Caters News Agency is believed to have been founded shortly after the First World War, making it one of the oldest established news agencies in the UK. In fact, it's so established that the company has even been featured in a book, "Copy! Boy!" by former reporter, Peter Deeley, who first joined the company in 1951.

Here Peter gives his own account of Caters:
"Caters News - one of the oldest names in the British freelance news world - has been in existence in some form or other since in the 1920s, telling the world about Birmingham and beyond.

News people don’t often make the news themselves and when Herbert S. Cater left the subs desk at the Evening Despatch (then one of Birmingham’s two evening papers) in 1927 he can’t have envisaged that one day someone would write a book about the freelance news agency he set up.

As an ex-Caters ‘boy’ (in every sense) I did. "COPY! BOY! A ‘black’ from Brum"* carries you on from that moment when young Herbert took the plunge into freelance reporting after he had lost out in a shake-up in the paper‘s editorial department.

So to a degree he was probably pushed to set up on his own. This, mark you! at the very height of the 1920s economic depression when bankrupt businessmen were jumping out of office block windows rather than face ruin.

What kind of a man was this Cater who was to build up the biggest agency of its kind in the country? He came from a family who ran a building business in Barnstaple in the West Country. He served in the tank corps in the first war and by all accounts had a grim time.

At 16, Herbert had left school and joined the Devon and Exeter Gazette as copy and office boy. After the war he moved to the Exeter Echo, went to Nottingham to work as press officer in a government department, then settled in Birmingham as a sub on the Gazette (morning sister paper of the Despatch).

He was above all a very shrewd businessman and took over a small freelance agency whose boss was retiring, renamed it and opened up offices in Upper Priory, close to the Law Courts.

There he began a shorthand-writing section (verbatim writers covering courts and business meetings) a pr unit which extended to writing and publishing monthly magazines for the big Birmingham industrials, a photographic department to serve both industry and newspapers and, of course, a reporters room. There was even a library and a huge collection of Press cuttings.

Cater gathered round him young men in the 1930s who went on to become novelists of some acclaim. He was at the centre of what became known as ‘the Birmingham writers’ group’ and was always happy to employ them if they happened to be hard up. They got the use of his office, telephones, cuttings service and the like and wrote features for him. The profits were shared fifty-fifty between Cater and the writer but he guaranteed them a minimum of £3 a week!

Cater had his fingers in every pie. He was both printer and publisher of books and magazines, ‘cable, telegraph and telephone proprietor, wireless transmitter proprietor and news cuttings agent.’

He led a team of young reporters covering courts, council and football, where it was said he brought "a ferocious energy and an uncanny nose for a news story" to the job.

I can testify to that. When I arrived at Caters as copy/office boy in l951, he was only semi-active and had further branched out into running local weekly newspapers. But by God he terrified this 16 year old! He reminded me of Alfred Hitchcock and his bulbous eyes seemed to bore right through you.

If he caught you idling, a session with his precious Press cuttings was in store. He knew the value of a ‘hardy annual’ better than any gardener. "It’s Bonfire Night soon, lad, let’s see if we can tickle up last year’s stories."

This was a description of Cater as reporter: "he is at his typewriter and has just rushed into the office to meet a deadline so imminent that he has had time to do no more than unbutton his raincoat and push his trilby hat to the back of his head…the ash on the cigarette stuck to his lower lip is over an inch long…."

Maybe it’s difficult to grasp now, but in those days Caters would often get paid ONE OLD PENNY a line, pictures for Fleet Street were taken to the London train by us boys. Alternatively there was a cumbersome system of wiring which involved a phone and a cylindrical drum, sometimes took ages to transmit and often failed.

Most of us started as boys though a very few came in by the back door, as editors’ ‘pets’ or university graduates, but they were largely despised because they never got their hands dirty.

Reporting was almost exclusively a male, white world. There were no training courses let alone university media studies (one child in fifty went to uni. then)

You learnt on the job and on your feet, worked about 50 hours a week, running the copy, carrying typewriters, mopping the floor, managing the ancient telephone switchboard, making the tea and fetching the typists’ cream cakes.

Trade unions were all powerful. I joined the NUJ the day I started and immediately a two shilling (10p) levy was docked from my 30 shillings (£1.50) wage.

We were indentured to Cater as apprentices, our good behaviour vouched for by our parents. In the contract Caters were "the masters" and the apprentice undertook "not to gamble with cards or dice and shall not play unlawful games or frequent taverns." It sounds Dickensian but this was the middle of the 20th century!

But to a boy we all thrived on it. It was said then that once a Caters man you could get a job anywhere. So in that sense things haven’t changed.

*Copies of the book are available from me Peter Deeley, 2, Knapton’s Croft, Market Square, Lower Heyford, Oxon OX25 5NR. Including p/p £6.50 to all journos (£8.50 to others!). Or you can contact me on pknapton@onetel.com