Telephone services came to Church Lawford and King’s Newnham in the late 1920s. There is a record for a phone connection to Manor Farm in Church Lawford and Newnham Hall in King’s Newnham from as early as 1927.
The first telephones were manually operated as they pre-dated the electricity supply reaching the village, and their connection was to the local exchange in Wolston. The first users were local farmers and tradespeople – see here for more details.
In most villages the local Post Office provided a Telegraph / Telegram service in addition to the postal services, which brought a certain level of communication to all villagers, albeit via the written word – and at some cost in the case of Telegram services. However, as late as 1911 the local Telegraph office for Church Lawford was in Wolston, and the nearest office for Kings Newnham was in Brinklow.
Voice telephony had begun some years earlier in various cities, and was reaching out into rural areas after the Great War. Some Post Offices offered a service that allowed voice calls to be made – for example such a service was offered at Wolston, but the suggestion is that may not have been available at the Church Lawford Post Office. Either way the growing trend was for a more “personal” voice-based service as provided by the Telephone Kiosk.
The first Telephone Kiosk in the village was installed in the early 1930s – on the village green in the position still used today. This was a cream-colour booth known as a K3 kiosk – and it can be seen in the picture below. The telegraph pole is the pole on the right – the other two poles are for the newly installed electricity in the village. More details can be found in a link here.
The Phonebox would have been fitted with a Button A and B mechanism along with a money box which had to be emptied regularly. The call charges were based on a minimum of 2d. More details are on the British Telephone History Website here – see the 1925 entry for details on the payments, and 1929 entry for more on the K3 kiosk.
At this stage Telegraph services were still very important for longer distance communication, but during the 1930s the ability to initiate a telegram via a telephone became available to those subscribers with their own telephone connection. The K3 kiosk was limited in this aspect, and there was a push to install the latest kiosk model, known as the K6 or Jubilee kiosk, as discussed in this article from the Rugby Advertiser of 4th June 1935.
The exact date the K6 kiosk was installed isn’t well defined, but that Kiosk still remains on the Village Green some 80 years later – more details on the K6 kiosk are here. There was some pressure for a newer box to be installed during the late 1980s, with a village campaign highlighted in the Rugby Advertiser of early 1989. Although this campaign seemed to fall on deaf ears, it appears other pressures meant it was allowed to remain. It was joined by the village postbox in 2000 when the Post Office in King’s Newnham Road closed.
The picture below, taken in September 2024 from a similar position as the one at the start of this article, shows the K6 Phone Box still remaining on the village green – albeit now a village amenity for media sharing sponsored by the Parish Council.
