Stuart and Ian Evans Honoured for 100 Years of Combined Service

Production at the Kettering works stopped this week for a presentation, and the reason had nothing to do with web widths, tonnage or delivery dates. Two brothers had reached a hundred years of service between them.

Giovanni Piazza, Managing Director of Timsons, presented Stuart Evans and Ian Evans with bespoke awards marking their combined century at the company.

What a century on one floor looks like

Presses have been engineered in Kettering since 1896, and the Evans brothers have watched a fair share of that history leave the building. Machine after machine has been assembled, print-tested and shipped to printers around the world while the two of them were on the floor — and a great many of the engineers who built those machines learned the job from them.

A hundred years is not a figure anyone sets out to reach. It accumulates: one shift, one build, one problem worked out at the machine, repeated until the total is large enough to stop for.

The apprenticeship scheme is running again, which means there is now a first-year engineer somewhere in the works whose own long service has quietly started counting.