1 The Beginning

The telephone system has always fascinated me. A couple of my earliest memories about phones date back to the early 1970's, when I was about 9 or 10. My mother came from quite a large family and we used to travel up from London to Somerset a couple of times a year to visit them. On one such visit during a hot summer out roaming the countryside with one of my Uncles, who was maybe five or six years older than me, we came across a derelict coal mine. We ventured in and found what I guess must have been a few Series 300 Bakelite phones and decided to liberated them. Back at his home we took them apart and I remember seeing the governor wheel in the dial mechanism along with a set of driver cogs, fascinated by the way it rotated when the dial was turned. My memory is a bit hazy here but I have a recollection that my Uncle somehow connected two of the phones together with a battery and we talked to each other over the phones. Hours of fun. After a few days with my Mothers family we would take the short drive over to Bath to visit my Dad's side of it, well to be exact my Grandmother and my Great Aunt. My Grandmother lived in a huge house, bought back in the times when property was dirt cheap. In fact it was so big my Grandfather (who I never met, he died before I was born) had installed an intercom system. I still have the circuit diagram and a picture of one of the phones he put in the kitchen. I'm pretty sure it didn't work by the time I was around, probably no one had changed the batteries for years, but it was still great fun to mess about with the heavy, Bakelite hand sets and push the buttons. It all came to an end a few days later when we returned to London but I knew even then some day I would have a proper working telephone system of my own. 

Time passed, the huge house was sold, my Uncle swapped the phones for something else he needed, the 70's became the 80's, I went to Technical College and then to University. Onto the 90's I graduated, got a job and a mortgage. By the time the noughties came around I was married and had started a family of my own. Around this time I came across a stall in Camden Market selling restored GPO phones. I bought one for old times sake and then discovered you could buy them in "ready to restore" condition for a fairly cheap price off of Ebay. So I started collecting.

We moved out from London around 2005 then again locally in 2015. The house we bought needed a complete electrical refurbish so I took the opportunity to put in a structured cabling solution. Shortly after that I Ebay'ed an old Orchid PABX and finally a Series 300 in each room and a Plan 7 in the dining room all connected to the PABX in the "comms" cupboard. A proper telephone system that could be used as it was designed to be used. Achievement unlocked, well, almost.

There were a couple of minor niggles - the PABX doesn't work with pulse dialing so to make a phone  usable I had to fit a Rototone to convert the pulse dialing to DTMF. If not a phone could only be used to receive, which was still ok since not every room on the house needed the ability to be able to dial out. Also the bells on the phones needed a bit of adjusting to work at 50Hz on 50v, so basically a bit quiet. And the GPO Plan 7 didn't really work as well as it could, but overall it got me where I needed to be. I did find out at a later date that there is an obsolete Panasonic PABX that would do a better job of it but that's another story.