Winifred Slack
Surveyor · fourth generation
Does the walking. Twenty-two years on the Sussex and Kent foreshore, and holds the view that anything drawn from a photograph is a guess with good manners.
The press
A room, a machine, and three people who know where the tide is.
Fathom & Furlong has cut and printed maps at 7 Watchbell Street since 1868. The name on the first ledger was Slack & Rell; the press is the same one.
Plate i — No. 4, drawn to the inch from its own bed
No. 4
It came up the hill on a dray and never went back down.
A Hunter Penrose direct-drive, thirty-inch bed, delivered in the October of 1868 for £41 and some shillings — the receipt is in the second drawer. When the front of the building was reworked in 1931 the doorway was rebuilt around the press rather than the press taken apart, and that decision is the only reason it is still here.
It has been re-beared four times. The rollers have been ground twice. Everything else on it is original, including the star wheel, which has a chip out of the third ball that nobody has ever explained.
Two turns of the wheel to a sheet. About ninety seconds, including the damping.
Ledger
A hundred and fifty-eight years, abridged
| Year | Entry | In the archive |
|---|---|---|
| 1868 | Slack & Rell open at Watchbell Street. No. 4 installed in October. | Plates i–iv |
| 1889 | The Bodiam estate survey — still the largest single plate cut here. | Plate xxii |
| 1904 | Harbour re-survey after the Rother shifted its mouth by 400 yards. | Plates xl–xliii |
| 1941 | Foreshore work for the Admiralty. No records kept, by instruction. | — |
| 1947 | Rell's granddaughter takes over the bench. First woman to cut here. | Plate lxi |
| 1972 | Nearly sold for scrap. Bought back by the town for £900. | — |
| 2019 | No. 4 re-beared; rollers ground for the second time. | — |
| 2026 | The Rother walked again, end to end, for the current edition. | Plate xxxi |
At the bench
Three of us, and that is the constraint
It is why we take eight or nine commissions a year, and why we will tell you honestly if we are the wrong people for the job.
Tobias Rell
Engraver
Cuts the plates. Trained at Cowell's in Ipswich before it closed, then eleven years here. Letters everything by hand and will not discuss the alternative.
Marta Okonjo
Pressman · paper & conservation
Runs No. 4 and looks after the archive. Came from paper conservation at Hastings Museum, which is why the 1889 plates are in the condition they are.
“You cannot correct a coastline you have not stood on. Everything else in this trade follows from that one inconvenience.”
Winifred Slack
Rye Fixtures oral history, 2024
Method
How a plate is made
One — the walk
Chain, level, staff and a notebook. We fix to whatever the Ordnance Survey has left standing nearby and work outward. A four-mile stretch of river takes eleven days if the tides are kind, three weeks if not.
Two — the fair copy
The notebook becomes a pencil drawing at final size on Bristol board. This is where the arguments happen: what to leave out is the harder question, and it is settled here, not on the plate.
Three — the transfer
The drawing is offset onto a grounded copper plate in reverse. Everything from here on is mirrored, which is the part nobody believes until they watch it happen.
Four — the cut
Burin work: four to nine months depending on the sheet. Water in italic, land in roman, and the lettering cut last so that a change of mind about a name does not cost a coastline.
Five — proofs, then forty sheets
Three or four proofs, each going back to the plate for corrections. Then the edition: damped rag paper, one sheet at a time, forty of them, numbered at the plate mark. About a fortnight.
Come and see it running.
We pull sheets on Tuesday and Thursday mornings and we do not mind an audience. No appointment, no charge, and the kettle is always on.