Thinking Inside the Box
JUDE MONTAGUE uncovers a slice of Social History
I have been chasing history. Specifically, Hastings history. My research has uncovered the tale of the first woman ever to become a technical apprentice with Rediffusion TV. In the 1970s Maureen Coutts found herself in a realm of work in which all the manuals and documents referred to ‘he’, ‘him’ and ‘his’, as if women had no place in this male world.
MAKING CHANGE
Many of us remember the Manpower Services Commission. It had been founded in 1973 to coordinate employment and training services in the UK, and it was to become responsible for the Youth Opportunities Programme (YOP) and Job Creation Programme. By the end of the 1970s and early 1980s its activities focused on the absurd catch that you couldn’t get work without work experience. To help counter this, they produced a series of pamphlets to try and change social attitudes and increase opportunities for young people. For example, they wanted to encourage more women to enter the electronics industry. Maureen was chosen as the cover girl for a booklet, and it has some interesting detail about the jobs and what they entailed. The booklet brings us Maureen’s voice and attitude from the era:
“I’ve always been someone who fiddled with a screwdriver and undid things to see how they worked – I took my sister’s sewing machine apart. So I went to further education college and did a full-time preliminary electro-mechanics course for a year. Then this company came to the college and recruited two of us as apprentices. I didn’t find it difficult being the only girl on the course, or in the workshop. It depends on your attitude. You must speak up and make yourself known, ask questions – otherwise, no one will know you’re there.”
ADJUSTING YOUR SET
For the booklet, Maureen described the kind of jobs she carried out. She might be working on a test rig or a sub-set (subscribers’ sets) that had been identified as faulty. The hardest mental work was to find out what was wrong for which a technician needed to examine the individual components on the board. Although the sub-sets would come in with notes about what was faulty made by the field technicians, it was not always straightforward. The usual job would be to change the tube, but the fault would often not show. The set had to be run for a number of days which she called ‘putting on soak’. The set had to be plugged in and allowed to run and heat up for days so that eventually the fault showed up.
Looking back, Maureen reflects: “All the men I worked with had no problem accepting me – especially my small hands as I could get small things out of the backs of TVs when anyone dropped something in there.” She was only criticised by one person – a female customer who rebuked her for “taking a man’s job from him”.
DON’T THROW IT AWAY
At the time Maureen was working, there were rapid changes in technology. There were no video recorders when she began her apprenticeship, but by the time the booklet was written, they had become the big thing, and Rediffusion employed a VCR specialist in the workshop. But, what she never anticipated was that in the future, no one would get their TVs repaired, just throw them away and buy a new one.
In 1982 Maureen moved to Lancashire, where she explained her job experience and skills at the jobcentre. The woman working there looked her straight in the eyes and said: “Oh no, my dear, you don’t do that up here.” Yet on a bookcase there in the very jobcentre there was the MSC booklet with Maureen on the front cover, giving a shining example of a TV technician!
But Maureen took these attitudes with a pinch of salt. As she says: “I was always a bit of a tomboy and rode a motorbike. You had to be able to give as good as you got. Oh, and work hard.”
If you have a story about technology in Hastings or St Leonards-on-Sea please get in touch. There will be an exhibition, Spirit of Invention to commemorate a hundred years of Logie Baird’s invention of television at the Electro Studios in St Leonards-on-Sea from 7-13 May 2024.
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