- 3 months ago
Category
ðº
TVTranscript
00:00The telephone. How could we live without it?
00:25I think it's abominable. I think it's costly. And I think it's a thundering nuisance.
00:30Incredibly, there was a time when phones weren't pocket-sized wireless devices, but bulky objects, wired into our homes and workplaces. Historians call this distant era the age of the landline.
00:44Over the course of a hundred years, engineers rolled out a communications network that joined up Britain. A web of more than 70 million miles of wire.
00:57One of the most ambitious engineering projects in British history. Yet telephones were initially regarded with suspicion.
01:05Who is going to answer the telephone? Will there be improper conversations between the maids and gentlemen callers?
01:15They were agents of social change. They were looking for educated, well-spoken young ladies who would be able to enunciate clearly.
01:23Number please. Thank you.
01:26But when you wanted a phone, you often couldn't get one.
01:30They said, well, sorry, you know, bad luck, Sean. In two years' time, you might get a telephone.
01:36This is the story of the battle to build Britain's phone network. The heroes...
01:42He said, tradesmen to the rear. I said, does the doctor go to the rear? He said, no. I said, I'm a doctor of telephones.
01:49And heroines. It was really comical trying to have a tin hat on with these things stuck to your ear.
01:55The disappointments.
01:57You would shout down the phone in the hope that they would put the phone down so the line would be restored and you could actually use it yourself.
02:04And dreams.
02:06Well, don't you think it would be rather fun? Don't you think anybody who goes up 500 feet would like a panoramic view of the greatest capital in the world just spread out in front of them?
02:15And why it is that now, when we're more connected than ever, it's not the telephone that's keeping us on the landline.
02:34In 1877, inventor Alexander Graham Bell sailed by steamship from America to Britain, the land he once called home.
02:49He'd come to showcase a revolutionary new electric device that was taking the US by storm.
02:55The telephone.
03:00At Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, Bell faced his sternest test yet.
03:05The stakes were high as he awaited the audience for his latest demonstration.
03:09He had to impress none other than Queen Victoria.
03:13This, no doubt, entirely historically accurate film from the 1930s sets out Bell's meeting with the Queen,
03:23who politely makes no mention of the Scottish inventor's strangely American accent.
03:29I think you had better speak into it. After all, one does not converse with a wire.
03:38Beatrice, Major Phipps, come closer. Listen.
03:42If you please, ma'am, we're ready to begin.
03:45You may proceed.
03:47Sir Thomas Bidoff?
03:49Yes, I'm here.
03:51That is Sir Thomas' voice.
03:54Bell's telephone arrived at exactly the right moment. The rise of the office, a new phenomenon in Victorian society, had created an eager market of businessmen.
04:06There are legal changes to the notion of company. And the modern corporation is born at that time legally. And with it is somewhere for it to live. An office block in America, a skyscraper. So you suddenly, you need to be able to talk to each other.
04:25Queen Victoria was amused enough to buy two devices from Bell, and the telephone was away. Flush with royal approval, Bell and his partners set up a firm imaginatively named The Telephone Company.
04:42The fledgling service provided the most basic of systems. The first subscribers could only make calls to the other end of their own phone lines.
04:50Telephone communications were private circuits, point to point, which is to say they connected floors in a big house or in a factory. There was no network, no public network as such, no telephone exchanges.
05:03They were sold as private instruments, initially by Alexander Graham Bell's agent, Colonel Reynolds, who came across the Atlantic on a steamship with a bag full of these telephone instruments, which he sold to the very wealthy and to businessmen.
05:16As the potential for telephones in Britain became clear, Bell's company was joined by myriad competitors in a technological wild west.
05:26But businesses wanted to talk directly to their suppliers and customers. So the phone companies began to create networks of telephone lines, connected by exchange switchboards.
05:41Early phones didn't have dials, so calls were put through by an operator.
05:47Hello, what do you want?
05:49The operator would physically have to take a plug, an electrical plug, and plug your wires into a socket, which was then the two wires connecting to the person that you wanted to speak to.
06:04Networks began to spring up in commercial centres across the country, a tangled web of cutting edge engineering and financial opportunism. But progress wasn't pretty.
06:16So if you looked up in the sky, you would actually see this cobweb of wires criss-crossing the streets.
06:23The height, the danger of actually putting men up there to put the cables in, the risk when it snowed.
06:32With snow falling on those wires creating a lot of weight, would sometimes bring telegraph poles and some of the derricks would actually collapse.
06:39The sprawling mass of wires expanded as fast as the companies could put them in.
06:46The network was changing the face of our cities.
06:50But what started out as a service for businesses soon began to stray into other areas of Victorian life, where it wasn't anywhere near as welcome.
07:04In Victorian society, the home was sacrosanct. Here, telephones were treated with outright suspicion. A whiff of scandal clung to the wires.
07:23Who is going to answer the telephone? Will there be improper conversations between the maids and gentlemen callers?
07:35Obviously, it was also lunacy, you know, fake news lunacy, i.e. will I catch a cold if I answer the telephone and other people, the person at the other end has a cold?
07:44There was that was going on. But there was a very real sense that this was a leveller, a social leveller, and that that was really not necessarily a terribly good thing.
07:56Gradually, though, the changing view of the telephone as something that could be tolerated by the wealthy, if not exactly cherished, was reflected in new handset designs for the Edwardian era.
08:08A bit like the camera, the early telephone started as a kind of scientific experiment, the sort of thing you might find in the lab at Cambridge University, mahogany and brass and bits of wine, huge dials and details like that.
08:21And the big leap, I suppose, was the candlestick, which turned this piece of engineering equipment into something that you'd actually give house room to, a consumer object, you might say.
08:31The stylish design of the candlestick encouraged the domestic use of telephones, but they would only be seen in the wealthiest of homes.
08:40If the rest of society wanted to get their hands on a telephone, they were going to have to work for it. Literally.
08:47At the heart of the telephone network were the exchanges. They were run by switchboard operators, who helped keep the system going for nearly a century.
09:06At first, the phone companies used young messenger boys to connect the calls, but it soon became apparent that this was a bad idea.
09:17Very quickly the boys were dispensed with because they seemed to be too rude and cheeky to customers.
09:23Instead, phone companies started recruiting women en masse.
09:28This change is actually creating respectable jobs for lower middle class girls.
09:38So women are joining the workforce as exchange operators, telephone operators. It's a respectable job for a woman.
09:47And that is not an inconsiderable factor in the changing way we were organising society at this time.
09:54There's a really simple reason why women were operators. It's because they were cheaper workers than the men.
10:01So there were also preferences for the sort of cultured, civilised, soothing tones of the hello girl, the female telephone operator.
10:17The phone companies had very particular requirements.
10:20The phone companies were looking for telephone operators who would be able to answer in a particular manner.
10:25They were looking for educated, well-spoken young ladies who would be able to enunciate clearly and say number please when you called up.
10:33So they had this imagined middle class style worker, although in fact lots of varieties of women went into that profession.
10:41Women would be recruited as operators for decades to come.
10:45They obviously took notice of your speaking voice because you needed to speak clearly.
10:52A light would come on in front of the operator. We would put a plug into that hole next to your light and say number please.
11:01Number please. Thank you.
11:05So you had an experienced telephonist sit with you for a week or so.
11:09And they very rarely said number please. It was always rubber knees.
11:13Go ahead please.
11:17If you wanted to go to the toilet, you had to put your hand up and ask the assistant supervisor, can I have an urgent or a run through?
11:30And you weren't allowed off that board until there was a vacancy for you to go.
11:37There was one funny call which I only remembered the other day.
11:42I walked back into the switchroom from a break and one of the operators said,
11:45you'll never guess what I've just had to look for.
11:47She said, I spent hours looking for the Countess of Air.
11:50Countess of Air, I've looked everywhere. Do you think I could find it?
11:54And eventually, in desperation, you would ask them to spell it.
11:58It turned out to be the County Surveyor.
12:02She had a bit of a plum, this lady.
12:13For the first few decades of its existence, the telephone was the exclusive preserve of businesses and wealthy households.
12:20But places began to spring up where anybody could use one.
12:24Early phone boxes, known as public call offices or silence cabinets.
12:31Some of them were, believe it or not, attendant operated.
12:34So they would be manned. The attendant would open the call box for you to go in.
12:39They would make the call connection for you.
12:41They would take your payment and then they would close the door behind you whilst you made your telephone call.
12:47Others had coin boxes on them, which actually required you to put 2p or 3p into the box before you made your call.
12:55Believe it or not, when you walked into a silent cabinet, the floor moved and the roof lifted, so it was ventilated.
13:02Very man, we're talking about a time when people's personal hygiene was as good as it is today.
13:07And therefore, people would spit into the microphone and those sorts of things.
13:11It wasn't long before a love-hate relationship with phone boxes began to develop.
13:17One of the earliest reports of kiosk vandalism, phone box vandalism, was Samuel Wortski in 1907,
13:25who got really annoyed because he'd gone into a call box, inserted the money.
13:32The operator claimed that they hadn't heard him insert this money.
13:36He knew he had, so he got absolutely riled by this and set about wrecking the phone box apparatus.
13:45And they say he'd cost 19 shillings worth of damage to the phone box.
13:50But strangely, when he was brought to court, the magistrates obviously took pity on him and only fined him one shilling.
13:57And there we are, vandalism begins.
14:00In 1912, the private phone networks were all taken over by the general post office,
14:09which was the branch of government in charge of communications.
14:13This effectively nationalised the whole system.
14:16Phone boxes came in a multitude of shapes and sizes,
14:20but the GPO wanted to spread telephones as widely as they could.
14:24So in 1920, they tried to come up with a standard design
14:28that could be rolled out across the whole country.
14:31But they were soon to learn how hard it was to please the public.
14:35They introduced in 1921 the first design, which they called the K-1.
14:42K-1, first of all, is reinforced concrete.
14:45It has a door with windows in it.
14:49On that it would say public telephone.
14:51It would also say always open.
14:54Try as they might, the GPO couldn't please everyone with the K-1.
15:00In Eastbourne, the council wanted a phone box to fit in with the bowling club pavilion.
15:06So the GPO gave it a thatched roof.
15:09But the K-1 just wasn't doing the trick.
15:12So in 1924, the GPO tried again.
15:15This time they got it right. Nearly.
15:18A new competition was held to design, yet again, a standard kiosk.
15:24The winner of that was Sir Giles Gilbert Scott,
15:27who produced what became Britain's second standard design, the K-2.
15:31And it was radically different to anything which had gone before.
15:34As an architect, he saw this kiosk, this phone box, as a miniature building.
15:40It has a lovely domed roof, which they say he took inspiration from the Soane Memorial
15:48in St Pancras Old Churchyard in London.
15:50It's a cast iron construction, so you've got moulded columns, architectural features.
15:56You have a telephone sign, opaque glass back illuminated at the top.
16:01It looked imposing, but the K-2 was too expensive to be installed anywhere outside the capital.
16:07So to celebrate the King's Silver Jubilee in 1935, the GPO had one more try.
16:14The General Post Office once again turned to Sir Giles Gilbert Scott,
16:18and what he produced has really become Britain's ubiquitous red phone box, the K-6.
16:25The K-6 had the stylish features of the K-2, but it was smaller and cheaper to make.
16:32It is well proportioned. The domed roof from the Soane Memorial is preserved.
16:39But there was one thing about this new phone box that many people really didn't like.
16:45That shocking un-British red colour.
16:49Countryside campaigners demanded a rural version.
16:55Initially insisting on a colour that was much more appropriate to this green and pleasant land.
17:01Grey.
17:04And then there was Hull.
17:06Kingston-upon-Hull was the only municipality that remained independent from the GPO's telephone network.
17:12And it had its own ideas about colour schemes.
17:18If you are from Hull, then your identity as a person from Hull is slightly bound up with the telephone system.
17:25The cream phone box is really the icon of the city.
17:31And you will still see them everywhere.
17:33You can buy little biscuit tins in the shape of a cream phone box.
17:38If you see the cream phone box, you know that you're home.
17:42It's extraordinary how versatile the K-6 turned out to be.
17:46In rural communities, the red phone box on the edge of the village was the place which kept the place going.
17:51People actually would go out and use it to communicate.
17:53In cities, it fitted in all kinds of sensitive architectural environments.
17:58They were great.
18:00They belonged to an era when we still believed in privacy.
18:03I'm so sorry to keep you waiting.
18:06Not at all.
18:07The smartphone might put you in constant contact, but it also means everyone knows where you are.
18:13If you're a spy or planning a bit of adultery, forget it with a mobile phone.
18:18K-6 is a much better bet.
18:28The Post Office had reached a crossroads by the 1930s.
18:32The business world had felt the benefit of telephones, but only the wealthiest actually had one in their home.
18:39Calls were just frankly too expensive.
18:42And there wasn't enough of an appetite in Britain to pay those high tariffs.
18:48So the Post Office had two tasks.
18:50They had to increase the numbers of people using the service.
18:54And the way to do that was to reduce those costs.
18:58But by increasing the number of people who were using telephones,
19:01they could also release more money into developing better equipment for the public.
19:09So the GPO turned their attention to the aspiring middle classes.
19:14Despite the Great Depression, their living standards were on the rise.
19:18But it was going to take an enormous effort to convince them to get hooked up.
19:23The first step was to make the telephone itself an object of desire.
19:28The real change came with the introduction of the new plastics in the 1920s.
19:34Because that meant you could make a one-piece moulded body.
19:38The all-in-one pyramid phone is something that you can actually relate to.
19:42It's the start of it as an object rather than something which is fitting into its setting.
19:46You could see it's time. It was actually that moment in Art Deco was giving way to modernity.
19:52And so the new look of the phone was something which actually did hint at this modern world.
19:57But these new phones had more than just panache. They also had a dial.
20:09This meant you could make local calls by yourself without the need to go through an operator.
20:14Automatic exchanges allowed the GPO to massively increase the number of people on the network.
20:21But they didn't come cheap.
20:25The government through the post office had invested hugely in the telephone network.
20:30At one point in the late 20s they were opening a new automated telephone exchange once a week.
20:36Instead of thousands of operators, row after row of electro-mechanical switches connected the calls.
20:45The system was invented in the 1890s by an undertaker from Kansas called Allman B. Stroudger.
20:53When his business went through a lean period, Stroudger discovered that the local telephone operator was the wife of his rival,
21:00who put anyone phoning up for an undertaker through to her husband.
21:05Peeved in the extreme, Stroudger set about making a machine that replaced operators entirely.
21:12He gets very worried that the women in the patch exchange, right, have power.
21:18So somebody rings up and says, I want to talk to an undertaker.
21:21Come to think of it, it's exactly the argument about Facebook and Google
21:26and what comes up if you punch something in.
21:29So this guy would say, I am losing business.
21:35Here's how it worked.
21:37When you selected a number, an electrical contact would generate a series of impulses as you let go of the dial.
21:44So the number nine gave out nine impulses.
21:47The number three gave out three.
21:49These went to the exchange, where the impulses drove a series of selector switches,
21:55one for each number you dialed, and they connected you to the right line.
21:59Here, on the distribution frame, is the converging point of 10,000 pairs of private telephone lines.
22:10The sheer cost of automation meant it took decades to roll out.
22:14Manual operators would still be around until the 1970s.
22:18But Stroudger's machine had other consequences, like creating more jobs for the boys.
22:25The telephone exchange is now a machine.
22:28So a whole new generation of telephone engineers have to be trained on the understanding of the Stroudger system.
22:37They have to be trained on how to maintain it.
22:40So you now find that telephone exchanges have their resident engineering staff,
22:45who have to look after this machine and care for it 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
22:51With new phones, exchanges and an expanding network, the post office was ready to attract new subscribers.
22:58But to make the phone as ubiquitous as the letter, the GPO needed to get its message out there.
23:04By the end of the 1920s, early 30s, up to 25% of the network was not being used.
23:11The whole situation changed, really, with the appointment of Clement Attlee as Postmaster General,
23:16for only a few months in 1931.
23:18But he saw immediately that the post office had to change its whole approach.
23:22He brought in Stephen Talents, who was a pioneer in publicity.
23:27He brought in press advertising.
23:29He commissioned artists to produce very colourful artwork.
23:33A lot of the artwork which they submitted was very imaginative, very leading edge, very modernist, almost Bauhaus.
23:40He also worked with young filmmakers and established the GPO film unit.
23:44So it was a big push to really change the look of the post office to attract new subscribers.
23:53Do not abandon a call without allowing a reasonable time for a distant subscriber to answer.
23:58The GPO had begun its campaigns at a time when the competition for middle class cash was heating up.
24:07The radio was becoming popular. Cars were cheaper than ever before.
24:11The telephone needed to boost its credentials as an essential service for everyday life, particularly in an emergency.
24:19A tragic house fire in 1935 led to criticism that the phone system performed poorly in a crisis.
24:32What was needed was a dedicated number, a shortcut to the emergency services.
24:38What should I do?
24:40Oh!
24:41Dial nine, double nine.
24:51Higher!
24:52Oh, thank you.
25:02The question arose, what number to give it?
25:04It couldn't be a one because the post office technicians, the engineers, were concerned that there's more chance of a missed dial or the equipment not working correctly if the first digit dial is a one.
25:19They wanted another distinctive number and it was decided it would be nine, but then nine, nine, nine. Why not nine, one, one? I don't think anybody knows.
25:34But it was the phone as a source of instant information that really impressed the public.
25:39In 1936, the GPO again showcased its technical prowess and eye for publicity to launch the most famous service of all, the speaking clock.
25:52The speaking clock was designed by E. Spate at the post office research station in Dollishill, which was in northwest London.
26:07And he brought a new way of recording sound to disk and it was recording the voice onto glass plates, which were then synchronized and when a phone call was made, it intercepted that signal and told the time.
26:24In order to promote the service, they had a competition called The Girl with the Golden Voice.
26:28But there was a slight problem. The winner's voice made it hard to distinguish between certain numbers.
26:35At the third stroke, it will be 4.33 and 40 seconds.
26:40It was won by a London telephonist, Ethel Cain, and she became Jane Cain and took up a film contract.
26:49It has to be said that when the engineer who made the recordings, Eugene Wender, who designed the optical disc system that the clock was using, heard the voice and said,
26:59well, this is unsatisfactory. Can we have the runner up?
27:02And they said, no, you can't because there's been so much publicity about Jane Cain that you're stuck with her.
27:08And she had a slight speech defect, which the judges hadn't noticed.
27:13I'm thrilled, absolutely thrilled to have won this competition.
27:16So if you want to know the time, there's no need now to ask a policeman. Just give me a ring sometime.
27:22And Wender had to spend a lot of time working on those optical soundtracks with Indian ink, just changing the shape of the soundtracks to get rid of this speech defect.
27:34And there still were complaints for years afterwards that you couldn't distinguish between 30 and 40.
27:42The British attitude to telephones was being transformed. More and more people wanted to join the network and the GPO encouraged them.
27:59But the failure to deliver on their promises would haunt the service for a generation.
28:05With the outbreak of World War Two, the drive to get the masses connected came to a sudden grinding halt.
28:22The telephone network was redirected away from civilian use to serve military needs.
28:30After a decade of being constantly encouraged to make calls, the public was now told to get off the line as quickly as possible.
28:37The 1930s advertising was so successful that the network was at capacity, and the network was needed for the war effort.
28:47The Post Office introduced a whole range of posters with messages like, be brief, telephone less, telegraph less, don't phone if a letter will do, because the network was needed for military purposes.
29:03The demand for new lines was relentless.
29:09There were so many new installations to put in. All the arms of the services, all the new airfields, all needed to have their telephone systems,
29:18and also other landline communication networks for radio systems, and the Post Office did all of those.
29:24Keeping the network going was a major concern. Telephone operators found themselves at the spearhead of the GPO's war on the home front.
29:35Jean Toms began working as an operator in 1940.
29:39When the air raid went, we just put on our tin hats, it was as simple as that.
29:44Which were, looking back on it, pretty useless.
29:48Because it wasn't the bombing that bothered most of us, because if the bomb dropped, I mean, that was it.
29:53It was the shrapnel coming from our own guns, then falling on these tin hats.
29:58Wouldn't have had any impression at all, they would have gone straight through, but it made you feel better.
30:02Even getting to work could be a challenge.
30:07We turned the corners to go to work, and there was a land mine up in the tree outside the building.
30:12The Germans used to drop these things by parachute, and they were exactly like the mines that you see at sea.
30:18So there was no work that day. There was poor police officers standing there waiting for the bomb disposal squad to arrive.
30:25Jean was moved from a local system to the Central London Faraday Exchange, one of the largest in the country.
30:33It was quite quiet. You could hear a hum, but never any real noise.
30:40Not unless the air raid siren went, and then, of course, everybody ran to put our tin hats on,
30:45which was really comical, trying to have a tin hat on with these things stuck to your ear.
30:49With the German bombing campaign in full flow, operators had to keep calm and carry on.
30:56We didn't go anywhere. People still wanted telephone calls.
31:00And, of course, in Faraday, they were all long-distance calls, of course, that's why we were there.
31:05And some of the calls were very urgent. We had the Air Ministry, War Office, Admiralty,
31:11all their switchboards came through to us. Sometimes we couldn't get a call through.
31:15If we'd had a bad raid on London, we had no lines out. We had to find those that we got.
31:21And I have actually called to Glasgow via Cornwall and then to Wales,
31:25because they were the only ones that had lines.
31:28But in wartime, with many calls urgent in one way or another,
31:32determining who should be put through first wasn't easy.
31:36I must get through straight away.
31:38The people who were entitled to Priorities One and Two were no problem at all.
31:44It was those who thought that they were very important,
31:47who, with a bit of luck, would have Priority Three.
31:50And I'll call him Major Smith, which wasn't his name, and he was a terror.
31:55You had to be extremely polite, of course, but tell them that it wasn't his job.
31:59You're holding up vital war work.
32:02But Major Smith, he was definitely my nemesis.
32:08Not all calls from Army personnel were about operational matters.
32:12Ordinary soldiers often wanted to speak to loved ones from phone boxes.
32:17That was the thing I disliked most, cutting a serviceman off after three minutes.
32:21He was talking to his wife or his children, whatever.
32:24That was the worst bit.
32:26Occasionally, you would risk and letting them stay.
32:30Fortunately, I never got caught.
32:33In the exchange, news about the progress of the war travelled fast.
32:38I was on duty the morning of the day.
32:41The rumour rang through the exchange,
32:44they've landed, and no, they haven't.
32:46And I don't know who found out.
32:47By the time they'd actually landed, we knew they were on the way.
32:49With the end of the war, thousands returned to civilian life.
32:55But it wouldn't be business as usual.
32:57Austerity meant long waiting lists,
33:00and Britain's telephone infrastructure had taken a battering.
33:06A new generation of roaming engineers took on the task
33:10of getting the post-war network into shape,
33:13rebuilding, repairing and expanding.
33:15This was an enormous challenge.
33:16But despite limited resources, they would embrace it.
33:25Well, you had a stepped, what was known as a stepped fence.
33:32And you thread your pole down to the bottom,
33:36pushed it up with a ladder,
33:39and then filled it in,
33:42and then you climbed the pole.
33:43You've got the arms, wooden arms,
33:47and you put the insulators and everything on before it went up.
33:51So all you had to do was to climb up and put the wires on the insulators.
33:57Initially, it was a bit daunting to go up a pole.
34:00It used to have leather belts.
34:02Once a week, you used to have to coat them with a special kind of polish
34:05to keep them flexible.
34:07And you all had your own belt.
34:09You were responsible for your own belt.
34:11You got up the pole, holding one hand on the step,
34:16and you flicked the belt.
34:18And if you got used to it,
34:20it would come right round the pole,
34:22right to your safety device.
34:24You buckled up, and then put it into the safety buckle,
34:28and bingo, you were there.
34:30And I think the worst thing was leaning out.
34:35That was the time.
34:37And your feet are on two stands.
34:39That's the time that, you know,
34:41well, do you hold on to what?
34:43Once you got used to it, it was all right.
34:45Attitudes to safety were rather laissez-faire.
34:48Health and safety didn't really exist.
34:51I can remember being on one pole,
34:54and it was known as a D pole.
34:56It had a red label saying danger.
34:58And we had to transfer the wires off it,
35:01and the only thing that was holding it up
35:04were the wires.
35:06So when I got rid of the last pair,
35:08the pole began to go like this, you see.
35:11And I thought, oh dear, I'm going down.
35:13So I had to unlock my safety belt,
35:16jump onto the new pole that was alongside,
35:18and the old one just went down.
35:20So I thought, that's one-off.
35:21In the 50s and 60s, the sheer scale of the network
35:31meant that modernising it was a perpetual struggle.
35:34Much of the equipment in the exchanges was ageing,
35:37and needed teams of engineers to keep it all going.
35:39Even in London, there was quite a few exchanges that dated from the 1930s,
35:47still working well, virtually to the end of the Strouda system.
35:52Until about 1990s, there was a lot of routine work,
35:57which meant taking switches out, lubricating, cleaning, adjusting.
36:01So at each telephone exchange, you would find a team of engineers
36:06whose job it was to actually maintain,
36:09that meant cleaning the Strouda equipment, the switch banks,
36:13and keeping it in tip-top condition.
36:16And there was also the fault-finding aspect of it.
36:19Things obviously went wrong, bits dropped off.
36:21You could find yourself being involved on a fault for several days.
36:26Parts of the network truly did belong to another era.
36:31We were converting telephone exchange to automatic,
36:34because all around this particular era was manual.
36:37And when we'd done Isha and Ockshot,
36:39it was like going back in a time warp.
36:46He's in a hurry, Joel.
36:48So wait, we've got to have this back in service by morning.
36:51And we had to do everything from scratch.
36:54Rewire every house, bring it up to date.
36:56And the Ockshot telephone exchange was all in one room.
37:01The frame, the equipment, the lot.
37:04And at night time, it was manned by a husband and wife team,
37:08who lived upstairs.
37:10Now, it was a very, very personal service,
37:12because the people used to say,
37:14I'm going out, I'll be back about 10 o'clock tonight.
37:17So people were ringing in,
37:19they used to put what we call a peg in the multiple,
37:22with a little note.
37:23They used to take notes, just like an answer service.
37:25But it was very, very personal, you see.
37:27And they'd come in and say,
37:29did anyone leave in here and call me?
37:30Yes, yes.
37:31Mr Sanzo called you.
37:32Thank you very much.
37:34And at Christmas time, you could not move in that exchange
37:38for hampers sent in by the customers.
37:41Three for one.
37:45It wasn't just the technology that could be tricky,
37:47but the customers too.
37:51When I was told that a customer was possibly very obnoxious
37:57and been shouting and all the rest of it,
37:59I would ring and knock on the door in a bright manner
38:03and turn my back on the door.
38:05And the moment I heard the latch go and the door open,
38:09I would swing around with a bright smile on my face and say,
38:13good morning, telephone engineer.
38:16And of course they go to say,
38:19well I can't be rude to this fellow,
38:22he is being pleasant.
38:27Hello, 60957.
38:30Good morning, the exchange here, just testing the line.
38:33Have the engineers left your directory in a dial code list?
38:38I've worked in houses where, you know, the butler came to the door
38:41and I said, or GPO, he said, tradesman to the rear.
38:45I said, does the doctor go to the rear?
38:47He said, no. I said, I'm a doctor with telephones.
38:49You see? In a go.
38:51And I actually had tea, the tea was pushed on a trolley in,
38:54and sit down, you know, this...
38:56It was that type of area.
38:57The limited resources available to expand the phone network
39:07presented a conundrum.
39:09People wanted to get connected,
39:11but there just wasn't the capacity to give everyone a phone.
39:14One cheaper solution was to double up with another household,
39:18the so-called party line.
39:20It was a lot less fun than it sounded.
39:23Here's the tea.
39:25Thank you very much, lady.
39:27We had a party line for a while,
39:30which was something that you did.
39:31You got it on a slightly different rate, it was cheaper,
39:34and you shared the line with somebody else.
39:37So you had to kind of gingerly pick it up just to check
39:40if there was, if the people, whoever they were.
39:43I mean, they weren't the people.
39:44That was the mysterious thing.
39:45They weren't the...
39:46Were there the people next door? I don't know.
39:47They almost seemed like occupants of another realm.
39:50Oh, good morning.
39:52Morning.
39:53You are Mr Health, aren't you, number 14?
39:55That's right.
39:56How do you do?
39:57My name's Richards.
39:58Ah, how do you do?
39:59Please to meet you.
40:01I believe we're sort of sharing a line now.
40:04Sharing, yes.
40:05You would pick up the phone and find that you were connected
40:08to somebody else's house.
40:10And it meant that the person who you shared the line with,
40:13whoever they were talking to,
40:14hadn't put the phone down.
40:15And I can remember doing things like,
40:18when it was stuck in this position, as it were,
40:21yelling down the phone to try and attract the attention
40:23of a person who, you know,
40:25we had no idea who they were, where they were in the world.
40:29But you would ring and you would shout down the phone
40:31in the hope that they would hear it and put the phone down
40:35so the line would be restored and you could actually use it yourself.
40:39Of course, not everyone wanted to share.
40:42A lady, and she refused to go party line.
40:47She absolutely refused.
40:48We couldn't get past the front door.
40:50And it was on my patch.
40:52I went to see her.
40:54I said, look, you've got to go.
40:56But I can't, she said.
40:57It will ruin my business.
40:59So I said, how's it going party line ruining your business?
41:03Well, she was a lady of the night.
41:05So, she didn't want to go party line.
41:09In case her neighbour picked up and could hear the customers
41:12applying for a time and place.
41:14Eventually, we did get in and converted to party line.
41:17But we never said nothing to the other half that what she was doing.
41:21Obviously, because he'd be listening on the phone all the time.
41:23The party line enabled more subscribers to get on the network, even if some were unimpressed.
41:33But behind the scenes, the GPO were making advances in technology that would change how people used their phones.
41:39In 1958, the Queen visited Bristol to unveil a new system with the slightly unfortunate name of STD, subscriber trunk dialing.
41:50STD meant you could make long distance calls without the help of an operator.
41:55And they cost less.
42:00The Lord Provost of Edinburgh speaking.
42:03This is the Queen speaking from Bristol. Good afternoon, Lord Provost.
42:07STD also made phone calls more complicated.
42:13It's inevitably made telephone numbers got larger.
42:16Because you had more numbers that had to be used to represent the whole country rather than just a small region.
42:25So, we get regional codes.
42:27This is when Manchester becomes 061.
42:30It's when London becomes 01 and so on.
42:33What is your number, please?
42:34Well, all very charming, but no more of that.
42:43It took a while for the nation to catch up.
42:46This is subscriber's trunk dialing.
42:48You, as a subscriber, is dialing your number through the trunk network.
42:55And they used to comment, oh, I can see what we're doing.
42:58Let us look up the code for Bristol in the code list.
43:01Bristol. Here it is, OBR2.
43:04O-B-R-2.
43:05O-B-R-2.
43:12I picked up a coin box one day.
43:15And I said to this gentleman, you can now dial these calls yourself.
43:19And gave him the code.
43:22And he said to me, oh, Miss, I would try and dial it myself.
43:27But there's three letters and only one finger hole.
43:30And so I don't know what to do.
43:33So then I dialed it for him.
43:35When you talk about the introduction of subscriber trunk dialing,
43:39you're talking about the continued automation of the telephone network.
43:44So inevitably, more engineers are needed because, of course,
43:48the network has got more complicated.
43:51There's more technology in the network.
43:54It would take a long time before everyone had access to STD.
43:58Meanwhile, the GPO once more turned its attention
44:00to getting as many people connected as it possibly could.
44:04A new post-austerity era was dawning.
44:09Oh, two petty muscles I can afford.
44:11See you Friday. Bye.
44:13Hang on time.
44:14Wish I was coming.
44:15There you are.
44:24In the 60s, having a telephone was about living the dream
44:27in a very modern way.
44:28Everything from music to design demanded the fresh and new.
44:33Just as in the 1930s, phones needed to rediscover their sense of style
44:39and appeal to a new generation of potential callers.
44:46The telephone age.
44:48Yes, indeed it is.
44:50The telephone is everywhere around us.
44:52Part of our lives.
44:53As modern as a jet plane.
44:56As familiar and as taken for granted as an electric cooker.
45:00We were going in the 60s from a period of austerity,
45:04of post-war rationing, to a time of consumer abundance.
45:08And that spilled over into everything.
45:10The colour of the phone, its shape,
45:12the idea that you might actually change it regularly,
45:15that you had some kind of choice,
45:16that you weren't just being provided.
45:19Just here. There, on the whole table.
45:22The introduction of modern plastics into the telephone
45:25also brought with it colour.
45:27And now you had a choice of colour for the phone.
45:30It didn't have to be black anymore.
45:32And I had one lady one day, she said,
45:35now I'll arrange the whole table, and with the phone on it,
45:38don't fix it yet.
45:40And she opened the front door and she walked down the path
45:43to the front gate.
45:45And she said, oh yes, yes, that's what I do.
45:47And what she was looking for was that when the front door was open,
45:51the neighbours would be able to see the coloured phone through the front door.
45:55If you wanted cream, you could have cream. If you wanted red, you could have red.
46:01The phone is becoming fashionable.
46:03It's tuning in to that interested-in-home decoration.
46:07There's some more over here, you know.
46:10The coolest phone of the lot was the trim phone.
46:13Mrs Lund takes it all in her stride.
46:15And she decides that a blue trim phone
46:18will match the new decorations in the hall very nicely, thank you.
46:20The general post office actually wanted a more luxurious phone,
46:24a different style of phone.
46:27And that brought along really quite a novel design,
46:30the so-called trim phone.
46:32Trim ringer illuminated model trim phone.
46:37And this was quite different to any of the other handsets of the time.
46:42First of all, the actual handset you held was L-shaped.
46:46It sat vertically on the body of the phone rather than horizontally at the top.
46:53It was also, as it turned out later in life, controversial.
46:58It had an illuminated dial. It glowed in the dark.
47:02And the controversy was over how that glow was done,
47:05which was a small amount of radioactivity in a glass tube underneath the dial.
47:10Changing the shape, the form, the shape of the handle.
47:14The trim phone was trying to be a revolution.
47:17You could say maybe it was the Mini Cooper of telephone design.
47:20It looked lighter. It was less ponderous.
47:23It sort of belonged to this modern drip-dry nylon world.
47:28Satisfied that everything's working correctly, it's over to you, Mrs Lund.
47:32And that's all there is to it.
47:34It's off to the next job for him.
47:35And for her, a chance to try the new phone for herself.
47:40And guess who she calls first?
47:42Why, Mr Lund, of course.
47:45She tells them she's speaking from their very own phone.
47:48Well, isn't that nice?
47:49It's not nice.
47:53With new colours and shapes available, phones were more appealing than ever before,
47:58and more people wanted one.
48:00In 1965, the post office had 4.3 million subscribers,
48:05many of whom had bought into the aspirational lifestyle that the new telephones represented.
48:09But the reality of the service was often considerably less inspiring.
48:14We'd just pick up the phone and there'd be nothing happening.
48:18And you could sort of hear clicks and things and know that someone was there and they wouldn't speak to you.
48:22I have to wait sometimes 15 to 20 minutes before I can get hold of the operator to make a call.
48:27I find that quite often my calls don't ring straight through and you have to try at least four or five times before the call actually registers.
48:36So, Edward Bern, as Postmaster General, why is it, do you think, that the post office's telephone service has got such a bad name?
48:43Well, first of all, I don't think it has.
48:45We commission independent surveys and 70% are satisfied, not good enough.
48:49But, er, the people appearing in the programme were not representative, of course, obviously they were picked because they had complaints.
48:55Well, we are investigating complaints, I mean, this is the purpose of the programme.
48:57Well, I appreciate this, but, I mean, any viewer looking at it would want to know that this isn't, of course, a cross-section.
49:03I can't hear you...
49:05Even a well-known mayor waded into the debate.
49:08What? Yes, crackling!
49:11No, it's no good. Try again later.
49:15I've had the same trouble, says Mr Troop.
49:17Every time I ring anybody up, there's this crackling noise and I can't hear a thing.
49:22There is an episode of Trumpton where the phone system goes totally haywire, really, and it creates chaos in the town.
49:31Nobody's calls are connected properly because this character, he's just some guy from the GP...
49:36Actually, he's not even from the GPO, he's from the PO, which perhaps tells us something about Trumpton's attitude to the telecommunications system.
49:43And he makes all these connections in the wrong way and all of these cross-purposes conversations happen, including a false call for the emergency services of Trumpton.
49:57And we know how hard-pressed they are because they're called out every week to deal with something.
50:01During the 60s, phone subscriptions doubled. But for most of the country, making a call still meant using a phone box. And the service could be even worse than home phones.
50:17But there are 20 times as many complaints about public telephones as about private ones. Complaints about broken instruments, directories missing or torn up, cracked glass and filthy floors.
50:33Of course, the post office is well aware of these problems. In 1962, they designed and launched these brave new kiosks, all glass and aluminium. Three years later, and the total number of these super kiosks throughout the land is five.
50:48The GPO needed to dispel the nagging doubts about telephones and reassure the public that the future would be bright. And they did it with a dazzling, unmissable symbol of technological prowess.
51:01By the early 60s, the GPO needed to find a new way of meeting the growing demand for connections and get ahead of the game.
51:17Simply winding out ever more landlines wasn't going to cut it. Instead, they went wireless, turning to a technology that transmitted microwaves through the air.
51:27In 1961, construction began on the post office tower.
51:34The tower was actually built essentially as a tall radio antenna. And throughout the country, there was a whole series of these towers built, not quite as elegant as the post office tower in London, but as functional.
51:49So this whole network was built in order to provide the capacity for the handling of the phone calls we were now making.
51:57The tower could handle 150,000 calls simultaneously. The GPO built it so tall that nothing else would get in the way of the signal.
52:07It was part of a network of 130 stations throughout the country and the tallest building in London when it was finished.
52:17But the tower was more than the sum of its parts. It made you feel that the telephonic future was in good hands. And you could stop by for a bite to eat, if you had the head for it.
52:30Are you going to have the floor of the restaurant revolving? Why do you do this?
52:34Well, don't you think it'd be rather fun? Don't you think anybody who goes up 500 feet would like a panoramic view of the greatest capital in the world just spread out in front of them?
52:43Won't go down too fast, you know, about one revolution in half an hour.
52:46So you don't put them off their food? Well, I don't think so. I don't think so.
52:56However, there was a downside to this growing technological transformation.
53:01Creating a network that could cater for everyone meant removing people from the process.
53:06Operators had been at the centre of the system since the outset.
53:11But in the 1970s, the last manual exchanges were finally replaced by machines.
53:17We were a family. Everybody looked after everybody.
53:21We grew up through those teenage years learning from each other, learning about boys and life.
53:28Everything was done together as a real family. We all realised that was the end of an era.
53:34It was a sad time for operators.
53:38But automation and the post office's new technology meant that the infrastructure was finally in place to begin to match demand.
53:53During the 70s, having a phone in the home became considered a necessity.
53:57The baby boom generation was starting families of their own and consumer culture had given them very different expectations from their parents.
54:09They wanted their mod cons and they had the disposable income to buy them.
54:13Uptake in the 1970s was particularly marked and that may have been because families were moving around the country.
54:23You see higher levels of geographical mobility.
54:26So Britons had a stronger need to phone home to try to maintain contact, for example, with the families who were being rehoused outside of London in the overspill developments.
54:35And who wanted to maintain their links with their prior friends and family.
54:40Hello. Hello Granny. Daniel.
54:43Your phone could get you closer to someone.
54:47Ever more of us were joining the network.
54:49But even with access to our own phones, we weren't exactly a nation of chatterboxes.
54:55Most people kept a wary eye on the length of calls.
54:59The public needed convincing to loosen up, relax and stop worrying about the cost.
55:04In 1976, the post office came up with just the thing to help us along.
55:09A yellow bird called Busby.
55:11Hey, listen to this.
55:18Happy birthday dear grandma.
55:21Happy birthday to you.
55:24Busby was the state owned bird who represented the phone system.
55:30And who, I think, used to kind of hang around in telephone boxes, encouraging people to use them.
55:35First, I fell out of the nest this morning.
55:38And hit me head.
55:40And I sprained me ankle on the way to the shop.
55:43The 1976 Busby campaign really changes the pace in my view.
55:50Because suddenly you've got a campaign which has gone truly national.
55:56It was truly a massive campaign, probably the largest and first of its type.
56:00And that really brought the telephone into the consciousness of the general public.
56:07And if you dial direct on your own phone during cheat rate, you get at least three minutes for less than 10p.
56:12So why not phone someone you love tonight?
56:14It could be the happiest 10p you've ever spent.
56:19After a few years of Busby flapping around, the burgeoning network was making millions.
56:24By the 1980s, we'd become the nation of phone users that the early pioneers had dreamed of.
56:30What had once been a service was now very much a business, with what appeared to be a lucrative future.
56:37So, in 1984, the government sold it off.
56:41But as the shareholders of this newly privatized business dreamed of their coming balance sheets,
56:45a quirky piece of new technology arrived on the scene that would go on to change the world.
56:52The C5. No, not the C5.
56:56Right, now then, I've got my cellular radio phone here.
57:00That's it. You see, no cables attached at all, completely portable.
57:04Now, of course, we all use mobile phones.
57:12But in true telephone tradition, we still complain about bad service and dodgy lines.
57:19And sometimes we even use them to speak to people.
57:23The popularity of the mobile phone appeared to signal the death of the old landline.
57:29But that was before the arrival of something nobody was expecting.
57:32The internet.
57:35A communications revolution that used the landline network to transmit digital data.
57:42All that effort by the pioneers and builders of Britain's phone system
57:46was vindicated by a technology they could never have imagined.
57:50So, the landline lives on.
57:54The epic achievement of a century of struggle to connect the nation.
57:58It was part of history and it was something that I don't really think I would have wanted to have missed.
58:05I was very proud of the work I did, and I'm still very proud.
58:10I saw a revolution outside. I never thought it would happen, but it did.
58:13It was changing every day. Before your eyes, you saw a vast advancement in communications.
58:23a communications.
58:25radio
58:26Analize
58:35Transcription by CastingWords
Comments