November 5 is the 60th Anniversary of Vancouver’s last manual telephone exchange. Angus McIntyre writes about its history and the changeover.
By Angus McIntyre
If you grew up in the City of Vancouver in the 1950s you may well remember your telephone number looked like this: KErrisdale 3457-M. Or ALma 0609-L. These numbers indicated a manual non-dial telephone with a shared party line. The letter at the end of the number indicated the party and 80 percent of Vancouver telephones were party lines. What made Vancouver unique at this time was that it was the largest city in Canada, and likely the USA, that still had operators connecting local calls.
Vancouver’s earliest record of telephone service shows up in the 1888 City Directory as: VANCOUVER CENTRAL TELEPHONE COY., 11 Cordova st., C.S. Tilley, manager.
The company name changed with a move to the Empire building at Seymour and Hastings, and by 1907 the B.C. Telephone Company shows up at 555 Seymour Street in a new building.
555 Seymour Street in 1912. CVA 99-5033
While most telephone companies in large North America cities converted to dial exchanges in the 1920s and 1930s, Vancouver did not.
B.C. Telephone started the conversion to dial in 1939 and opened the first automatic exchange in a new building on Seymour at Robson in 1941, the same year the Pacific National Exhibition introduced Vancouverites to dial telephones and how to use them.
Telephone operators at work in 1907. CVA Bu P498
But World War II delayed further expansion, and changeovers to dial did not start in a major way until the 1950s. Land had to be purchased within a few blocks of the old manual exchange. New dial exchanges were built with large windows to show off the new equipment.
I met many former operators over the years, and they all had wonderful stories. One thing they did to break the routine was to say “Rubber Knees” instead of “Number Please”. They were also known as Hello Girls.
The Calculagraph printed start and finish times for calls on cards by pulling on the levers. Operators used the same vintage headset equipment until 1960.
Since demand for telephone service increased after World War II, manual exchanges had to add capacity by expanding switchboards and hiring more operators. A 1950s ad bragged that operator wait time was down to four seconds.
New Westminster, North and West Vancouver and most Lower Mainland communities also converted to dial in the 1950s.
Dunbar/Kerrisdale went dial in 1959, and Point Grey/UBC in 1960.
The last manual switchboard in British Columbia was in Ahousat on Vancouver Island, and went dial in 1982.
The City of Vancouver Archives has a Jack Lindsay collection of 135 B.C. Telephone photos from 1948.
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17 comments on “The Missing Telephone Operators of BC”
Our number was ALma2077. It wasn’t a party line because my Dad was a doctor. We three kids couldn’t wait for the “new” system, and on the appointed morning I got up early to make the first call from out house. Of course, I had no idea who to call, so I dialled the Time Of Day service. Once I was convinced it worked, I called the girl I was sweet on, and learned that she has also called Time Of Day at the same moment. Romance was in the air…
I am so glad that I was a little boy when the phone system changed. The good old days are filled with nothing more than a world of rose colored glasses. Today, its all about privacy, if you can find it among nearly eight billion people. Think my mom had the same seven digit number for over fifty years.
I grew up in North Vancouver but learned my dads office number in town and my grandparents numbers long before they switched to these multi-digit ones. Our home number was North 543-R still long after the ones in the city had changed. We went eventually to a York number and eventially to a Yukon 8 number…those old numbers have all been useful as virtually uncrackable PASSWORDS until we needed more sopohisticated ones recently.
My mother was one of those switchboard operators in the early 50s.
I believe this article has a few errors. The newspaper clipping above is about direct dialling for long distance, not local calls. Dial phone conversion was well on its way in the late 1940s, my Dad installed a lot of this equipment in Vancouver, the Okanagan in the 40s and continued to do so at the Victoria Legislature in 1950-51. He later was foreman for installing 4w equipment that was part of the long distance direct dial system.
B.C. Tel was on its way in the late 1940s to convert to dial telephones, but it took installation of automatic exchanges throughout the 1950s to complete the process. The newspaper ad from 1960 referred to the last manual exchange for local calls: “The B.C. Telephone Company is nearing completion of one of its biggest projects. When the conversion of the Hastings exchange from manual to dial service is finished all Greater Vancouver telephones will be 100% automatic.” The HAsting manual exchange served 18,000 telephones, and the changeover happened in two stages. The ad also mentions “Direct Distance Dialing will come into effect in 1961”, and phone number changes related to that.
My mother was an operator working first in New Westminster, later Langara, then Amherst before finally being ‘automated’ out of a job at Hastings.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I grew up in Fraserview in the 50’s and still remember the day we had our own “ private line” no more party line. Our new number was Elgin 2326. I couldn’t wait to talk to my boyfriend
Any chance anyone has a copy of the map that used to be in the front of every Vancouver White Pages showing the locations of the “prefixes/exchanges” for each Great Vancouver ‘city / village’? (the first 3-digits of the 7-digit telephone numbers placed on a map with boundaries just like the postal code map of Greater Vancouver – like 298 / 263 / 925 etc of 298-1234 / 263-1234 / 952-1234)
Great article by the way!
My family had West7384. On a party line. Can still remember that heavy hand set that limited the length of my phone conversations. Weak arms I guess.
My grandparents lived in the west end and they received their dial phone along time before us as we lived in Kerrisdale. We could only practice our dialing on the grandparents phone if we did not take the receiver off the hook.Their number was PAcific 9094. I never knew that one day I would work for B.C. Tel for 21 years.
We lived in Vancouver Heights , North Burnaby , Hastings in the ‘50/60s.phone no. GLenburn 0913 Y
This was fun to read. I was an operator at the Alma exchange for three years(1954 -1957) during the summer and Christmas holidays while I attended UBC. I was only 16 years old and they hired me by mistake ! I did well and finally was trained for ‘Intercepting’. You actually got to talk to clients when they were called from an old party line phone to a new dial phone or when they were having problems with their call. It was great fun after only being allowed to say ‘Number please’ and ‘Thankyou’ you actually got to say, “What number did you call please?” I tried to get promoted to Emergency but it was the Chief Operator’s belief that no one 17years old was reliable enough to handle that job.
A Happy Incident One of the girls lost the diamond from her engagement ring as she was operating. It fell out of the ring and down into the machinery. Several years later when the building was being torn down a lineman found the diamond and it was returned to the young girl…an honest lineman!
Love this story!
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Yukon 8 = 988 North van
Waverley 9 = 929 Deep Cove
We’re our exchanges growing up in NVAN
Was there a B.C. Telephone exchange in Burns Lake B.C.?
I believe my sister worked in the exchange ?