Free A Day at the Races by Keith Armstrong Page A

intend to print the notes, gravure or litho?” asked Derek.
    “Well gravure will give us a crisper image, but the gravure plates will be a pain in the arse to etch, so we will go for litho it will be easier and quicker, although a couple of the elements we will have to print with letterpress.”
    “You appear to have thought this out carefully Mike.” Said Tony.
    “I have, believe me”
    “The new Brazilian plates we tested last week are excellent quality, you can get lots of fine detail with them and if we put it on the eight colour Heidelberg, we can zip it through in short order.” said Derek.
    “What about the paper?” Asked Tony.
    “Well I have some old stock I brought with me a good few years ago. The previous company I worked for was in the business of printing Government Currency, Bonds and Securities. It’s made from cotton fibre and linen rag and is exactly the same paper as used in official UK bank notes. All the paper has the metallic security thread and watermark embedded in the paper.
    The Bank of England supplied us with the paper along with the inks. Any unused paper stock and inks were supposed to be returned to them at the end of the contract. However there was a fire in the paper store at John Derby’s the Security Printers, and a lot of stock was water and smoke damaged during the fire. On inspection the assessor deemed these pallets of cotton-based paper were too badly damaged to use, and ordered them to be disposed of.
    He was employed directly by the Bank of England, and from a security standpoint, he was most insistent it was done immediately. All this was going on while firemen were still damping down the paper stores, pallets of smouldering paper being brought out with the smell of smoke everywhere it was bloody chaos. He was hopping around from one foot to the other you would think his life depended on it. In an effort to pacify him we had a large coal fired boiler for generating hot water for the factory’s central heating system, so it was decided to put the reams into this boiler to dispose of them.
    Anyway we had only disposed of about fifty or so reams of the paper when he got called away. So we just left the remainder for him to record the batch numbers when he returned. Later that day I got a phone call from him to say he had an emergency and he wouldn’t be able to get back to us for at least a few days, and would I carry on and burn the rest of the paper, so I said I would.
    To be honest I had more urgent things to be getting on with, because the fire although only confined to the paper store, had put us seriously behind in production.
    We were beginning to miss deadlines on some of our other print business, and we were in the middle of printing an order for 2.5 billion in Kwacha notes for the Central Bank of Malawi, and there were penalty clauses in the contract if we missed the shipping deadline. With this in mind I just put the remaining paper to one side in the factory and carried on as normal or tried to do in the chaos that was everywhere.
    He phoned back to make sure we had disposed of everything so I told him we had, as I fully intended to burn the rest of the paper when things calmed down a bit and I got chance.
    However on further investigation, I found most of the stock was ok, only the outer packaging got damaged, so I made sure they were put in a safe place along with all the inks.
    Not with any intention of doing anything untoward, its just I could not see six full pallets of what was perfectly good paper being destroyed, its just not in my nature.
    When I came to Hurricane Press, I brought the stock with me and it’s at the very back in the old storeroom. No one knows its there, the outer wrappers are a faded purple, but the stock itself is ok, I have tested it.”
    “What about the foil patch, will you attempt to print that?”
    “No I am getting those made and we will heat laminate them on, I have an old hot foil machine I bought at auction years ago, it’s