FEW people can boast the ability to read lines of text upside down and back to front - but if you're a former Daily News compositor it's second nature.

We caught up this week with a few of our former employees in the form of Ron Bryant, Alec McBean, Les Meiklejohn, Graham Gillam and Rex Baguley, at the Daily News shopfront display at the Pringle Cottage museum.

This crew of workmates has witnessed incredible changes in the technology used to produce newspapers and commercial printing material, but the guiding principle of attention to detail has never changed.

Put simply, the job of the compositor involved assembling text, which back in the day was produced in the form of lead "type", in our case on a British-made machine with thousands of moving parts called an Intertype.

Arriving at the Daily News in 1950, the monster was fed with lead ingots which melted down deep in its bowels and popped out as lead plates of text ready for printing.

With little in the way of formal health and safety practices in those days, workers who came into contact with the lead would have a medicinal belly-full of milk at the butter factory on the way home, with milk acting as a prevention for lead poisoning.

Rex Baguley, who later headed up our commericial printing business, started his working life as a message boy and general rouseabout.

"My first job was mopping the floors and the toilets," he laughed.

"But I also used to do things like working the (paper) guillotine at the start of World War II, when there was a shortage of printing staff."

And if you've ever wondered about the origin of the term "upper and lower case" it's quite simple - Rex explained it refers to the timber cabinet holding wooden "hand type" letters, with capitals stored in the "upper" section.

Ron Bryant recalled the 1976 flood, which sent 18 inches of water into the Daily News Albion St site.

"We were kicking pallets we couldn't see below the waterline," he said.

"At one stage we thought the paper reels were going to bust out the walls."

Hot and cold type have given way to the internet and the plates and presses which are today used to produce your Daily - but it's all still done with as much care, and not to mention unfailing humour, as it always has been.

ON MONDAY: We look at the economic and social contribution of the Daily News and APN Print to the Warwick community.