![]() The POEEJ article gave an artist’s impression of the base stations for the radio links. Whilst microwave links have given extra capacity, television alone would not have provided an overwhelming argument for establishing new microwave links. The first and second London - Birmingham coaxial cables had both been designed with television in mind and parts of the second L-BM cable are still used to carry television programmes. But the General Post Office could equally well have used coaxial cables for television purposes. This argument was given to Duncan Campbell when he made enquiries about the system in the early 1980s. Following hard on the heels of the above “backbone” system will be the development of radio-relay systems for up to 2,000 telephone channels, or about 1,000 telephone channels together with one television channel.”Īs we will see later this article describes the system we know as Backbone but no purpose is given for the system but it hints that a functional justification for the microwave system was to provide the additional bandwidth required for television distribution. The main link will carry six broad-band channels in each direction one or two of the broad-band channels would be for use as a standby. …The first embodiment of a system designed to the new Post Office specifications will be a main radio link between London and Scotland with branches at intermediate points. was initially linked to London by a radio-relay chain in 1949, and the Kirk O’Shotts station has been served by a system from Manchester since 1952. “The first use of microwave systems by the Post Office was for the transmission of television programs the Sutton Coldfield station of the B.B.C. The first public mention of what we know as Backbone came in the 1955 Defence White Paper which announced “The Post Office…are planning to build up a special network, both by cable and radio designed to maintain long distance communication in the event of an attack”.Īn article in the October 1956 edition of the Post Office Electrical Engineer’s Journal (POEEJ) gave a surprising amount of technical detail about Backbone although again without being very specific. ![]() There were some early mentions in public documents of Backbone although these were often vague and it is perhaps only with the benefit of hindsight that we recognise their true subject. ![]() This is perhaps not as far fetched as a recent suggestion that the Backbone masts were sited to coincide with “ley lines”. This book suggested that in the early 1960s the Russians funded a string of petrol stations in Britain under the name Nafta which were sited in out of the way places where they could be used as sabotage bases to destroy amongst other things the Backbone stations. With this thought in mind it is interesting to note a suggestion made in a book called “Roland Perry - the Fifth Man” which speculates that Baron Rothschild was the fifth man in the Cambridge spy ring. Both authors mentioned that microwave systems like Backbone would be less vulnerable than cables to sabotage. Writing some 10 years later Duncan Campbell gave us some more details in “War Plan UK” saying that Backbone had been conceived in 1954 for a wartime role but with a peacetime one of feeding international communications into the US listening base at Menwith Hill. Later editions of the book largely dropped the idea of Backbone as part of a communications network for “secret sites” but continued to maintain, correctly, that it had some military function. Unfortunately, we now know they they could not be seen because they did not actually exist. Unfortunately, whilst mentioning a role for Backbone in both civil defence and air defence he assumed that the system linked “secret sites”, a belief founded on the mistaken, but perhaps understandable assumption that the civil defence sites the government said it would provide existed but because they could not be seen they must be secret. Three years later he expanded the article into the groundbreaking “Beneath The City Streets” in which he says “The GPO planned a chain of concrete towers code-named Backbone which linked the 3 major cities, as well as having connections with the air-defence chain”. ![]() The enigma of Backbone has been with us for over 30 years since Peter Laurie first referred to the use of microwave relay towers in his 1967 Sunday Times article on civil defence. Military - Intelligence and Communication.Close Menu Facebook Instagram Twitter YouTube ![]()
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