Tetney Beam Station changed peoples lives.
Harry Woolf, who was mentioned earlier, lodged in Church Lane, Tetney and returned later to marry Jessie Lingard who lived next door but one to his lodging place. At the time of writing (1993) Mr and Mrs Woolf are still living in Church Lane, Tetney.
Mrs Parrish who came to the area as a 13 year old with her family when her father was appointed to be one of the engineers married a local man and settled in the area after the rest of her family had moved on.
There were unhappier incidents connected with the station. In the course of either the construction or maintenance of the station one of the workers, who was lodging in Church Lane, was killed on the site.
During the dismantling of the masts in 1940 a young woman was killed, run over by a bus, when she lost control of her bicycle while looking up to wave to the men working on the masts. When the accident occurred all the men hurried down the mast and lifted the bus to remove her and her cycle from beneath it. On removal she was placed in a barn on a tarpaulin covered bench. In the words of Thomas Rodwell who was one of the helpers "it was a terrible sight and state her body was in with blood". The farm concerned was Staves Holding.
For some reason the body was not removed to a mortuary and it also appears that nothing was done to clean the blood from the body. Some recall the young woman’s husband who was serving in the army coming to identify the body. The sight was so distressing for him that he was described by one person as entering the barn as a young upright man and leaving as a bent and shattered person.
Rather like the Forth Bridge, maintenance was almost continuous and the wires and shackles constantly maintained. A man was employed to look after the aerial curtains. He used a cage to go across from one mast to the other on the wire supporting the aerials. He spent his working day alone in the cage at approximately 260 feet above ground level. He took his lunch and presumably other creature comforts with him. At the end of each day the cage was often still between masts and he would leave the cage in position and descend by rope after his days work. He was nick-named either Triatic Joe or Triatical Joe after the triatic wires which linked each mast. Clearly this was not a job for the faint-hearted or those who needed the company of others.
One local resident who was a young man at the time recalls his enthusiasm for trying to climb the masts and being offered a packet of cigarettes each week to stay away from them.
After the masts were dismantled there was apparently an attempt to blow up the concrete blocks. An inspection of the site shows that this was clearly unsuccessful. Mention of the station can be found in pre-war magazines, newspapers, reference books and school text-books. Photographs of it appear in histories of Marconi and his company and even in April 1993 a photograph featured in an historical article in the journal "Electronics World + Wireless World".
Probably the most unusual reminder of the station is a cigarette card. It appears as number 50 in the set "Applied Electricity" issued with Ogden's Cigarettes.
