Old 3 digit UK Telephone numbers.

[chris_49]

I've just remembered that in "The Man Who Never Was" the Black Lion, Mold had a two digit phone number in 1939 - something like Tel: 26 (sorry I lent the book out, silly me). How would that work?

I remember that when 3-digit numbers were phased out our neighbours were annoyed that theirs suddenly went to 6 digits while ours stayed at 4. We eventually joined them there, of course.

Older Lancaster numbers like ours have only 5 digits still which confuses people. On a form I sometimes have to add a 6th "dummy" digit before being allowed to proceed. Seems to work.

[behindthefrogs]

When we moved into our house nearly fifty years ago we had a four digit telephone number.  Those four digits are still the final digits of what is now an eleven digit number.  The extra digits were added gradually over the years

[LizzieL]

In the 60s / early 70s my parents had a three digit number. It changed in 1972 (I think) and became a six digit number. The last three digits of the six digit number were the same as the original three.

[ShaunJ]

The change was phased in over a period of years with the roll-out of  automatic exchanges.

This item is from the West London Observer, 3 October 1924:

[cristeen]

When we moved house in 1970 our new number was Loftus 776 which then had a 40 prefix added and by 1981 had become 640776 with a 4 digit area code. I am unsure of the exact dates of the changes but it was a relatively rural area

[Kiltpin]

Surely it was all down to population numbers.

In 1966 my aunt and uncle had Bristol number - Clifton 33515.

Regards

Chas

[Dyingout]

back in the 50's our number was 21 by the end of the decade it had a 3 added by 63 it was 4321

[zetlander]

As recently as 1960 my parents had a 3 digit telephone number.
They also had a party line which meant that if the other party was on the phone you couldn't use your phone although you could listen in....

My cousin worked at a manual (is that the right word) exchange where she connected phone users.
A colleague of my cousin was sacked for passing on to her parent some information she had picked up! after connecting two people she knew

[Mart 'n' Al]

Re Peter, lots of London businesses get the format wrong, even above premises, and even argue when told. Sometimes it even confuses people if you give a number correctly,  020-8xxx-xxxx, then they read it back to you wrongly.

Martin