Colin Seabright's new Empire when the SB Test room combined with the Telecomms Test Room.

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Mike Jordan remembers coming in on a Sunday to divert the Control Room pairs from the Sound Test Room to the ATA (is the block still in the Lower Ground Floor cable riser?) and convincing Colin Seabright to actually go to the Canteen (for an orange juice).

Dave Buttle refusing to do bay wiring work on the new audio test bays (not my job - its for a wireman).

Always keeping a loudspeaker across the line when doing a lines test with Alf Brookman. He used to do the run, let you set the EQ then do the final squeak just twitching the PTS10 so it looked as if he was changing frequency. He would leave it at 1K/c till he thought it had gone far enough Then never remind you to do harmonics. All so he could get to the pub earlier (or so I'm told - he he).

Early Stereo tests with the Seabright 0.1dB attenuator and a parallel strip to measure phase difference.

Modifying the MU37s on the carrier gear to take new-fangled Germanium rectifier stacks instead of  valves!

Tuning UN10/2 ringers to all those odd frequencies for selective ringing - 600/700/777/1600 - must have been more.

'Carribean' cleaners turning on all the radiators every morning to get a familiar atmosphere - us turning them off again and finally removing all the adjusting taps and Aralditing them shut!

And the 'Technical cleaner' (forgot his name) who used to come in every week to clean the double enders. Staring at the door end every week and never getting to the far end so we had to 'rotate' the cords so they all got cleaned eventually!

It was always useful to know the GPO blokes in the basement. I used to want to go to The Palyhouse every Sunday evening for the recording of 'I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again' but it was always hard to get through on the (then) internal phone to the ticket unit.
The answer was to go down to the basement PBX, borrow the line tester, intercept the relevant extension and break in between calls - success!

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And Mike Steed adds after seeing  Steve Redburn's comments about roller shutters in SWC:-

And seeing the roller bomb shutters..

Do you remember how little Bill the Handyman would come into the ATA at 9 am and roll open all the shutters with his little pole. He would grunt, swear and sweat 'cos the spring counterbalances were so naff. In the evening he would repeat the exercise to shut them all.

One day it was such a bright morning that we opened all the shutters ourselves at 0830. Bill came in at 9, and proceeded to shut them all, cursing as usual, much to everyone's amusement. He got half way along before he noticed the growing, sniggering audience. He stopped, looked at the clock and the dawn sun streaming through the windows, glared at us, swore profusely, and worked his way back down the line opening them all again.


PS Ever wondered why was it OK for the ATA to suffer bomb damage during daylight?

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Another good one from Mike Steed:-

Manning the main ATA desk one afternoon, I picked up the old bakelite extension 2222. "Is that Telecoms Faults?" asked an apparently inebriated, and slightly familiar, voice on the other end.

"Yes," I replied.

"Well, I think the PW between my brain and my legs has gone dis" he complained.

By now I had placed the caller as Ken Clayson, with whom I had recently returned from a local hostelry.

"Put a loop on both ends and we'll buzz it out" I suggested, and hung up.

Ken's roar of laughter from the adjacent workshop permeated the whole ATA, prompting Colin to emerge from his office to investigate the cause.

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Tony Hosking tells of  when not to do ATA maintenance:-

A while ago I jotted a summary of Beeb recollections and had quite a list in a few short minutes.  I guess we all have many tales that must be embargoed because a) they're too incriminating, and/or b) they're libellous, and/or c) pensions are worth keeping.

Here's one that escapes these categories...

In November 1973 Princess Anne married Captain Mark Phillips in Westminster Abbey.  True to form, the BBC machine went into overdrive.
Amidst the other fuss of a Grade 2 event, the ATA was busy with more lines tests than anyone thought Postie had lines.  Even the rarely-used
rear test bays E and F were pressed into service.  Every spare eq chain and C amp was used to supplement LCR for the huge number of music lines
- the jackfield knitting was amazing.  I recall we even had to send out for more double-enders.

Once 'on air', peace and tranquility descended except for programme monitoring.  An estimated 500m people were watching and listening.
No-one was inclined to do much in case something got unplugged.

Except muggins.  Using Bay F had revealed a poor state of repair from disuse.  Never one to stay idle for long, and with Colin's approval, I
started cleaning the 20 indicator contacts along the jackstrip.  These indicators would drop when they detected AC ringing current from a
remote site, thus closing a circuit to sound a buzzer.  This saved a Comms engineer having to find a phone (no cellphones in 1973) -
sometimes far from easy at some OB sites!  When the contacts got dirty, the buzzer was feeble or didn't work at all.  So this seemed a good time
for a quiet spot of maintenance.  I worked along the strip, clean and test, clean and test.

Until Colin's phone rang.  His head popped round the bay, "Head of Comms Ops wants to know why someone just rang down his Spendors!".

[Footnote: Spendor BC-1s were high-end studio monitor loudspeakers; 17Hz at 100v is hazardous to voicecoils.]

Posted 24th October 17:48

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Mike Steed tells how to 'wind up ' Colin Seabright:-

There used to be a BBC payment called "Lunch Hour Work-Through". Its purpose was self-explanatory.

One day, we spent a little longer than usual taking afternoon tea in the canteen. (OK, maybe a lot longer; it may have been that hot summer day when we spotted the ladies sunbathing topless on the roof of a nearby fashion house).

Anyway, we tried to slink quietly back into the ATA, but the mass of ringing phones and buzzing EMX lines was clearly giving the game away about our late return.

Colin greeted us with a superb one-liner:- "So, what do you call that? A Work Hour Coffee-Through?"

Posted  25th October 16:01

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Martin Perry was always a joker:-   

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Richard Taylor  (Having taken redundancy when Pebble Mill closed, rather than moving to 'The Shoebox') adds these stories of ATA times:- 
ATA/SWC/MNTCE/SIS MNTCE/WALES/BRUM/RETIREMENT
Rusty's pipe

When I joined ATA from WN in 1969 Colin had established a no smoking ban in the ATA.  Rusty Walters liked to brood over his pipe, but had to go elsewhere to do so when Colin Seabright was in.

Sometimes though Colin went to meetings and Rusty used to gleefully light up knowing he had a few hours to enjoy a couple of pipes!

We devised a little eddystone box with a few resistors covered in oil and wired back to the MDF, which we fixed under Rusty's desk.  On Colin's return and Rusty's pipe stowed back in his desk we applied 50V to each resistor in turn as Colin stopped by Rusty's desk for a chat.  Allowing a few minutes between each one for maximum discomfort.

Little wisps of smelly smoke could be seen to apparently drift out of the desk drawers......

Embassy Feeds
These were of course a pain in the arse, as they often rang to complain of losing them.  Usually it was their own fault as someone would unplug or turn off the mains to the kit.  So we were frequently testing them out, usually by phoning a contact in the embassy and talking them through checks.

So we invented a feed, and wrote out a card for it.  I forgot who got to check that one out, but the contact phone number was the British Museum Reading Room.

Much to our delight, quite a conversation was started up as both parties had got the wrong end of the stick.

R1 over the "phone bell"

Remember the warble tone fed to earpieces over the bays to indicate a phone call all over the ATA?
We would plug the input to a R1 check receiver when Colin was absent.

Swapping phone handsets over
Very childish, but both Rusty and Bob Lim often fell for it.  With so many phones on the desks we simply put each handset on the rest of another phone.  When the phone legitimately rang, out stretched a hand to pick it up and mumble into the mouthpiece "SBs" or whatever.  The look of surprise on their face as it continued to ring and then picked up another handset or listened carefully to work out which phone it was!

Although the PBX extensions were on lamps on the test bays it was difficult to see other than Bay A in front of them.  And the person on A would of course put his hand up over the lamps!!

ADX Shutdown

Isn't there a story (Ken Clayson could confirm?) about Gary? someone who was "let go".  On his last day he wandered around saying goodbye and ended up in the ADX.  After asking how it worked, he allegedly said "and to think this turns it all off!" and reached up to the mains isolator and turned it off.


Posted  5th January 2007  00:21

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Tony Hosking tells of the good maintenance state of the ATA:-

A while ago I jotted a summary of Beeb recollections and had quite a list in a few short minutes.  I guess we all have many tales that must be embargoed because a) they're too incriminating, and/or b) they're libellous, and/or c) pensions are worth keeping.

Here's one that escapes these categories...

In November 1973 Princess Anne married Captain Mark Phillips in Westminster Abbey.  True to form, the BBC machine went into overdrive. Amidst the other fuss of a Grade 2 event, the ATA was busy with more lines tests than anyone thought Postie had lines.  Even the rarely-used rear test bays E and F were pressed into service.  Every spare eq chain  and C amp was used to supplement LCR for the huge number of music lines  - the jackfield knitting was amazing.  I recall we even had to send out  for more double-enders.

Once 'on air', peace and tranquility descended except for programme monitoring.  An estimated 500m people were watching and listening.
No-one was inclined to do much in case something got unplugged.

Except muggins.  Using Bay F had revealed a poor state of repair from disuse.  Never one to stay idle for long, and with Colin's approval, I started cleaning the 20 indicator contacts along the jackstrip.  These indicators would drop when they detected AC ringing current from a remote site, thus closing a circuit to sound a buzzer.  This saved a Comms engineer having to find a phone (no cellphones in 1973) - sometimes far from easy at some OB sites!  When the contacts got dirty, the buzzer was feeble or didn't work at all.  So this seemed a good time for a quiet spot of maintenance.  I worked along the strip, clean and test, clean and test.

Until Colin's phone rang.  His head popped round the bay, "Head of Comms Ops wants to know why someone just rang down his Spendors!".

[Footnote: Spendor BC-1s were high-end studio monitor loudspeakers; 17Hz at 100v is hazardous to voicecoils.]


Posted 22nd January 2007

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MJ  220107