Name/Title
Brighton Borough Police Wireless Department sign c1933Entry/Object ID
49Description
Dark blue painted wooden sign approx. 46cm x 30.5cm with off-white coloured sign written lettering marked "Police Wireless Department. Private".Use
For attaching to the outside of the Brighton Police Wireless Room.Context
This sign is believed to be from the original Wireless Room of Brighton Borough Police established in 1933 at the top of the Town Hall. As such it probably would have been attached to the door or outside wall.
In 1933 Brighton Borough Police became the first in the world to issue its beat officers with pocket radio receivers, to relay urgent messages to them. This system continued until the outbreak of the Second World War, after which the radio frequencies were changed. Personal radios were not re-introduced in Brighton until 1967, by which time they could relay messages as well as receive them.
The 1933 system was operated from the Town Hall which a transmitter at the top of the building. The Wireless Room from where the equipment was operated was also on the top floor of the Town Hall, close to the caretaker's accommodation. Access to this room was heavily restricted to prevent tampering with the equipment, with only the operators, senior officers and messengers from other Brighton police departments allowed to enter. There was a direct telephone line to the wireless room from the police switchboard on the ground floor of the building.
Details of the room and the duties of the operators are contained in the "Brighton Police Box System" booklet from 1939 (pages 63-64) and this states that the wireless room was capable of receiving messages from other police forces. It also had facilities for the repair and testing of the radios, the means to charge the accumulators that powered them as well as storage facilities and the necessary books and forms for their maintenance and operation.
In 1946 a "999" emergency telephone system was established in Brighton and to handle these calls an information room was created in the Town Hall which had radio equipment capable of one way transmissions to radio cars. It seems reasonable that the radio equipment and possibly the information room receiving the calls were in the same room as the pre war wireless equipment. However in 1949 a new police station was established in what had been a training school in Wellington Road, and the Police information room moved there. This new information room was capable of both transmitting and receiving messages from the police radio cars then in use (History of The Brighton Police Baines 1967).
In 1965, a new purpose built police station was opened in John Street and the information room moved there, the police stations at both the Town Hall and Wellington Road, having closed.