DIRECTORATE OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS
HISTORY; POLICE ON MF
page 4 of 6

Document written by Brian Pears (no other details available)


Marley Hill began service in 1942 with a staff of around seventeen under Regional Wireless Engineer, Mr A.T. Martin. (From 1945 to 1972 the Regional Wireless Engineer at Marley Hill was a gentleman who has featured in virtually every phase of the story so far, Mr Oswald B. Kellett. Both Mr Kellett and Mr H.B. Old were later awarded the MBE for their services to communications).

Durham County Constabulary was the largest of the twelve police forces in Marley Hill's service area and it immediately adopted the MF Regional Scheme as a direct replacement for the one-way telegraphy service provided by Newcastle City Police.The County's six patrol cars were sent to the GEC factory in Bradford, Yorkshire to be fitted with suitable mobile receivers, and fixed receivers were installed at the forces Durham City headquarters and in each of the divisional police stations. Arrangements were also made with the GPO to extend Durham's already extensive private-wire telephone network to the wireless station by means of an additional link from the switchboard at Consett Divisional Station to Marley Hill.

The system worked well - messages for the cars were passed verbally to Marley Hill and within seconds were repeated over the air by the civilian operators - "RL to Andrew 3, proceed to... ".

The fact that the scheme employed telephony rather than telegraphy meant it could be used by any officer and not just those trained in morse, but there were problems caused by interference from North Sea fishing fleets which used the same wave band. This had also affected the telegraphy service but was more noticeable with the new telephony system. The biggest drawback, of course, was that the system was strictly one-way; the officers manning the mobile units had no means of replying other than by using the public telephone system.

Two-way telegraphy systems had been working successfully in some city areas for many years and there would be obvious advantages if this could be provided with the telephony system too. Experiments with two-way telephony communications on MF were carried out at the Cheveley Regional Wireless Station in 1942 but the results were far from satisfactory and it became clear that MF was completely unsuitable for the purpose.

Callsigns

The callsigns allocated to the later police VHF schemes were almost always derived from that of the MF Wireless Station which had previously served the area - they just omitted the "R" from the callsign and added a letter to the end. So, for schemes in the area served by Marley Hill callsign M2RL) they used the range M2LA- M2LZ. Thus there was, for example, M2LB for 'Northumberland Constabulary, M2LG for Gateshead, M2LL for South Shields, M2LK for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, M2LN for Sunderland and M2LQ for Tynemouth. Similarly there were the M2Vs, M2Ks, M2Hs, M2X's, M2Y's, M2Q's and M2N's derived from the callsigns of Cheveley, Cranbrook, Hannington, Kippax, Romsley, Shapwick and Stanton respectively. Billinge (M2RB) was slightly different, it gave birth to both M2B's and M2C's because there were far too many police forces in its area for the M2BA-M2BZ series. So we had M2BL for Barrow-in-Furress Borough Police, M2BU for. Carlisle, M2CL for Oldham and M2CK for Manchester, and then there was perhaps the best known police callsign in the world, that of Lancashire Constabulary, M2BD, remember Z-Cars, "BD to Z-Victor 1 ". Later fire-service schemes generally followed the same pattern and indeed it is still the general rule to this day. Of course there are many exceptions including the "Met", which used M2MP among others, and some fire services which opted for callsigns in the range M2FA-M2FZ. Schemes in the Isle of Mann, Wales and Scotland used the M2Ms, M2Ws and M2Z's respectively.

Source: Kevin Carrig

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