Fakes, forgeries and fabrications give printers a bad name. For centuries, everything from banknotes to artist prints, cup final tickets to branded T-shirts have been surreptitiously produced either by professional criminals using print’s latest technology, or knocked out by amateur crooks on old photocopiers.

　　Forgery is a serious offence. In the past, counterfeiters were punished with death. Today, retribution is simply a prison sentence. But not all counterfeiters are criminals and not all forgeries are illegal; some of the greatest fakes have been produced with the full cognisance and support of the authorities, and the perpetrators have been rewarded for their services to the nation. The stories of these legitimate forgers are an intriguing part of print’s history and are to be commemorated rather than condemned.

　　Brusque but brilliant

　　I first met Roy Kilminster in 1995 when I interviewed him about his pioneering colour masking techniques at the Kynoch Press, Birmingham, where he was head of repro from 1950 to 1979. A slightly gauche and inexorably shy man, Kilminster was economic with his words, sparing with his time and relentlessly difficult to question. But his brusque manner obscured a fascinating story.

　　Kilminster joined V Siviter-Smith’s photolithographic reproduction department in 1933, but at the outbreak of World War Two, he forsook printing and enlisted with 35 Squadron, Bomber Command. Kilminster’s days of active service were shortlived when his plane was shot down over Germany on 7 November 1941. Kilminster was captured and detained in Stalag Luft 1 – a prisoner of war camp for RAF personnel on the German Baltic coast – where he remained until its liberation by the Russians in 1945.

　　Fake documents

　　Kilminster’s peacetime knowledge of printing and graphic repro came into its own when he became the camp’s primary forger. In the Stalag, he was engaged in preparing forged escape papers, manufacturing identity cards, printing passes for leaving the camp or travelling about Germany, replicating letters authorising travel, printing rail tickets and issuing letters purporting to come from relatives in Germany or occupied Europe. It was dangerous, painstaking work produced in adverse circumstances and with rudimentary equipment.

　　“In the early days,” recalled Kilminster, “I only undertook forgery work after the huts had been locked and barred for the night; there was less chance of interruption by German security staff under those circumstances. To carry out the forgery work, a stool and something to serve as a small table were placed on top of a larger table, so that the work could be brought as close as possible under the none too bright electric light. A blanket was draped over the window so that guards patrolling the compound could not see through any chinks in the shutters that were clamped across the windows at night.”

　　Initially, all reproduction was done by hand, with India ink and a fine sable hairbrush. “For this work, we found it impossible to obtain fine enough brushes in Germany. Those we used came from England, which meant six or eight months’ delay in transit. Usually, only a few people had the requisite skills, and forging on a large scale was impossible without mechanical assistance.”

　　The camp’s first mechanical assistance was a duplicator. Although it could not produce high-quality passes, it brought a great increase of output and proved particularly useful in forging typewritten documents, whose 12pt text Kilminster imitated by hand with pen and ink.

　　Access to the duplicator was short-lived as the Germans impounded it. But Kilminster retained some of the duplicating ink and after much experimentation discovered cooking jellies could be used as a duplicator base. “These jellies were one of the luxuries obtained from the rather spasmodic arrival of Red Cross food parcels and, if anything, they gave better results than the original duplicator base.” But the jellies were difficult to work with because they were too soft and unsuccessful attempts were made to harden them with formalin contained in tablets in the sick bay.

　　Jelly duplication

　　However, the jelly duplicator did give excellent results in imitating the impressions of rubber stamps. Previously, Kilminster had unsuccessfully tried to replicate rubber stamps by cutting rubber or lead with a penknife, but the results were too rough. Etching with hydrochloric acid and aluminium extracted from kitchen pans with the resist for the design being painted on with boot polish, candle grease and finally cellulose paint gave passable results.

　　Belatedly, a camera was smuggled into the camp. “Previously, when photographs were required for identity cards and the individual concerned did not possess one, a photograph of another person had to be altered by hand – a tricky business. We used the camera to reproduce passes, but before we could do this, we had to have an extension for the camera, other­wise we could not reproduce to the required size. A further diffi­culty was the printing paper available was not large enough. Printing paper was very difficult to get hold of and was not usually of the required contrast and so gave inferior results.”

　　Kilminster devised several methods of reproducing passes by photography. The first was to photograph the original pass the same size, and after retouching the negative, make the required prints. Sometimes the original pass was unsuitable for direct reproduction because it was in poor condition or printed on dark paper. Then Kilminster had to re-draw the pass by hand and photograph that. Another method was to cut words and letters out of German magazines and patch them together.

　　Photographing passes on coloured paper was a difficult job. “We had to use panchromatic film, which was not easy to handle with our primitive equipment. The Germans could break in any minute on an operation and therefore all our equipment had to be ready for dismantling and disguised in a few seconds.”

　　While the necessities of war made an undercover forger out of Kilminster, war also made a legitimate and state sanctioned counterfeiter out of another British printer.

　　Prior to 1939, Ellic Howe had been a printer and respected typographic historian. But working under the pseudonym Armin Hull, Howe was metamorphosed into a master counterfeiter who was responsible for directing Britain’s forgery operations during World War Two. Howe was born in London of Russian/Jewish parents. He studied history and economics at Oxbridge until 1934, when he turned his interest to the production of books and the history of book printing and binding.

　　In 1941, Howe wrote an article entitled ‘Political warfare and the printed word – a psychological study’. As a result, he was invited to join the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), a government office concerned with psychological warfare that was founded on the initiative of Winston Churchill under the auspices of the Foreign Secretary and the ministers of Economic Warfare and Information. Due to his pre-war print and publishing contacts, Howe was able to arrange the supply of paper and typographic material for the PWE and to oversee the printing of forgeries of German post cards, supply cards and stamps. Howe also trained other counterfeiters to produce documents for agents going behind enemy lines.

　　Howe made all the necessary arrangements for the design and production of PWE forgeries. The Fanfare Press, St Martin’s Lane, London printed the general forgeries, but philately fakes were sent to Waterlow & Sons for watermarking and perforating; Spicer’s supplied the paper; and the Monotype Corporation provided type and other materials. Before the end of the war, Howe and the PWE had produced hundreds of forged German documents. He once remarked that he could supply “anything from a few forged letterheads to several million forged German ration cards”.

　　Two days after war ended, Howe was ordered to destroy all files in his office. As a result, an incredible amount of irreplaceable material on wartime forgery operations was eradicated. Thirty-five years later, when Howe came to write an account of his wartime activities, the Government refused to let him study his own archived official reports and memoranda, which were still classified. However, The Black Game, Howe’s account of his wartime work, was eventually published in 1982 by Michael Joseph, London.

　　War, of course, tests human ingenuity, with some surprising results. Who would have thought Monopoly would act as a real-life ‘get out of jail’ for World War Two prisoners? In 1941, the British Secret Service asked John Waddington to include some added extras to Monopoly sets sent to POWs by the Red Cross. In addition to the usual pieces, a metal file, compass, and silk maps showing safe houses in enemy territories were included in the game and French, German and Italian currency was concealed among the usual Monopoly money. Captured British soldiers and pilots were briefed to look out for the special editions, identified by a red dot in the Free Parking space. Unfortunately, all sets remaining in Britain were destroyed after the war, but it would be nice to think that one of two of the 35,000 prisoners who escaped German prison camps had John Waddington to thank for their freedom.

[时间：2008-05-09  作者：Caroline Archer  来源：互联网|#]