Bruce Lloyd, an apprentice at Bletchley during 1965 recalls...

I did the Youth in Training courses and I mainly remember the telephonists or telegraph operators being trained there - I was seventeen and my main interest was girls either at the dances and social functions in the main house or in the neighbouring towns.

The forest of telephone poles (see picture top of page) were only about 8 feet tall as I recall; nearby was a similar forest of similarly short poles where we practised our skill at recognising decayed and unsafe poles. We put in hours practising wiring up the various combinations of 706 type phones and extensions. Also tested our patience running wires up and down walls and along skirting boards hammering in staples the regulation distances apart. Used waxed string to create elegant wiring looms, adjusted dozens of 3000 type relays for correct twining, tension etc. We sorted, arranged and twisted together hundreds of pairs of paper coated lead sheathed wires and created beautiful lead joints using plumbers black and ladles of molten lead (that was my favourite task). Learned the mantra of blue, orange, green, brown, slate... Learned the purpose of A, B, C etc relays in Strowger pre 2000 selectors.

I remember my time at Bletchley as being very enjoyable, for many of us it was our first time away from home - or at least the first not constantly supervised by teachers day and night as on school trips.

Forms & Paperwork

In the well ordered Post Office, all stores (forms, equipment and sundries) had either an item number or identifying code. Here are the A 2049 forms for 'Training Course-Advice to Officer of Assessment' for

	Youth A Course  TTA B	R 1/8  20.7.1964 to 18.8.1964  (picture 76k) R 2/3 17.5.1965 to   9.7.1965   (picture 67k)

Telephones

[The 746 telephone was not introduced until 1967.]

Cable Jointing

The paper insulated lead cables were in layers and each layer had a green tracer, then the pairs in that layer had one to four red stripes repeated in order. It was very important to tie off the layers when you opened out the cable, very easy to lose the order or forget which way the cable was round (and did you curse the cable gang who pulled a cable in the wrong way round so the layers went in opposite directions and you ended up with a real birds nest!)

We also had the beginnings of plastic coated cables, joined the wire the same way as paper coated ie twisted together but with plastic sleeves rather than paper and the cables went into a plastic tube with a rubber plug between two brass plates which squashed the rubber to seal it all up, I think they still pressurised the plastic cables from the exchange, but there was talk of abandoning that in years to come. The lead cables had to be pressurised because as soon as water touched the paper the cable was useless.

Exchange Work

I worked in Folkestone exchange, a Non-Director exchange with a mixture of Pre-2000 and 2000 types, it had several satellite exchanges. When I arrived so did STD and I send many tedious hours soldering grading for GRACIE. As an apprentice (until they offered me a job in transmission) my aim in life was to get my own satellite exchange area job, mixture of exchange, subs and line maintenance between Hythe and Romney Marsh.

[GRACIE-nickname for Group Routing And Charging Equipment.]

Andy Reynolds recalls...

I served one of the last true apprenticeships in 82 and ended up a Special Fault Investigator covering all the UAXs and subs apps. around Stevenage and Hitchin. All the smaller sites were Strowger, larger ones being Crossbar. I served my apprentice a,b,c, subs apps. and relay adjustment courses at Bletchley, staying in the wonderful Gifford House (One of the big H blocks). We had a barrack room each to sleep in with a sink in one corner and a wardrobe in the other. WE did our pole training in a shed at the bottom corner by all the aerials.

Bob Oborne writes...

Not all GPO telephone engineers started as apprentices (Youths in Training). The increased demand for telephones in the 1960s, together with the conversion programme from manual to automatic exchange working throughout the land, and the projected work in rearranging the switched network for Subscriber Trunk Dialling, gave rise to more adult recruitment in the engineering field during this decade. I was one such adult entrant in 1964 after answering an advert in the local paper, and subsequently starting on Internal Works (Exchange Construction) at Dorking ATE in Surrey around three months later with virtually no knowledge of the public telephone system.

I received about half the wages (£11 5s 0d per week as a T2B) than from my previous factory job. The work however, as expected, was more interesting with more prospects and generally cleaner. At that time I was twenty two, unmarried and had now become a civil servant with more security for the future if I made the effort. I was not the only beginner to join the construction team that month and fortunately the technical officer with whom I started was a calm Liverpudlian who took the time to teach his new charges how the system worked and the practices involved. Ray had a great sense of humour, which he certainly now needed. Inevitably we made mistakes, but, after a moment of initial panic, he took them all in his stride. There was much to learn. As new recruits we attended practical training sessions at Guildford and a specially tailored fortnight long course at Bletchley Park to bring us up to speed with the way things should really be done. Back in the area, once regarded as half way competent, advancement came to T2A. The City and Guilds examinations for a Telecomms Technicians Certificate were tackled in our own time. Unlike apprentices there was no day release to college for us.

The telephone exchange at Dorking consisted of two stories above the post office and sorting office in the High Street and comprised an apparatus room with an auto-manual operators' switchboard on the top floor. In the basement was the cable chamber. There was no yard as such, only a loading bay for the postal vans. A strowger equipment room could be quiet in the early morning with mechanical noise rising to a crescendo around 10 a.m. during the "busy hour." Exchange equipment faults were detected by experienced maintenance TOs often by just listening to the equipment further up the apparatus room as it stepped and hunted. The basic test equipment for the "faultsmen" who worked outside, was the Detector No.4, a sturdy voltmeter that still worked after it had been dropped from the top of a pole. The older men however licked their finger and thumb, placing them across a pair to detect the necessary voltage on the line and hoping it was not being rung at the time.

Dorking was the parent exchange of the Newdigate Call Charge Area (so designated as that particular small village was the centre of telephone density for Dorking and its group of dependant exchanges). The parent, dating from 1936, contained a mix of Pre-2000 and 2000 type switching equipment, including the original Pre-2000 linefinder groups, all housed on apparatus racks, many of which were fed by the original waxed silk and wool insulated cables with black enamelled conductors and braided cable sheaths impregnated with asbestos. With ingrained dust in the wax, it was now impossible to tell the colour of the insulation on any of the wire terminations from these old cables, as they had now all turned black. The old Pre-2000 selector bank wiring was brittle, but some spare positions, fitted nearly thirty years before, were brought into service with re-used switches recovered from other exchanges up country. The engineers who had taken them out in distant areas probably thought they were to be thrown away. Any new cabling was of course now carried out using the modern light straw PVC cables, but all connections were still cut, stripped, terminated and soldered. There were also some earlier PVC cables with battleship grey sheathings. The wire wrapping gun had not quite yet made an appearance, and insulation displacement connectors for cabling came years later. New equipment from the GPO stores was still appearing in light battleship grey, with some arriving in light straw. Any new equipment provided by the manufacturer's contract installers was all in light straw. In our work we sometimes fabricated miscellaneous equipment racks from angled steel that had been cut to size by the regional workshops and fitted new cable racking. If the surrounding equipment, as well as that to be fitted, was all battleship grey, then we painted the iron work and new cable racking that colour also. If it was light straw, then naturally we used light straw paint to match. The main internal cable holes were filled with the original packs of blue asbestos to retard fire, and a white asbestos covering board used. The reportedly more effective vermiculite mineral however was used for all new work or resealing existing holes after our cabling was complete.

The dependant exchanges around were mostly also old. They consisted of a discriminator satellite, a Pre-2000 UAX7, several 2000 type UAX13 exchanges, two of which were not too old, being all in PVC wiring and with open racks.One of these newer UAX13s was in the former village hall, the building having been purchased by the GPO. There was more than enough floor space for extensions. Another relatively modern UAX13 was originally in the London South Telephone Area, but now inherited by Guildford. The remaining two UAX13s had the closed cabinet type racks, although the doors had been discarded and thermo-tubes fitted in the bottom to provide heating in place of the previous inbuilt system. The other two dependants were manuals. The oldest of these was a two position local battery signalling board with doll's eye indicators, located in the back room of the village butcher's shop. Its main distribution frame was near a fireplace that contained an open fire in the winter to keep the two operators warm. Here they may tell an incoming caller that it wasn't worth ringing now as the person they were trying to reach was out shopping. The other manual exchange was slightly larger (probably a CB10) being in its own dedicated building, although a similar personal service was also given.

This then was the charge group on which STD was be provided in the next few years. Of these exchanges, the parent was completely replaced in a new building, becoming the GSC; the discriminator satellite converted to group selector satellite working; the UAX7 replaced with a TXE2; the old manual in the butcher's shop absorbed into the parent by external cable development; the other manual temporarily replaced early with two MNDX and one MTX units before being permanently replaced with a TXE2; one UAX13 replaced with an SAX; another replaced with a similar UAX13 in a new building, leaving the two remaining UAX13s and the new one to be converted to STD working. Although I worked all over the Guildford Telephone Area at various times on many types of equipment, Dorking was my home exchange and I spent much of the next fifteen years working in its charge group, mostly as an internal works TO until moving into the planning office with the prospect of an A/EEs board.

Your Recollections?

The GPO Traffic Office

	If you were part of the GPO TOo, then pop along to the GPO Traffic Office, sign up and have a chat, perhaps meet up with old friends and share some of those not so distant memories about your day to day routines...