Final call to save Pahīatua’s 100-year-old Cossar printing press

Steve Carlé standing by the newer Cossar press thought to have been built circa 1970, with the 100-year-old 1924 Cossar in the background.

Two Cossar newspaper printing presses - each weighing 15 tons - need to be removed from their location in Pahīatua, in the North Island, within 40 days due to the sale of the building they are in.

One of the presses is 100 years old and printed New Zealand’s last Labour newspaper, the Grey River Argus. It was moved to Palmerston North to Viscount Press and then to the Bush Telegraph in Pahīatua.

The other press was built in the 1970s and printed Kapi-Mana News, Thames Star and the Bush Telegraph. They are letterpress machines that print from hot metal from Linotype machines.

Despite having been built in Yorkshire, England, to the design of a Scotsman, the Cossar had a special place in the hearts of New Zealand newspaper publishers, one of whom bought the first press in 1903.

A radical new model introduced in 1915 was also popular and two of the last four known to exist in the world are still in working order at Pahīatua.

The Telegraph team linked the two presses using a duplex chain - timed half a revolution apart to moderate the load on the drive - printing larger papers or spot colour, the latter with a turner bar and modifications to the gantry. In tandem, the presses would print a 32-page tabloid.

The original electric motor and speed controller are still in operation for the older Cossar, and the original electric motor is boxed up for the newer one available.

Steve Carle, now editor of Whanganui Midweek and former proprietor of the Bush Telegraph, used to operate the Cossars and recalls having to lubricate 240 oil holes.

“If you ran the press without oiling it, you could hear the sound of metal to metal clanking away.”

At the 150-year-old Gisborne Herald, former managing director Michael Muir recalled two Cossars, used between 1906 and 1943. The second - this time with a 15 hp electric motor - was installed in March 1924, and printed up to 4500 copies an hour. This had “double-decked” stationary-type formes, and a rewinding apparatus enabling it to have three reels of newsprint running through the press simultaneously.

Wellington Printing Museum committee member Terry Foster recalls seeing a Cossar in production at the Hawera Star “some time up to the late 1980s” - later scrapped except for its motor - while his brother Ken, a retired printer, recalls machines in the Morrinsville/Matamata area, around the same time.

“They were a truly magnificent machine to see in operation,” he said.

A printing museum in the Netherlands, Museum Drukkerij Ijzer & Lood, is interested in one of the presses in Pahīatua. This could mean that if there is no interest in one of the other Cossars, it may be scrapped.

■ Anyone interested in preserving this piece of New Zealand heritage can contact Steve Carle at 021 153 1917 or email steve.carle72@gmail.com.