HELP AT HAND: 999 TURNS 80
Milestone for world’s first emergency phoneline
IT WAS the Crimestoppers of its day – the nation’s direct line to its law enforcement officers – and today it turns 80. It might have been older still, but for the fact that the police weren’t on the phone.
Britain’s 999 service, the first emergency hotline in the world, was unveiled in London just in time to take advantage of an only recently connected constabulary.
At the beginning of the century, officers had resisted having telephones in police stations because they wanted to be inconspicuous, and they thought members of the public would be embarrassed to call them.
But the success of the 999 service proved from them wrong, said Neil Paterson, manager of the Metropolitan Police Heritage Centre, in a history of the service.
Within a week it had been responsible for an arrest – that of a 24-year-old labourer who had tried to break into a house in London’s Primrose Hill.
The location of the crime was no surprise, since the service was available only in London. It would be a decade, separated by the Second World War, before 999 became available in the York, Bridlington and Middlesbrough exchanges.
The 1937 launch had been deemed worthy of a discourse, published in London’s Evening
News. “Only dial 999 if the matter is urgent,” it advised. “If, for instance, the man in the flat next to yours is murdering his wife or you have seen a heavily masked cat burglar peering round the stack pipe of the local bank.
“If the matter is less urgent, if you have merely lost little Towser or a lorry has come to rest in your front garden, just call up the local police.”
A government committee had instructed the General Post Office to set up the service. It proposed that there should be a standard number that was easy to remember, considering first 707, which corresponded to the letters SOS on the telephone dial, and 333, but settling on 999 as the most practical number, since the ‘nine’ hole on the rotary dial was easier to find in the dark.
Initially, each 999 call triggered flashing red lights and hooters to alert exchange operators to give priority to the emergency call, but the noise was so great that the operators pushed tennis balls into the horn to reduce the volume.
Hoax or unnecessary calls were a feature of the 999 service from the beginning, including a complaint about bagpipes being played outside a house and a dispute between a neighbour and the local coal man. BT, which succeeded the old GPO upon privatisation in the 1980s, says around 35,000 999 calls a week are made in Yorkshire, peaking in the early hours of New Year’s Day. Around 96 per cent of all calls are for the police and ambulance services. Tom Keeney, of BT’s Yorkshire board, said 999 operators were “at the sharp end of the most important communication services in the country”.
Only dial 999... if the man next door is murdering his wife. An example of an emergency given by London’s Evening News in 1937.