aston – What Was Pebble Mill?

Building of Pres Gallery 1991

Room to the side of Pres, before the Pres Gallery was built. Photos from Stuart Gandy, no reproduction without permission.

Pres Gallery building 1991

Pres Gallery in use

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These photos from Stuart Gandy show the building of the Pres Gallery in 1991. The first photo shows the ‘before’, the second the ‘during’ and the third, the ‘after’.

Stuart describes how the gallery was built: “the talkback panel in here with the mic sticking out of it was entirely home built, like we did back then – all analogue wiring in and out of the panel designed by me and Charlotte – built by Mech workshop and wired by Pete Holmes.”

These photos were originally shared on the Pebble Mill Engineers Facebook group.

The following comments were added on the Pebble Mill Facebook page:

Paul Hunt: ‘Is it Clare Clibbery-Davies on the Pres desk and Craig Wood on the Paintbox? Not sure who’s on the Aston?’

Craig Wood: ‘that’s going back a bit, yep that’s me lurking at the back. I can’t work out who it is on Aston either.’

Gary Williams: ‘Jacqui Cawston on the Aston?’

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Gary Williams – Graphics

This photo shows Gary Williams, from Graphics, hard at work. Gary was excellent at Astons. The photo is from the 1993. Gary thinks that it was taken in the old News graphics room, when it was round in the main Graphics area. The computer looks like an Abekas A72, or something similar.

The photo was first shared on the Pebble Mill engineers’ Facebook group.

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Resources booklet mid 1990s

Copyright resides with the original holder, no reproduction without permission. This booklet was produced in the mid 1990s, as Resources were sold off from the rest of the BBC by John Birt, and had to commercialise activities.

The following comments were left on the Pebble Mill Facebook page:

Dave Bushell: ‘The David Suchet production was ‘Bingo! by Edward Bond. David was a brilliant actor to work with – he always found his light!

The betacam cameraman is Jim Gray and in the left hand image it looks like Sue Cook interviewing with cameramen Paul Woolston and Doug ? and FM Steve Pierson.’

Stuart Gandy: ‘Although I can’t put a name to the productions, that little picture bottom right of the Aston brings back memories for me from the time I was engineer for graphics. The keyboard is for the Aston 4 character generator, which was a step up from the stalwart Aston 3’s we had. It could of course do more and fancier captions and the hands seen there would have been those of one of the specialist Aston operators working in the graphics department. The little box above it was one of the 6 or so homebuilt talkback boxes that allowed communication between the studio gallery and the aston desks in the graphics area. A era of turbulent change.’

Peter Poole: ‘Studio 3, the late Mark Decker and Archers producer. Dubbing Theatre, Neve mixer.’