This telephone directory would have been around 1928 when the telephone exchange was in East St Helen Street.
- A. G Leach
- Barclays Bank Limited
- Alderman A.E Preston
- Morland & Son
- Abingdon Borough Surveyor
- …
Somebody phoning from outside Abingdon would have their number connected by using the place and number such as ‘Abingdon 2’. This allowed calls to be placed initially through the local switchboard operator to the number and later by local or national dialling codes.
Some signs still show the original Abingdon national dialling code of 0235, which became 01235 on 16th April 1995 – known as PhONEday.
P.S. Thank you to Glenn for a picture of his bike bell from Braggs with the number Abingdon 34.
When my parents arrived in 1953 their number was 5 until the exchange was automated in the early 70s. If I tried to ring home (trunk call) via an operator I was often told “No such number” since Abingdon was one of the last manual exchanges in existence
Interesting! I knew my mother (Anna Gwendolen Leach) had been a telephone operator, but not that she was ‘No 1’ in the Abingdon Directory.
My interest was piqued by the entry “Radcliffe, Sir Percy de B.”. According to Wikipedia, General Sir Percy Pollexfen de Blaquiere Radcliffe KCB KCMG DSO, was an officer who served in the Second Boer War and the First World War. No mention of any connection to Abingdon, but I suppose it’s the same chap. His long military career came to an abrupt end: “His final appointment was as General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of Southern Command from 1933 until his death, when he fell from a horse and had a heart attack, on his sixtieth birthday, in 1934”
Interesting article, as O Tame is listed and I have seen his advert in a magazine now, he was a Butcher. When I started work for post office telephones in 1964 I dealt with a lot of exchanges using three digit numbers but they were automatic and you could dial the number yourself, without operator intervention. I am looking to see if he was a relative of mine.