‘You turn the handle’: the Roneo Machine

The object that immediately sprang to my mind for this project was a Roneo machine. It could’ve been an acetate for an overhead projector, given my years in academe but no, it had to be the Roneo. Why? Because of the hours, days, I spent producing the BAAT Newsletter in the mid-late 1970s. 

I can’t recall the dates of my Editorship but I know it was while I was working at Joyce Green Hospital in Dartford, Kent. Art Therapy was in the Occupational Therapy Department of a small, acute psychiatric unit which also housed an Industrial Therapy Workshop and an ‘office’ with desks and typewriters. At the side of this room, over some cupboards and on a formica worktop, stood the Roneo machine.

It was an imposing object in its pale green, metallic livery and with a big handle on one side. Otherwise known as a Banda machine it was invented in 1923 and only put out to grass with the advent of the photocopier. It was splendid but infuriating. You had to type your ‘copy’ onto waxed-backed paper, praying that you made no mistakes because you’d have to start again, and then carefully insert the paper into the Roneo (right way round) before turning the handle to slowly roll the drum and produce each page. Two hundred and fifty copies of who knows how many pages, several times a year, typed, printed, collated and posted to BAAT members. Patients in the OT Department helped out; they too would get covered in ink and we all rather enjoyed the smell of the spirit and the click click click of the drum.

I couldn’t locate a Roneo machine so I searched and found a fascinating array of images with which I made a collage, ‘You turn the handle’. Many of the images featured women, either operating the machine (‘invaluable for reproducing’) or standing coyly beside it, the occasional male figure looking harassed by the pieces of paper flying about. This speaks to the gendered nature of most ‘office’ work during the Roneo machine’s ascendancy, embodied in the spaces of the OT Department and resonating with a sense of subservience that Art Therapists were fighting against during those early days. However, grappling with the Roneo machine hardly equated with the heady negotiations that I was also involved with at that time (see Waller, 1981) with the (then) Department of Health and Social Security that resulted in the first recognition of Art Therapy in the NHS in 1981, nor was it the ‘proper’ writing represented by Inscape (now the International Journal of Art Therapy). BAAT’s Newsletter was chatty and informative, stapled (painfully) and sometimes smudged; a sort of ‘handout’, a fanzine for this new and developing profession produced by a young and enthusiastic BAAT member.

Unfortunately I couldn’t locate any of the Newsletters I produced, nor – for the purposes of comparison – could I find a recent BAAT Newsletter. Perhaps it’s digital now, or maybe I’ve fallen off the mailing list. I must check.

Reference

Waller, D. (1981) Becoming a profession. Routledge, London.

Andy Gilroy is Emeritus at Goldsmiths, University of London, having spent 35 years as an art therapy educator and researcher and, latterly, a senior manager at the College. She has published widely eg Art Therapy, Research and Evidence-Based Practice (2006), Art Therapy Research in Practice (2010), Assessment in Art Therapy (with Tipple, R. and Brown, C) (2012) and most recently, ‘Art Therapy in Australia: taking a Postcolonial, Aesthetic Turn’ (with Linnell, S., McKenna, T. and Westwood, J.) (2018, in press). Andy’s ‘encore’ career has seen her continuing to write, draw and garden.