'How long do you think we'll have to wait?', said a young lady to me. I had noticed her on the train before, pretty, neatly dressed, including the white cotton gloves which were fashionable at the time. We stayed together until a train arrived to take us on to Epping, and walked together as far as the road where I lived. She lived a bit further on. By that time I had asked her to go to the cinema with me, to the Regal at Edmonton to see 'The Pumpkin Eater'. Our next date was to the Motor Show at Earls Court, to which I had free tickets. After that Ros and I saw each other every day, both on the train in the evening and at her parents' home later. She was unable to spend any length of time in my parents' house as she was allergic to their two dogs and the cat.

It quickly became understood that we would eventually marry, and after looking at what other studios were paying I approached John Rooke for a rise in order to save a deposit for a house. He felt unable to help, so I obtained a job as a printer with H.J. Hare and Son, in Lincoln's Inn Fields.

This was a slightly larger company, housed in a dingy basement, again very cramped. I had been the only printer at Verity Press, but at Hares there were four printers, including one making large prints with a horizontal enlarger. The work was rather different, being mainly industrial photography. One client was Rediffusion Television and their 6pm 'Today' programme transmitted from what is now St Catherine's House at the bottom of Kingsway. For this we made 15x12inch prints and large background prints, all done on the afternoon of transmission. The background prints usually had to be delivered wet straight into the studio as there was no time to dry them.

I wasn't very happy there, at first. John Rooke's philosophy had been that if you have nothing to do, then do nothing. At Hares you always had to look busy, even if there was no work.

But I stuck with it, for the money if nothing else, and things eventually improved. The company moved to another basement, this time much larger and cleaner, in Africa House in Kingsway. It was a large open area which had just been vacated by the RAF Cinema Corporation, and had to be partitioned off to provide darkrooms, a large studio and an office. And at the same time I became the Manager.

In Lincoln's Inn Fields one printer had been trained to make colour prints, a very slow and laborious process then with equipment only capable of making small prints. In our new premises a large multi-purpose processing drum was installed, later supplemented by two Colorapid processors for prints and Ektachrome transparencies. With the advent of the C-41 colour negative process and fast-drying resin coated colour paper quality and speed of production improved enormously. And our photography was increasingly being shot in colour.

With our improved processing capabilities we took on more TV work, notably captions for Thames Television's 'This is Your Life'. For this we would be given photographs and other material related to that night's subject, which would be photographed onto 35mm Ektachrome and returned to the studio together with slides for the credits captions and a large portrait print by the end of the afternoon. We also provided slides and prints for Independent Television News, for such events as the Olympic Games and the Apollo Moon Missions.

Ros and I became engaged in May 1966, and arranged our wedding for September 1967.

In May 1967 we took our first holiday together, a Cosmos coach trip to Switzerland. No overnight travel this time. We stayed in Victoria overnight for a 7am start from Victoria coach station to catch a ferry from Folkestone. In Ostend a coach took us to Aachen, in Germany, after a late lunch stop in Brussels. From Aachen we travelled down the Rhine, partly by boat, to an overnight stop in the Black Forest in a hotel infested with mosquitos.

Lunch next day was taken at Rhine Falls, on the border with Switzerland, before travelling on to our hotel at Kastanienbaum on the lakeside a few miles from Lucerne. After a week exploring this beautiful area we returned via a couple of nights in Paris, where Ros developed a cold and had to spend a few days in bed at my parents' house when we arrived home, as her parents were away on holiday in Scotland.

To be continued...