999
what’s your emergency? A
system for immediately notifying the emergency services of an incident was implemented in the UK in 1937 with the introduction of the ‘999’ telephone number by the Metropolitan Police. The number was introduced following a house fire in 1935 in which five people died. During the incident, the telephone switchboard was flooded with calls and the operators had no means to prioritise emergency calls over routine ones. One caller was held in a queue for several minutes and was so concerned about the delay that he later wrote a letter to the editor of The Times newspaper. The letter caught the eye of someone in government, and a review was initiated. ‘999’ was originally limited to a small area of London; a 12-mile radius around Oxford Circus. Over time, it was adopted in other cities and towns across the country and became a fully national service in the 1960s. Long before the existence of mobile telephones and automated exchanges, telephone calls in the UK were fielded by the General Post Office (GPO), which was rebranded as British Telecom (BT) in 1981. The caller picked up the telephone handset, dialled ‘0’, and requested the relevant number or destination from the operator. By dialling ‘999’ on a rotary telephone, a red flashing beacon was activated at the telephone exchange which prompted the operator to prioritise the call. From the outset, the operator has always first asked the caller which service they require, which is still in practice in the present day. In the southwest of England, ‘999’ was adopted in Plymouth, Truro, and Kingsbridge on January 1, 1946. At the time, the chief constable of Plymouth hailed the scheme as a step forward for the city, and said: ‘As far as the police are concerned, we can guarantee that within five minutes of the receipt of the call a wireless patrol car
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can reach any part of the city’. To maximise success, the scheme had to work in hand with radio-equipped police cars and motorcycles, and in some areas such as Torbay (where even in the present day the landscape provides challenges for the police ‘Airwave’ radio system), technological advances had to be made in order to roll out ‘999’ uniformly and efficiently and it took many years before the whole of Devon, Cornwall, and the Isles of Scilly obtained coverage. In Plymouth, emergency police calls were passed to the control room at Greenbank Police Station, which was the headquarters of the Plymouth City Police force. In the Devon Constabulary, calls were managed from the information room at Middlemoor on the outskirts of Exeter, whilst a separate system existed in Exeter City Centre, which had its own independent police force and managed calls from Waterbeer Street Police Station, and from Heavitree Police Station from 1960. In 1965, a government inquiry into the proposed amalgamation of Exeter City Police with the Devon Constabulary highlighted problems with the ‘999’ system in an area where two police forces operated very closely. The inquiry found that on many occasions, the GPO operators struggled to identify whether the ‘999’ call came from within the boundary of the city of Exeter (policed by Exeter City Police) or the surrounding districts (policed by the Devon Constabulary). In these instances, the operator sometimes connected the call to the wrong force, necessitating a transfer of responsibility from one force to another, and therefore caused delays in the police response. The inquiry also found that if multiple calls were made about the same incident, it was potluck whether the operators had enough local knowledge to pass the calls
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