|
 | |  | |
Sydney Partridge, born 1922 in London, tells us of his exciting days with the Post Office, after marrying Marjorie in 1952.
'Marjorie and I bought a house at Southgate, North London, for which I had saved up about 40% of the purchase price during my years of frugal living since leaving school. Being able to put up such a high proportion of the price meant that I was able to get a mortgage at a fairly low rate of interest from the Borough Council, under the 'Small Dwellings Acquisition Act'.
This was a Government legislation at the time (a Labour Government) which helped people to buy a modest house of their own and so leave rented accommodation for people who were not able to buy. This house purchase took up almost the whole of my savings, and Marjorie contributed her savings, and marriage gratuity, for the purchase of the minimum quantity of furniture, carpets, etc., that we needed to furnish most of the house.
It was a three-bedroom house, with separate bathroom and WC, and was well-built, on an estate of similar houses, built by the large building firm, Laing, in the 1930's, when the Piccadilly Underground Line was extended to Cockfosters, including our station, Southgate. This meant that those who lived on that estate and on neighbouring ones were within 15 minutes walking distance of a tube station, which provided quick and frequent trains to and from Central London.
This must have been a major factor in the selling of the houses. In addition, the Laing estate was particularly attractive because the pavements were shrub-lined, planted by Laings with flowering shrubs like lilac, flowering currant, and with trees like Japanese flowering cherries, crab-apples, rowan and copper beech.
The houses were very well built with bay windows upstairs and downstairs, at both the front and back. To improve their appearance further, the bathrooms and WC's were placed at the side of the house, so all the drainpipes were on the side walls. Therefore the backs of the houses looked as attractive as the fronts.
Obviously, a lot of consideration had been put into the planning of the houses and the pleasing character of the estate. This enhanced the desirability, so that the price of a Laing house was about 15% to 20% higher than a similar sized house in a less desirable setting only a few miles away.
We had looked at many houses in other districts but it was soon evident that if you wanted to live in a neighbourhood as pleasant as this, you had to pay a premium price for it. I looked at it from the viewpoint that it was better to spend as much as you could afford on your first house, rather than choose a cheaper place initially, and move to a more expensive place several years later. So we found that, with the loan of a few hundred pounds from my Mother, we were able to afford the mortgage which the Borough Council was prepared to lend. So, we spent 'up to the hilt' keeping only a 'cushion' of £100 in reserve for emergencies.
We were able to furnish most of the house with the basic items of furniture of decent quality, and also a carpet for each room. This was regarded by our friends as rather luxurious, in the days when it was more usual to have linoleum on the floors of bedrooms with only a bed-side rug or a 'runner' each side of the bed, to step out onto.
Those were the days before fitted carpets and carpets were made as standard sized rectangles or squares. It was also before central heating of domestic houses, and the rooms were heated by open fires (even the bedrooms) and the hot water for baths and kitchen use was provided by a coal-fired boiler, situated in the kitchen, with a hot water tank in the airing cupboard upstairs. This kept the kitchen warm in winter, and the rest of the house was warmed by coal fires or by electric bar fires.
Domestic appliances were only electric irons and vacuum cleaners, and a radio set. Fridges, washing machines, food mixers and television came along later, along with the invention of the transistor, tape recorders, stereo, record player, and colour TV. The longer life of transistors and their reduced power requirements, (which could be met by small batteries) along with the rapid industrialisation of Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and other Far Eastern countries with low labour costs, made such luxury items within the price range of the bulk of the population.
On my low point on the salary scale of an Executive Officer, we had to start our married life with strict budgeting. We worked out how much housekeeping money Marjorie needed for food, other domestic purchases, clothes money, a 'presents fund' and a certain amount of pocket money for her luxuries. I paid all the bills for electricity, gas, water, coal and coke, the Rates, house and contents insurance etc., as well as my fares to work and a mid-day snack while at the office.
Money was pretty tight for the first few years, fortunately neither of us smoked or drank alcohol - our tastes were simple and our entertainment was limited to listening to the radio (we both liked listening to radio plays) and reading books from the library. We couldn't afford to go away on holidays except to visit relations - it was lucky that my parents living at Ventnor ensured that we had a week or two at the seaside each year during summer and autumn and usually also at Christmas.
One week of my leave entitlement had to be reserved in the spring for painting the outside of the house, as it took about a week's hard work of washing the paintwork, preparation, primer, and the top coat of paint. Those bay windows meant a lot of paint work and endlessly climbing up and down the ladder, and moving it along a few feet took quite a lot of time and effort.
Internal re-decoration was done at other times of the year. 'Do it yourself' (DIY) had not yet arrived and there were not such things as 'DIY stores' - one just bought from hardware shops (or big stores like Damages) and Woolworth's. We learned how to do jobs from 'help yourself' books or tips from friends or hardware shopkeepers. All tools were hand tools - there were no Black & Deckers then!
We were able to build up a little money during each year to buy additional household items - usually as a wedding anniversary present to ourselves! Deciding by our priorities that food safety was more important than entertainment or luxury, our first significant purchase was a refrigerator, which took up almost a year's savings.
The following year we bought a Hoovermatic washing machine, one of the early twin-tub machines, (long before fully automatic washing machines were available on the domestic market).
A year or two after that we bought a black and white television set - 14' diameter was quite a good size in those days and with only two channels, BBC1 and ITV, and the definition of the picture was not so clear as nowadays. It was a wonderful addition to home entertainment, however, and there was no need to go out to a cinema now, unless there was an especially good film to see.
It must have been about 1955 and I had been making progress at the office, moving into more specialised and interesting work. A major international project (a 'World first') was under construction between 1954 and 1956 - the first Transatlantic telephone submarine cable. This ran from Oban in Scotland to Newfoundland, then over land across the tough terrain of Newfoundland, under the sea again to Nova Scotia (Canada), over land (by microwave radio links) parallel to the Atlantic coastline to the Canada/USA border and then to New York.
It was a tremendous achievement. Both in technical solutions to the problems of carrying high quality speech over much longer distances under water than had been tackled before; in the arduous conditions of laying a cable in the depths of the Atlantic, three miles deep and with the cable ship being tossed by the Atlantic swell.
Even the overland section across Newfoundland was across almost virgin territory, through forests and over hills, which required considerable physical effort to get the cable through. It was rather reminiscent of building the railways across the American 'West' and seeing the reports of progress and of the hurdles overcome.
I was involved only on the accounting aspect of the project. Since it was to cost the then huge sum of $15m however, and was a joint effort between Britain, Canada and the United States, it was important to get the accounting right. The accounting records had to be set up so that they could be inspected by representatives of the other two parties to assure themselves that what they were being asked to contribute was correct.
The provision of a good quality telephone service between USA/Canada and Britain/Europe (in place of the previous 'steam radio' service which was subject to 'fading', atmospheric crackles, interference from other radio users, sun-spot activity, etc.) was recognised as being a great step forward in telecommunications.
Once this was achieved with 'TAT 1' (Trans-Atlantic Telephone Cable No.1), it was succeeded in later years by TAT 2,3,4, and 5, by UK/Canada 'CANTAT' and by the Canada/Hawaii/Fiji/New Zealand/Australia 'COMPAC' (Commonwealth Pacific Cable). It was also succeeded by the cable from Australia to the Commonwealth points in South East Asia, Papua New Guinea, Hong Kong and Singapore (the 'SEACOM' cable).
I was involved in the drafting of the agreements and the accounting arrangements for all these projects, and also in the early days of satellite communications. In the early days of these new cables and satellites the number of channels available was quite small (36 channels in TAT1 and 80 channels in INTELSAT 1).
However, development brought huge increases in the capacity so that we now talk in terms of thousands of telephone circuits and several TV channels within the same satellite. All these advances took several decades after 1956 and the people who were in from the beginning of these projects could be looked on almost as 'pioneers'.
These developments gave us the opportunity to prove our ability (or otherwise!) to cope with changing situations, and I attribute my subsequent promotions to the fact that what I did on TAT 1 brought me to the attention of my superiors. I was considered as one who could be set a problem and work away at it until he came up with a solution, and to work that solution through in meticulous detail to a satisfactory conclusion.
In the days of the 'Suez Affair' (late 1956) the wife of the UK premier, Anthony Eden, was reputed to have said that the Suez Canal ran through her sitting room. Well, in our case, the First Transatlantic Telephone Cable ran through ours!
Before my TAT 1 involvement, I was still an Executive Officer, but in 1956 was promoted to Higher Executive Officer (HEO) and about 1963 to Senior Executive Officer (SEO). In 1966 I went on my first official business trip to New York to look at the Americans' accounts for the TAT 3 project.
In 1967 I represented the British Post Office's interests at several meetings in Frankfurt concerning the link-up between Earth Stations in the shared use of the Atlantic Satellite. The following year I was promoted to Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and for the next four years I concentrated on dealings with mainly European countries.'
After a long and very exciting career with the Post Office (Engineering), Sydney retired and moved to Southbourne, Bournemouth, with his wife, Marjorie.
| |  | |  |
To add a comment you must first login or join for free, up in the top left corner.
|
|
