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1890       Geo W. Jones Ltd. established in London.  
Karl Klic approaches Storey Brothers of Lancaster, offering his technical knowledge, methods, and services in the field of recess printing.
1895 Rembrandt Intaglio Printing Co. (Rembrandt) is established in Lancaster by Storey Brothers on the advice of Karl Klic. Klic and Samuel Fawcett provide the new firm’s technical direction.
1898 Anglo Engraving is founded in London by Edward Hunter and Archie Hughes – two young men just out of their apprenticeships.
1900 Rembrandt begins producing the series of Burlington Art Miniatures for The Fine Arts Publishing Co Ltd. of London. The work is typical of what Rembrandt was becoming known for at the turn of the century. The three examples shown here are reproductions of paintings by, respectively, Van Dyck (‘Child with Cap’ – the infant Duke of York), Del Sarto (‘The Youthful St John’), and Le Brun (‘Madame le Brun at her Easel’ – a portrait of the artist).

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1901 Geo W. Jones Ltd. prints the first book to use three-colour halftones. The book was illustrated by artist Mortimer Menpes, who now joins Jones’s business.
1905Klic succeeds in producing three-colour gravure.
1906 Rembrandt begins marketing colour gravure prints. Employment at Rembrandt exceeds 80.
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In this Rembrandt staff photo, Klic is seated in the front row with an arm over Samuel Fawcett’s shoulder. The young Ernie Hampton (see People and Reminiscences pages) sits at Karl Klic’s feet.
Geo W. Jones constructs a new printing factory in Watford on the Whippendell Road at a cost of £14,000. He employs 160 people.

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1908 Jones leaves his company. Menpes takes over and names the company Menpes Printing and Engraving.
1910 Mezzogravure Co. Ltd. of Barnes (London) is acquired by Anglo Engraving Co., and experiments in rotary gravure printing methods are secretly started there.

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The first rotary gravure machine, a 15 in. calico printing machine made by John Wood of Ramsbottom, Lancs, was set up at Barnes by Edward Hunter in 1910. (Photo supplied by Digby Wakeman)
1911 The name ‘Sun Engraving Co.’ becomes available and Hunter and Hughes create a new company at Milford House, Milford Lane, London, using that name.
1912 Menpes’ caretaker and ‘general factotum,’ Thomas Farrell, and his family (see A Sun Family), are granted use of what will be known as Ascot Cottage, located just to the east of the modern intersection between Whippendell Road and Ascot Road. In the photo below, note a building to the left of, and probably adjoining, the cottage: this will eventually become Sun Engraving’s ‘rest room’ (see also 1933).

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1914 Anglo Engraving Co. and André & Sleigh (and its associated company, Bushey Colour Press) show work in a printing exhibition at Agricultural Hall, London; Edward Hunter, impressed by the quality demonstrated by his competitors, acquires the companies (and their manager, David Greenhill) from their owner, the publishing firm of Cassell & Co. The combined firms are renamed André Sleigh & Anglo.
1914-16The cost of the First World War forces the UK government to stop circulating gold currency. The coins are replaced by paper notes that prove to be easily forgeable. At the request of the Treasury, David Greenhill, working with his nephew Cyril and others, develops a new way of engraving and printing a banknote that makes it difficult to photograph and therefore difficult to forge.
1919Menpes Printing and Engraving Co. in Watford (now owned by Debenham & Freebody of London, and employing over 300) is acquired by Sun Engraving, who adapt and expand the factory for their own use. Hunter and Hughes then move all their production acquisitions to Whippendell Road under the banner of The Sun Engraving Co. Ltd., retaining their London site as their head office. A formal opening ceremony is followed by a huge sit-down luncheon for all employees.

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Sun Engraving opens its doors on Whippendell Road, Watford, August 1919. Four of the original directors appear in the photo: (A) Edward Hunter (founder), (B) Noel Hunter, (C) J. A. "Archie" Hughes (Edward Hunter's partner), and (D) David Greenhill. (E) is Mr Curling Hunter, father of Edward and Noel. The chairman, Sir Arthur Spurgeon, stands to Edward Hunter's left. The little girl in the flowered dress is Edward Hunter's daughter Eileen.

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1919Sun Engraving starts printing its first periodical, The Draper’s Organizer, a letterpress weekly with four-colour illustrations. The rate of pay for a compositor (member of the Typographical Association union) at this time is £2 for a 48-hr work week.
1926 Rembrandt Intaglio moves to Norwood (London) from Lancaster.
1929 Sun Engraving issues The Sun Compendium, a comprehensive, 196-page manual and price list ‘For Users of Photo-Process Engraving.’

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1929The first-ever all-gravure weekly, Picturegoer, is produced by Sun Engraving, consisting of 32 pages with a two-colour cover delivered complete off the press.
1931 Sun Engraving begins the printing and re-reeling of inserts for The Times Weekly Overseas Edition, work that continues until the outbreak of WWII.
1932 Sun Engraving acquires Rembrandt Intaglio.
1932-33 Sun Engraving issues its Sun Type Book, whose text samples of the available fonts do not simply repeat a selected passage throughout the book, but contain an entire, book-long discussion on the engraving and printing processes, constituting a primer on the industry. By now, employees number about  1,600.

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The Sun Engraving works as shown in an aerial photograph from the Sun Type Book. At the intersection of Whippendell Road and Ascot Road are the canteen, garden, and ‘rest room.’A little further back is the half-timbered water tower that supplied pressure for the ceiling sprinklers in the plant.

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The Sun’s garden and ‘rest room’ in more detail.

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Some of the staff, and a large group of employees’ children, photographed against the backdrop of the ‘rest room.’

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A large gravure press of the pre-World War II era.
1934 Rembrandt Intaglio is moved to Watford and renamed Rembrandt Photogravure Ltd. Sun equips the company with state-of-the-art sheet-fed presses and the firm continues to output ultra-high-quality colour reproductions of fine-art subjects.
1937 The publishing house, Odhams Press, a principal customer of Sun Engraving until now, builds its own production facility in North Watford after its owner, Lord Southwood, fails to persuade the Hunters to sell their photogravure operations to him.
Sun Engraving obtains the printing contracts for Vogue and Everybody’s.
1938Picture Post, the magazine that pioneered photojournalism, is printed by Sun Engraving in monotone and colour, becoming the first weekly magazine to exceed a million copies per issue. Print runs of this 104-page magazine will reach a peak of 1,700,000 weekly.
At its fortieth anniversary, the 2,000 people of Sun Engraving’s workforce are producing up to 1,500 tons of printed matter a week, consisting of more than 6 million copies of weekly magazines, 2½ million monthly copies, and a further 6 million quarterly and special editions. The Sun adds a further extension, replacing the garden and ‘rest room’ with more factory space.

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The Watford works, now all business. The canteen, garden, and ‘rest room’ have been replaced with a loading bay and more factory space. The all-important canteen has been moved into a building on the other side of Whippendell Road.

1938 Sun Engraving starts marketing its own ‘Sungravure’ printing presses in collaboration with the manufacturers, Baker Perkins.

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At 13-1/2" by 18-1/4", with a heavy woven-cloth cover, a silver-printed glassine insert, many full-page foldouts, spectacular technical illustrations, and text and images impeccably gravure-printed in one, two, and four colours on heavy paper, the Sungravure Printing Equipment “brochure” is an impressive promotional piece. The images below, reproduced from the brochure, show the Sun’s Watford works and just two of the many large technical illustrations.

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1939 The Sun builds its first solvent recovery plant. Recycling the petroleum derivatives used to thin photogravure inks will improve air quality inside and outside the factory and greatly reduce the firm’s heavy expenditure on solvent. (For more details, see Norman Oldknow’s article on solvent recovery on the Facts & Opinions page.)
  The Sun is now printing Ladies’ Journal, Film Pictorial, Woman’s Own, Good Taste, Weldons Bazaar of Children’s Fashions, Mother and Home, Good Gardening, Passing Show, Picturegoer, Weekly Illustrated, Pictorial Education, Farmer’s Weekly, Mickey Mouse, Silver Star, Cavalcade, Everybody’s, Picture Post, Supplement to Weekly Times, Vogue, Vogue Pattern Book, Vogue Knitting Book, Housewife, Country Life, Christmas Pie, Summer Pie, Nursing, Mirror, Pearson’s Magazine, Today, inserts and covers for Radio Times ...

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In this illustration from the Sungravure promotional brochure, every publication on display in the bookstall is a Sungravure product.

1939-45 Sun Engraving undertakes extensive war work, much of it classified and highly secret. The firm prints an estimated 1.5 billion propaganda leaflets and also Tactical Targets, popularly known as the ‘Bible of the Invasion’ – the aerial reconnaissance books for the Allied invasion of Europe.
1940 Sun Engraving produces the Haggadah and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, both with illustrations by book illuminator and anti-Nazi propagandist Arthur Szyk (1894-1951). Szyk was a Polish Jew with extraordinary artistic skills, who had come to England to find a publisher for his Haggadah and who eventually settled in the United States. Edited by Oxford don Cecil Roth, the Haggadah was printed on vellum in a limited subscription edition, and a small number of run-on copies were made on paper. We show here the famous dedication page (which, understandably, was not present in subsequent reprints produced in Israel) and two spreads of what is unquestionably Szyk’s masterpiece and has been called the most beautiful book ever printed.

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1940 Sun creates a munitions department to produce parts for tanks, bulldozers, anti-aircraft shells, and artillery. A small example of the output of this 130-person group: 679,000 bearings for Bren-gun carriers (16 per carrier); 420,000 fuze-timing rings for anti-aircraft shells; and 975 stub axles for the Hamilcar gliders, including the first ever made (for the prototype, which flew on 27 March 1942).

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Sun staff make sprockets and other parts for tanks (top and bottom photos), and axles for the Hamilcar glider (centre).

Sun staff produce and inspect anti-aircraft shells.
1941 Sun begins printing propaganda leaflets for the Government, the first order comprising 200,000 units. Over the next four years of this contract the factory will produce booklets, small magazines, posters, and even a German-language daily newspaper – the equivalent of 1.8 billion units involving the use of 4,400 tons of paper and 250 tons of ink.

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Just some of the daily newspapers produced by the Sun during WWII for the Political Intelligence Department and the American Office of War Information.
1941 The Sun undertakes secret experiments as a subcontractor to the Metals Division of Imperial Chemical Industries. The success of these experiments and the Sun’s subsequent production work on the gaseous diffusion process will contribute to the development of the atomic bomb. The firm’s participation is important enough to warrant mention after the war in the Government publication of statements relating to the A-bomb.
1942 Sun undertakes the printing of complex, colour-coded admiralty charts. A completely new and error-free set will be produced each month until the end of the war.
1943 For the Air Ministry, the Sun begins ultra-secret production of massive loose-leaf books of aerial reconnaissance photographs covering strategic bombing targets and tactical operations for before and after D-Day. The ‘Sun’ at War (vol. 4) explains that ‘all this work, which had to combine fine engraving with good printing and good paper, needed the utmost care.’ The work involved a huge amount of etching and hand engraving, and the printed material involved millions of hand folds and hand collations. The article revealed that ‘the Engraving Department worked long hours; the machine staff worked 43 Saturdays out of 53, and the girls in the Binding Department completed nearly thirty consecutive week-ends.’

The Sun begins production of secret material – code-named ‘Window’ – on which the firm has already conducted experiments at the request of the Air Ministry. The product will later be cited by the R.A.F. as having saved many lives. (For a detailed description of ‘Window’ and its production, see the Facts and Opinions page.)
1944 On the night of Friday, July 28, the Milford Lane premises of the Sun receive a direct hit from a V-1 flying bomb. Half the building and much of its contents are destroyed. A team from the Watford plant works around the clock to help the London operations get up and running again. By the following Monday afternoon, work is going out once more from what remains of Milford House.

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Sun Engraving, Milford House, after being hit by a V-1 flying bomb. The view is from the Strand, with Milford Lane on the right. “A” marks the older wing of the firm, “B” the newer part.

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The remains of the wet-plate process studio.

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The remains of the stereo and electrotyping departments.

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Three months after the bombing, Milford House puts on a brave face. The Sun was only able to obtain a repair permit for the property (a permit to rebuild was refused), so the building still looked like this even a year and a half later, although its entrance had been brightened a little with some flower-filled planters.
1945 Sun Engraving spins off its now massive letterpress and gravure printing operations, newly named Sun Printers Ltd., selling them to Hazell, Watson and Viney of Aylesbury. The rate of pay for a compositor (member of the Typographical Association union) at this time is about £5 for a 45-hr work week.

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An immediate-post-war gravure press (made by John Wood).
1946 Sun Printers’ general manager, Cyril Greenhill, bids farewell and happy retirement to long-time letterpress manager W.T. Blenkarn. Mr Blenkarn had originally worked for Menpes Press and had been with the Sun since Menpes’ take-over in 1918. To the left, Alf Larcombe.

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1949 The contract is obtained to print the weekly magazine Woman’s Own, which will become Sun Printers’ greatest revenue-earner.
1951 Watford’s Industrial Exhibition – spawned by the Festival of Britain to celebrate the centennial of the Great Exhibition of 1851 – is opened on June 14 by Douglas Fairbanks Jr and is the occasion of much activity in Watford, particularly in the printing sector. Among the distinguished visitors to the Sun works are Commander Fairbanks and H.R.H. the Duchess of Kent.

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Sun general manager and director Cyril Greenhill, vice-chairman of Watford’s Industrial Exhibition committee, shows a set of progressive proofs to the Duchess of Kent during her tour of the printing works. (Greenhill archives.)

1952 Sun’s new ink factory, built at a cost of £130,000, is opened in April by Hazel-Sun chairman Col. O.V. Viney, who calls it ‘the finest Gravure Ink Factory in the country at the present time.’ The ink works will pump ink directly to the gravure machines. By the early 1970s the factory will be producing more than a million gallons of ink a year.

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The ink factory under construction on the south side of Ascot Road. (Photo by George Konig, ARPS. Supplied by Basil Boden.)

1953Sun Printers’ office façade is decorated for Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, the decorations designed by Charles (C.H.A.) Chaplin. From a large colour transparency (probably by Jack Riley).

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1954 Sun Printers embarks on ‘Operation Sunrise,’ a massive, 4-year modernization and expansion project that will involve the addition of new buildings, the moving of almost every department, and the raising of the roof over presses that must be kept running at full tilt throughout the construction period. (The Facts and Opinions page contains the text of the plan and a photo essay of the construction.)
1956 The European Rotogravure Association (ERA) is formed, with Sun Printers as a founding member. The ERA will provide an international forum for the exchange of technical information within the industry.
1957 The ERA holds its first meeting on 31 January in Zofingen, Switzerland. The Sun’s representatives are Dr George Fuchs, Cyril Greenhill, and Raymond Walker.
The Sun is now printing Vogue, Practical Householder, Practical Motorist, Motor, Woman’s Own, Farmer’s Weekly, Popular Gardening, Mirabelle, Titbits, Everybody’s, The Leader, Woman and Home, Housewife, Vanity Fair, Flight, Country Life, Homes and Gardens ...

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Aerial shot of the works. A huge new building (flat white roof) has been added to house the various process departments, and it is clear that further extensions are already under way.

1958 When Odhams’ twenty-year sole UK rights agreement with Goss expires, the Sun purchases two 18-unit Goss presses for its gravure department. Woman’s Own is transferred to these presses, which are capable of producing 80-page issues, stitched but untrimmed, comprising thirty full-colour pages, ten two-colour pages, and forty black-only pages.

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Full view of one of the 18-unit Goss presses. (Photo courtesy of Brian Wiseman.)

1960 Sun replaces its twenty-year-old solvent recovery plant with a state-of-the-art installation. Over a mere six years the new system will deliver more than 5 million gallons of recovered solvent to the ink factory for reuse.
  Sun Printers completes its new south extension. This aerial view, looking south and east, shows the works at its most resplendent. Besides the new extension (blueish roof), the photo shows the sizeable ink works (at the top of the picture). The plant now occupies 21½ acres.

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1961 Rembrandt Photogravure is absorbed by Sun Printers. Use of the Rembrandt name ceases after sixty-six years.
1962 Thomson Newspapers awards Sun Printers a contract to produce the first-ever colour weekend magazine supplement for a newspaper, The Sunday Times Colour Section. Employment at Sun Printers peaks, with more than 3,600 people on the payroll.
1963 A landmark year as The Sunday Times Colour Section starts to roll off the press.

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Roy Thomson, Sun joint managing director Cyril Greenhill, and Watford’s mayor admire a copy of the first Sunday Times colour supplement, 1963.

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The first Sunday Times Colour Section. The model is Jean Shrimpton. And the James Bond short story is unputdownable, even in 2005. (Greenhill archives)

1965Edward Hunter dies on June 28.
1966 Sun Printers installs a 13-unit Goss press, the most advanced press of its kind, capable of outputting 25,000 copies of a folded, stitched 96-page magazine (72 pp in colour) per hour. The cost of the press is in excess of £1 million and The Sunday Times Colour Section is transferred to it.

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The Goss was capable of very high speeds and could produce a 96-page magazine (72 pages in full colour) complete from reels right through to the finished, shrink-wrapped product. The press pictured here printed the Sunday Times colour supplement – at least 850,000 copies per week, although at times the run exceeded a million and at one point reached almost 2,000,000.
1966 The Hazell Sun Group, Sun’s owner, merges with the Purnell Group to form the British Printing Corporation (BPC). Family involvement at the senior management level is almost at an end.
1968 Sun Engraving, after seventy years in business, is acquired by C.E. Layton. Renamed Layton/Sun, the firm closes its Watford operations and moves to London. Sun Printers, in the meantime, is employing 3,300.
1969 At Sun Printers the rate of pay for a compositor (member of the Typographical Association union) is roughly £30 for a 40-hr work week. This same year, the Linotype department is closed and a number of compositors are made redundant.
1970 There is little work left for letterpress, and the Composition department continues to shrink in size. Employment numbers at Sun Printers have declined to just over 3,000. Weekly paper consumption is a little over 1,750 tons.
1973 Sun Printers employment numbers have declined further, to 2,500. The plant, too, has shrunk, to 18½ acres. The ‘new’ south extension, originally built to house the Letterpress and Composition departments, is closed after only 13 years (the building will be sold to the Post Office and will become a main sorting station). Annual revenues of £10 million include export work of £500,000.
1974 The day after their wedding, Frank Venables and Linda Horwood, both of the Sun warehouse, win the European Amateur Ballroom Dancing championship at Linz. Later that year they will take the World Title in Bremen.

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Sun’s managing director, Roy Smith (right), makes a presentation to Frank and Linda Venables following their World Amateur Ballroom Dancing championship title win.
1975 OPEC’s energy embargo of 1974 is followed by a miners’ strike to protest the Heath government’s institution of wage and price controls. Facing a major fuel crisis, the government mandates a nation-wide, three-day work week. The restriction will be in effect for two months. Added to the Sun’s recent loss of Titbits, TVTimes, and other magazine contracts (some £3,000,000-worth of business), the difficult situation triggers more staff cuts. Under a voluntary severance scheme, 330 employees leave the company.
  Both Sun and Odhams are now struggling, but merger talks between Watford’s two gravure houses fail when the plans are strenuously opposed by Odhams employees. BPC reluctantly withdraws from discussions.
1976 BPC injects £2 million in cash into Sun ‘to keep it in existence.’ Wages and salaries represent a crippling 92.2% of the value of production this year. As part of a new five-year plan, Sun orders an Albert 10-unit gravure press, the first ‘thoroughbred’ jobbing press purchased in twenty years, in the hope that, being faster, better in quality, and less costly to operate, it will open up new markets.

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Machine No. 71 (a 15-unit John Wood press) is dismantled to make way for the Albert. Two hundred tons of masonry and steel work will be removed and reformed to accommodate it. (Photo courtesy of Brian Wiseman.)

1977 Sun financial statements report ‘a disastrous year,’ with trading losses at nearly £700,000. The company loses True Story, True Romances, and Woman’s Story to more-flexible, less-expensive, web offset printers. On the brighter side, the TVTimes contract is renewed. Writes a manager in the house magazine Sunews: ‘The Sun is mired in endless industrial relations disputes with its multiple trades unions.’ Management tries to get the various chapels to agree to a 25% productivity increase to reverse losses and fend off competition from UK web offset printers and German and Italian gravure printers.
1978 Condé Nast moves its magazines to web offset, ending letterpress contracts with Sun for Brides, Vogue, and House and Garden. The Letterpress department will close in 1979.
  After many technical hold-ups the Albert press is commissioned and takes on new mail-order work. But a year-long series of national and industry disputes involving everyone from road hauliers and tanker drivers to the National Union of Journalists keeps raw materials from reaching the works and printed product from reaching the public.

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A vertiginous view over the Albert press. (Photo courtesy of Len Hooker.)

1979 Margaret Thatcher becomes Prime Minister on May 4, vowing to curb the power of the country’s trades unions. Sun lands a big new contract – Weekend magazine – and more work comes in for the Albert, but industrial disputes at The Sunday Times and Woman’s Own are disastrous for Sun and help to double the firm’s losses over the previous year – to £1.8 million. The dispute between Times Newspapers and the trades unions is only resolved after a year-long work stoppage. Sun starts printing the Sunday Times again in November.
1980 Sun Printers lands the contract for a ‘new-look’ TVTimes magazine, whose requirements call for new gravure presses. Sun settles on two Ceruttis from Italy and embarks on a massive 18-month engineering program that will literally raise the roof to make room for them.

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Printing director Brian Reynolds takes Sun Printers gravure, finishing, and warehouse staff to Oslo and Cologne to view Muller Martini jumbo-stackers and gathering-stitching-trimming equipment in action. Identical equipment is to be installed at the Sun for the sectional production of TVTimes and Sunday Times. On the tarmac at Oslo are, l-r: Brian Smith, Mike Batchelor, John Swan, Jack Swaffer, Ken Gravestock, Brian Reynolds, Ed Joyce, Wally Reynolds, Bill Ford, John Humphries, Bill Prentice, Don Griffin, Alan McCarthy (Muller Martini), Norman Beach, Mick Tyler, George Greenham (Muller Martini), and Captain Eddie Asquith.
  Sun leaves traditional typesetting behind and moves to photocomposition. The Composing Chapel of the 1960s boasted nearly 400 members. Compositors now number fewer than 20.
  Using borrowed money, Robert Maxwell buys a 29.5% stake in BPC.
1981 Maxwell gains control of BPC in April and renames it the British Printing and Communications Corporation (BPCC).
“Prosperity is around the corner. It is not here yet, but it will come. And you can be proud of what you have done so far.” So says chairman Maxwell as, with great fanfare before a raft of visitors, journalists, and VIPs, and with popular TV hero Telly Savalas (Kojak) in tow as star guest, he announces the opening of Sun’s new press hall, the switch-on of the first Cerutti press, and the launch of the much-enlarged TVTimes. The editor of Sunews waxes eloquent about ‘the day the Sun rose in glory,’ but his lack of confidence is palpable.

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Posing by the start button: Bob Phillis (once Sun's managing director and now managing director of TVTimes), Robert Maxwell, and Telly Savalas. The start-up coincides with a power failure across much of West Watford but the machine soon roars into action and copies of TVTimes begin to stream from the press.

1982 The two giant (18-unit) Goss presses are decommissioned and removed from Sun.
  Maxwell acquires Odhams in November and merges it with Sun to create Odhams-Sun Printers Ltd. He announces that almost all typesetting will cease at the works.

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Maxwell enters into an expensive joint pilot project with Crosfield Electronics to find a way of engraving cylinders by laser. Unfortunately, the plastic surface fails to stand up to the wear and tear of the presses. After five years of fruitless trials the project will be cancelled. Here, Brian Reynolds and pre-press director Ray Cox examine a laser-engraved cylinder.
1983 In September, Maxwell closes the Odhams factory and moves the remaining Odhams personnel and some of the equipment, including a 13-unit Albert gravure press, to the Sun site. Some Odhams work comes over as well.
  The Sun’s first web offset press, a Baker Perkins ‘G16,’ is installed and training begins.
1984 Woman’s Own, once Sun’s biggest contract and a mainstay of the company for half a century, is lost to a web offset printer. A second Baker Perkins ‘G16’ is installed at Sun and a web offset department is created.
The Sun’s Ink Factory and Research department are closed and the employees are let go. The ink factory is demolished and the land sold.
1985 Most employees in the Process department are made redundant. Further staff reductions take place in the Litho and Gravure departments throughout the year to meet Maxwell’s target of a 50 per cent staff cut.
1987 Etchers, engravers, camera operators, and retouchers are all gradually let go. The Sunday Times colour supplement is lost to a competitor, ending its 25-year life at Sun. The 13-unit Goss on which it had run stands idle.

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The end of an era. This cylinder, marked “August 30, 1987”, records the last printing of the Sunday Times magazine at the Sun after a quarter of a century.
  BPCC is renamed Maxwell Communications Corporation (MCC – though it seems Maxwell never ‘played the game’).
1988 Maxwell announces that the Sun’s Gravure Process and Machine departments are to be closed. Sun’s workforce is now down to 200.
Warehouse #3 (originally part of Sun’s gravure paper warehouse on Ascot Road) is cleared for the arrival of a new MAN litho press from Germany.

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The MAN press under construction.
1989 John Holloran leads the buyout of the BPCC group of companies from Maxwell Communications Corp. Odhams-Sun is renamed BPCC Watford, then BPCC Consumer Magazines (Watford) Ltd., then BPCC Sun Ltd.
Gravure operations are closed down in September. The two Albert gravure presses are sold to VNU Netherlands. BPCC Sun Ltd becomes a small web-offset plant operating out of the former Ascot Road paper warehouse. The MAN press is commissioned in December. The workforce now numbers 240.
1990 The part of Sun Printers that had housed the offices and platemaking, bindery, electrical, and engineering operations is closed down. All staff are now located in the refurbished warehouse.
First allegations surface of the misappropriation of pension funds within the Maxwell companies.
1991 The last Cerutti press is dismantled and shipped to Purnell’s.
On October 31, Robert Maxwell drowns in mysterious circumstances while boating off the Canary Islands.
In early December upwards of £400 million are discovered missing from the Maxwell Communications Corporation pension fund.
1992Pensioners’ action groups are formed across the UK to try to recover the missing pension funds.

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A meeting of the Maxwell Pensioners Action Group (Dunstable).
1994 Most of the Sun factory now lies derelict, awaiting the wrecker’s ball.

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1995The ‘Maxwell pensioners’ succeed in their battle to have their pension funds restored.
1999 A merger between Watmough Holdings and BPC results in the formation of Polestar Group. The printing works on Ascot Road are renamed Polestar (Watford) Ltd.
2002 At a community planning meeting, Watford residents are told that while the derelict Sun buildings will be razed, the old Sun Engraving plaque will be retained, as will the clock tower building on Ascot Road. The latter is slated for refurbishment as part of the redevelopment plan. Will this happen? And will the letters S U N on the tower survive?

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2003 The abandoned Sun buildings are demolished and the site is cleared for redevelopment.

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2004 Following Polestar's decision to close the Watford works, two presses are dismantled and transferred to Polestar Direct Leeds, new homes are found for some of the binding lines, and the rest of the equipment on Ascot Road is scrapped. The closure brings to an end a century of printing on the site. On Whippendell Road, construction begins on a hotel and shopping complex where the Sun once so proudly shone.
2006
The Sunset Club holds yet another well-attended reunion, in July, for former Sun employees.

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Peter Pridmore, formerly a Goss chargehand, cuts the 'Goss' cake at the Sun reunion. Beside him is Shirley House, wife of former Sun chargehand Ernie House.

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Les Johnson cuts the 'Sun logo' cake.

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