Oral History Gallery

Extract Text (Duration01.48)

The stuff we learnt on... well Morse code as I said which is dead now, audio Morse is no longer practiced. But Morse was the driver and we learned to type and it was touch typing then, now that's no longer taught to surface communicators. We still retained it in submarine communications because we have a remit to work live circuits, what they call 'chat circuits', so you're typing teleprinter live, ship-to-ship. But that skill seems to have gone away in the surface flotilla for whatever reason, but we had these - museum piece now - teleprinters up there and we used to try to... if you type quick enough on you could actually jam it and that was always the aspiration of a lad. So I used to use stock phrases like 'of all the fishes in the sea the mermaid is the one for me', or 'the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' and you typed it as quick as you could to see if you could jam the teleprinter.

It was all what they call tape relay back then, everything that you produced from the teleprinter cut a tape which you would then run through an auto-head when it was transmitted. And the tape, the perforated tape that came out of the teleprinter was in a code known as the Murray Code and some of us more sort of anoraky-type people actually learned to read the tape. So you could read the Murray Code on the tape. There was no requirement for you to do that, but it just seemed a fun thing to do at the time. It was all slow communications and it was... it was all noisy. You walked into the communications centre of the day and it was all chatter and tapes being fed through auto-heads which were chunking away, and teleprinters clacking away just like the old Grandstand teleprinter on the television with the football scores coming out. It all seems a long way off now because it's moved on so quickly.