The death of John Walter Robert Doran, 82, on September 11 at Frimley Park Hospital of congestive heart failure is something of a milepost, certainly in human terms, of the transition of weekly newspapers.

A printer on the Farnham Herald staff from the time when communities momentarily paused for their record of events over the previous seven days to be announced, Doran reached retirement age just as market towns became able to access their news via 24/7 rolling internet reports.

For more than 40 years Doran, known almost universally as ‘Dolly’, was the boiler-suited pressman responsible for maintaining the machinery and making it ready for the first deadline run on Thursday afternoons.

In pressing the start button, Doran marked one of the moments by which the weekly pace of community life was once measured: the hour when legal announcements became formal, when shoppers could start looking for the latest bargains and house hunters would ring estate agents in the race to book the first viewing of a new listing, when schools announced students’ academic achievements, when local sports clubs’ performance boosted pride or induced despair, and when the social, political and criminal events of the preceding days were placed in the public domain.

Six hours of what would look to the uninitiated as near-pandemonium would follow the time Dolly pushed the red “run” button, first to bring the press into slow motion to check the register, then dial it up to 12,000 copies an hour, literally shaking the foundations of the Herald’s pressroom and sending the rhythmic, low hum of heavy machinery down Harts Walk to late afternoon shoppers in West Street.

Scores of the first regular readers received the sound as their cue to turn into the newspaper’s front office and purchase a copy, the warmth of having been run through the press and smell of wet ink lingering in the paper.

Doran’s assignment started a choreograph of frenetic activity in the office hive. When he rolled the press some 100 employees of the Herald – reporters, editors, advertising representatives, typesetters, compositors, platemakers, a mainly female team handling, sorting and hand-inserting the pre-printed real estate section into the front section, and the van drivers – would converge on the pressroom to wait for the result of their previous seven days’ labour.

As Dolly and his crew tended to breaks in the newsprint web, changed reels and replated for the late editions – all the while keeping an eye on the clock – 35,000 copies would be handed over to the carriers for distribution across southwest Surrey and north Hampshire by the late dinner hour.

Modest about his role at the paper, Dolly’s knowledge of the machinery in his care and his familiarity with its operation was such that his counsel would be sought by the Herald’s late proprietor, Sir Ray Tindle, when printing matters became a topic of business, and the two remained on familiar terms long after they stepped away from the working day.

His was the role of 1,000 pressman across the country, and Dolly was Farnham’s singular contribution to a profession which has now largely passed from local history. Portly, sporting an elegant Van Dyke, and always prepared to doff his cap or open a door for the ladies, Dolly was one of Farnham town’s most recognisable figures, known if not by name then by reputation as “the man who prints the paper”.

Ink flowed in his veins and in whatever activity he engaged, Farnham’s rugby and cricket scenes, local theatre (including a season in which he shaved his trademark beard to be a pantomime dame), assemblies of local whippet fanciers or beating at local shoots, Dolly was always identified as the Herald’s representative.

Born in London near Elephant and Castle in 1940, Dolly and his sister Mabel, known as “Bunty,” moved with their parents to Farnham during the war.

He could recall sitting on the doorstep of The Six Bells pub, sipping lemonade and watching the eastern sky flash orange from the bombs falling on London while his father enjoyed a pint with colleagues.

Resident in Farnham for the remainder of his life and an active participant in the Scouts, and later the Frensham cricket and Alton rugby clubs, he acquired a young buck’s wanderlust and with a friend once packed an ailing VW Beetle with enough grub and gear for a zig-zag road trip to Morocco. The expedition didn’t make it across the Strait of Gibraltar, but a sufficient amount of Europe was taken in to satisfy his desire to travel until trips to Sheffield became a regular feature in his life.

Those were to be with the family of Sue Matthews, his new Yorkshire wife, a hockey-playing schoolteacher he met at a party for one of her teaching colleagues and who became an equally well-recognised figure in Farnham after they made a home and pursued their professions. Sue predeceased Dolly in 2018.

Their son Richard has remained a Farnhamian and with his wife Nicki Mullins has raised Dolly’s grandsons, Caspar and Rufus, to continue the family’s devotion to town sports activities.

After Richard left home, a touch of wanderlust was reignited and Dolly and Sue made journeys to northern Sweden, to the near continent and to the United States in addition to their regular forays north of the Watford Gap.

Some of those trips were to Crufts, after Sue collared animal-loving Dolly into the pursuit of showing whippets and greyhounds.

The Herald will never have a newspaper press in a town centre premises again as a result of the change to outsource printing to centralised, dedicated factories, a trend which rapidly picked up speed as Dolly entered his final decade of employment at 114 West Street. An age of community communications ended when he and his fellow pressmen moved with the press to the Monkton Park Industrial Estate for almost two decades before newspaper printing left Farnham forever in the early 2000s.

With Dolly’s passing only a few of his workmates from the pressroom remain above ground.

But at the wake following his funeral service on Wednesday, October 19, at the Farnham Rugby Club, many of those left were able to reminisce and exchange tales – some of them inevitably quite tall – about an era of manic Thursday afternoons when, for just a short while, Farnham paused for its history to be put on record as Dolly pushed the red button.