DIFFLOCKEDTHE REGISTRY

Post Office Telecommunications

The telephone side of the British Post Office — the GPO's Engineering Department until 1969, Post Office Telecommunications from 1 October 1969 to 30 September 1981, then British Telecom — which specified and fitted out its own field fleet, from winch-equipped Land Rover station wagons to Forward Control tractor units, cable-testing laboratories and outside-broadcast link vehicles.

History

The General Post Office ran Britain's telegraphs from 1868 and its telephones from 1912, and its Engineering Department designed and maintained the network, including the specialised vehicles that kept it working: line gangs, cable-jointing and testing vans, pole-erection units and, where the poles ran across country, Land Rovers with capstan winches or platforms. The Post Office Act 1969 turned the GPO from a government department into a public corporation on 1 October 1969, with Post Office Telecommunications as the division running telephones and telegraphs; through the 1970s it modernised exchanges, extended subscriber trunk and international dialling, pioneered packet-switched data services and Confravision, and developed the System X digital exchange.

Its vehicle work was done to its own specifications through the Telecommunications Development and engineering branches, sometimes bodied by outside coachbuilders and sometimes fitted out in the Post Office's own workshops — the registry's Post Office Land Rovers include a Series III station wagon with front capstan and centre bull winches, a Forward Control articulated tractor unit, a cable-testing laboratory body and a Forward Control outside-broadcast video link. Under the British Telecommunications Act 1981 the division became the state-owned corporation British Telecommunications on 1 October 1981, privatised as BT from 1984.

Vehicles in this registry (3)

Sources & citations

Maker record updated 2026-09-11T09:21:18.547Z · status: researched