The Development of Telecoms - Bournemouth
The Bournemouth telephone area comprises 1,056 square miles, mainly in the County of Dorset, although the most densely telephoned part is around Bournemouth in Hampshire.
The area has a beautiful coast line and hinterland and its boundaries closely coincide with the Wessex of Thomas Hardy.
Its most important industries are holiday making (which keeps telephone people very busy!) and agriculture and there is also the important naval base of Portland – a huge rock which supplied the stone for St. Paul's Cathedral and other famous buildings. It is packed with relics of English history, ranging from the days of the earliest British inhabitants to the invasion of Europe in 1944. The first cross-channel cable to the Normandy beach head was terminated at Southbourne in Poole Bay.
No report about the area would be complete without mentioning the close ties with the Channel Islands, where a number of engineering staff maintain the trunk for communications.
There are 70 exchanges, 22 manual and 48 automatic, 70,300 stations, 43,300 exchange connections and a total staff of all grades of 950. Almost all the largest exchanges are still manual. The annual revenue is now about £1,000,000.
