Speaker Rotarian Brian Burton - Tales of a Telecom Manager

Brian told us that his life in telecommunications started in April 1962 when he first walked through the doors of Telephone House on Broadway in Bradford. It was not what he was expecting to do with his life. He had trained for and passed the Civil Service entrance exams and was looking for a posting. To get that he had to put down five choices in order out of a couple of hundred possible government departments. He had put Forestry at the top of his list as he enjoyed an outdoor life but was actually given his fifth choice at the department of the Post Office and Telecommunications as it was then called.

Because he was a qualified civil servant he was given an executive chair (cloth covered with arms) rather than one for ordinary office workers (plastic covered without arms). This pretty much described the mentality of the organisation which was tremendously bureaucratic and hierarchical as well as being grossly over manned. Brian gave an example of installing a new phone line in a subscriber’s house where it took 3 engineers each with very specific parts of the job whereas one engineer could have easily accomplished the whole installation. Management of the Bradford area was very much by memo and the manager in charge was known as "Mince Pie Man" because the only time that the general staff saw him was when he doled out a mince pie to everybody at Christmas.
In the 1960's and 70's telephone exchanges were still connecting calls by means of a Strowger Switch that had been invented an undertaker called Almon Strowger. He was motivated to invent the switch because at that time all connections were made by operators plugging connections manually into the necessary location on a panel. Strowger's undertaking business was seeing falling sales whilst his competitor was growing rapidly. He found out that his competitor’s wife was a telephone operator and was diverting all calls for an undertaker to her husband's business.
From Bradford Brian moved around the country a bit - firstly to Leeds which was headquarters of the North East region. Here he was given 3 trays for his desk an In Tray, an Out Tray and an LBW tray. When receiving them he knew what 1 and 2 were for but had bo idea what LBW was - his boss told him - "Let the Buggers Wait". He then moved onto Brighton for a while before being transferred to Portsmouth. Here he had to sign the Official Secrets Act because he became involved in "War Games". These were very stressful as they simulated a nuclear attack and the telecoms industry was tasked with proving how they would keep communication channels open. If war actually came Brian would have had to have lived in an underground bunker with his co-workers for the duration.
Whilst at Portsmouth he was involved with the opening of a new computerised Exchange in Chichester to replace the old Strowger system. There was a lot of publicity with high profile individuals and television cameras. The opening was to be marked by the mayor of Chichester making the first call to his counterpart in their twin town. Brian was very nervous about the call going through, but his boss was very laid back and Brian couldn't understand why until he explained afterwards that he had had the call switched through the old Strowger system.
After his stint in Portsmouth Brian was then sent back to Bradford as Area Manager. One of the perks of his new job was that BT asked him to join Rotary and paid for his subs and meals as they saw it as an important way of networking. As area manager is photograph was in the front of the Bradford area telephone directory for 4 years. His job made him responsible for everything outside of the exchanges, so he was known as the "Holes, Poles and Plastic" man (see main picture) which accurately described his area of coverage - see the diagram below.

He also had to deal with a mysterious Mrs Moon who his superiors told him would call occasionally and he had to get whatever information that she asked for. On the few times she called it was to ask him to get details about either who the subscriber of a particular telephone number was or what was the origin or destination of calls made to or by that number. The lady was obviously working for the security services and before current day technology such as GCHQ this was the way to track down terrorists and other undesirable elements.
When privatisation came along in 1984 he was given the option of being transferred to another government department or leaving the Civil Service and remaining with the privatised BT and he chose the latter. Privatisation saw the company having to become much more efficient and employee numbers tumbled from 250,000 to 100,000 by the time Brian left BT in 1992.
Brian gave one example of how the new digital computerised exchanges could be a problem. When one of our former members John Moxon issued a new catalogue for Intasun (where John was manager) and the day after it went out so many calls were made to the company that the Bradford telephone exchange stopped working because of the overload. This gave Intasun a lot of free publicity whilst causing Brian nothing but grief.
The Bradford area covered 820 square miles and Brian was always having to look at problems such as floods, snow & ice on the cables as well as high winds. As such a hotline to the metrological office to be able to keep up to date on developing weather patterns.