The 1940s Broadcasting House Control Room - page 2

To the far left of the front bench was a junior operator known as "SB". Standing for "Simultaneous Broadcast" this sounded a very important job. Let me explain. At this time the Home Service was not a network but consisted of seven independent regional services, each with its own continuity. Much of the time, programmes came from London and were fed to Birmingham and on to the rest of the country but if a programme originated in Bristol, then the incoming line from Bristol had to be fed to Birmingham, the London continuity feeding only the local transmitters. Similarly, if Birmingham was the source then the feed to Birmingham had to be broken away to prevent a possible howl round. There was a 10 second switching pause between programmes in which to carry out this simple task which was given to a junior on the basis that they wouldn't dare miss a switch and also because they were available most of the time to do tea rounds. Quite a demanding job in itself as tea rounds were large and very heavy in the days of china cups and saucers. Behind the front bench were more bays, overflowing with amplifiers, power supplies, line equalisers, test gear and so on. Also lurking near the back of the control room, but not shown in the pictures, were six autochanger 78 RPM grams used for playing out line idents.



Above left: Some of the incoming and outgoing line amplifiers. Near the centre of the picture is the AC Test Bay, seen in detail on the right.







Left: relays and more trap valves. Right: check receivers with the control room Tannoy intercom amp at the top of the bay.