Olden Life: What was the London police box?
In the Ealing Comedy The Lavender Hill Mob, PC David Davies flags down what he believes to be a police car for a lift as ‘my box is flashing for me’ – a once common phrase that had all but vanished by the end of the 1960s.
When the film went on general release in 1951, there were nearly 700 police boxes in London, all serving as communication posts, a beat constable’s base and, on occasion, an ad hoc holding cell for a miscreant.
The first London police box appeared in 1897. By the 1920s, the forces in Newcastle and Manchester had their own networks; such initiatives so impressed the Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police that his surveyor, Gilbert Mackenzie Trench, was instructed to create a new style of booth for the capital.
Trench’s 1929 design featured a pyramid-shaped roof. Inside, there was a desk and a stool for use by a constable, and a first-aid kit. The telephone was accessible to the public, while the station could summon a constable via a roofmounted flashing light and a gong. Successful trials were carried out in the Richmond area and, ten years later, the boxes extended across London. The first
examples were built from wood, subsequently replaced by concrete. Each ‘Trench Box’ cost £43 to construct.
The 999 code would not come into operation until 1937; use of a (comparatively rare) home telephone or a standard GPO kiosk to sound an alarm meant dialling ‘O’ for the operator. However, the exchange was unable to distinguish a priority from a routine call, while using a police box meant being put straight through to the authorities.
During the Second World War, the police boxes served as Air Raid Wardens’ Posts, but by the late 1950s they were starting to appear faintly anachronistic. By the time Doctor Who was first aired, on 23rd November 1963, they were still familiar sights – thus their new incarnation as the TARDIS. Bob Dixon recalls in his book, Bobby on the Beat: Memoirs of a London Policeman in the 1960s, that ‘patrolling officers were supposed to phone in twice [from a box] during their eight-hour shift’.
In 1965, the Home Office authorised the initial purchase of 1,000 ‘pocket wireless sets’. Four years later, the Met began dismantling their boxes, although the final operational example, on the Barnet bypass, lasted until 1981.
Today, the police box is associated by younger television viewers primarily with the TARDIS. Many Who devotees can distinguish the minor differences between the first, second and third generations of Trench’s creation with remarkable accuracy.
For those of us with a taste for the great British second feature, they belong in a world of wide boys, bomb sites and the headlamps of a Wolseley patrol car peering through the fog. All that’s needed to complete the vista is the voice of Edgar Lustgarten intoning, ‘And it was here that the criminal made his fatal error’ – as a uniformed bit player dashes towards the box to utter his one line of dialogue.