Trinity call: student engineers’ clandestine phone network

Back to all news

Posted:

13 Aug 2024

Climbing through attics, clambering over roofs and laying submarine cables was all in a day’s work for Trinity Hall students in the 1970s: just to create their own version of social media.

Tony Nixon (1973) now lives in Otley, Yorkshire having retired from a career as an engineer, designing control systems for high-speed machinery making food and drink cans. But from 1973 to 1976 Tony spent his time studying to become an engineer and, with a group of friends, creating a labyrinthine web of telecommunications cables to connect a clandestine network of student telephones.

“It was an era when students did not generally have access to phones. The College provided landlines for the JCR President, the Organ Scholar and, possibly, the Boat Club Captain, but the rest of us had to make do with a rather fetid call box at the bottom of E Staircase. Fifty years ago subscriber trunk dialling did not extend to the whole country and if I wanted to phone my girlfriend in rural Lancashire I had to call via the operator. Our phone system was confined to a small number in the College. We didn’t use it for much, mostly just to arrange to meet. You’d pick up the phone, dial, and say: ‘Bar tonight?’ or ‘Shall we meet in 1st or 2nd Hall?’ That was it, but it was the technical challenge and the adventures while installing it that made it fun.

“We had nine extensions and no privacy, as all calls could be heard by anyone picking up their phone. I was not keen on climbing round the rooftops and attics at dead of night laying cables, but I did have a room at the top of D Staircase where it was possible to put an exchange (in a ‘Rover’ biscuit tin) just outside the window.

“The exchange had to be outside because of the noise it made. I specialised in the installation of the concealed internal wiring usually from the window of the room to the drawer or cupboard where each phone was concealed. You could not have them on-show or the bedders would have been curious.”

Tony Nixon in 1978 wearing sunglasses and a patterned shirt

Tony says he was dragged into covert communication by a fellow engineer who had a friend at King’s College who’d obtained some scrap equipment from the Marconi Company.

“But we needed some cable. We had 30-foot lengths of it, with 25 pairs of wires twisted together in each length. To untwist them we dropped them down a three-story staircase in King’s and hung them there. Then we soldered the lengths together, wrapped the joints in insulation tape, and covered them in bitumen paint for camouflage.”

Fortunately, the College was “festooned” in General Post Office (GPO) phone wires so it was easy to “tuck a few more in”. But how to extend their network to King’s College to include their co-conspirator?

“At dead of night in January 1974, we used the scaffolding alongside the Old Library to install cables in the guttering. The cables went down inside a drainpipe, were buried in the gravel to L Staircase and then up inside another drainpipe to emerge and become tucked in amongst GPO wiring.

“The wires ran all along the front of the Thornton and Latham Buildings to another exchange on the top floor of Q. This second exchange had the most ambitious part of the scheme, a submarine cable laid from a punt we had shares in, connecting our system to the one at King’s.”

The system grew over a period of months from late 1973 through early 1974. Extra telephones were bought as needed, often from electrical surplus shops on the Tottenham Court Road.

Most of the ‘subscribers’ moved out to Bateman Street or St Clement’s Gardens for their second year, but the system in College was revived when they moved back in October 1975.

“It was handed on when our year graduated in 1976 and ran for at least another year.” Some of the wiring across the front of L Staircase was still visible in 1998.

Nowadays Tony keeps his hand in with engineering and volunteers to help look after a 100-year-old steam engine in nearby Barnoldswick… and remembers his days at Trinity Hall with fondness.

In 1999, Tony’s younger son came up to Trinity Hall. By then students could pay to have a landline in their room, with direct dialling in and out, and soon after that, mobile phones became ubiquitous.