Telephone supervisor - overseas : Mrs Josie Ridley

Transcript

I was responsible for all the telephone exchange staff throughout Nigeria and I was based in a place called Lagos where I had a switchboard. I had an operating staff aged anything between forty and sixteen, men and women, the thing that struck me most was that they couldn't converse with one another in their own dialects so they had to use this pidgin English. When the Queen came out she was going to have a break at a hill station, and the telegraph engineer said I think we'd better go along to the hill station and have a look and see the equipment, what sort of equipment she's got there, because she'll probably want to make a call to UK.