GWR’s Swindon Works Telephone Exchange
The women who worked in the Great Western Railway Swindon Works Telephone Exchange were also classed as clerks. The exchange of the 1930s had about 14 staff, run by head supervisor Miss Gutteridge and her assistant, Miss Retter, but the quieter night shift was run by three men because it was not considered proper to leave a few females unprotected during hours of darkness.
When Violet Lane was told that she could not be a ‘high-stool clerical worker’, she was sent to work in the Exchange as an office girl where, happily, she sat on ordinary chairs: “All my spare moments were used learning Morse code and practising on the single needle, and also learning by heart the hundreds of internal telephone numbers on the Works switchboard.” That task became more demanding at the New Telephone Exchange, where she worked in the 1950s: “There were 700 numbers to learn, and we had gone from two-figure numbers up to four figures!”
With the arrival of the teleprinter the women had to learn to type, which they enjoyed because it gave them a break from wearing the heavy headphones that often made their neck ache.
The Telephone Exchange was staffed round the clock every day of the year in case of emergencies. Even during the bombing raids of World War Two they stayed put. Violet remembers: “We couldn’t go because we had to give the air-raid warnings to everyone in the Works, and up and down the line in the signal boxes. They all relied on us.”