Old telephone numbers (UK)

[Kevin137]

I'm currently going through the 1908 telephone directory for the Swansea Area of Wales. Obviously, it's street addresses I'm looking for -- none of those numbers is going to work 105 years later! -- but I'm curious as to the meaning of the letters a, x, and y as used in many of the numbers listed, e.g.

Central 183a
Central 586x
Central 295x3
Central 567y
Central 471y2

Does anyone know what they signify, and how one would have called, say, Central 295x3? (x perhaps stands for extension, but what about a and y?)

[jc26red]

Possibly a shared line which was quite common even in the 60's.

We had a 3 digit telephone number and my dad's brother, who lived across the road, had a shared line with us  . My parents still live at the same address and have the same number but the phone now has 3 digits preceeding the original three.

[barryd]

1908 would have been in the era of operator assisted telephone calls. People did not make calls but asked to be put through to a certain number. The operator only needs to know how to connect to Central 183a etc..

[Meezer]

Hubby (ex telephone engineer) says that when a line was shared there was a x subscriber and a y subscriber so that could explain those. The a might have indicated that that particular line wasn't a shared one?

[mrs.tenacious]

Ooh, I remember the shared line!  My parents shared a line with the next door neighbour-but-one.  Although the household telephone numbers were different, so the phone only rang in the house of the number that was dialled) if we picked up the phone in our house, we could sometimes eavesdrop on the neighbour's conversation (no that you ever did - manners meant you put the phone straight down!).

Hard to imagine these days, and when I mentioned this recently to some (much younger) work colleagues, they looked at me as if I were mad!

[Kevin137]

Thanks, everyone, for the speedy replies.

One of the great attractions, for me, of genealogy is that you learn so many other interesting things on the side!

I should have realized that in 1908 you still had to call the operator and state the number you wanted. Just about everybody with low telephone numbers (all of them businesses -- they were clearly the "early adopters") had a party line in the village I'm researching. I've read since that there was a system of distinct rings so that you did at least know whether an incoming call on your shared line was for you or not. Another thing was that, at the rural exchanges in 1908, there were operators on duty only from around 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. on most days (and only 8 to 10 a.m. on Sundays!).

[GrahamSimons]

Two trivial observations:

1. A friend of mine had a 2-digit number in Abingdon in the 1970s. Some operators would not believe that 2-digit numbers still existed and would refuse to try to connect the call. Only way out was to ring off, and try later in the hope of getting another operator.
2. In the 1980s I came across very complex party line system in Kenya - the number was 2Y1 if I remember - the operator would put different ring patterns on the line so that the different subscribers knew whether to answer or not.

[barryd]

I was in Rhodesia in the mid-seventies and they still had party-lines. A long ring for one farm and a short ring for the other farm, and steam locomotives and DC-3's were still cayying passengers. 

[mrs.tenacious]

The party line I mentioned in my house when growing up was from the late 60s to the early to mid-70s - not that long ago really.  And around the late 70s when working as a hotel receptionist in one of the large London hotels, I remember helping out occasionally on the main switchboard.  It took up a whole room, and was the old plug-in type of operation.  You flicked a switch to answer a call, and if the caller needed connecting to somewhere else in the hotel you pulled out an elasticated plug and inserted it into the relevant hole for the extension or room.  I can still see these huge boards filled with criss-crossed elastic cables plugged in!

Sounds antiquated now, of course