NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: David Pike
Date: 2020 Nov 8, 09:27 -0800
Geoffery Kolbe you wrote: As I recall, people got phone bills in the 1960s. How did that happen?
That’s what I was going to say. I think you did trunk calls through the operator and were given three-minute packages. Whether the operator recorded the number called or just clobbered you for three minutes of time was a matter of conjecture. There wasn’t universal telephone ownership in the 60s, and people didn’t talk for long. Subscriber Trunk Dialling (STD) began in the 60s, but it took a couple of decades to instal over the whole of UK. Our Waddington Village number didn’t change from Waddington 456 to Lincoln 123456 until the early 1980s. ‘Oxford’ and probably ‘Denton’ would have been sooner of course, but ‘Midsummer’ probably never got it. Shortly after that they seemed able to give you a basic printout of numbers called if you really asked for them. Now you can go to your PC and it will tell you absolutely everything. Those with insomnia might wish to study https://www.britishtelephones.com/histuk.htm . Hitting Ctrl F and typing “itemised” or "STD" might speed things up a bit. DaveP