The Guardian (21/Sep/2006) - Dial M for Mayfair
(c) The Guardian (21/Sep/2006)
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Dial M for Murder (1954)
Dial M for Mayfair
Telephone exchanges named by inventive locals made us think of Keats to talk to Enfield
Winston Churchill was PAD 1003; Sigmund Freud was HAM 2002; Sir Oswald Mosley was SLO 3395. No mysteries there: Pad was Paddington, Ham was Hampstead, and Slo was just as obviously Sloane Square. A little more mysterious though, as befits the man, was Alfred Hitchcock: FRO 1339. Where in London was the district which abbreviated to FRO? Well, there wasn't one. Fro was short for Frobisher - one of the London exchanges listed in the archive of old London directories which went online yesterday through the genealogy website ancestry.co.uk where the name was based not on a place but on an allusion.
Self-evidently ABB meant Westminster Abbey, FLE was Fleet Street, BEL was Belgravia, MAY was Mayfair and WHI was Whitehall. GER was the sector of Soho around Gerrard Street. But you couldn't base the letters on location every time because some had already been bagged. Highbury couldn't have HIG because Highgate had got that already, so they gave it DICkens. Ingenious people sought out such local connections to provide apt alternatives. Often they were writers or artists. Enfield had KEAts, South Harrow had BYRon, the area around Nine Elms had Lord MACaulay. For parts of Harlesden you had to dial ELGar; for parts of Chelsea, the sculptor FLAxman. FRObisher was the 16th century English explorer. KEL, in parts of Clapham, was Kelvin, the Scottish physicist and mathematician, while LIBerty, for Merton and South Wimbledon, commemorated the fabric-printing works of the famous Regent Street store.
Some associations were tenuous (what had KIPling, I sometimes wondered, to do with Mottingham? Did the ARNold exchange at North Wembley refer to Matthew or Thomas? Had Elgar once composed a now largely forgotten Harlesden Suite?); but even so they led people to look up great figures whose local connections they might otherwise not have known.
The mysteries kept recurring. BLUebell was part of what is now the London borough of Croydon because, presumably, bluebells flourished there. That seemed a bit of a cop-out, though BYW, an area of Purley close to a wood, seems even more so. But why was Isleworth ATLas? And why was a swath of the East End designated ADVance? Paul Coxwell - whose list of old London exchanges can be found here - says the people of this part of London rebelled against the original designation BEThnal Green, which they thought was too downmarket, and were given ADVance instead.
Out of town things were often simpler, and even more picturesque. There was nothing especially catchy about Churchill's PADdington 1003, but in the years much later when as a Guardian political reporter I sometimes had to phone the former Conservative prime minister Alec Douglas-Home, his number, as I remember, was Coldstream 2. I used to gaze on this number and wonder: whoever in the Scottish border town of Coldstream, near which Sir Alec lived in his fine house, The Hirsel, could have come in ahead of this famous figure as Coldstream 1? Too late now to ring Coldstream 1 and find out, but I wish I had.
In those days there were many areas where you had to ring the operator who would find the number for you. I rang a village exchange in Sussex one evening and asked for 349, my aunt's home number. "Are you wanting Mrs Kerslake?" the operator inquired. Yes, I was, I confirmed. "It's no good ringing her on a Wednesday evening," the operator told me, "she'll be at her choir practice." I thanked her warmly. Had I been an intending burglar I'd have thanked her even more warmly.
If you called in those days from a call box (remember them?) you put your money in first: if the call connected you pressed button A and the money was swallowed: if you didn't get through you pressed button B and your money came back. Some operators were exceptionally helpful in finding the line you wanted. (Others were grumpy and gave you no help at all.)
A friend who worked a switchboard in Yorkshire told me that after spending the best part of 10 minutes counselling a would-be caller, she found the appropriate number, only to find it engaged. "Press button B" she advised . But the caller declined to do so. "You've been so extremely helpful," she said, "that I'm going to press button A. I want you to have the money."
