Background
BBC TV Tech Ops staff lists … and everyone had a staff number …
Staff List 1st May 1962
Brian White
Staff Numbers
Mike Jordan
… reposted this from the uk.tech.broadcast newsgroup
Once upon a time staff numbers were given sequentially – so the smaller it was the more ancient you were. Then a ‘check digit’ was added. (query around 1984)
This digit is calculated thus:-
Take your staff number – say 123456
Multiply
First digit by 7 = 7
Second digit by 5 = 10
Third digit by 3 = 9
Fourth digit by 1 = 4
Fifth digit by 11 = 55
Sixth digit by 13 = 78
Add results = 163
Divide by 17 and note remainder – answer = 9 remainder 10
Add 1 to remainder = 11
Choose the ‘nth’ letter from the following sequence where ‘n’ is the number above.
ABDEFHJKLNPRSTWXY
In this case the 11th letter is P
Therefore your staff number would have been 123456P.
1984 ..
Click on the link below to open a page in which you enter your staff number (up to six digits), and click the button to get the full staff number plus the ‘check character’.
Peter Booth and Peter Fox
And it works for a person with a five digit number, once you put the notional 0 on the front end of the 5 digits and use up the first 7 achieving 0 and then carry on with the formula.
(Note: the script (above) automatically adds the zeros to a short Staff number (ed))
Did anyone in Admin, or Salaries or Personnel/HR ever have cause to check out anybody’s staff number using it?
Personnel never quoted one’s check letter with the staff number – when asked :“we never bother with those" was the answer!
Rex Palmer
What about the missing 9 letters? I presume C, G, O & Q look(ed) too much like 0 (zero), I too like 1 and Z too like 2, but why lose U and V rather than one from the pairs P and R or E and F, for example?
Peter Neill
Someone asked when the change from 5 to 6 digit staff numbers happened.
With contributions from Peter Neill, John Howell, Hugh Sheppard, Dave Buckley, Peter Fox, Mike Felton, Geoff Fletcher, Derek Martin, Dave Plowman , Rex Palmer, Chris Eames, Peter Cook, David Brunt, David J Denness and Alec Bray: from the responses, it seems that 5 digits were used (ending with the 88xxx sequence) up until about May 1962, from when six figure number were used, starting with 110xxx, then with 111xxx in 1963 and with the 120xxx sequence used in 1964.
Chris Eames
I remember someone telling me that staff numbers were allocated when you applied for a job, not when they actually recruited you. If this is correct it means that many staff numbers were actually never used, and would account for the exponential rise in staff numbers circa 1963, when they were recruiting for BBC2.
Doug Coldwell
I think that Chris is right about the numbers being allocated before induction. John Christie and I have consecutive staff numbers in the 111*** range and we remember each other from the waiting room for the initial Langham interview in February 1963.
David Brunt
I would imagine there was also a big new inflood from 1955-1958 when the ITV regions started up and a lot of BBC-staffers all defected. They’d have needed a lot of new crew afterwards.
As noted, the other major increase of 1962/1963 would be down to the start of BBC2 requiring almost twice as many staff to cover the extra work. It’s possible that some of those already in the regional staff were reallocated to TV Centre (I know a lot moved down from BBC Scotland then) and new staff went to the regions to cover.
Peter Fox
I would guess that someone in Admin/Personnel saw the forced change to 6 digits coming up within 11,000 new staff, and didn’t like the idea of staff numbers 99999 and 100001 etc, They do look a bit unbelievable, and so made a pre-emptive jump in 1962 to 110xyz for more convincing numbers.Ignoring the leaps, it will last until the millionth new recruit and that’s not going to happen with the Beeb going rapidly down the plughole.In very round numbers, the jump from Hugh’s 22xxx to my 88,xxx is 66,000 between 1958 and 1962 16,500 a year for four years? That’s rather a lot even with BBC2 expansion!10000001 would have had letter F in due course! Do we agree that check letters happened much later, probably with the Coppa payroll system ?
Dave Mundy
I joined in December. 1960 and my number is 80xxx, the next intake I believe were 84xxx and then 88xxx. I knew a man in Birmingham with the number 12xx and he joined before WW2!
Bill Jenkin
It would appear that no-one has got a 10**** staff no. All the early six figure ones quoted seem to be 11**** unless I have missed someone.
I think it must have been decided by the powers that be to switch to a 6 figure system when they were hitting the 80000s and start with 110000. Also I see that Peter Neil’s staff no is 120*** and he joined in 1964. Mine is 119*** but I didn’t join until January 1965. My lot were supposed to start in Autumn 1964 but we were put back for three months so I suspect the staff numbers were allocated either when you were accepted for the job or, as suggested earlier, when you applied.
Mike Giles
I also joined in January 1965 and my staff number begins 119, as Bill’s does. I believe the delay from the previous Autumn was a money saving ploy.
Peter Sumpter
If I remember correctly, a colleague when I joined (George Smith) had a 4 digit staff number.. He started as a 14 year old page boy at Broadcasting House before the war and eventually retired around the mid 80s.
There was another 4 digit staffer who worked in the BBC shop that used to be at the front of TVC.
Peter Cook
Monday October 14th was the start of my induction course with others such as John Heard (renamed Johnston later) Simon Fone and Ray Fitzwalter. I too remember the ‘insidious dust’ from the cranky civil defence lecturer. My recall of the cake and candles caused me to advise caution on a “Rolf on Saturday” but the SM ignored me. Oops we were live!! but the fire extinguisher did work.
Geoff Hawkes
I joined on 9th September 1963 along with Doug Coldwell, Roy Bailey, John Carter and a coach load of others who at the December that year formed the happy band known as TO18. Roy can probably name them all. My staff number is of the order 113xxx, which makes me wonder how Peter Cook got his 112xxx, having started a month later, and which rule of allocation that helps prove?
I’m intrigued by the formula for the tag letter … why did mine turn out to be an "F"?
Brian White
As a curator of several Crew 3 diaries from the 70’s I could divulge several ‘mature’ Staff Numbers i.e. 6 digits and many more with 7 digits – last one always being a Letter.
On Crew 3 I started it off with 643xxx (Jan 55 followed by RKT with 742xxx, Jim K with
760xxx, Peter C with 773xxx & one Doug W with 899xxx.
Totting up the younger 20 (+anonymity) we have;
| Fist three digits | Number of staff | |
| 111 xxx | 3 | |
| 113 xxx | 2 | |
| 124 xxx | 3 | |
| 135 xxx | 1 | |
| 139 xxx | 4 | |
| 144 xxx | 5 | |
| 208 xxx | 1 | |
| 212 xxx | 1 | |
I could retain these records if it becomes someone’s life project!
John Henshall
When Peter Hider and I joined, on 28 August 1961, we had staff numbers beginning 84xxx but one of the people on our induction course had a 4 figure staff number. It was reckoned that this was because they re-issued some staff numbers.In the early 1960s at Television Centre, I remember the retirement of someone (in vision control or a junior TOM?) who I believe had a three digit staff number. He had joined the BBC in the early 1920s before it was even called the British Broadcasting Corporation — it was initially the British Broadcasting Company Ltd. Back then in the early 1960s, I worked out that it would be past 2000 before I retired and that seemed impossibly far ahead.
Now it’s almost 2014 and I still haven’t retired!A few years ago I was coming back from Beijing on British Airways and a man asked if anyone wanted an upgrade from Business to First Class, so that he could sit with his secretary in Business. I noticed he had a BBC brief case, so I asked him what his staff number was. "Staff number?" he replied, "What’s that?" I found that incredible and, rolling up my sleeve, I said, "When I worked at the Beeb we had our staff numbers tattooed on our arms."
With that, he actually leaned towards me to have a look! I mention this because, unlike us, he couldn’t give a stuff about staff numbers. I then asked him what his job was: Head of BBC News. I still have his card.
(Afterwards I felt bad about my tasteless joke, in view of what happened during the war.)BBC middle management was always somewhat ludicrous and we should not be surprised that there were strange jumps in the number sequence. There are probably faded memos somewhere in dusty middle management files about the perceived wisdom of moving to new staff number batches. These probably followed endless focus group meetings. All understandable because, after all, they had little else of any consequence to do while we were busy making the programmes the public loved. Call me cynical? I don’t mind. How else do you regard those who went on to get rid of our beloved Television Centre?
Angie Wilson
I guess if you’re Head of BBC News there’s no actual need to know your staff number, or indeed that you have one. You don’t have to do time sheets, and you have minions to type your expenses claims. Reassuring isn’t it to know that management so has its finger on the pulse of how the other half lives.
Hugh Sheppard
I’ll venture that your TOM 2 was Frank Sellen, an ADC to Col. Sam Neeter on crew six
Clive Doig
I joined in 1958 as a JPTO and have a 5 digit staff number starting 75*** and suffixed A. That seems to be about the same time that Hugh Sheppard joined, so don’t understand the discrepancy in his staff number (22xxx) and my numbers.
