Before the first Loxwood numbers
At the beginning of the twentieth century the Post Office was already one of the village’s points of contact with the outside world. A report in the Sussex Agricultural Express of 27 July 1901 names Foster Dennis as Loxwood’s sub-postmaster after a burglary at the premises. Dennis had closed the shop the previous evening, heard a noise before dawn and later found money missing from the Post Office and shop takings. The episode belongs to the period before the earliest Loxwood telephone evidence yet identified, when letters, money orders and telegrams passed through the village counter.
Telephone networks were already expanding in larger towns. On 6 October 1903 the Daily Mail reported an experimental test of Brighton Corporation’s municipal telephone system. Brighton’s mayor, Alderman John Charles Buckwell, opened the exchanges by ringing several subscribers. Buckwell was a Brighton solicitor who later wrote ‘Stories of Loxwood’, published by the Sussex Archaeological Society in 1914. His municipal telephone call belonged to Brighton; Loxwood’s own numbered service appears in the surviving records two decades later.
Kelly’s Directory for 1915 lists George Weller as sub-postmaster at Loxwood’s ‘Post, M.O. & T. Office’ – the Post, Money Order and Telegraph Office. Telegrams could therefore be handed in locally before the earliest Loxwood telephone numbers now found in the archive. The directory gives the postal arrangements and the village’s private residents and trades, but no Loxwood telephone numbers in that entry.
A Loxwood number by January 1924
By January 1924 Loxwood had its own telephone service. On 9 January the Surrey Advertiser carried an advertisement from Miss Cammell of Whitelea, Baynards, offering a prize-winning Sealyham dog at stud and puppies for sale. Alongside the postal address appeared a distinctly modern addition: “Telephone Loxwood 12.” The number shows that a local exchange was already operating and that subscribers were being identified by the village name followed by an individual number.
‘Loxwood’ was the exchange name and ’12’ identified the subscriber’s line on that exchange. In a small rural system the local numbers could be very short. A Loxwood History list compiled from early directories and notices records the Post Office as Loxwood 1, Ifold House as Loxwood 2, Aylward, Smith & Co as Loxwood 3 and Hilltop Stores as Loxwood 4. A 1924 Kelly’s Directory research note also records W. Spooner with telephone number 16.
The exchange in the Post Office
The first Loxwood exchange was housed in the Post Office and village shop beside the pond. It was a manual exchange: the operator received the request for a number and connected the two lines at a switchboard. The exchange therefore depended on the Post Office as both a public counter and the working centre of the local telephone network.
A postcard dated 1926 records how quickly the new service altered the appearance of this familiar corner. A telephone pole rises beside the shop with pairs of overhead wires carried on crossarms. Immediately outside the Post Office stands a public telephone kiosk, giving access to the network without a private subscription. Earlier photographs of the shop and pond show the building before this telephone equipment appeared; by 1926 the pole, wires and kiosk had become part of the roadside scene.
The kiosk was the early K1 design. The General Post Office introduced the K1 in 1921 as its first standardised outdoor telephone kiosk, built of reinforced concrete. Loxwood’s 1926 postcard records one of this first national generation of standard public telephone boxes only a few years after the design was introduced.
More subscribers on the wire
On 17 March 1928 the West Sussex County Times printed a list of new telephone subscribers. Corral Farmer of Linden House received Loxwood 23 and A. E. Whowell of Spye House received Loxwood 26. The same notice listed new connections at Horsham, Southwater, Wisborough Green and Rudgwick.
By November 1929 the telephone number had become part of an ordinary classified advertisement. In the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, Mrs Stevens of the Onslow Arms advertised Airedale puppies and gave ‘Phone, Loxwood 28’. Five years after the Whitelea advertisement, another pedigree-dog notice preserves a different stage in the same local network: the village inn could now be called directly.
A subscriber notice dated 25 April 1931 records Betty Hempstead of Burnleigh, the guest house beside the village pond, among subscribers ‘recently connected to the exchange’. Burnleigh’s number was Loxwood 55. By 1938 Kelly’s Directory advertised ‘Burnleigh Guest House (Mrs Hempstead)’ as a private hotel with the longer number Loxwood 255.
1933: the exchange moves to Guildford Road
In 1933 the manual exchange in the Post Office closed and a Rural Automatic Exchange No. 6, usually shortened to RAX6, opened in a new building on Guildford Road. The operator’s local switchboard was replaced by electromechanical switching that responded to the pulses sent from a subscriber’s dial.
The Post Office continued to serve the village from the shop beside the pond and the public telephone box remained there, but the switchboard was no longer needed. Automatic equipment now worked from its own building on Guildford Road.
1939: a new exchange and a low purring dial tone
On 24 February 1939 the West Sussex County Times and Standard reported that Loxwood Automatic Telephone Exchange was to be converted to ‘the most modern type of automatic equipment’ at the beginning of March. The village already had the RAX6 automatic exchange installed in 1933; the new work replaced it with a later system.
The newspaper explained what subscribers would hear after the change. On lifting the receiver they were to wait for a dialling tone, described as a ‘continuous low purring sound’, which showed that the automatic apparatus was ready to receive the call. Standard ringing and engaged tones would also be introduced, matching those already used in other automatic areas.
Every Loxwood subscriber was to be told the exact date and time of the changeover. New instruction cards would explain how to make calls, accompanied by a booklet describing the new system. The newspaper reassured readers that the change would leave their existing telephone numbers unaltered and said the new installation was then in its final stage of completion.
Exchange history identifies the replacement equipment as a UAX13 – a Unit Automatic Exchange type designed for small communities. The 1933 RAX6 building was replaced by the low brick exchange erected on the same Guildford Road site in 1939. That is the building now known in Loxwood as the Old Telephone Exchange.
The telephone becomes ordinary village equipment
Burnleigh’s number had lengthened from Loxwood 55 in 1931 to Loxwood 255 by 1938. In June 1948 Garden Cultivations at Pound Cottage advertised rotary cultivating and grass cutting in the West Sussex County Times and asked customers to telephone Loxwood 328. Three-digit local numbers were by then appearing routinely in village advertising.
The public telephone remained beside the old Post Office and a photograph from about 1950 shows a later kiosk and a telegraph pole carrying several crossarms of telephone wires above the road.
The end of the old automatic exchange
The UAX13 equipment installed in 1939 remained in service for more than three decades. Exchange records date its closure to the spring of 1972, when local lines were transferred to numbers in the Loxwood 752*** series. The switchgear that had supplied the village with its 1939 automatic service was retired, but the low brick exchange that housed it still stands on Guildford Road.
