LPWS & affiliates' Magazines

Before the Internet, our magazines were printed and posted out, here are a selection from the past

Back in the dim distant past, more than 20 years ago, we had to use an old spirit duplicator to publish The Penrose Gazette, the magazine of the Laughing Policeman Wireless Society. We later got our hands on an old off-set printer, and then in 1990, the dawning of Desk Top Publishing and a turning point!

Breakaway!

Sadly, the emergence of Desktop Publishing coincided with splits within the LPWS and several break-away groups started their own magazines. The original Penrose Gazette was in competition with the likes of The Buffoon, The Thin Blue Line, Squeak International, and probably the most widely circulated NOT! The Penrose Gazette. The latter being published by Not! The Laughing Policeman Wireless Society.

In the mid 1990s. due to internal conflict and disagreement about the way the LPWS should act with regard to radio matters and direct action, several breakaway groups were formed, basically with the same goals, but with wildly different ideas of how these goals should be achieved.
As far as I can remember, some of these "groups" seemed to consist of only one or two people, all hell bent on outshining the original LPWS.

Breakaway groups consisted of Not! The Laughing Policeman Wireless Society, The Laughing Policeman Club, and several people fixated with the meddling ex policeman Bodwen, who called themselves the Club For Unlicenced Naughty Telephony Stations (C.U.N.T.S.) rather a good name I thought at the time.

Apart from work "in the field", they all churned out magazines to compete with our original Penrose Gazette, Not The Laughing Policeman Wireless Society were the most successful with their NOT! The Penrose Gazette, which they later agreed to call Squeak International. C.U.N.T.S. had some issues with ex policeman Bodwen, and produced Buffoon and The Thin Blue Line.

After a while, old differences were reconciled and at the 2000 AGM we were all friends again with old differences forgotten, after all, we all had the same general goal.

Publications

From the early days of spirit duplicators, offset Gestetner, on to photocopiers, and then to desk top publishing (a term rarely heard these days) we always produced magazines etc.
Sadly, the passage of time has meant that many of these are no longer in existence, however, like the BBC are gradually finding lost programmes they foolishly wiped, people are finding the odd piece of LPWS literature and sending it in, the most recent arriving in July 2011, the WANTED poster and 3 copies of Thin Blue Line.

We are looking for the flyers and examples of LPWS Christmas Cards, in fact anything relevant will be scanned and listed here. Keep up the hunt please.