Análisis de la Relación de Causalidad del Cambio Climático con el Desarrollo

Telephones and duplicating machines were, as much as typewriters, a symbol of the modern twentieth century office. Mechanisation was well under way by the 1920s; in his book on clerical workers, Klingender marvelled that in 1927, ninety seven separate firms were members of the Office Appliance Trades

Association.²⁹¹ At the BBC it was women who operated these new technologies, in line with the convention of the 1920s and 1930s which saw routine office work as appropriate female employment.²⁹² The telephone and duplicating machine feature in the recollections of BBC staff: even at Magnate House, Cecil Lewis, the Assistant Director of Programmes, stressed how they both never stopped ringing or duplicating.²⁹³ Ruth Cockerton, looking back to the mid 1920s, recalled the roneo machine “which ground out memos and things in a room where people hung their hats and coats.”²⁹⁴ The operator of the lone BBC machine at Savoy Hill in the early 1920s was a ‘girl’; in 1938, the Duplicating Section at

Broadcasting House employed twenty seven female operatives.²⁹⁵ The BBC telephone exchange saw a similar expansion; from one operator in 1923, by 1938 it had a staff of twenty five. Since the first exchanges had begun operating in the

290 The 1937 Staff List shows that catering and cleaning at the Transmission stations was also done by men. The exception was Bournemouth which employed a female cleaner, Mrs Cross.

291 F. E. Klingender, The Condition of Clerical Labour in England (London: Martin Lawrence Ltd., 1935) p.64

292 Anderson, op.cit., pp.17-18

293 Cecil Lewis, Broadcasting from Within (London: George Newnes Limited, 1924) p.27

294 Ariel, June 1938

295 Goatman, op.cit., p.29

Fig 4.1: Miss Gibson, Senior Duplicating Operator. Broadcasting House,

Ariel, April 1938

Fig 4.2: Telephonists, with Mrs Rouse, Supervisor, Broadcasting House, c.1937

1880s, telephonists had been women.²⁹⁶ By 1921, the Post Office employed 26,000 female telephonists and the GPO would become the main recruiting ground for the BBC.

Amongst Reith’s first appointments in 1923 was that of switchboard operator.

Olive May was personally interviewed by Miss Banks, the Women’s Staff Supervisor, and Reith, who stressed the importance of the job. The switchboard was the first point of contact between the outsider and the BBC and, as such, it was vital that all callers were dealt with intelligently, efficiently and

courteously.²⁹⁷ Miss May was recruited in March 1923 specifically to open the PBX switchboard [Private Branch Exchange] at Savoy Hill.²⁹⁸ The space was cramped, the hours of work long, (including weekends), with no overtime pay expected. She was soon joined by a second switchboard operator and together they covered extensive shifts, starting at 9am and finishing late, often not until 10.30pm. Despite the intensity of the work, Miss May relished her time at Savoy Hill, especially the amity that developed between her and Reith. As will be touched on in Chapter Three, Reith was devastated when she left to marry Cecil Bottle, a BBC engineer from Leeds. On her retirement on marriage in 1928, Reith recorded in his diary, “Mrs Bottle, senior telephonist since 1923 departing today.

I gave her a silver inkstand and went along to see her presents. She has been beyond praise in every way and I regret her going very much.”²⁹⁹

In 1931, Mrs Bottle was invited to return to the BBC for twelve months, to oversee the development of the telephone exchange at Broadcasting House.³⁰⁰ When it opened in 1932, six switchboard positions were installed; by 1938, this had been extended to twelve.³⁰¹ Not only did the twenty three operators, working in shifts, deal with an average of 11,000 calls each day but their job also entailed memorising the details of 650 internal extensions and the frequent movements of

296 McNally, op.cit., p 5. The use of women as GPO telephonists was a legacy of telegraphy, where the experiment of employing female staff had first taken place. Martindale, op.cit., pp.16-17

297 Reith Remembered, broadcast June 21^st 1989. Sound Archive No: 87181

298 Prospero, June 1984. Cecil Bottle confirmed his wife had worked for GEC, being turned over to the BBC on March 17^th 1923, Prospero, June 1968

299 Reith Diaries, January 27th 1928

300 Prospero, June 1985, Olive Bottle Obituary

301 Goatman, op.cit., pp.32-33

staff. A photograph from this time shows a row of women telephonists dressed in neat white blouses and dark skirts, their female supervisor, in a smart floral dress, standing over them.³⁰² [See Fig. 4.2 p.108]

Reith maintained a close relationship with the switchboard; Dorothy Torry, who worked in his office from 1936, remembered how a senior telephonist was employed to deal personally with Reith and how he made a friend of her. “They knew each other and their wants and dislikes and the way they spoke. He felt he couldn’t really manage with someone different.”³⁰³ This sense of a personal connection with the BBC’s telephonists extended to other senior staff. In 1946, Roger Eckersley looked back nostalgically to earlier days when” the girls in our telephone exchange used to know us all - I still feel hurt when a girl asks me to repeat my name.” ³⁰⁴ The telephone exchange thus epitomised the familial ethos of the Corporation in the inter-war years.

According to a Radio Pictorial article in September 1939, the “Hello Girls” of the BBC needed long-term experience in a Post Office exchange before they could be considered for a position with the Corporation. ³⁰⁵ As with other secretarial/

clerical staff, the BBC expected telephonists to arrive already trained. A series of documents from 1937/1938 offer an insight into the comparative workings of the telephone exchanges at the BBC, Selfridges, Lever Brothers, Midland Bank and Harrods. Miss Freeman, the WSA, was keen to place BBC telephonists on a higher grade but in order to do so she needed to convince the Director of Staff Administration that this was in line with rates of pay outside.³⁰⁶ Accordingly, information about age, experience, pay and working conditions was requested from a number of companies. For the BBC, Mrs Rouse, the PBX Supervisor, clarified that the approximate starting age and wage for BBC telephonists was twenty-four on a rate of £3 a week. Four years LTS (London Telephone Service) experience was required and while languages weren’t essential, they were an

302 Goatman, op.cit., p.33

303 Dorothy Torry interview op.cit.

304 Eckersley op.cit., p.66

305 Radio Pictorial, September 8^th 1939

306 R49/237/1: Staff Policy: Grades and Salaries: Telephonists 1937-1946, Freeman to Wade, March 22^nd 1937. Miss Freeman believed telephonists should be graded BW rather than CW, see Appendix 3: Weekly Grades and Salaries

asset. BBC telephonists worked an alternate weekly shift pattern while Sunday and Bank Holiday duties were compensated for by extra time off rather than overtime pay. In line with other weekly-paid BBC staff, telephonists received three weeks annual leave.³⁰⁷

Four companies responded to Freeman’s request for information which show wide variations. Midland Bank recruited inexperienced girls at seventeen, paying them

£1.10s a week, although experienced staff could earn up to £4.15s. Hours were similar to the BBC at 40 hours a week, and for those who stayed with the Bank for twenty years, four weeks holiday could be accrued. Harrods, on the other hand, recruited older women, between the ages of twenty-five-and thirty; hours were longer (49.5 hours per week), pay lower (starting at £2.10s rising to £3) and holidays shorter (two weeks). Maximum salaries were £3.15s (Lever Brothers);

£3 (Harrods) and £2.15s (Selfridges). At this time, Post Office telephonists earned a maximum salary of £3 a week.³⁰⁸ The BBC’s pay and conditions of service were, in consequence, shown to be as good as, if not better than, other telephone exchanges and as a result, Miss Freeman did not get her wish for re-grading.³⁰⁹

However, it wasn’t only the pay that made the BBC an attractive place to work, it was the prestige of the job. As Reith had originally told Miss May, switchboard operators dealt with people from all walks of life and the nature of BBC work would have entailed daily contact with dignitaries and celebrities. For those who worked in the Duplicating Section, daily life was less glamorous, but the busy office was a vital hub of the BBC. Wilfrid Goatman, writing about the office in 1938, joked that it was quite unoriginal to say life at the BBC was largely a matter of forms.³¹⁰ The duplication of forms was a major function of the Duplicating Section and Goatman relished listing the thousands of specially formulated index cards, internal memorandum sheets and analytical record proforma that were printed every day, smirking that the Section Supervisor had even designed a form

307 Same file, Rouse to Freeman, January 4^th 1938

308 Dorothy Evans, Women and the Civil Service (London: Pitman, 1934) p.82

309 R49/231/1: Staff Policy: Grades and Salaries. Notes on the Method by which the April Salary Revision is Conducted, 1938

310 Goatman, op.cit., p.28

for the requisitioning of forms. While this may seem amusing a large

bureaucracy, such as the BBC, needed a uniformity of paperwork to function efficiently. The Duplicating Section not only produced forms, it was also responsible for the copying of play-scripts, minutes of meetings, press releases and announcer’s duty sheets along with daily menus and studio allocations, all of which might be subject to last minute change.³¹¹

Duplicating was not a job singled out by either Ray Strachey or Joan Beauchamp in their studies of women’s work in the 1930s so it is difficult to compare the BBC’s duplicating staff with others doing similar work, however conditions of service were in line with all BBC weekly-paid secretarial/ clerical staff with operatives placed in two grades earning up to £3.10s a week.³¹² Under the management of a Supervisor and Assistant Supervisor, were two clerks, seven stencil typists, fourteen operators, two office girls and three ‘boys’.³¹³

In 1938 Mary Lewis, a graduate of Westfield College, joined the Duplicating Section as a checking clerk. Years later, on her retirement as Head of Pay Policy, she was interviewed for the Oral History of the BBC and her recollections are illuminating.³¹⁴ Miss Lewis had taken a secretarial training course after university but failed the Corporation’s shorthand test hence her decision to accept the job as a temporary checking clerk. Although the Duplicating Supervisor, Miss Hills, enforced rigid discipline such as controlling the hours at which staff could go to the lavatory, Mary Lewis described an atmosphere of friendship within the office.

She also emphasised the interesting and worthwhile end-product and especially

311 Everywoman, February 1935 included an article on the “Silent Women of the BBC” which included a paragraph on the Duplicating Department. Described as “a most important department”

with Miss Hills as principal, it was the BBC printing works. “Here time sheets, press notices, and programme schedules are handled, and artists’ scripts issued in duplicated form. There is a staff of twenty four girls who confine themselves to multigraphing machines which ooze forth thousands of copies daily.”

312 Roneo and Multigraph operators were graded ‘C3W’ earning up to £3.10s weekly, Junior Duplicating Machine Operators were graded ‘DW’ earning up to £3 a week.

313 BBC Staff List, 1937. While the ‘Office Girl’ is a rarity in BBC documents, the position of

‘Boy’ was common; 222 ‘Boys’ were listed as working at the BBC in 1939. This was an established position within the Corporation for selected youths who had left school at fourteen.

They were encouraged to attend evening classes and, it was hoped, would qualify for junior clerical positions in the Corporation when their employment was terminated at eighteen. R49/227/:

Grades and Salaries, Grades “D” and Weekly Paid Staff, Memorandum on the Employment of Boys, April 28^th 1937

314 Mary Lewis interview, op.cit.

welcomed the chance to be party to the confidential papers that were processed by the section in the run up to the Second World War. Part of her job, she explained, was to check that circulars, scripts and documents produced by the Section were of a correct standard.

Mary Lewis did not specify if, as a clerk in the department, she was expected to wear a uniform but it is known that all the BBC’s female duplicating operators wore a floral overall, shown to its full glory in an Ariel photograph from 1938.

[Fig. 4.1 p.108] Here Miss Gibson, a senior duplicating officer, stands proudly in a distinctive flower-pattern robe, her job in the BBC apparent to all. There is no way of knowing whether the female duplicating staff enjoyed this differentiation, but the covering would have protected their day-clothes from ink.

Neither do we know if specialist experience or training was required of the BBC’s female duplicating staff and it may be that a lower level of education was

accepted. The section appears to have been unique in its employment of “office girls” as we have seen two were recorded as working in the section in 1937.Aged fourteen or fifteen, the girls would have been too young to have gained any qualifications and may well have come from working-class households. This was unusual at the BBC, where most female office staff were educated at least to School Certificate level.

Telephony and duplicating were specialist jobs, and there is no indication that any women who worked in these sections of the BBC were ever considered for

promotion or transference to other areas of work. Mrs Rouse, the PBX supervisor, Miss Hills, the Duplicating Supervisor and Miss Armstrong, the Assistant Duplicating Supervisor (all salaried positions by 1939), had risen through the ranks of their particular section. These were sections where only women worked (apart from ‘Boys’) and female supervision was seen as essential.

Two areas of waged work were performed equally by both men and women at the BBC, that of clerk and waged assistant.³¹⁵

315 Small numbers of male and female bookkeepers and cheque-writers were also employed, but little is known about these roles.