralding the revolution the third … ’ There was plenty of talk. But there was also action. Some of those involved had helped sell copies of a short-lived predecessor, The
Other Paper, which had appeared fortnightly from October 1969 to April 1970. Produced by a separate group from those who went on to produce LOP, The Other Paper relied on commercial printers, which was expensive and placed limits on what could be printed. The new paper was to have its own means of production, and the necessary £150 was raised by jumble sales and a levy of supporters who contributed 6p a week. Suggested titles included Leeds Mercury, Leeds Aire and Soot, before Leeds Other Paper was agreed upon just before publication of the launch issue in January 1974 (see Appendix 1). The old printing press they’d bought was installed initially in a friend-of-a-friend’s
leaky garage in the Bramley area of the city, where volunteers sometimes had to negotiate several inches of water while getting the paper out. The first issue was produced on portable typewriters in three different houses, and those bits that hadn’t
dropped off or blown away were transferred to a fourth house where there was a makeshift lightbox to convert the copy into a metal plate ready for printing. By 2am it was beneath a big, solid old television set with someone standing on top of the TV to provide the extra weight needed to make the copy flat.
