Ah! At long last, it’s 1958, which I never thought would finally come. Naturally, I’m no longer in the Royal Air Force; so, no wonder I’m out looking for gainful employment. Naturally, I’m hoping to capitalize on my teleprinting capabilities. In the R.A.F., I had proved my ability to type at a speed of 50 wpm (words per minute,) in plain language, 30 wpm in code. (Code was 5-letter groups each of which had a meaning not readily discernable at first (or even second) glance, i.e. QSEDR LOKIJ DRZWQ HUYFG, etc.)
Later, after landing a job with KLM after a brief period of hunting, I was to learn that what I had imagined was fast keyboarding was really close to virtually standing still.
From the Lambeth North Underground Station, bus rides to KLM involved driving past St. Thomas’ Hospital; Big Ben; Downing St.; Whitehall; Horse Guards Parade; Trafalgar Square; Piccadilly Circus; Regent St. and its famous decorations. Finally, the bus stops at Conduit St., or Hamleys Toy Store. Most of the time I didn’t bother with these never-to-be-forgotten sights of London; rather, I would have my nose buried in a newspaper or a book. Oxford Circus was the next main junction for the buses, where Regent Street is intersected by Oxford Street, where one could shop to one’s heart’s desire, so that became a regular stop on my lunch breaks. [Don’t forget that Big Ben is the name of the bell, not the name of the clock or the recently-named Elizabeth Tower, in which Big Ben resides. Big Ben is just a name that most everyone associates with the image of the clock-faces.]
Finish the trip with a brief walk down Conduit Street past infamous Saville Row to New Bond Street, where the Time & Life Building stood on the opposite corner where street names changed, and Conduit Street became Bruton Street.
Bus rides were a genuine pleasure in London, as the service was, even back in the 1950s, absolutely excellent. If you missed one bus, another one would come shortly afterward which would be glad to take you to your destination. It’s still the same today; during recent visits, we found the same situation, as bus followed bus. Many of the lines covered the same routes as far as the city of London was concerned, although their points of origin, and/or ultimate destinations, might be totally different.
Normally, it would be a number 12 or number 53, a number 1 or 139. Any of these bus numbers would carry one from Lambeth North Underground Station or Waterloo Station over to Hamleys Toy Store on Regent Street from which it was a mere six minutes walk to the Time & Life Building. I did that trip five times a week for three years. Both Lambeth North and Waterloo Station were well within walking distance from home.
After my work shift was done for the day, the above would be reversed.
Three years I would spend at K.L.M. Royal Dutch Airlines at the Time and Life Building on New Bond Street, in London. (Officialy, it was 1 Bruton Street, but unofficially, it was 153-157, New Bond Street, London W1.) It involved shift work, including the night shift, which required one to spend all night in the communications office, where, in addition to teleprinting duties, one would be responsible for answering the telephone using the PBX (Private branch exchange) switchboard, routinely manned during regular office hours by two or three ladies. Here, was where my Royal Air Force experience kicked in, as I had the opportunity to share with several W.A.A.F. telephone operators in running the A.D.O.C.’s PBX, which was much larger, requiring some twenty girls to man its many positions.
The difference was that calls to K.L.M. were normally for the Reservations Department, next door to the Communications. This would almost inevitably result in a slip later being sent from Reservations to Communications which had to be rendered onto perforated tape to be sent to K.L.M. at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. That was where the Communications office came into its own.
The slip contained the name/s of the would-be passengers plus the flight upon which they would be leaving London’s Heathrow Airport, and the flight number they required to book from Amsterdam. The information was, with the exception of the passenger’s name, in encoded format, except that it was not the coding used in the R.A.F. It was in the AIRIMP code, used by all airlines, i.e. KK LHRSPL KL123/23MAY NN SPLNYC KL985/23MAY. (That means a would-be passenger wanted to book London/Schiphol on KL123 on May 23rd, and then making a connection to SPL to New York City the same day on KL985. KK meant that the seat was confirmed on KL123/23, and NN meant that a seat was required on KL985/23, which SPL had to give a KK confirmation. KLM was operating Viscount aircraft in those days between LHR/SPL.
It would always irk me that all the personalities seen on TV or in the newspapers getting on or off an aircraft seemed as if they had to be travelling with B.O.A.C. (later, British Airways,) and never with K.L.M. Remember that we’re back in the late 1950s.
In normal office hours, under the watchful eye of the person who had hired me, Ken Youngman, the manager of the Communications office, one person would stand at a teleprinter, monitoring an automatic transmitter, while another would be typing on a “perforator,” producing a long string of tape punched with five holes, in addition to a tractor-feed hole punched roughly in the middle of the tape which was approximately one inch wide.
It amazed me to see in those early days, the tape would build up on the floor, waiting to be fed into the automatic transmitter despite the fact that the machine was speedily working away at 66.6 wpm (remember, words per minute). No wonder that 50 wpm seemed slow by comparison. Those working on that perforator must have been making eighty or even more wpm in order to gain headway on the automatic transmitter.
Ultimately, the speed achieved would have been well in excess of 100 wpm. Among those very fast typists I remember the names of Ron French, and Norman Wood, both quite tall, and not ancient by any stretch of the imagination. Both must have been in their late twenties or early thirties, although, at the ripe old age of twenty-one, they seemed old to me.
The nightshifts were a dream, there was mostly nothing to do; just the odd phone call, followed by the customary slip from the Res. department that required transmission to SPL.
On more than one occasion it was necessary to call 999 to alert the police to a burglar alarm that kept ringing on an adjacent building. Too, some reservations personnel from Air France, located right next door, came to our part of the Time and Life building, they were looking for someone who spoke French. It was not that they were unable to speak French; they had as a would-be passenger someone who spoke French, but had such a strong accent that they were unable to understand the man.
While on night duty, I received a call from a young woman whom I remembered as the child of friends of my parents. She was about my own age. I have no idea to this day as to how she managed to locate me in London. Also, I have no recollection of what she had to say. Too, on another occasion, I remember receiving a call from my sister-in-law who was considering suicide from which I deterred her. She later divorced her husband, remarried and moved from London to the south coast of England.
K.L.M. lost a Lockheed L-1049 (Flight KL607E/14Aug 1958) off the coast of Ireland. The L-1049 was a four-engined propeller-driven aircraft with three tail fins, holding about 100 passengers and crew, itself a stretched version of the L-649. The K.L.M. office in London was the closest to the site of the accident which had the effect of making the offices in London the responsible party for all activities involving the incident . That fact also made our office extremely busy, with messages travelling back and forth with SPL.
That aircraft accident was to take place while I happened to be on duty. Very quickly, I learned that the K.L.M. code for an aircraft crash was “ICARUS.” Every message having to do with a plane crash would be prefaced “ICARUS.” When, on the 14th day of August of 1958, a message came in having the first word “ICARUS,” we knew right away that there was some bad news to be shared. [Icarus, just for the record, was the Greek dude who, many, many eons ago, tried to fly too close to the sun which promptly melted the wax he had erroneously used in his wings to hold them together. He, naturally, and promptly fell to his death.]
I vaguely recall seeing a message (possibly the final message) we had sent to SPL giving details of a boy’s body that had been recovered at the site of the crash, asking for direction as to the disposal of the human remains.
Interestingly, while I was at K.L.M., my two brothers-in-law, Bill and Tom Miller, were both active in airlines having been in the Royal Air Force and while there receiving training as teleprinter operators, just as I had. One was with BEA, the other with SITA (Société Internationale de Télécommunications Aéronautiques), which, at that time was operated in the U.K. by BEA (British European Airways, later absorbed into British Airways). So, that made for excellent opportunities to look out for their work since we often received messages from both entities.
Just ahead of my departure from K.L.M. an old acquaintance would show up, almost unannounced: An off-station assignment. In other words, my body was being shared with another department, only, this time, hundreds of miles away at Prestwick, Scotland (Airimp code: PIK). PIK was the international airport serving Glasgow (GLA). All short-haul traffic would use the former Abbotsinch Airport, while international traffic would make use of PIK.
My “digs” on this occasion were at a Bed and Breakfast home located in the town of Ayr, Scotland, some 4 miles from PIK as the proverbial crow flies. Incredibly, we would spend our evenings, when not on duty, singing, or playing cards, which I would never do today.
There was a 12-hour train ride from London to PIK to work, but, to this day, I honestly cannot recall doing anything while I was there. I so much regret not keeping a diary to document all the details of my moves around the country.
It was at the end of my 3 years with K.L.M. that I applied for and received a 75% discount on a plane ticket to Montreal, to begin my time in Canada. It was for a Viscount aircraft to SPL, then a Douglas DC-6 to Montreal. I can still remember the never-ending drone of the four propeller-driven engines as the aircraft flew across the Atlantic Ocean.
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