Name/Title
Sussex Police Force Telephone and Call Book 1944 - 1945Entry/Object ID
2512Description
Buff coloured card covered A4 size (33cm x 20.5cm) bound booklet consisting of 200 pre numbered pages 79001 to 79200, each printed at the top "Sussex Police Force", with pre-printed spaces and columns with titles.The majority of the pages have handwritten entries detailing date, time nature of call (ie telephone or visit) and the details of it. All of these entries are for Northiam Police Station which is recorded in the book as being in the Battle Division. The front Page is marked in print "Sussex Police Force Telephone and Call Book". The entries are dated between 22th August 1944 and 11th May 1945.Use
For calls and visits to an individual police station to be recordedContext
Call books similar to this were used in all police stations to record not only in person calls and telephone calls by the public and other external agencies, but also internal calls and updates from other stations within the same police force. These pro forma registers would have replaced ledgers, where everything would have had to be handwritten. Over time call books were themselves replaced with carbonated call or incident logs, which in more recent years have been replaced by computer communication logs, usually referred to as CADs short for Computer Assisted Dispatch.
This particular call book was used at Northiam Police Station between 22nd August 1944 and 11th May 1945. Northiam was one of a number of small rural police offices in the then Battle Division of East Sussex Constabulary before the Second World War. These rural offices were usually attached to, or were part of a rural police constable's house, which would have been owned by the Constabulary. At the time most reasonably sized villages across Sussex would have had their own constable, who would have often patrolled on a bicycle. This system of rural officers continued into Sussex Police until the 1990s after which there was a move to have rural officers work out of police stations in larger towns and eventually do away with dedicated rural officers altogether.
In April 1943 until March 1947 all of the six police forces across East and West Sussex were combined temporarily into "The Sussex Police Force", also known as "Sussex Combined Police", which is the period when this call book dates from. Though the wartime combined Sussex Police Force did not have it's own insignia, it is clear from this call book that it did have its own stationary produced.