An apprentice printer retches when a putrid soup is poured over him as part of his initiation.
The practice was already an anachronism when - in the spring of 1994 in a street in Clerkenwell, London - photographer Rebecca Michael stumbled across what was possibly the last ever example of this rite. The images she took were published in both The Guardian and The Independent newspapers. In the latter, journalist Jim White wrote the following accompanying text:
“It [used to be] a commonplace sight. Most Fridays, in most of the printing rooms in Fleet Street, a small-scale crucifixion would take place. ‘Banging out’ it was called, the initiation rite which marked the transition from apprentice to fully qualified printer. For four years, he would have cleaned up the mess on the shop floor: his last job as a junior was to clean himself up after filth had been chucked over his head.
It was no spur of the moment event: it took planning. For months, the victim’s colleagues had been brewing up a cocktail in which to immerse the initiate. Tradition dictates that, on the same principle as Orwell’s Room 101, the banging out soup should consist of the fluid the apprentice likes least. Under intense interrogation, the subject of these pictures let slip that he had an aversion to sour milk. So, for three months milk dregs were gathered from around the works and deposited in a specially requisitioned vat. Anything that came to hand was added to spice up the brew: vomit, flour, the contents of ashtrays, urine, ink, glue. By the time it was ready, the stench had eyes watering.
The etiquette of banging out is to accept it with a smile. So, on his last day as an apprentice the 24-year-old stripped almost naked and presented himself to be strapped cross-like to a chair in the works car park. It took 90 minutes to apply the gunk; after which, he was wheeled to a nearby traffic island and left for over two hours, strapped and marooned, for astonished motorists to stare at him. It took a further three hours’ application of industrial quantities of professional cleaning fluids before he was allowed to join his mates for a celebratory pint in the pub.”
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