If you go to Embankment station and get on the Northern Line you’ll hear the famous cries of ‘mind the gap’ as you would in other London stations.
However, at this specific station and on this specific line it isn’t the same announcement you’ll be hearing, and the story behind it is heartbreaking.
A Twitter thread this week revealed the backstory as a welcome faith-in-humanity-booster at this turbulent time, and it’s given us all the feels.
The story – told by John Bull – starts with a woman bursting into tears at Embankment in 2016, begging staff to tell her where ‘the voice’ had gone.
She was referring to the voice of the ‘mind the gap’ announcement, which had been recorded by a man called Oswald Laurence.
Oswald was the woman’s late husband, and she’d come to Embankment (the last station where it was still played) to hear his voice since his passing, seven years earlier.
John said: ‘The woman, a GP called Dr Margaret McCollum, explained that her husband was an actor called Oswald Laurence. Oswald had never become famous, but he HAD been the chap who had recorded all the Northern Line announcements back in the seventies.
‘Oswald’s death had left a hole in Margaret’s heart. But one thing had helped. Every day, on her way to work, she got to hear his voice.
‘Sometimes, when it hurt too much, she explained, she’d just sit on the platform at Embankment and listen to the announcements for a bit longer.
‘For five years, this had become her routine. She knew he wasn’t really there but his voice – the memory of him – was.
‘To everyone else, it had just been another announcement. To HER it had been the ghost of the man she still loved. And now even that had gone.’
The staff apologised to Margaret, telling her that there was nothing they could do, as the system was being digitised. But, touched by her story, they decided to see if they could at least find the recordings of Oswald.
They managed to do more than just that in the end, thanks to some hard work from people across the London Underground network.
As John said, ‘Archives were searched, old tapes found and restored. More people had worked to digitize them. Others had waded through the code of the announcement system to alter it while still more had sorted out the paperwork and got exemptions.’
Margaret was then given a CD of Oswald’s recordings, and his voice was later completely restored at Embankment, back where it had been since 1969.
And that is why today, even in 2019, if you go down to Embankment station in London, and sit on the northbound platform on Northern Line, you will here a COMPLETELY different voice say Mind the Gap to ANYWHERE else on the Underground.
It’s Oswald.
Merry Christmas everyone.
— John Bull (@garius) December 11, 2019
London Underground director Nigel Holness said at the time: ‘We were very touched by her story, so staff tracked down the recording and not only were they able to get a copy of the announcement on CD for her to keep but are also working to restore the announcement at Embankment station.’
Margaret isn’t the only one to be attached to the announcements either.
Elinor Hamilton is one of the ‘voices of the tube’ along with her late husband Paul Sayers, with whom she ran a voiceover company.
Like Margaret, Elinor still loves to hear her husband’s voice when she travels to London, and said in an episode of podcast Everything is Alive: ‘I actually quite like the fact that obviously nobody else would know that this is so special for me.
‘And I just love the fact that he’s still there just getting on with life and directing people to where they need to go – and just being part of the furniture of London.’
Also like Margaret, Elinor was sad to know that his voice had been removed from some lines.
She said: ‘He used to be the main voice at Waterloo until about a year and a bit ago and when somebody told me that he’d gone from Waterloo I grieved again as if I’d lost him.
‘You know, it affected me that much knowing that his voice was just slowly being taken away.’
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