George Bolt

George Bolt, 1903-1986, joined the GPO as a telephone engineer in 1925. He was a kindly, affable man who Colin and I both spent time with during our apprenticeships, so he was a natural choice when we began recording our interviews. He tells of the days of manually operated “Number please” exchanges which in rural villages were commonly situated in the front rooms of anyone willing to take on the paid task, such as Alice and her family at Chillerton. George was recorded in 1983.



A 1936 County Press advertisement for the new automatic telephone exchange at Ryde. Newport went automatic in 1938 as did many of the rural exchanges. Cowes, Sandown, Freshwater and Ventnor had to wait until the 1960s.
This is the top of Union Street Ryde in approx 1910. In the skyline is the gantry where Ryde customers’ overhead lines came into from across the town. They were then fed down to the manual switchboard located in what was then the Head Post Office.

This is Newport somewhere, probably in the 1920s. It took a ten man team to erect a pole in those days. The tenth man is the foreman. He’s the one on the far left doing nothing.
This monster of a pole, about 45 feet tall, stood in Trinity Church Lane at Cowes until finally disappearing in the 1970s. George and his colleagues would have climbed many poles like this one, usually without the aid of a ladder but instead with ‘climbers,’ metal calipers strapped to to the heels and lower legs. The climbers had metal spurs which left holes in the pole, clearly visible in this photo.