Thanks all
Thanks to your help ppp seems to be working.
I still seem to be missing some things ....

1. Still some confusion
I am not too clear on how pppd handles "user" and "name" options.
In order to connect to a remote site I specified both "user" and "name"
user fred
name fred

I had to add the hostname fred and the ip issued to me by the ppp connection
to my hosts table.

How should I manage this for the 40 or so connections I need to make.

2. What I wish
Normally my box is connected to a highspeed connection.
It derives its configuration via dhcp.

When I connect to a remote site I can't seem to go anywhere
unless I flush the routing table first and let pppd add a default route.
Of course this makes it so I can't access other subnets on my
high speed connection.

I'm not sure how to go about arranging a routing table that would allow me
to keep my original default route but still be able to access machines
on the dial-up connection.