The world of hot metal meets the world of the silicon chip in deepest Hampshire.

That’s where the Mew Milton Advertiser and Lymington Times are produced with the aid of e-mail and the Internet – and a John Deere tractor engine to turn the press.

Both papers are created using hot metal on a Hoe Viscount Crabtree Di-litho press rescued from a scrap dealer. It was snapped up after the Lancashire Evening Post threw it out in the late 1980s.

And before that the papers relied on a 1903 four-unit rotary press, which also ran on a diesel engine before it was transformed into 35 tons of scrap.

Perhaps the reason the papers sell for a reasonable 20p is down to the fact that even today the proprietor only spends £8-a-week on diesel to run the press!

The papers are put together at a congested site of three houses and three sheds. In one of them, linotype machines line one of the rooms.

Some of the staff have been there 40 years and are well versed in their dying art. Any update of machinery to allow text production to take advantage of the more advanced photosetting process might mean some of the loyal staff would have to go – so it’s not high up on the list of things to do.

Proprietor Charles Curry very much runs the show at New Milton. He’s nudging 80 now and took over the firm from his father, also Charles, who invested £1,000 in 1932 to become a partner.

Mr Curry, who left school without any qualifications, is responsible for upholding the traditions and values of the Advertiser and Times and his titles include editor, printer and publisher.

Under his stewardship even the look of the paper takes readers back to days gone by, with the broadsheet-style giving a solid, trustworthy feel to the news.

Mr Curry said: “I didn’t particularly want to go into it – I probably would never have got a job as a journalist or engineer. But I don’t think I could have done any job that was so profitable or interesting.”

But he obviously made the right choice, with the combined weekly circulation of 23,000 showing how their popularity persists in the face of more slick, up-to-date competition from papers like The Daily Echo.

News editor Angus Hollington said: “We’ve moved on a bit in recent years, and continue to do so, with more and more use of computers.

“We’re all working on word processors now, for example!

“One of the biggest changes is that we have e-mail now and get copy for adverts, photographs and news from our MPs through that. There’s also the Internet available for looking at Hansard and other resources.”

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