Just when you think you’ve escaped the ‘corporate speak’ of BT and will no longer have to listen to repetitive sentences such as ‘Welcome to BT Meet Me,’ and then you get on the train and the same voice says ‘Welcome to this Greater Anglia train‘…!
Dressed to Deliver
Upcoming temp exhibition at The Postal Museum looking at the history of workwear from 18 October 2023.
50 Years of Commercial Radio
October 2023 marks 50 years since ‘commercial’ radio was launched. Capital, LBC, and others…
https://www.boomradiouk.com/fifty-years-of-commercial-radio/
Styling the Post Office
Copies of my 2022 book, ‘Styling the Post Office’ (history of the corporate image(s) of the Post Office) are still available direct from the link below. New books in the series are expected mid-2024 onwards.
Kingsway Tunnels
Ex-wartime telephone exchange site, redundant from BT uses, currently being scoped by investors for a possible London themed attraction.
HS2 at Euston
A look at progress and planned configurations:
Blog Transferred
And pages/sections (being) edited!
Promoting Social History
How do you encourage social history, for your favourite topic? Writing about the General Post Office #MyGPOFamily captures the working practices of the era, the organisation, and some of the quirks of working for the GPO. But who wants to read about it? The engineers (predominantly/historically men) want to go down the pub, and are perhaps more interested in the practical side of telecommunications, not the written history. The operators (mostly women) may not care about the technical workings of the industry, and tend not to join the engineering social media groups. The real (working) engineers are jokers, and enjoy tales of pranks and scams which (of course) never occurred?! The dedicated historians are too busy doing their own research to read trivia on Facebook postings, or Twitter? Judging the audience and finding them is difficult…
Working for the GPO
I never actually ‘worked for the GPO’ – My dad did, and at that time it was still part of the government. Writing biros (pens) were marked ‘Government Property’ – it wasn’t the most commercial of logos! Everything was labelled, numbered and accounted for. It was a well-ordered organisation, although some folks might say it was a bureaucratic nightmare. People seemed to have more respect back then in the late 1960s. It was a time of changing social ideas, but the GPO was a powerful employer with hundreds of thousands of staff on its books. It had a job for anyone who wanted it, as long as they met basic criteria and standards.
By the time I was old enough to work, the telephone part of the GPO had already become ‘Post Office Telecommunications’ and it was that which I joined in 1979. I was enthralled by the company; it didn’t matter too much what I did, simply being in its employ was everything! Perhaps it didn’t always feel that way, every day, but for the most it was exciting ‘working for the Post Office.’ To many, it was ‘just a job’, but to me it was always special.
Writing books about the General Post Office – 1
I’m not sure that folks today even know what the GPO, or General Post Office was, or even if they really wish to find out? People today mostly want a service to work well for them without the worry of how or why it does, what it does!
The GPO once operated both the postal and telecommunication services in the UK. Various names such as The Post Office, or the British Post Office were familiarly used in everyday use. Royal Mail always delivered the post (letters and parcels), but the local post office was where you went to buy stamps. Conveniently, The Post Office ran Royal Mail, so whichever name you used, it didn’t really matter!
Telephones were installed and the system was operated by the Post Office too! GPO Telephones was the name until the organisation became a corporation in October 1969. Posts and Telecoms split so that British Telecom came into being from about 1980. For the period between 1969 to 1979 the term Post Office Telephones morphing into Post Office Telecommunications (circa 1974) were the other names used!
British Telecom- Part of the Post Office became British Telecommunications Plc from 1984 and thence simply BT (trading name) from 1991. Openreach, the engineering bit, was named in 2006 and is steadily on the way to separation from BT. The companies and products continue to evolve from year to year, which is why tracking them becomes ever more complicated; thus it’s worthwhile to set out the details in a book.
Structure is everything in understanding a big company; how it operates and what it does. Tied up in it all is the history, which goes back to the 1830s for recognisable buildings in London, although Royal Mail has over 500 years of history! The fine detail is an unfolding trail of stories and evolution.
[Writing this ‘off the cuff’ without reference to papers isn’t the same as writing for a book – the facts have to be triple-checked and cross-referred to other sources, to confirm the accuracy of the info.]