CONTENTS OF
TELEPHONES UK

Please note:

This is a site which looks purely at historical telephones & telecoms through the last 100 years plus.

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	In 1931 the Birmingham Director Area opened, which initially included four exchanges: Birchfield, Harborne, Northern and Victoria. By 1938 a further 34 local exchanges were included.  Subscribers in the Director areas would dial the first three letters of the exchange name followed by the subscribers number, usually three or four digits. In 1966 all-figure number (AFN) dialling codes were introduced in Birmingham. There are presently 47 telephone exchanges in the Birmingham Director Area. Early days of the telephone in Birmingham
This map shows the 40 local exchanges in use in 1931		This map shows the 43 local exchanges in use by 1969

The dial on GPO telephones in those early days had letters as well as numbers on it:-

Dialling instructions for making emergency calls

Because of expansion and the reorganisation of exchanges into sectors many of the exchange numbers were changed, however some stayed the same. For example to dial someone on the Four Oaks exchange with the number 0200 you would have dialed FOU 0200, nowadays it would be 308 0200.

A leaflet (shown here) produced in the mid 60's explains the introduction of All-Figure Telephone Numbers for London (01-), Birmingham (021-), Edinburgh (031-), Glasgow (041-), Liverpool (051-) & Manchester (061-). These were known as the Director Areas. The changeover began in March 1966 and was completed in 1969. Further information on Director Area Codes can be found at: Letters for digits in UK telephone numbers

There are now over 275 exchange codes in the Birmingham 0121 STD area compared to the 44 listed above. 
§ - this denotes exchanges added after 1938 and before 1965. 
± - Prior to 1956, CENtral included COLmore and MIDland included CITy.

Toll Calls: If a subscriber wished to call someone outside the Director area, they would dial TOL. This then directed the call to an operator at the toll exchange. A small lamp on the switchboard would flash and the operator would switch the call through to the particular manual exchange in the toll area required.

Note: Since the introduction of Cable Telephone in the 1990's and other more recent services, not all exchange numbers observe these sectors codes.

  List of Call Charges for the Birmingham Group, MID.3 applicable from January 1958

There are few differences between the 1965 and the 1968 dialling codes, apart from the fact that the 1968 codes are shown as numbers, rather than letters (see top of the page). By 1987 many exchanges had lost their local codes in lieu of STD codes. These days all the codes are in STD (01XXX format), although they are still charged at the local call rate, if calling from Birmingham. My thanks to Roger Harris, Andy Emmerson and John Chenery for supplying much of the information on this page.

Further information about the 'Hello Girls' who worked at the GPO Telephone Exchange, in Birmingham, in the 1940s is available in a new book called 'Hold the Line Please' by former telephone operator Sally Southall.

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