Profession: drawing clerk

The Monotype Drawing Office tended to recruit young women from the local area, who were hired as ‘drawing clerks’. An advertisement posted in the local newspaper The Surrey Mirror in 1935 shows that the company sought an ‘intelligent girl’ for its TDO, adding that ‘accuracy with figures [was] essential’. Later advertisements emphasised that new recruits should be no younger than 16 years of age, and had to be good at drawing and arithmetic. By 1946, the Monotype Corporation further stated in its advertisements that the job involved ‘interesting work in a bright, pleasant atmosphere’.

Interviews with former Monotype staff revealed that the women employed in the TDO were generally considered as being better educated than women working in the Matrix Factory — a large department that employed many female staff, who contributed to producing, checking and sorting Monotype faces on a daily basis. Former TDO employee Maureen Mitchell remembers that ‘there was an unspoken distinction between the TDO and the factory staff’. While the latter were recruited from secondary school and essentially completed repetitive tasks, TDO staff typically joined the company after attending grammar school. They had to be skilled and meticulous and were seen as precision workers.

A so-called ’10-inch’ drawing for Monotype Times New Roman lowercase letters a and b. © Monotype archives

Undated photograph of a female drawing clerk in the Monotype TDO. Courtesy of Richard Cooper

Undated photograph of a female drawing clerk in the Monotype TDO. © Monotype Archives

Undated view of the Monotype TDO. Courtesy of Richard Cooper