Our Santa phoneline correspondent Angus Young reports on yet another (slightly odd) Hull first.
While children up and down the land continued to scribble traditional letters to Santa in post-war Britain, their counterparts in Hull were ahead of the game. Not for them a pencil and paper and a carrot for Rudolph. Instead, they got on the phone and dialled a special Hull number – 211211.
Launched in 1952 by the council-owned Hull Telephones, Call Father Christmas was the first telephone service of its kind in the country. It was the brainchild of Councillor J.M. Stamper, a member of the council’s Telephones Committee. On a visit to Europe, he came across a recorded children’s story service you could listen to on the phone and thought it would be good to do the same in Hull.
Thanks to the fact that Hull’s telephone service was independent of the national one run by the Post Office (and later British Telecom), innovation was much easier to implement at a local level. Putting the idea into practice, staff at the Telephones department wrote and recorded a series of Christmas stories with an engineer doubling as Santa Claus to deliver a special message. The dial-up festive menu also included a selection of Christmas carols and the festive sound of sleigh bells.
The first Christmas story as told by Santa himself in a Hull accent attracted 20,000 callers when the number was made available on the three days running up to Christmas. The instant popularity of the service attracted national and international media attention with the story making headlines in America, France and even Japan. Closer to home, it also featured in the official Brownies Annual.
In the following year, 32,000 calls were logged. Buoyed by its success, the Telephones department expanded the service. Soon children could listen to bedtime stories over the phone while their parents could ring up for recipes, details about local attractions, to hear the latest pop hits and check their watches with Hull’s version of the speaking clock
The recipes would evolve over the years, from the 1950s favourites of meat loaf and corned beef to more modern 1990s dishes such as Italian chicken bake. By 1985 the Hull dial-up service was probably at its peak with no fewer than 14 different recorded services for people to call including one featuring the latest job vacancies in the city.
The Call Father Christmas service ran until the 1990s when, gradually, the record telephone services were phased out. By then, mobile phones and something called the internet were about to change the way we communicated with each other – and Santa – forever.