I saw my first Goss Community in Cleckheaton, Yorkshire, in 1976 on a tour which took in the Morecambe Visitor and the Preston factory (writes Peter Coleman).

Webs from five or six orange mono units drooped into a C58 folder until gradually tensions were resolved and the Spenborough Guardian came together simply on the fly.

I’d been aware of web-offset before that: My father had taken me to Ipex in Olympia in 1963, pointed at a Fairchild Color King he thought more fitted to printing cereal packets – he had moved and rebuilt a 1930s rotary from Bristol to our humble weekly newspaper base in Sheerness, Kent, only a couple of years before, so doubtless felt a commitment to letterpress – and observed that the technology would be “for you son, not me”. It was a statement he reinforced emphatically by collapsing and dying at a press conference at the end of that year.

Completing school, a few years as a trainee at a south coast evening daily, and a some more helping my mother in Sheerness, it took me to the mid-1970s to lay our own plans for web-offset: Two years as a contract customer on the Goss Urbanite of the neighbouring Kent Messenger while we got our composing room in order; no good installing a press capable of printing many times more than we were publishing if we couldn’t set it.

I signed for four Community units and a Preston-built SC58 folder at the start of 1977. We knew we would want to insert and picked up a secondhand Müller 227E from the maker, and finding perversely that annual repayments on the US-financed $158,000 Goss would be less for four units than three, went for that.

The exchange fluctuated over the four years, but was usually offset by the difference in interest rates, and after a while a large and successful advertising customer – for whom we were later to print a 300,000 weekly property newspaper – asked if we would give him discount for an accommodating billing regime: “pay me half-yearly upfront ahead of my Goss repayment,” I said… and he did.

My “Australian connection” had also developed the previous year, but the Aussie sub-editor with whom I had developed a close relationship had returned home, leaving me in an “am I installing a press in 1977 or getting married” conundrum. I ordered the press and it was being installed when my soon-to-be soulmate told colleagues at the Addy in Geelong that she was “going north” for a few days… and popped up in Sheerness; we were engaged over the Silver Jubilee holiday, married soon after and together when North Sea floods (and rolls of newsprint) swirled around the press early the following year. But that’s another story: thank goodness for units mounted over the reelstands, cabling running along the top of walls, and a drive motor that ran as soon as it had dried out.

Over years of contract and our own production – the Kent Messenger told us we printed their freesheets better than they did – we added a second four-unit Community, purchased from a comic-book printer in Como, Italy… an exercise which brought home the true meaning of ma˜nana. They’d gone bust, but enjoyed doing so, and we received a press full of champagne corks.

Beyond spot, colour hadn’t been high on our agenda or those of our customers, but we ran unit-to-unit (with the yellow printed direct, even on Kodak’s chemical-transfer plates) and looked at stacked units and the ubiquitous tricolour UOP. The latter I saw printing posters at Southdown Press in Melbourne – where the main event was the Halley Aller heatset webs – on a trip to visit the in-laws. A single pressman (there was some sort of dispute on at the time) made light of the process and afterwards, we all – including a powerful woman who may have been Dulcie Boling – repaired to a bar where, shout after shout, I made another discovery: Australian pubs don’t call “last orders” at five to two and shut down until the evening.

Eventually, in the run-up to moving Down Under, I sold the extended press to Tony Barrett at dealer Milthorp (now at Grafitec Web) for every penny we had paid for it; it had always been “like money in the bank”.

The respect I had gained for Goss engineering served me well in Australia: Printing trade magazine Ink, which I edited, sold multipage profiles to Goss on the understanding that I would write them, and I’m proud that the relationship of trust with Peter Kirwan locally, and the whole of the Goss team globally, has stood the test of time.

The Magnum Compact is still essentially a Community: the automatic plate changing on it one of those blindingly simple devices you wonder why no-one had thought of before; the compact slide-apart units evocative of the Web Leader QuadStack without their access issues; software sophistication from Goss’s top-end heatset presses… but most of the rest from the evolved design first introduced in the 1960s.

As songwriter Guy Clark put it, Stuff that works.