| AVEnue Auto Manual Centre (AMC) | |
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| AVEnue AMC, East Cheap, London, EC1. | |
In the early 1960s, as well as running the exchange and managing the staff, the Exchange Superintendent was also responsible for local customer service issues, which embraced not only AVEnue subscribers, but also those on MANsion House, MINcing Lane and HOP; named after the Hop exchange near London Bridge. The small AMC at BERmondsey, south of the Thames, was initially included in this remit, but closed within a few years.
Of Traffic Offices
Of Subscriber Trunk Dialling
In 1963 there were three Director units within AVEnue exchange:
AVEnue and MINcing Lane already had STD, but MANsion House had yet to be converted.
Coincidentally, City Area became the first to be fully converted to STD. To celebrate the achievement, the Lord Mayor invited the Exchange Superintendent to lunch to witness the inauguration of the first directly dialled trunk call from MANsion House on 14th January 1964.
Malcolm Knight recalls...
Obs (observations) at AVEnue wasn't standard Service Obs as understood in more recent years. The exchange housed City Area's 'Special Obs' suite for 'tapping' subs. lines. This was done with their permission, trying to track unauthorised telephone use, persistent misroutes and other obscure service issues often caused by the 30 year old equipment then in use. 'Obs Suite' was a rather grand title for the primitive facilities available. It was situated in a five foot square recess in the switchroom wall towards the front of the building except that 'front' is a confusing term for AVEnue exchange because its front door was permanently closed and all access to the building and to the switchroom was via the back door to the south.
The equipment consisted of a single cannibalized doll's eye position placed on a wooden desk before one ordinary office chair. On the desk was a brass instrument of enormous antiquity which held a pool of ink and a spool of telegram adhesive paper tape. It needed constant engineering attention and when working splodged its ink on to the tape to represent dialling pulses. The number of splodges was counted to discover the number dialled. Through the adjacent swing doors was the exchange superintendent's office which allowed him to keep an eye on the machine when the telephonist was off duty.
0001 and 0101 (the inf. suite) were answered on positions nearest the main entry point to the switchroom along with 999. We were often plagued by false 999 calls on Saturday afternoons when the exchange staffing was so few that we had no supervisors on duty. I think you had to have nine operators before you could employ a supervisor. I often used to operate the switchboard on Saturdays and one such afternoon, a young boy kept calling and before waiting for a response yelled, "What colour are your knickers?". (Only females worked on Saturday afternoons so my presence was entirely unexpected). After half a dozen of such calls my patience was exhausted and I allowed the howler to work up a good head of steam on a spare circuit and plugged him straight into it when he next called. He didn't come back.
[At the time, the day staff were all women. The male night staff came on duty at 6 pm.]
Another Saturday, I turned up unannounced and a tpst by the name of Miss Cox got off the board and said to me, "Would you like me to go home?" Not understanding, I asked her to repeat and then explain. "Well I'm wearing trousers, shall I go home to change?" It was strictly against the rules for female tpsts to wear trousers. Needless to say, I said Miss Cox need not go home on my account. I don't recall incurring the wrath of the CSR on the following Monday.
Miss Vowels, the CSR (Chief Supervisor), sat at the front desk separated by a screen and looking away from the inf. suite which may not have been the best arrangement and Miss Willis, the DSR (Day Supervisor), at the corresponding desk at the other end of the island suite. Miss Willis's desk was enhanced by three large bakelite dials which she could set to a number and listen to the corresponding switchroom position. I think the facility was 'outlawed' some years later. I wonder if Miss Willis ever discovered that if an operator TKO'd her telephone, the operator could listen in too?
My recollection is that there were two lifts, the main one in the centre of the building which the staff used to get to the switchroom and another in the southern corner which was for equipment and deliveries to the canteen. I think they both had a criss-cross folding grid for a door. There was no lift to serve the front of the building and the Exchange Supt's office and he (it was always a he back then) had to make do with a cold stone staircase. My way out was to avoid the only 'official' route via the switchroom and dodge through the auto rooms below. Very spooky late at night if one of AVEnue's very few evening callers (there were if I recall correctly just 13 residential lines on MINcing Lane, just one of the three 10,000 line director units in the building) terminated his call at the same moment and the silence was broken by the sound of selectors dropping out.
The fact that the front door was very permanently shut and completely blocked was a source of some concern to me as it was one of the authorized fire escapes. On one occasion during a fire drill I engineered two seats of fire so that the only safe exit was the front door to bring the danger more forcibly to the attention of the powers-that-be in the FLEet Building HQ.
The night staff at AVEnue were a rather badly behaved crew tipping the contents of tea pots into switchboards, fiddling the TTA (Time To Answer) meters, smoking in the switchroom and completely 'plugging out' all access to the exchange from BERmondsey payphones whose users always refused to pay for their calls with every excuse known to man. AVEnue handled BERmondsey's Pay on Answer (POA) phones because BERmondsey was a Bridge control board and so unable to control Pay on Answer coinboxes.
The AVEnue canteen was a private dining club owned and run by the staff and
provided particularly good meals for 1/9 [9 new pence] for two courses in
1963/4. On Fridays the fish, enormous skate being a speciality, came directly
from the adjacent Billingsgate Market. As a young lad of 19 at the time and
weighing barely 9 stone I was fed very well by a number of motherly operators
and assistant supervisors the names of whom I have sadly forgotten though
the name Miss Pike does stick in my mind for some unknown reason - it must
be the piscine associations!
An AVEnue Telephonist
Christine Smith, one of the 'Hello Girls' in the exchange, has similar memories of working at AVEnue.
A Change in Management
City Area operated a fairly strict two year management rotation policy, allowing barely enough time to get established or to be fully effective in the post. In early 1966, the AVEnue Traffic Office was relocated into the ROYal AMC building. All MINcing Lane subscribers were transferred from AVEnue control to ROYal control at the same time.
"MINcing Lane 6000 was very much a well known fixture for the AVE Supt., so it moved with me to Royal. It received a constant stream of WNs for FLEet Street 6000, the Daily Express, and wasn't a lot of use to anyone else. Vincent Green, the other Supt. in the building had ROYal 1763."
During 1966, John Seaman took over responsibility for AVEnue AMC traffic. Malcolm Knight moved on to work in a City Area HQ office, viz London Bridge House, and later, Riverside House, which is another story...