So what is a linesman then? Heard it in the song, but never worked it out. I would guess a telephone man?
The
Wichita Lineman? I always felt that the lyrics suggested he was working on power lines, especially the part about "searching in the sun for another overload," although I remember reading that the inspiration for the song came from driving along a lonely stretch of highway in Oklahoma and seeing a lone lineman working on telephone lines. The term itself can certainly apply to either.
The British government realised how this would help business and wanted to extend the system so formed the GPO telephone system.
The history there is actually rather more complicated than that. Outside of the railways, the first public telephone systems in Britain were all privately owned and operated, although by way of its initial setup plus the acquisition of many smaller local companies over the early years, the National Telephone Co. became by far the largest.
The challenge came with a court case to establish whether, legally speaking, a telephone message was to be considered equivalent to a telegram, over which the Post Office had a monopoly. The court ruled in the G.P.O.'s favor, which had two results: First, it meant that the G.P.O. could then start to set up its own competing system; second that the existing privately owned companies had henceforth to operate under license from the Postmaster General. The terms gave the G.P.O. the option to takeover the private companies at various intervals.
By the time the G.P.O. exercised that optiion in 1912, the former smaller private companies had already been bought out either by National or by the Post Office itself, so the G.P.O. duly absorbed the National Telephone Co. in 1912 thereby becoming the sole telephone system for most of the country.
The exceptions were the two cities of Portsmouth and Hull. Around the turn of the century, the government had also permitted certain towns and cities to operate their own municipally owned telephone systems if they so wished. The list of eligible towns and cities was quite extensive, but few showed any interest, and only six ever actually got off the ground: Hull, Portsmouth, Glasgow, Brighton, Swansea, and - perhaps somewhat surprisingly - Tunbridge Wells. All but Hull & Portsmouth had already decided to abandon the municipally owned telephone idea and had sold out to either the Post Office or National Telephone Co. before the 1912 takeover of the National. Portsmouth got out of the telephone business and sold up to the G.P.O. the following year. Hull decided to continue, which is why right up until the creation of British Telecom Hull was the only place in the U.K. to be separate from Post Office Telephones.
How being a linesman for the county fits into this not sure.
Obviously the framework is a little different in the U.S.A. than in Britain. The lyric about being a "lineman for the county" is slightly ambiguous as well - Does he mean simply that he works within and all over the the county (for somebody else, such as a private electricity utility or telephone company), or does he mean he actually works
for the county, i.e. as a county employee? Either way, it doesn't answer the question fully, since in various parts of the U.S. there are some county-owned power grids and certainly in the past some county-owned telephone systems.
Same as Bangor main could refer to Bangor having two stations in Wales or Bangor in USA being in the county of Main. Both are true.
It's spelled
Maine. And it's a state, not a county.