He had no previous experience, having arrived in Masterton courtesy of a £10 boat fare from England.
The big skill, he said, is reading backwards fluently.
He waved the editor over for a try. Interestingly, the read is right to left and letters are backwards. Working out the logic, and the meaning of the sentences, starts making the editor's head ache.
Mr Bailey explained how a machine would create a "line" of type by lowering brass letter keys into a mould. When a line was complete, lead would pump in, and a small block representing one line would be created.
He would then stack the lines, with blank pieces of metal for spacing.
Once all the advertisements were assembled within a block, he would shuffle and move the type to balance and tidy it, so it properly filled a page.
"Important parts of the ad had to be spaced out," he said.
"Each line, you read from right to left, and it took me a wee while to learn how to do that.
"If you put a mirror up in front of it, it would read normally - but we didn't do that.Once I had conquered reading it, I sped up, and it would take about 20 or 30 minutes to put together."
When a page was made up, he would wheel it over to a machine called a "Winkler".
"The guy, he would put a paper mache over the entire page, then a few blankets on top, and put it under a compressor.
"The impression would come on to the papier mache."
Then the papier mache mould was taken to another machine with a semi-circular mould.
Hot lead was poured in, to create a semi-circular plate.
The rough edges were trimmed, and the plate would be fastened to the printing press.
Mr Bailey said the press could take up to 32 plates, but the weight was restrictive.
"Usually we would do 16 or 20 plates."
He hardly ever did front pages, but he said the classifieds were a "very sensitive" page.
"If you got something wrong, they would soon phone up."
He qualified after seven years as a tradesman.
"I was qualified, sometimes I would go too fast, and you could misread something.
"The foreman would say, you made an error.
"I would say, I was under pressure, I had to get that page out."
It was also his job to preserve contract ads, for reuse, and to keep an eye on them if the soft lead wore down.
All the other type would get broken up and remelted for next time.
Lead poisoning was not thought about back then, he said.
Mr Bailey retired after 37 years as a compositor, but stayed on as a cleaner.
Did that seem like a demotion, asked the editor.
Mr Bailey shrugged.
"I had served all that time, I didn't mind."
He was a cleaner for 11 more years.
"It was just to keep the income coming in, just to keep in exercise, and just to keep in touch with people."
