Sunday’s Communion service, from Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral will be ITV’s most ambitious church broadcast. Two ABC outside broadcast units will televise the service, and special equipment never before used will illuminate the vast cathedral. Seven cameras will take viewers round the cathedral, the origins of which are described by the man who has made it his life’s work

I DON’T think I realised when I decided to enter for the competition to design Liverpool Cathedral in 1901 that it would affect my whole life. It was a small beginning, just a blank sheet of paper, a well-sharpened pencil, and the need a vision for what I knew I wanted to do.

I was living with my family in a flat overlooking London’s Battersea Park. My father, an architect, had died while I was still at school, and I was articled to a church architect, Mr Temple Moore.

The terms of my articles said I must not undertake any outside work without permission so I sought the permission of Mr Moore. “It will be good experience you, my boy.” he said. A truer word was never spoken. I have been working on the cathedral ever since, and I shall never see it finished.

Architects, of course, employ different techniques. Broadly speaking. I like to try several lines before I make my choice. But once I have an idea I like on my blank sheet of paper, the task becomes a joy.

That is, just how it was with Liverpool Cathedral. The only hardship for me, once I had got started, was going to bed.

When I was doing my drawings for the competition, I used to leave the office on the early side and get there in the morning a little late. I went to bed around 1 am.

After I had won the competition — I was then 22 – Mr Moore asked: “However did you find the time to do such wonderful drawings?” I told him about my late and early finish at the office. I don’t think he minded.

Now I am 78 and there is nearly another quarter of the cathedral to be completed. Since winning the competition, I have never looked back. I never had to struggle with “early beginnings.” The cathedral gave me a flying start in life.

Because of my youth and inexperience on the business side, the executive committee responsible for building the cathedral appointed me a joint architect with Mr G. F. Bodley, one of their advisory architects.

The design went through three stages: the first was my competition design; the second was that design much modified by Bodley; and the third came after 1907, when Mr Bodley died and I was left in sole charge of the building. I then redesigned it.

At that time we did not have what is called now “contemporary architecture.” We used past styles. There was the Gothic style, which emphasises the perpendicular lines of a building, and the classic, such as St Paul’s, which emphasises the horizontal.

I preferred the Gothic because its vertical lines appear to disappear into the skies where we believe, I never can quite understand why, Heaven lies. Hell is down below. I felt that for a church, this vertical style has much more of a religious inspiration than the classic.

Drawing the plans in small scale was only a part of my work for the cathedral. It is no good saying to the builders, stonemasons and other craftsmen: “There are the plans Get on with it.”

I have drawn in full scale every line of that cathedral. I have had the drawing paper on my office floor, crawling over it, drawing mouldings to full scale. I have done plans of every piece of intricate masonry.

Sometimes I have expected the craftsmen to come back to me with scores of questions. But they have not done so, and am delighted to record my admiration for the craftsmen who have worked on the cathedral.

They are the finest in the world. I am sometimes astounded how they have done such intricate work so that everything falls perfectly into line.

Naturally, Liverpool Cathedral is my own child. I love it all, for I have watched it grow, stone by stone. And I think my favourite interior view is looking up at the central vault from the central space.

It was in the central space that I once met a woman sightseer who, not knowing who I was, murmured: “I do think it extraordinary that the architect of this building could have so big a thing in so small a brain.” In a quiet way I was rather flattered.

During the war. when mercifully the cathedral was spared any serious structural damage, we had some old stonemasons continuing with the work.

In my life I have designed hundreds of buildings: Waterloo Bridge, Battersea Power Station, the re-building of the House of Commons, the restoration of London’s Guildhall … and the public telephone kiosk – though I didn’t choose its beastly red colour.

As an old but nevertheless active and practising architect, I am just a little sad that I shall never see my greatest work, Liverpool Cathedral, finished. But I have every hope that my son and partner, Richard Gilbert Scott, will.

• The cathedral was completed in 1978, but not to the additional plans drawn up by Richard Gilbert Scott – Ed

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It is an impressive record. From its Manchester headquarters, the outside broadcast fleet is out every weekend, bringing on-the-spot coverage of sport and entertainment from all parts of the North and Midlands.

The programme planners, and the ABC communications engineers, who made TV history by being the first to overcome technical difficulties in bringing pictures from the Isle of Man and the Yorkshire coast, are always looking for new locations.

During the past 12 months, their list of “firsts” ranges from little-known places like Steeple Aston, Thwing and Pott Shrigley, to towns like Stockton. Peterborough, Towcester, Huntingdon and Burton-on-Trent.

Outside broadcasts cameras have been covering as many as four different events in less than 24 hours, packing all their equipment the moment one programme ends and rushing across country to set it up again.

This is no small operation. The fleet needed to convey all the men and material for this Sunday’s programme, for instance, consists of an eight-ton scanner, which carries £40,000 worth of electronic equipment, two three-ton supply vehicles, a “links” truck, two generators — on isolated locations the unit usually has to provide its own power — and at least six cars.

Then there is the problem of getting the programme back from the unit to the transmitter and so into viewers’ homes. This is usually done by “bouncing” the picture over a series of shortwave radio links, and, at the same time, sending the sound over the Post Office telephone network.

On a new location, getting the picture back is the result of weeks of work by communications experts, who, after plotting a route on contour maps, often have to scramble up mountains to see whether their ideas will work out.

Even linking-up the sound is not as simple as it appears. For the Bentley Springs programme, private telephones nearby are connected with the central control van. The lines, which local farmers willingly lend to ABC, are used for feeding the sound commentary and maintaining constant telephone contact with the Manchester headquarters.

This not only happens in out-of-the-way parts of the country. When ABC go to Coventry for wrestling, city men lend their office phones.

Outside broadcast crews are always on the move. Some of the ABC team travel 28,000 miles a year — well over 500 miles a week.

Look at their timetable for the next seven days:

SUNDAY: By 9am they are arriving at Bentley Springs. Most of the equipment has been put in position the previous day, but the morning is spent checking and testing.

Though ABC have paid numerous visits to Bentley Springs, new camera points have had to be worked out because the course has been lengthened to include the crossing of a deep ravine. One of the organisers described it to me as “most difficult and bound to cause a lot of excitement.”

MONDAY: The crews clean the weekend mud off their equipment and prepare for their next assignment.

TUESDAY: The team go to Market Rasen, Lincolnshire, where horse-racing is to be screened later in the week for the first time.

CHRISTMAS EVE is spent setting-up and testing the equipment and trying out the three-hop radio link between the racecourse and the ITV transmitter at Winter Hill.

CHRISTMAS DAY is a day off, but the team are spending it in Lincoln. 20 miles from the course and 100 miles from their families in Manchester. One of them told me: “We can travel home and back if we want — but we have agreed not to. We cannot face the risk of being delayed and jeopardising the next day’s programme.”

BOXING DAY: The Market Rasen crew starts at 9am to cover the afternoon’s racing. At the same time, a second crew is at a Bolton theatre setting-up equipment for a circus programme.

SATURDAY means another early start for the crews. Rehearsals at Bolton, where the theatre stage has had to be shored up to take the weight of the two performing elephants, begin at 10am. At Market Rasen, the racing continues until 3.15, when viewers are switched south for table-tennis and then back north for the three-quarter-hour circus transmission.

Then their week’s work, as far as viewers are concerned, is over. But there is still plenty to do, dismantling the equipment and putting it on the road for Manchester. It will be 10pm before the Bolton crew are home. Some of the Market Rasen team will be travelling back overnight, while others will have to stay the night in Lincoln.

A week of non-stop activity. And while all this has been going on, other members of the outside broadcasts division have been out making final arrangements for programmes that are four weeks away.

These outside racing broadcasts make life hectic, also, for the three talking members of the ITV team — Peter Moor, Tony Cooke and John Rickman. Rickman, for whom life as a journalist and broadcaster almost begins and ends on a racecourse, reckons 1,000 miles by train and car each week is a fairly normal stint.

He told me: “Friday is often the start of the long haul. We may be racing in the South on that day and due in Catterick the next. So it means the night sleeper … out of the train at Darlington with the morning papers, and work out the form on the way to the course.

“There are owners and trainers to contact and interesting characters to be lined-up for interviews. Then there’s the business of getting people in the news — a winning jockey, owner or trainer — in an off the-cuff interview before we go off the air. After that, a car dash to the station and back on the train to London.”

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The television audience, while demanding a full share of drama, light entertainment and feature programming, also enjoys sport – even if only from its armchair. And because you can’t take a football field to a studio, the studio must go to the field. In outside broadcasting the scene is set by the programme. For the rest it requires the same basic resources as any other television production, plus a few of its own. The first of these is mobility; getting the cameras, control unit and attendant vehicles to the scene and, having got them there, getting the cameras to the spot that will deliver the best shots. The second is a private, flexible and extremely positive link with the studios. Where there are no GPO land-lines for carrying the pictures back to a Master Control, and so to the transmitters, the OB unit must create its own contact; by bouncing the signals in a straight, uninterrupted line from one high, lonely point to another; from one mobile micro-wave relay transmitter to the great dish aerial of a receiver on another – regardless of weather or terrain.

In short, the whole coverage of an event in the open requires men who are rugged and optimistic, and determined enough to go anywhere; with vehicles tough enough to get them there. The ‘vehicles’ in any of ABC’s three OB units might include a mobile generating plant for producing lighting power, a hydraulic tower for camera or micro-wave aerial, tender vehicles and, if the programme is not being transmitted ‘live’, a mobile VTR unit. Once these have been positioned, the necessary connections made, and the line back to Master Control set up, a normal transmission procedure follows.

The show must go on. Travelling with an outside broadcast unit is like being with the circus. The rigging and de-rigging before and after shows, the long caravan of vehicles… all this reminds you of the Big Top. The same spirit pervades both; whatever happens, whatever the difficulties, the show must go on.

Top: The floor manager holds up a caption card to begin recording. A familiar television scene, acted out in unfamiliar conditions.

Left: Like the circus, an outside broadcast unit needs large supplies of electricity in remote places where they are not always readily available. ABC has the same answer: a mobile generator.

Right: The numbed yet willing fingers of an electrician make a last-minute adjustment to one of the lamps lighting a cattle shed.

The cameras are the same as those in a studio, though perhaps fitted with ‘zoom’ lenses; the control suite – a ‘scanner’ – has nearly the same crew; and the radio or telephone ‘talk-back’ link with Master Control holds the unit as close to home as it would have done if it had been just down a corridor. ABC with its weekend contract in the North and Midlands, and a lot of difficult country-including the Pennines-to be crossed, has gained a great deal of experience in operating an OB fleet. The fact that they are now doing more ‘remote’ programmes than any other ITV company, and not many less than the BBC, is a strong pointer to the power they have built into their OB division.

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Television came into the life of Eileen Killeen the day an ABC outside broadcast unit pulled up at the Liverpool toy factory where she works.

Picked from the thousands of girls employed at the factory, 18-year-old Eileen and five of her workmates appeared before the outside broadcast cameras in the Sing Along With Joe[1] pretty girl contest. She won her heat, passed through the section finals and semi-finals, and at the end of last season was awarded the coveted title of Miss Industry 1961.

But success didn’t go to her head. Of her £250[2] prize money, Eileen gave a donation to her church, bought refrigerators for her mother and sister, and put the rest in the bank.

She also turned down the chance of starting a new career as a model and decided to stay in Liverpool[3] doing the job she knew best.

Today, however, Eileen is being constantly reminded of the time the blue-and-grey outside broad cast vans arrived at her factory. For every day thousands of them are passing through her hands – scaled-down versions of the real thing.

Eileen is a toy inspector. She has been since she left school at the age of 15. She is the last girl at the end of a 100 ft.-long conveyor belt down which the models travel while the finishing touches are being put to them.

Her job is to make a final inspection and give them a “test run” before they are packed and sent to toyshops all over the world.

The first of two model ABC vans – a micro-wave links vehicle topped by a moveable disc-shaped aerial which beams the programme from the outside broadcast site to the studios[4] – is already being mass-produced.

The second is a model of the heart of a £36,000[5] outside broadcast unit – the mobile control room. This goes into production in the next few weeks, and with it will be a tiny TV camera and cameraman.

Putting a new model on the market is a long and involved task. Work on this outside broadcast unit started nine months ago, when photographer Warwick Bedford – who also took the pictures on this page – was asked to take colour transparencies of the vehicles in action. From these photographs. draughts men made detailed drawings and wooden models were prepared for engineers to make the die-casting tools which are now turning out zinc alloy castings at the rate of 2,000 a day.

From this stage the models have to go through more than 20 different operations and pass through hundreds of hands before they reach Eileen Killeen for final approval.

They are splashed with acid, plunged into hot and cold baths, go through nine sprayings and get plastered with tiny transfers in ABC colours[6] – all this before they are ready to start down the final conveyor belt.

Apart from Eileen, 56 other girls are employed on this last lap. It is one of the many production lines snaking through this six-acre factory.

Model vehicle bodies are being constantly fed in at the receiving end of the 2ft.-wide belt. And every few feet of the slow, 100-yd. journey they are being dexterously whipped off and replaced as one part after another is quickly fitted and revetted into position.

Said Eileen: “I cannot help thinking of the opportunities that were open to me after I won the title.

“But I have no regrets about staying in the factory.”

1. A now-lost ABC Weekend TV talent show presented by Glaswegian pianist Joe “Mr Piano” Henderson (2 May 1920–4 May 1980). ↩
2. In cash, and allowing for inflation, this is £5,150 in today’s money. The average salary for a monthly paid professional employee was £800 a year (£16,500 in today’s money) – Eileen would have been weekly paid and earned far less – and the average price of a new-build house was £2,500 (£50,000). ↩
3. Meccano Limited, Binns Road, Liverpool. The factory manufactured Meccano, Dinky Toy vehicles, Hornby Dublo trains, Bayko building blocks, Kemex chemistry sets and Elektron electrical sets. It was bought by Tri-ang in 1964, but collapsed in 1971 and was sold to Airfix. Airfix closed the factory in 1979 and themselves collapsed in 1981. The remains of the companies are now owned by Japanese toymaker Nikko. ↩
4. If you have one in your attic, it is now worth £139. ↩
5. £750,000 in today’s money. ↩
6. See right. ↩

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