I COULD have phoned

Edgware 2110

Ancestry now has old telephone directories online

poddys...

Hmmm - I bet they were fun to transcribe....

A. Gwilliam...

Straightforward OCR, surely?

Jeff...

Unfortunately!

Charles Ellson...

Indeed, as found when I tracked my late father through the
directories. Another quirk which might catch people out is the
occasional practice of showing a name with the first name initialised
rather than the second name, e.g. "F. Secondname Bloggs" as I found
with a couple of relatives' names for which I have no evidence of them
using that style themselves. Where that practice gets tangled with
dodgy OCR then some names might be a bit difficult to find.

Operator - give me Whitehall 1212

(actually if that gets routed to the new building it might reach my
ex-wife who works there...)