Just what can you learn from a telephone directory?

I guess the telephone directory will soon go the way of the telegram and become just a part of history.

After all many people will use the internet to look up a number and many more don’t even bother with a land line.

Of course not everyone has access to a computer so the telephone directory will survive for a wee while linger, but I wouldn’t lay bets on it still dropping through our letter box in ten years time.

When I was growing up in London we got four covering the whole of the city and I rather remember getting three Manchester volumes which has become just one for the central area.

They are something I have just taken for granted and increasingly ignored all of which is a shame because in their way they are an invaluable resource in tracking down people from the past.

The first British book was issued in 1880 by the Telephone Company, and contained 248 names and addresses of individuals and businesses in London and that as they say was just the start.

All self respecting local studies centres should have old editions and the entire collection for the whole of the country dating back to 1880 can be accessed on line.

Now what makes them so useful is the opportunity to track an individual from one area to another, and before any one points out the obvious that until relatively recently not everyone had a phone that in its self is very helpful.

To be in possession of a telephone in 1890 said something about the individual, their occupation, wealth and place in society.

It doesn’t tell you anything about the rest of the family but it is a start and like street directories has the potential to follow a person year by year unlike the census which is every ten years and currently stops at 1911.

So armed with a name and the mystery of why a house in Chorlton-cum-Hardy should have been named Damascus House I roamed the past and came up with Mr Kabbazwho who  had been born in Damascus in Syria  and who was “a subject of the Ottoman Empire.”

Now I don’t know yet when he arrived but by the April of 1901 he was settled in Damascus House and had installed a telephone.

Now this was not as unusual as you might think and a quick glance down the telephone directory and on either side of Mr Kabbaz were several others listed with phones.

It may have been connected with his business which he described as “Agent, Shipping Goods employer” and he and his brother had offices at 21 Cooper Street in Manchester.

Cooper Street once stretched from Peter Street up to Booth Street, but the southern end disappeared under Central Ref and the Town Hall extension and number 21 which was on the northern stretch has long vanished.

Nor were the Kabbaz family the only residents from the Empire just a little further away on High Lane was Mr Mouradian who had been born in Constantinople and was also in engaged in shipping, while just a few doors down from Damascus House lived Krikor Topalian also in shipping and also from Turkey.

Not bad for a search through one book.

So should I throw that telephone directory away?

I leave that one up to you.

Picture; cover from the recently delivered BT Directory, a detail from from the 1901 telephone directory, a women from Damascus, by Pascal Sebah, 1873 and Kabbaz Brothers, 21 Cooper Street, from Manchester, Salford and Suburban Directory, 1911, Part two, page 487, The National Telephone Company

*A house in Chorlton and a subject of the Ottoman Empire, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/a-house-in-chorlton-and-subject-of.html