Dail-a-Disc and Dr John Bodkin Adams

That last post got me thinking about BT's telephone services in the past, and my memory drifted to 'Dial-a-Disc', which was something BT offered back in the 1970s and a while afterwards, although it disappeared many years ago. You phoned a short two- or three- digit number - the cost of this was small - and heard the Disc of the Day, which was always something lively from the Top Ten.

It was really rather cool to dial up a current pop song and listen to it on one's phone. It was even cooler to do it in the office, at the office expense, dialling '9' first to get an outside line. If anyone senior came near, you could pretend you were taking a regular phone call. All very naughty, of course; but I admit to listening to Dial-a-Disc in the office right at the beginning of my Inland Revenue career, when I was still in my late teens, and silly, and very intoxicated with the wicked new freedoms of adult life.

The chief opportunity to use Dial a Disc came on overtime. Anyone who was part of the 'clerical staff' - meaning (in ascending order of seniority) a Clerical Assistant, a Tax Officer, or a Tax Officer (Higher Grade) - I was a trainee TO(HG) at the time - was entitled to work overtime and be paid for it. It was useful money, and if your social life was barely off the ground, you had time to spare, and there was nothing on the telly that evening, a spot of easy overtime was just the ticket.

We were supervised by a trusted older officer, but working overtime was relaxed way of passing a few hours for the merry band of young reprobates who regularly did it. Honestly, we mucked about if we could, chatting and no doubt giggling. Dialling pop songs was the least of it. But I will add that we would always have something to show next day for the time put in, and there was absolutely no hanky-panky. Moreover, the records kept of the time put in were meticulous. They had to be good - on pain of disciplinary action from the stern and no-nonsense Management Inspector, an ex-CPO.

'Meticulous?' you scoff. Well, I can back up what I say. I still have all my old overtime records for 1971 to 1975. Yes, I've kept them safe for over forty-five years. Indeed, I still have many old service records up in my attic. I have an idea that some of them might be regarded as documents that are subject to the Official Secrets Acts, so I'll be careful here! But I am pretty sure that personal handwritten records, on which my official payment and allowances claims were based, are probably outside the scope of the Acts. The claim forms themselves might not be. One day, certainly if I ever do move house, I will have to burn all these items.

So, in my attic are a collection of thick orange folders, set up some thirty years ago to hold various records together. One of them deals with 'Office Matters'...

...with a subfolder for 'Overtime'...

...and in that subfolder is a complete record of my overtime in Southampton 3 Tax Office, from 1st February 1971 right through to 14th March 1973, with additional stints in 1974 and 1975. I stopped doing overtime after 18th May 1975. I had just been selected for Technical Training, and would join the 'technical staff', who might well work unusually long hours on occasion, but could not claim extra payment for it. 

Here's the first page of eight:

That kind of lined paper (called '174D paper') was the original 'spreadsheet'. The storerooms of all tax offices had tons of it. I suspect it was very useful for keeping accounts at home, as well as for making year-by-year analyses in the office. Believe me, handwritten (or typed) spreadsheets were the thing long before Microsoft ever existed, or dreamed up Excel. In a pre-computer age, which in a local tax office meant pre-1990s, this is what you used. 

I'm sure you can see that if - following a deathbed confession, bragging in a pub, or the injudicious publication of a former Revenue officer's memoirs - it ever came to light that false claims to overtime had been rife in one or more of the six tax offices located in Southampton in the 1970s, all staff serving in them would immediately come under investigation. A criminal investigation. So I have kept hold of all my pay and allowances records, and hours-worked records - and especially records of expenses claimed - all this time. Just in case. Paranoid? Read on.

The Revenue always took a severe line with any dishonest member of staff who had, for instance, set up fake taxpayer files and claimed tax repayments payable to themselves, an alias, or a tame nominee. It was no different if it were 'only' filching notes and coin from in the office petty cash tin, or occasionally making use of the office postage stamp money. False claims to expenses were never laughed off: you'd be sacked. But you'd go through an ordeal first.

Officers from the Board's Investigation Office would come down from their citadel in London. They would be forthright and barely courteous in their enquiries. Anyone suspected would have a very testing experience. These inquisitors enjoyed their work. They used threat and fear to get a result. The guilty disappeared into an oubliette. Their associates, if found complicit but not actually guilty, were broken characters henceforth, never to achieve another promotion. If someone had already resigned, they were tracked down and prosecuted without mercy and without exception. Escape abroad was but a temporary reprieve: the BIO would wait, and hound them if they ever returned.  

Proving innocence might depend on what you could show and say in your defence. There had to be credible, contemporary, detailed written records. If you had them, and they looked believable, and you survived the appallingly cold and fierce interview without making an inconsistent remark, then all might be well. If not, well...

This is why I never accepted any out-of-office position that involved handling money. And still wouldn't. A serving Revenue officer had to be stainless, and beyond any possibility of stain. I am absolutely sure this is true of a retired officer also, with a pension to lose.

Not that I would worry if the entire staff serving in Southampton in the early 1970s came under suspicion. I still have those records. I can mount a convincing defence. And wouldn't the BIO (or whatever their current name is, now that the Inland Revenue is that hybrid monster, the HMRC) be surprised at their production?

This is what happened with Dr John Bodkin Adams. He was a medical practitioner in Eastbourne from the early 1930s until well into the 1950s. He inspired confidence, and was very popular with older patients in nursing homes and the like. Several wills were altered in his favour, and he accepted gifts from grateful patients. He sometimes seemed to seek these things. The patients died, and some said he had hastened their deaths with lethal overdoses of drugs like morphine. There were rumours, and the police heard of them, and mounted a murder investigation. In due course, Dr Adams faced trial. It was a celebrated case. 

I first heard of it when reading the book on the left in my photo below.

Later, I got hold of the book on the right. Lord Devlin was the judge in the case and heard all the evidence. On the back of the cover is this shot of the doctor himself, after the trial. He had an avuncular manner, apparently.

Dr Adams' defence hinged on proving that he prescribed and administered only moderate and medically-justifiable amounts of painkillers and other such drugs to the elderly patients in his care. The witnesses for the prosecution included a renowned medical expert and nurses of impeccable character and experience, who had actually looked after the patients under Dr Adams' instructions. Their evidence was damning. Basically, it was that Dr Adams had made sure that drugs were administered in such amounts that death was certain. And the expert asserted that such amounts could never be appropriate. The accusation was that he had hastened these deaths for personal gain - the money willed to him.

But Dr Adams was acquitted. For his defence team discovered the old records of what had been administered, written by these very nurses, lying forgotten in a surgery cupboard. Nobody guessed these records still existed. It caused a sensation when they were produced in court. The barrister for the defence used them to tear apart the nurses' recollection of the amounts given to the patients, proving that Dr Adams hadn't acted murderously. And he skilfully neutralised the expert opinion.

So: old records matter!

And Dial-a-Disc? I don't know when it stopped being available. But I listened to it for only a couple of years: 1971 and 1972. The sound quality was awful. It was much better to hear the Top Ten on the radio - or once a week on TV, on Top of the Pops. And in between, cassette tapes. I fancy that BT withdrew it sometime in the early 1980s. Probably as the Sony Walkman took off. An early example of modern 'new tech' ousting an outmoded service.