Toddington, Gloucestershire

 

Help at hand

This AA box has appeared by the roadside a few miles from where I live. They’re a dying breed, these AA boxes, and seeing one that was new to me set me thinking about their history.

In the post-war period there were over 1,000 AA telephone boxes scattered all over the country. They were originally built to provide shelter for sentries on the staff of the Automobile Association, who could offer help and directions to passing members; they also contained telephones, from which the sentry could call for further assistance. The first boxes were installed in 1911, and by 1920, AA members were themselves issued with a key to open the boxes, from which they could call for assistance if they had broken down. Maps, a light, a fire extinguisher, and other equipment were kept in the box for members’ use.

In spite of their shortcomings for those who broke down far from a box, they proved popular. When a box was manned by a sentry, he would salute the driver of a car bearing the AA’s distinctive badge, and a camaraderie built up between sentries and members. But with the development of communications technology, the increase in vehicle reliability and other factors, the boxes fell out of use, were replaced or supplemented by more modern roadside telephones, and this whole infrastructure of members’ telephones was finally rendered superfluous by the rise and rise of the mobile phone.

There are now only 30 or so boxes, without their original telephones, remaining,* some of which are in open-air museums such as Beamish and Avoncroft. The example in my picture has been restored by the volunteers of the Gloucester and Warwickshire Steam Railway, a heritage line whose whistles I can occasionally hear from the town where I live. It was originally sited at Andoversford near Cheltenham and apparently was in seriously damaged conditioned before the heritage railway acquired it and restored it. Now it’s a welcome sight as one leaves behind the Toddington roundabout in the direction of the climb up the Cotswold escarpment at Stanway Hill, on the way to Stow-on-the-Wold. As once it would have been welcome to motorists who were lost, or in need of mechanical help, as they went their way along the local steep, curvaceous and often chilly roads.

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* A website here lists 32 survivors, of which 12 are in museums and one is at the AA headquarters at Basingstoke.

Eardisland, Herefordshire

Brotherhood of the road

AA telephone boxes were scrapped in 2002, but a few still stand as a reminder of the hundreds of black and yellow boxes that once dotted the British landscape. They were originally known as sentry boxes, and when the first ones were erected in the years before World War I they were intended as shelters for AA patrolmen who were there to help with directions, repairs, and advice to the growing number of motorists who joined the Automobile Association. In the 1920s, AA members were issued with keys, so that they could open any sentry box and make use of the contents – a lamp, maps, and so on. Eventually, the boxes became telephone kiosks, equipped with one-button telephones with which they could summon help when broken down. All the boxes were numbered, so if callers simply gave the box number from which they were calling, the operator would know their exact location and send a patrol to help.

From 1956 onwards the four-gabled black and yellow box was the standard design. Such boxes stood not just for a welcome helping hand, but for a tradition of fellowship and support summed up for many motorists by the AA’s distinctive winged badge – I am old enough to remember the anger among older members when this badge was replaced by a more modern, and much blander, one in the 1960s.

The AA box that caught my eye stands by the Cross Inn in the village of Eardisland just off the A44 in northern Herefordshire. It started its life at Legions Cross, just outside Eardlisland on the A44, and my copy of the 1962 edition of the AA Illustrated Road Book of England and Wales confirms the presence of an AA box here. In the age of the satnav and cellphone it seems to come from another era – a time when the AA, with its uniformed patrolmen, winged badge, yellow vehicles, and shiny telephone kiosks constituted a true motoring fraternity.