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Telephone dialling code?


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Looking at old advertising material it's surprising how few contact details were provided. Many companies just had a phone number but in a lot of instances you had to write for a brochure. Those in magazines aimed at the public had a coupon to cut out and send your address in you were lucky.

Before the days of email some had a telegraphic address, for instance the Yale Lock factory was"YALETOWNE, WILLENHALL" with the London office being "Yaletoene, Westcent, London"  Telex came in during the 1930s and died out as FAX became common in the 1980s. It used a five-digit number for the address.

 

:offtopic:Thread drift warning.

The railway was quite advanced in telegraphic services. When I joined in 1966 the LMR had a STRAD (Signal Transmission, Recovery And Distribution) electronic system which was developed during the 1950s.  It was reputed to be on a par with the MOD system. We were using Creed teleprinter machines, IIRC it was the Model 75, which were similar to an electric 'Golfball' typewriter with a roll paper feed.

The STRAD was widely used between Telegraph Offices such as Birmingham New Street for urgent messages and in Control Offices for train reporting. I remember a particular machine in the Inspector's Office on the old Platform 4 at Crewe which was facing the window. It was programmed to get running reports for all trains approaching Crewe, Very useful for train spotting as you always knew when a new 50 was due to arrive on the Up Freightliner to change to a Class 86. You got the number and stabling location of that from the Loco Board in the same office.

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13 hours ago, jpendle said:

One other interesting tidbit is that the before the addition of the '1' the STD codes outside the big cities were somewhat in alphabetical order.

 

For example

Bolton 0204

Cambridge 0223

Carlisle 0228

Derby 0332

Doncaster 0302

Oxford 0865

Warrington 0925

Wigan 0942

 

Of course a lot of others have changed as more numbers have had to be added.

 

John P

At the time these were assigned, phones had two or three letters on the dials next to each number, so 2 would have ABC etc.  O or Q was zero.  So at least the first two letters of the codes were meant to match with the place name, and I think the codes within areas such as 021 used something similar.  From your example Bolton would be BO4, Cambridge would be CA3, Carlisle would be CA8, Derby would be DE2, Doncaster would be DO2.  Not sure how this fits with Oxford though!  

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57 minutes ago, TheSignalEngineer said:

Looking at old advertising material it's surprising how few contact details were provided. Many companies just had a phone number but in a lot of instances you had to write for a brochure. Those in magazines aimed at the public had a coupon to cut out and send your address in you were lucky.

Before the days of email some had a telegraphic address, for instance the Yale Lock factory was"YALETOWNE, WILLENHALL" with the London office being "Yaletoene, Westcent, London"  Telex came in during the 1930s and died out as FAX became common in the 1980s. It used a five-digit number for the address.

 

:offtopic:Thread drift warning.

The railway was quite advanced in telegraphic services. When I joined in 1966 the LMR had a STRAD (Signal Transmission, Recovery And Distribution) electronic system which was developed during the 1950s.  It was reputed to be on a par with the MOD system. We were using Creed teleprinter machines, IIRC it was the Model 75, which were similar to an electric 'Golfball' typewriter with a roll paper feed.

The STRAD was widely used between Telegraph Offices such as Birmingham New Street for urgent messages and in Control Offices for train reporting. I remember a particular machine in the Inspector's Office on the old Platform 4 at Crewe which was facing the window. It was programmed to get running reports for all trains approaching Crewe, Very useful for train spotting as you always knew when a new 50 was due to arrive on the Up Freightliner to change to a Class 86. You got the number and stabling location of that from the Loco Board in the same office.

And that continued of course.  When facsimile machines were being installed in 1973 as part of the TOPS scheme those which worked over BR 'phone lines were considerably faster than those running over BT lines because the baud rate achievable on BR lines was much higher.

 

And Even Further off topic

And exactly the same went for data transmission when the computer revolution came along - BR digital systems could send the entire national passenger timetable or the whole of the WTT to any logged desktop machine as single files with no trouble at all, something which was impossible using email over BT lines.  So when we left the BR internal Micromail system for common or garden email in 1994/95 the WTT had to be transferred by using a dat-tape because email couldn't handle files that large let alone anywhere near as fast as Micromail could (where for all practical purposes the transferable file size was effectively unlimited).

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5 hours ago, Bucoops said:

 

(020) 7 not (0207) ;)

 

I know.  Just force of habit having been brought up on the NNN NNNN number format for a director area and I can't get used to the NNNN NNNN format in London.

Edited by DY444
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5 hours ago, mezzoman253 said:

For a comprehensive article on UK dialling codes see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_telephone_numbers_in_the_United_Kingdom

 

Rob

 

I think that article is a little generous in its description of the situation in the early 90s.  It implies a strategic plan to use 071 and 081 in London to free up 01 for subsequent integration into the 1995 number change which in turn created the gaps for the 2000 number change.  Imposing number changes was (and presumably still is) extremely unpopular with customers and in the 1990s at least was a complex engineering undertaking.  Any plan which proposed 3 number changes in London in 10 years would not have been approved.  It evolved into what it became in an almost ad-hoc fashion because of the unpredicted explosion in demand for numbers firstly in London due to the growth in the City and particularly Canary Wharf, then later on through the growth of the cities outside the original 6 director areas and the mobile phone demand.

Edited by DY444
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5 hours ago, TheSignalEngineer said:

 This page gives a full list of the Birmingham Telephone area exchanges from 1931 to the 1960s.

 

http://www.telephonesuk.co.uk/old_dialing_codes.htm

Quite a few of the codes were a "fiddle" as they couldn't use the three numbers based on the exchange name

e.g. Moseley was "South", Warstock was "Maypole" (although it did cover that area until a new exchange was built there and called "Druids Heath"

Alvechurch was "Hillside" etc.

 

Incidentally "South" was the last manual exchange in the West Midlands and one of the last in the country.

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1 hour ago, melmerby said:

Quite a few of the codes were a "fiddle" as they couldn't use the three numbers based on the exchange name

:offtopic:more thread drift but it's getting towards Malt o'clock so how about a 'War Story'

An interesting aside on the Birmingham link I posted. The old GPO numbers became 262. This would be the equivalent of the name of the underground exchange in Newhall Street which acted as a trunk switching centre for the STD network and also a lot of Government communications links. This was code named 'Anchor Exchange', ANC=262.  The tunnels it is contained in were built c1953-7 on the pretext of being preparatory works for an underground railway system. It was actually the proposed seat of regional government in case of a nuclear attack. There were two similar exchanges known as Kingsway (London) and Guardian (Manchester).

There are several 'Back Doors' dotted around the city centre where the tunnels could be accessed. My Dad knew where they all were as the exchange was on his patch when he was in the Fire Brigade based in the Jewellery Quarter. He was involved in building a 'before and after' diorama of the city centre for a government conference on the plans in event of a nuclear attack. Apparently it was a bit theatrical as the conference was progressing showing the ways in that would be taken by designated officials. The lights went out, there was a big flash and bang then the lights came back on to reveal a devastated city centre.

The construction entrance, now sealed, was by Moor Street Station in the middle of the construction site of the Inner Ring Road.

The tunnels were never finished at the Hockley end, there is a gap of about 500 yards, The southern end is at Essex Street near to the Hippodrome. The full length if completed would have been approaching two miles.

Edited by TheSignalEngineer
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Remember also that it was not only the exchange codes which developed. Numbers had initial digits added to cope with increasing demand. My grandparents in Exeter went from 4214 to 74214 when I was young, and there were similar changes over a long period throughout the country. Six digit phone numbers are relatively recent. In Harpenden we went from 63415 to 763415.but I cannot remember the year except that it must have been between 37 and 12 years ago, and I think nearer the first than  the second.

Jonathan

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19 hours ago, LBRJ said:

Did any or many small businesses actually have Telex machines? I have never seen one in real life.

 

Fax machines were certainly getting popular in the later 80s / early 90s (posh firms hard hard copy fax that printed onto real paper, as opposed to reel paper!) but as has been said, they just had a normal phone number, with an extra 1 in there from 1994.

Interestingly (or not) faxes are still used (think Football Transfer Deadline Day Signings) because a signature on a fax counts as a "real signature".

 

Not only did many businesses use telex (My company in the late 60s sent hundreds of the damn things every day to it's US parent company. I spent many hours preparing the paper tapes earlier in the day so that messages could be sent later in the day when it was cheaper) but British Railways made extensive use of them to transmit such things as wagon locations and other operational information. My sister worked as a telex operator for BR on Derby station (Control Office on Platform 1(?)) for several years in the late 50s.

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7 hours ago, DY444 said:

 

I think that article is a little generous in its description of the situation in the early 90s.  It implies a strategic plan to use 071 and 081 in London to free up 01 for subsequent integration into the 1995 number change which in turn created the gaps for the 2000 number change.  Imposing number changes was (and presumably still is) extremely unpopular with customers and in the 1990s at least was a complex engineering undertaking.  Any plan which proposed 3 number changes in London in 10 years would not have been approved.  It evolved into what it became in an almost ad-hoc fashion because of the unpredicted explosion in demand for numbers firstly in London due to the growth in the City and particularly Canary Wharf, then later on through the growth of the cities outside the original 6 director areas and the mobile phone demand.

I think it was exactly that.  The intention was to add one digit to all numbers and the easiest way was to free up "01" by changing all London numbers.  It had to be done in several stages and there had to be a longish transition between one stage and the next (when both sets of numbers worked) to be reasonably sure that no recipient of a new number would be unduly inconvenienced by it clashing with an old one.  

 

They could presumably have kept 0171 and 0181, but then would have had to create other "area codes" for London to cope with the increasing demand for numbers, and these wouldn't have been geographic to any part of London as they would have overlapped with 0171 and 0181.  Hence the decision to go to 020 xxxx xxxx for all London landlines.  The same process also allowed the creation of 011x codes and adding an extra digit to the local part of the number for several cities outside London that were running out of numbers.  

 

Between the start of Subscriber Through Dialling and the 0171/0181 change London enjoyed an advantage.  Not did they have one digit fewer in their numbers than anyone else (01 xxx xxxx when Birmingham was 021 xxx xxxx for example, and most smaller places 0xxx xxxxxx).  But they also had the "1" code which was the quickest to dial on the old pulse dialers! 

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4 hours ago, TheSignalEngineer said:

:offtopic:more thread drift but it's getting towards Malt o'clock so how about a 'War Story'

 The southern end is at Essex Street near to the Hippodrome. The full length if completed would have been approaching two miles.

When I worked for the GPO the southern entrance was supposed to be at the back of Jubilee Works in Sherlock Street in what is now a carpark.

 

EDIT The last I heard the lower levels under Telephone House are now flooded

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2 hours ago, Edwin_m said:

IThey could presumably have kept 0171 and 0181, but then would have had to create other "area codes" for London to cope with the increasing demand for numbers, and these wouldn't have been geographic to any part of London as they would have overlapped with 0171 and 0181.  Hence the decision to go to 020 xxxx xxxx for all London landlines.

Have they changed the damn things again?  (Left in 2013)

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Some people had the inconvenience with a prefix change.

I had 3 totally different numbers at an address I lived at in Birmingham

I started with one at Warstock exchange (474), then It was moved to Druids Heath when that opened (430) then when they went all electronic I got another (436) the last 4 digits were always different.

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49 minutes ago, melmerby said:

When I worked for the GPO the southern entrance was supposed to be at the back of Jubilee Works in Sherlock Street in what is now a carpark.

 

EDIT The last I heard the lower levels under Telephone House are now flooded

They abandoned a lot of the tunnels due to flooding after the Strowger exchanges were taken out. Some have apparently been refurbished and are pumped out and still in use as cable tunnels. 

There was an entrance and ventilation shaft at Telephone House and another in Lionel Street. Shaft 3 was in Church Street. The notthern tunnel to Hockley was abandoned before compltion. The cabling at the southern end went as far as Smallbrook exchange, which I think was at the corner of Essex St and Bromsgrove St. There was a GPO Stores there as well I think. 

I remember GPO Engineering's Jubilee Works in Sherlock St, corner of Hurst St. Wasn't there a GPO garage opposite which went through to Lower Essex St?

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7 hours ago, TheSignalEngineer said:

I remember GPO Engineering's Jubilee Works in Sherlock St, corner of Hurst St. Wasn't there a GPO garage opposite which went through to Lower Essex St?

This is the view looking up Hurst St.

I can't remember whether the GPO garage was the first or second on the left side of Hurst St.

https://goo.gl/maps/yeFjBhTwWe3fRvut5

 

 

I can remember in the early 60s, sitting at my bench on the top floor of Jubilee works with a clear view of the GWR line into Moor St.

Happy days!

 

 

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12 hours ago, Edwin_m said:

I think it was exactly that.  The intention was to add one digit to all numbers and the easiest way was to free up "01" by changing all London numbers.  It had to be done in several stages and there had to be a longish transition between one stage and the next (when both sets of numbers worked) to be reasonably sure that no recipient of a new number would be unduly inconvenienced by it clashing with an old one.  

 

They could presumably have kept 0171 and 0181, but then would have had to create other "area codes" for London to cope with the increasing demand for numbers, and these wouldn't have been geographic to any part of London as they would have overlapped with 0171 and 0181.  Hence the decision to go to 020 xxxx xxxx for all London landlines.  The same process also allowed the creation of 011x codes and adding an extra digit to the local part of the number for several cities outside London that were running out of numbers.  

 

Between the start of Subscriber Through Dialling and the 0171/0181 change London enjoyed an advantage.  Not did they have one digit fewer in their numbers than anyone else (01 xxx xxxx when Birmingham was 021 xxx xxxx for example, and most smaller places 0xxx xxxxxx).  But they also had the "1" code which was the quickest to dial on the old pulse dialers! 

 

I was a senior engineer in BT's Trunk Network Planning department at the time of the 071/081 change and I can assure you that there was no three stage plan in place at that time.  The objective was solely to open up more number levels in London to cater both for growth and the emergence of other licensed fixed network operators after the lucrative City market and the thought was it would give enough number capacity for 20 years.  The project to insert the 1 was conceived after 1990 and was driven by the need to provide more NNG codes to cater for landline growth outside London and for the growing number of mobile operators.   I know from first hand experience that the London business community was very unhappy indeed at two number changes in 5 years and had the 1995 project been known about in the lead up to 1990 then I'm certain that a different approach would have been adopted to avoid the double change.  I'd left before the 2000 project started but I imagine London business would have been equally unhappy about that too.

 

As you say the decision to dispense with 0171/0181 was because there was a need for a further number level in London and all the 01x1 levels had been taken.   Adopting 020 then made it easier to add new levels going forward.

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2 hours ago, DY444 said:

 

I was a senior engineer in BT's Trunk Network Planning department at the time of the 071/081 change and I can assure you that there was no three stage plan in place at that time.  The objective was solely to open up more number levels in London to cater both for growth and the emergence of other licensed fixed network operators after the lucrative City market and the thought was it would give enough number capacity for 20 years.  The project to insert the 1 was conceived after 1990 and was driven by the need to provide more NNG codes to cater for landline growth outside London and for the growing number of mobile operators.   I know from first hand experience that the London business community was very unhappy indeed at two number changes in 5 years and had the 1995 project been known about in the lead up to 1990 then I'm certain that a different approach would have been adopted to avoid the double change.  I'd left before the 2000 project started but I imagine London business would have been equally unhappy about that too.

 

As you say the decision to dispense with 0171/0181 was because there was a need for a further number level in London and all the 01x1 levels had been taken.   Adopting 020 then made it easier to add new levels going forward.

Thanks for this update.  So it was moreorless accidental that all numbers beginning with 01 were freed up by the 1990 changes and this allowed us eventually to move to the current system.  I'm not sure though how else this problem could have been solved in 1990.  I do remember talk of some arrangement for businesses in outer London to get themselves an 071 number to make them look more central.  

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On ‎12‎/‎01‎/‎2020 at 01:38, LBRJ said:

Did any or many small businesses actually have Telex machines? I have never seen one in real life...

I would suggest only a few, for which it was a vital element in their business process. I did a short stint with a specialist shipping outfit, dozen employees, that had one. You were barely able to see it, as it was in 'the Telex room' with the operator, and there was a tiny hatch through which you humbly pushed your (correctly completed or heaven help you) message form. But it was a reliable way of getting a message through to other such businesses at any time, anywhere in the world, that also had a Telex, or an accessible Telex office.

 

Next encounter with Telex was in a major multinational. The Telex religion was still rigidly enforced, none but the priestesses of the Telex were allowed in the room. A suitably reverent attitude was required when humbly submitting the three daily reports in the approved form, in this business each individually enhanced by the approval stamp of the correct budget control clerk: for the whole content was charged by the character to one's cost code.

 

Now the fun starts. After about three weeks I had concluded that what I was reporting amounted to one of twenty four conditions. I wrote by internal mail to the recipient with the proposal that a single letter was sufficient as a report as a simple code reference, supplemented by a very few numbers (deviations from standard). He liked that and our previous three page reports dropped to very few characters indeed. Within a week the witchfinder general appeared enraged at such heresy, that had deranged the entire budgeting structure for the Telex operation. (I believe he was an accountant.) Fax appeared within the year and it was the scrawl of the wild from then until the Net creaked into life. So much easier.

 

And funnier too. Somewhere I still have the Punch cartoon of a secretary speaking to boss while holding a cat outline on a piece of paper. "It's from your dog. He appears to have faxed your cat."

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On 12/01/2020 at 15:40, DavidB-AU said:

 

The original alphabetical local dialling codes were simply converted into numbers (although there are now exceptions). Look at where the letters are on a phone dial, using 0 in place of O. Bolton was BO, which became 20. Cambridge was CA which became 22, Wolverhampton was WO which became 90, etc. These became STD codes by adding more numbers. 

 

When STD was introduced London got 01 which was expected. Birmingham got 021 (the 2 is ABC), Edinburgh got 031 (the 3 is DEF), Glasgow got 041 (the 4 is GHI), Liverpool got 051 and Manchester got 061.

 

Other services were numbered the same way. The speaking clock was 846 (TIM), directory enquiries was 347 (DIR), reporting faults was 364 (ENG) and you could get the latest test match score by dialling 867 (UMP).

 

<MichaelCaine> There's not many people know that </MichaelCaine>

 

Cheers

David

Interesting that in Australia the letter system (which were obviously really numbers) was used too, but in an entirely different way.

 

In capital cities, the first digit (say 5) was like a central suburban group, while around it were 51, 52, 53 etc. Other central locations were say 4 and around it were 41, 42, 43 etc. These were for 6 digit local numbers.

When expansion was required, the system used was 711, 712, 713 & 721, 722, 723 etc These being 7 digit local numbers.

 

The major difference was that the letters, made no attempt to replicate the name of the exchange, they were literally, just numbers but showing a letter. As the numbers were like a disc on a map, you could tell frequently if the number you intended to call was near you or not. The British system didn't give you that information by it's nature.

 

Like Britain, the number of digits had to be changed & we ended up with 10 digits (2 digit area code & 8 digit local number), for the vast majority of numbers. Some locations required a double change, notably Tasmania.

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2 hours ago, Edwin_m said:

Thanks for this update.  So it was moreorless accidental that all numbers beginning with 01 were freed up by the 1990 changes and this allowed us eventually to move to the current system.  I'm not sure though how else this problem could have been solved in 1990.  I do remember talk of some arrangement for businesses in outer London to get themselves an 071 number to make them look more central.  

 

Basically yes.

 

If the 1995 project had been known about in 1990 I think we would have probably opted to go straight to 0171 and 0181.  I can't remember now if there were any 01-71x and 01-81x levels in use back then but if there were then those would have had to be moved so the whole thing would potentially have been more complicated but worth it to avoid the second London number change in 1995.

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The other aspect of phone numbers used to be local codes, often two digits. I remember 91 from Swansea, but that was well over 50 years ago and I cannot remember what area it covered. What I do remember is that 9198 circumvented the charging system and if you knew the internal GPO codes you could phone anywhere in the country for free. I never actually needed to do it but it was a challenge one could not resist to try to find out how to route calls to places like Manchester.

But the point of mentioning this is to ask if these codes would ever have been included on publicity material such as van sides, posters or shop fascias.

Jonathan

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