Anyone who has visited the museum lately will have noticed that the AA roadside telephone box, number 59, has become much more visible. (All boxes had numbers so that a member calling for assistance could confirm their location to the call handler by reading the box number). Box 59, located at Bourton on the Water during its operational lifetime, has now opened its door and gained an interior light.

The history of the roadside boxes goes back to the early days of the RAC and AA; founded in 1897 and 1905 respectively.

Around 1912, both AA and RAC started to install roadside ‘sentry boxes’. These were built as a shelter from the weather for the roadside patrols who literally ‘patrolled’ their section of road looking for stranded motorists in need of assistance. This may sound like an inefficient use of the patrol’s time but back in the early 1900s, cars were not the comfortable, reliable machines that we enjoy today.

By the 1920s, members of both organisations received keys to fit the door of the roadside boxes. The boxes would contain supplies of oil, water, petrol and a first aid kit to help the motorist in trouble. The honesty of the motorist was relied upon to replace what had been used the next time they drove past.

With the spread of the landline phone network, the sentry boxes became call boxes, used by both the patrol and the member.

Why do we not see these boxes anymore?

• Well, in reality, only a very small and ever-decreasing number of calls for help originated from the roadside telephones (although the figure could be higher in popular but remote tourist spots).
• They were expensive to maintain.
• Vandalism was a problem.
• The rental cost of the landlines dominated the cost of any call charges.
• The patrol’s use of the phones reduced once they had mobile radio communications in their vehicles.
• And, of course, the arrival of the mobile phone and ever improving network coverage from the early 1990s proved to be the final straw.

Those remaining are now frequently preserved with Grade II listing building status.

At their peak the RAC had around 500 roadside telephones in use, with the AA at around 780. In the post WWII period, the member’s key fitted both AA and RAC boxes with the call handler directing calls for assistance appropriately. The composite photo at the end of this post shows a 1990s RAC telephone including a dedicated AA key. The role of supporting the competitors’ members in the event of a vehicle breakdown extended beyond the era of roadside sentry boxes.

Deriving an unambiguous location of the customer calling for assistance remained a critical priority for rescue organisations even as the roadside phones were being withdrawn. In the early 1990s, both the AA and the RAC offered a ‘transportable’ bag-phone to their highest tier of membership. Including the battery, the Motorola bag-phone, branded AA Callsafe and RAC ET respectively, weighed 3½kg. Unsurprisingly, the bag-phone had a very short commercial life.

In the early years of the 21^st century, the ability to locate a mobile phone using the phone’s signal received at more than a single network mast, became a service offered by some third-party businesses who had a contractual agreement with the cell phone networks. The RAC would ask their caller for permission to use this service to help find their location; a request very rarely declined.

Whilst cellular network location was technically successful, and is still used today, the rapid progress into the smartphone era soon rendered such techniques largely unnecessary. With digital mapping and the capability to use multiple satellite location networks as well as the cellular network, the precision with which the member can be located is almost as good as it was in the days when the motorist read the number on the outside of the ‘sentry box’.

Nowadays, of course, that precision is available nationwide and not just at the location of a roadside ‘sentry box’.

The composite image that concludes this post shows the evolution of the roadside rescue telephone boxes until their eventual withdrawal from service in the 1990s. All these items and the history of BT and police phone boxes can be found at the National Collection of Phone Boxes at the Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings near Bromsgrove in Worcestershire.