History in a Box

Hurrah - I’ve managed to empty out two large boxes and deal with the contents! Quite a lot of shoes, including two pairs of sandals which should come in handy for the next heatwave. These are now in the new wardrobe unit, though I’m probably going to have to review the shoe situation because there are simply so many of them. I have a sneaking suspicion there are yet more stashed in other unopened boxes.

There was also a big bag containing many things from my career days. It’s now ten years since I retired, so going through it all was a bit like an archaeological dig. I know for a fact that there’s more work memorabilia in a chest in the garage. I’ve blipped a few things from the final days. My beautifully bound autograph book, a traditional gift given to retiring staff of long service (I bought one from the very earliest days of the BBC which was signed by its key founders for one of their contemporaries). It’s filled with lovely messages from many of the amazing and talented people I worked alongside. The photo book created by my little team of workmates, loosely telling the story of my place within it both as a sound engineer and a union rep. We are hilariously represented as stick men, and I’m shown here with my clipboard doing the annual health and safety check of the studios. The footrest incident alluded to in the speech bubble went down in the annals of our team history. When we moved back into the refurbished Broadcasting House in 2006, new workstations for the editing and mixing computers and hardware had been installed in all the technical areas. Our old ones had a winding handle which adjusted the height of the table to accommodate the wide range of heights among colleagues (ranging from about 5’ to over 6’). The new workstations were fixed, creating a necessity for footrests to accompany the adjustable chairs. There were literally no footrests provided anywhere, so I kicked up a stink with management resulting in the acquisition of quite possibly hundreds! On the opposite page is a cartoon drawn by our dear colleague Shan, who has depicted me playing Jimmy Page’s famous double-neck guitar (my adoration of Led Zeppelin was so well-known that my manager, without the need to ask first, once assigned me to record an interview with Robert Plant). Also with my union hat on - a sheriff’s hat of course - accompanied by BECTU campaign badges and stickers. My ID card is not the actual thing. I photocopied the real one, including the reverse side, before I handed it back to our manager and put the cardboard printout in the holder which I had worn every working day for the past thirty years (yes, it was the same holder all that time!). This was not so that I could cheat my way into the building after I’d retired - the real deal has a chip in it which you hold up to a reader to access the areas where you are allowed, so this copy wouldn’t have worked at all. I made the facsimile as a souvenir. The photo on it was taken in 1997, and they never updated it in nearly twenty years - good job I didn’t age much in that time!