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This is a true story of an incident that happened when I worked for BT as a telephone exchange maintenance engineer near Salisbury in Wiltshire. I looked after small rural exchanges of several types and was also on emergency call out for them at night. It was during a hot summer'...
I went into the battery room in Salisbury exchange to maintain the batteries and in the area was a large stand-by diesel generator (used to keep the batteries and exchange going in case of mains failure). It would start automatically when the mains failed and this happened when I...
When we were doing an upgrade on the overhead wires, I - as the youth in training - had to get a wooden lead box and at the exchange get a sack of coke. We used to light it and have it in the back of the vehicle with us, and when the linesmen were up the pole we used to light at ...
When I started in 1958, we were in the gang vehicle driving along, the driver and the foreman sat in the front and they were the only ones who knew where we were due to working. In the back sat the bracket-man, the wireman, and the youth in training - me, and it was my job to mak...
I have always been sceptical about the paranormal but one incident years ago set me thinking. Back in the 1950s as a TO, I was in charge of maintenance on the 1st floor of Southend Exchange. In those days the floor was L shaped since the battery room occupied a quarter of the flo...
I started my working life when I left school in 1945 and enrolled as a Youth-in-Training at Baldock Radio Station. In those days the GPO overseas telephone service was via HF radio and Baldock was the main receiving station while the outgoing side of the transmission was from Rug...
It all began in Union House (the TMO of days gone by,
When System X and Kilostream
And Blue Payphone were still a dream...
In the mid fifties significant falls of snow were quite common in the Isle of Man, and on one of these occasions, during a Christmas period, the village at Kirk Michael became cut off overnight with huge drifts of snow. I was scheduled to report for duty in Douglas, but this was ...
Many years ago I was working as a young T2a on Subs Apps in South London. One day I was called to a house where the elderly lady reported her phone was not ringing properly but she knew when somebody was calling her because her dog barked/yelped...
When I was young I spent holidays with my Aunt in a small village, she was Postmistress and had a switchboard in her room, I longed to use it but of course this was not allowed. Aged 18 a friend suggested we should go to London to work. Quite by chance we found ourselves training...
In my Test Desk training days we had two interesting faults reported. The first was simply "my telephone bell doesn't ring."
We tested the line, found it to be ok so rang the number. A lady answered. We introduced ourselves; you say your bell doesn't ring, that's right. But you ...
It was interesting to read the story about the history of the 999 service. When I was an engineering apprentice, I was told that 111 would be quick to dial (on the old rotary dials) but it was not used as the emergency code because the numbers could be "tapped out" by open wires ...
It must have been around 1975 - I was about 12 years old - when I was the cause of a very bizarre accident.
I was out early one evening with some friends who had gone into a local convenience store. I waited outside and while doing so leant casually onto a set of traffic lig...
My name is Florence May Sharp nee Williams born 1934. I left school in July 1948 and as there were no vacancies at the Post Office I started work at a department store on the cosmetics counter. I had only worked there for a month when a vacancy occurred and I commenced work as a ...
After 37 years in the Post Office I still treasure this rather tattered picture of an event that was historic both to the Post Office and me.
The Telecom Tower in London, previously the Post Office Tower, is regarded as the hub of the BT microwave radio network, but the decision to build the tower was made some time after the Post Office started providing microwave radio links.
There was no initial plan for a na...
The Post Office turned up to install our shared line when I was about 12 in 1965. My parents were out so all the key decisions were mine such as postioning the phone and choosing the colour. The 2-tone instrument gave excellent service for the next 20 years. The only hick-up was ...
When I went travelling in my gap year - over a decade ago, the only way I could keep in touch with my friends and family at home was via very expensive, time-delayed public phones, or through letters delivered to post restantes. While it was very exciting to receive letters when ...
Seven-year-old Kitty Attwell uses a Mickey Mouse phone to hear one of this year's Dial-a-Santa stories.
She met Santa in person during his stay at Selfridge's Christmas grotto.
Santa is letting children phone him at the North Pole from 10 December.
They will be able to h...
With the birth of our twins Hannah and Rebecca, life became a little more hectic and tiring. We love them to bits but they leave no time for anything else. So it was a godsend to discover that by using BT Broadband and a webcam over a voice and picture connection, my wife's mothe...
I joined BT in 1976 as an apprentice. It has dramatically changed my life.
Who would have thought a Telephone Engineer Apprentice (with just O and A levels) would one day become the Solution Design Authority for BT's ATM (MSiP) Platform, being responsible for the sign-off desi...
Ann leads numbers-only phone drive
The Post Office has launched ANN, All-figure Numbering NOW, to persuade people to forget the old letter-code phone numbers and start using numbers only.
And a girl known simply as Ann will appear on posters advertising the switch...
When I first joined BT, the nearby Pershore telephone exchange was still manual (CBS2) - the very last of its kind in the West Midlands area. In 1967 the exchange was made automatic using the latest Strowger electromechanical technology. Sometime later it was converted to a semi-...
When I was a child my mother used to talk about her grandfather, who had worked on some sort of telecommunications on Rathlin Island. She actually used the word 'telephonics'. Until I started to work on my family tree 50 years later it hadn't dawned on me that each succeeding gen...
You need hands - for writing, searching through files and typing. That's why engineer Mr Leslie Sutton has invented this cheap, simple handset holder that enables people to talk on the phone and have both hands free.
Mr Sutton - he comes from Leicester, but now lives in Me...
I joined BT in 1966 as an engineering apprentice based in Evesham in Worcestershire. Evesham was the second telephone exchange in the country after Bristol to have STD, which meant that subscribers could dial long-distance calls direct without the need for assistance from the ope...
Jane Cain, the voice of the speaking clock, remembers making the first recordings:
The actual recording wasn't nearly as strenous as most people seem to think... The real work was done by the engineers of the Post Office, who had a wonderful place up at Dollis Hill, where they...
The 5,000,000th telephone was officially opened on 7 September 1949.
Mr H M Hawkins of Wildage Farm, Stelling Minnis, near Canterbury applied for a telephone in March 1946. However there was a long delay to his application as British telephone equipment was a good selling line...
In 1960s more and more people in this country were able to dial the Continent and needed to time those more costly long-distance calls.
This Swiss gadget fitted onto the dial of a telephone and showed the time of day, the date and when the phone was in use, the number of minu...
When I was 13 (I'm now 28), we only had one telephone in the house- which was kept in the hall. On a school trip, I met a boy called Alex who lived in Staffordshire. And in order to make sure that I wasn't overheard when calling him, I used to use the telephone box outside the ho...
We're reliant on the fact that most people, if not all people have a telephone. People need an immediate response. Without it, no Samaritans couldn't exist without the phone.
An explaination of how Alf Sawkins used a telephone for the first time with a group of friends to confirm a booking for his local football team, with disastrous results.