Number Please?

This is the original Biggar Telephone Exchange now preserved in Biggar Museum

In the day’s when the local exchange really was the community hub calls were manually connected by a personable operator and making a call was a serious business, not always successful and once the connection was made often a very crackly line would endure.

A schoolboy prank of the time was to call the operator from a call box (anonymous). “Is that the operator on the line?” When she replied ‘yes’, we would say “Well you better get off, there’s a train coming!”