Institutions have historically played a central role in defining, categorising, and constructing disability, in ways that have often been oppressive and harmful to disabled people. Therefore, some disability historians have questioned whether we should use institutional archives to recover lived experiences of disabled people. Penny Richards and Susan Burch understandably argue that ‘disability historians have to ask whether the “authoritative” source holds any true authority on the lived experience of disability’. They suggest that the documents retained in institutional archives, such as reports, legislative files and meeting minutes, ‘embody qualities that are typically associated with nondisabled historical actors’. However, in this article, I demonstrate that disability historians can effectively use institutional sources to recover lived experiences of disability.
Until 1969, the General Post Office (G.P.O.) managed both the postal system and telecommunications networks throughout the United Kingdom. The G.P.O. was a vast Department of State comprised of a complex network of employees, sub-offices, and Crown Offices. As an arm of the state, the G.P.O. was a major employer of disabled people, especially during the interwar years. The fastidious record keeping within the institution means that the G.P.O. archives, housed across the Postal Museum and B.T. Archives, are rich with lived experiences of disability and employment in the twentieth century. Using one quotidian feature of a telephone switchboard – the supervisory signal – I show the ways in which historians can read along the archival grain to illuminate examples of disabled expertise and agency. The design, rejection, and failed trials of two supervisory signals, in 1919 and 1929, reveal a narrative of inter-institutional collaboration and engagement with disabled employees. Blind employees drove the alterations and ultimately, it was their individual embodied experience that determined the usefulness of the signals designed by the G.P.O, Western Electric Company and St. Dunstan’s, a rehabilitative charity for blind ex-servicemen (now Blind Veterans UK).
Before the rise of automation, manual telephone exchanges formed the nucleus of the telephone system. Public telephone exchanges were buildings that housed a series of switchboards, which operators used to facilitate a connection between two callers. Private branch exchanges (PBXs) functioned in the same way, but were private telephone lines rented by companies to facilitate internal calls. As shown in the image above, switchboards were housed in tall, wooden cases that contained a series of smaller technological components, such as lamps, switches, jacks, cords, and a key. The front panel of the switchboard, which was a long vertical face, comprised jacks and lamps. The jacks represented various telephone extensions or trunk lines. Electric lamps lit up when a user engaged their receiver and this would alert the switchboard operator of an incoming call. The other element of a switchboard was the desktop area. As shown in the image below, this part of the switchboard encompassed cords, switches (also known as keys) and more lamps. The haptic interface of a switchboard made this mode of work suitable for blind men, who could manipulate electric cords and connect calls using their senses of hearing and touch.
However, to enable blind operators to manage the switchboards at PBXs, the supervisory signals on the switchboards had to be modified. These signals indicated to an operator that a call had ended, and the line could be disconnected (see image below). Most switchboards used visual signals, that lit up on the switchboard, so this style of signal was inaccessible for blind operators, who were unable to identify when the clearing signal had been given. In 1919, the ex-servicemen’s charity St. Dunstan’s realised that illuminative signals were totally inaccessible for the men. The founder of St. Dunstan’s, Sir Arthur Pearson, met with a Director from Western Electric Company and the organisations produced an ‘auxiliary supervisory signal’. The G.P.O.’s Superintending Engineer wrote to the Engineer-in-Chief to request the Post Office’s participation in the project alongside St. Dunstan’s, Western Electric Company and the National Institute for the Blind (now RNIB). The Western Electric design aimed to enable an operator to use their sense of touch to detect the signal. To do this, the supervisory relays were fitted with buzzers to each cord circuit, which meant the operator could feel for the corresponding vibrations on the signal.
The G.P.O. arranged to trial the new signals at the National Institute for the Blind’s private branch exchanges, where the switchboards were operated by blind employees.A trial of the auxiliary signal was underway by January 1920. However, by March 1920, it was clear that the alterations Western Electric had made to the switchboard at Great Portland Street ‘were not satisfactory and rather than being a help to the operators were a hindrance’. By the time two G.P.O. officers (Mr. Webb and Mr. Newitt) visited Portland Street, the device had already been removed. The blind operator informed the men that the ‘apparatus had proved a source of annoyance rather than of help’. With the modification of the switchboard, the operator had to ‘enter the circuit of the various connections…to ascertain which had cleared’. Western Electric and St. Dunstan’s had not initially consulted disabled employees when designing the clearing signal for blind operators, and this was reflected in the failure of the trial and the removal of the part.
After consulting with the operator, Webb devised an alternative modification. He took into consideration the operator’s embodied expertise to produce a design that met his specific requirements. Webb suggested that by substituting the glass disc above the supervisory signal with a metal disc that contained a slot, and adding a metal strip to protrude through the slot when the positive clear signal was activated, the clearing signal would be auditory, rather than solely visual or tactile (see image below). However, the G.P.O.’s Engineer-in-Chief explained that Webb’s design was ‘not recommended’, as the clearing signals required a ‘very sensitive indicator, and any interference by hand … would endanger its reliability as a signal’. Nonetheless, his revised design demonstrated that the needs of disabled users mattered. The operator’s refusal to use the inaccessible signal, and Webb’s efforts to circumvent the limitations of the first prototype, highlights the way disability design transformed a linear process to an iterative one. The operator’s rejection of the clearing signal, and Webb’s adapted blueprint, represent a transition from designing for disabled people to designing with disabled people.
Over a decade later, in July 1929, the G.P.O. revisited the matter of clearing signals for blind switchboard operators. The signals on PBX switchboards were fitted with glass covers that prohibited blind operators from using their sense of touch. The Controller of the London Telephone Service suggested that this could be resolved by having a pin rise above the cover when activated then return to normal when the indicator had been restored. The Controller also proposed an alternative method, whereby the pin sat below the cover, and when activated sat flush with it (see image below).
In December 1929, the Post Office arranged to have the new design of the supervisory signal trialled by a blind switchboard operator who worked at the Stationery Office in Clerkenwell, London. However, the report returned to the Post Office by the blind switchboard operator confirmed that the new supervisory signal was unsuitable. The operator noted that he ‘relied on the noise made by the previous type of indicator’ and he found ‘theabsence of this noise an insuperable obstacle to giving satisfactory attention’. The employee found the method of using his sense of touch to locate the clearing signals unsatisfactory and he preferred to use his sense of hearing to locate the supervisory signals instead. The 1929 trial showed that blind operators valued both the auditory and haptic experience of the switchboard and required the signal to do both to effectively manage the calls.
Although both trials of the supervisory signals in 1919 and 1929 were unsuccessful, the non-use and rejection of the devices reveal the working conditions of blind switchboard operators during the interwar period. The rejection of the supervisory signals demonstrates that blind operators preferred to work with auditory, rather than solely tactile signals. Operators first needed to be able to hear the taps and clacks to identify the signal’s initial location, before finding and disconnecting the corresponding line. The frustration operators expressed to G.P.O. officers during interviews forced the institutions to make practical changes to the designs based on the first-hand accounts from disabled employees, rather than imagined users. Blind switchboard operators used their embodied expertise to establish the limitations of the signals and communicate to officers what they required from the apparatus to make it more accessible. Each case affirms the control that disabled employees had over their workspace and demonstrates that their voices have been agentic and audible, within the sources and the archive. Institutional archives contain a wealth of material, which can seem extraneous and noisy to historians. Nevertheless, if we attend to these sources carefully, there are voices and testimonies that we can amplify. Disability historians canproductively meander the institutional archive to recover first-hand accounts of employment. In some ways, the historiographical grain, notthe archival grain, has made these stories more challenging to recover.
B.T. Archives Sources: POST 33/1637C, ‘Telephone Apparatus Employment of disabled ex-servicemen as telephonists by private firms’.