Edward Sandle on Navigation
Well when I joined in 1971, it was still down on the Undercliff at Niton and it was what had been a Lloyd’s Signal Station and also I believe at some time had been a Marconi operated radio station, and it had a sprawling building which was the Station itself, and then it had four or five houses grouped round it and I lived in one of those which was a semi-detached one which had a great big overhead concrete ceiling above us which was where the Lloyd’s Signal Station used to be.
They used to have a big set of binoculars mounted on this concrete, so it didn’t vibrate and access to this floor was from the back because the land went up behind the building so that there was an access to it without coming into the house itself.
But we lived in one of the … there were two houses then and we lived in one of them.
The Niton Radio Station, as I say, was down on the Undercliff and the Station Officer’s house … there were four Operator’s houses and the rest of the people who operated there lived all over the place, mainly in Niton.
The Radio Station then moved in 1975, moved up to near Whitwell, at Stenbury Down, an old RAF Station that had been what they called a ‘Forward Scatter Station’ which had been rather experimental, and it was empty, so the Post Office took it over and we moved up to there, much bigger and more modern site.
No accommodation of course, no buildings round there.
We changed some of our working arrangements. In the old Station, we were all Morse keys and we did have some old teleprinters, very old teleprinters and when we moved up to the new Station, everything got a bit more up to date and we had new teleprinters and we were connected more into the system of things and we actually had a system called Piccolo at one stage and we used to send the Press to the Queen Elizabeth. She was equipped with Piccolo.
I know that sounds a funny name. It was called that because it sounded like a piccolo, made a warbling sound, and they received the Press from us using that Piccolo system. Of course, the Queen Elizabeth is no longer with us and neither is Piccolo I think.
