Life on the switchboard
Every issue, Yours writer Marion Clarke will be reliving the best bits of our lives. This fortnight, your tales of working as a telephone operator
My mother belonged to a generation that was very cautious about what they said on the phone ‘in case the operator was listening in’. Our bumper postbag from readers who were telephone operators makes it clear that they were far too busy and polite to be doing any such thing! After her initial training in the Fifties, Muriel Kent started work at a small manual exchange in a West Sussex village. “All customers had to come via the operator for every call. It could be manic, but also great fun with customers popping their heads through the window to let us know if their phone was out of order.” Much easier than now, when we report faults to a call centre in India! Before STD (Subscriber Trunk Dialling) brought in automation in the Sixties, telephone users were known to make some strange requests, as Ms Imeson discovered. “People calling directory enquiries would ask for a number for someone whose surname they didn’t know, but they ‘lived opposite the chip shop’. Others would dial 999 and ask for the police if the takeaway they’d ordered hadn’t arrived.” Marguerite Stage recalls that, “Callers from phone boxes who didn’t have the correct money would ask the operator to send the change back, please, as though we pressed a button to send it back to them!” Being a mere 4ft¾in tall, Jean Boyes was a quarter of an inch too short to become a telephone operator but was accepted on the strength of having two GCEs. Her first ‘terrifying’ day at the Blackburn telephone exchange revealed the reason for the 5ft rule – because “the switchboards were so high!” At the Amersham exchange where Gill Simpson had her first job in 1964, “The chairs had a large metal foot rail for us to stand up on so that we could reach the higher numbers. We had eight pairs of jack plugs on each position and special pens that fitted the dials so that we could be fast and accurate in dialling numbers.” She adds, “We were not allowed to address our colleagues by their Christian names and the supervisors were strict. If you needed to ‘spend a penny’ a replacement had to take over your position while you were away (for no longer than ten minutes!). “I loved going to work, despite working 42 hours a week in shifts for just over £4 pay.” Gina Bianchi vividly describes her first impression of the busy switchboard room at the telephone exchange on the island of Guernsey. “The girls all sat in a huge semicircle, lights flashing, chords flying, swivelling their chairs as they stretched to reach numbers. Tiny bulbs lit up and each pair of chords – for answering and calling – were in line with a switch that you pushed forward to answer and back to ring the required
number. Once you put your headset on, you were in your own little world!”
Hazel Whatmore
remembers, “Every halfhour we were given the order ‘Change headsets’ which always made us laugh. This was to protect our hearing as the headsets only had one earpiece.” But it wasn’t damaging her hearing that bothered
Barbara McEnteggart.
“The heavy headsets ruined my hairdo, a blonde beehive. Every break time I had to backcomb it all over again. “I even got chatted up and had a date with one of our customers. His voice was great, but what a letdown when I met him!” When Margaret Meek started work in the Forties, the war was on and there were military personnel of various nationalities in her area. “Many had difficulty understanding the operators and vice versa. The girls would pass some of these calls to me as I spoke and understood a little Polish. The day came when a supervisor heard me and I was told in no uncertain manner that if I wanted to speak French I should be with the Continental exchange!” A knowledge of Polish would have helped Bren Morris when she worked as an international bilingual telephonist for the GPO in the Seventies. “We dreaded being on the Poland section as there were only eight lines between our two countries so it was difficult to get through and some of the villages had challenging names.”
Eleanor Gardner’s
job required absolute discretion. At the time of the Suez crisis in 1956, she was working in a secret government telephone exchange situated underground in Westminster when she and a colleague were given a mysterious new task. “We manned a special switchboard set up for reclaiming the Suez Canal, which was all very hush-hush. We didn’t know why we were there, but we were told that we would get extra money in our pay packets!”
‘The heavy headsets ruined my hairdo, a blonde beehive. Every break time I had to backcomb it all over again’