OH-4315_AngelaCooper_e07.mp3

Luchia Fitzgerald: [00:00:00] Well, yes, I decided to they were looking for somebody down at to train up down at the what they described as an underground press, and I went along and asked if I could, you know, and I trained to use the machines because I didn’t have any skills. And so, yeah, they trained me up and I got to a job..

Dr. Sarah Feinstein: [00:00:20] What was the what was the press?

Luchia Fitzgerald: [00:00:23] Offset litho, though it was called Moss Side Press. It was an underground press and it was in the Nello James Centre on Withington Road. And I think Vanessa Redgrave…

Luchia Fitzgerald: [00:00:34] Which was a black community centre, and the press was down in the basement. And I think Vanessa Redgrave’s had bought the house and dedicated it to the local community, didn’t they, to do whatever. So and some of the lads knew the local community and people there and they said, yeah, you can have the the basement. So they rented the basement. And so I was training away in there and basically speaking, that’s where I realised after nine months or so that they were thinking they might close it down because then everybody was opening up all these little printers and they weren’t doing that well, et cetera, et cetera.

Luchia Fitzgerald: [00:01:18] So I thought I went home and I said to Angela, Do you know what I said? You know, all that money we’re spending on leaflets, and la dee da…I said they’re thinking of closing down the press to cut a long story short. And they ended up saying, yes, I can take all the machinery in the business. And I said, would you be interested in, you know, getting together and making a women’s print shop or women’s print in that thing? And she said, yeah, we could give it a go.

Luchia Fitzgerald: [00:01:46] So anyway to cut another long story. So we got all of this stuff out of there and brought us over to another place in Moss Side that was quite cheap to rent. And we set up the women’s press there and we had one of the black women from Moss Side at the time came in and she was all trained up in that. And then we got the black women’s, which started training some black women at the time to start up their own black women’s press. And myself and Angela and a group of women ran that process successfully for 17 years, wasn’t it? Was it? Was it 12? I thought I thought it was 17…

Angela Cooper: [00:02:25] You might have been involved with it for that length of time.

Luchia Fitzgerald: [00:02:27] Oh, well, I was involved in it for 17..

Angela Cooper: [00:02:29] … you were going for a long time before that happened, you know, because you learnt your skills, but it was Amazon…. We decided to call it Amazon Press because we could and and we got a design that I’d found in California by that point. And it was like a woman on a horse…