A Nice Pair of RAT Phones

[FABphones]

I have wanted to add a RAT Co phone (Relay Automatic Telephone Company, London) to the collection for a while. Few come up for sale, and when they do appear in a nice complete condition they sell for above my budget at the time, so I haven't been lucky, until now.

As I have a Birthday coming up I was gifted a phone allowance to buy something for my collection which was a bit special. Typically, there was nothing to be found, then suddenly these appeared...

...they caught my eye for quite a few reasons including; a matching pair, very hard to find early No10 dials, cables in good condition, wall terminals still attached.... so many nice features on these phones.

Overall they are in very good condition for phones in the region of 100 years old. My work on these is minimal, attend to the dials, and a general tidy up.

Determined not to lose an actual pair, I bid high - and paid high, but thankfully not higher than their value (a last few seconds bidder all but doubled my purchase price).

I will be displaying these as a pair as they have been together since installation, having been removed from a factory in the UK prior to it's demolition.

I present - two very handsome matching RAT phones  :

[tubaman]

Very well done on getting those - they look beautifully original as you say.
First job - get those super small centre dials unstuck.

[FABphones]

Relay Automatic Telephone Company Limited
Marconi House, Strand, London

1913 Established as the Betulander Automatic Telephone Company by Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Co Ltd.

1920 September. Exhibited at the 1920 Machine Tool and Engineering Exhibition at Olympia with automatic telephones for business premises.

1922 Relay Automatic Telephone Co opened the first 'relay' automatic exchange for the public telephone service in the UK, at Fleetwood, Lancashire.

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'During the 1920s the Relay Automatic Telephone Company (RATCo for short) achieved some success with its system for PAX and PABX installations. One of the first was in December 1923 at the British Empire Exhibition (Wembley) where a system with in excess of 200 lines linked the pavilions of the various dominions and colonies with each other and the exhibition headquarters. The actual apparatus was one of the public exhibits. The company made great play of the speed of connection ('through in a second') and the simplicity of the equipment'.

[FABphones]

Very well done on getting those - they look beautifully original as you say.
First job - get those super small centre dials unstuck...

Thanks tubaman.

Thankfully due to much swotting up and with help from the great threads on here by teleplay and ktown, plus my previous taking apart/reassembling dial repairs, I am ok nowadays to get a dial running nicely. I have some good old GPO/BT test kit (and of course Audacity). And I have a nice old smaller dialcard someplace in my little workshop.

These have gone straight to the top of 'my favourite phone' list.

[HarrySmith]

Great find! Congrats CJ!

[FABphones]

Great find! Congrats CJ!

Thanks Harry. 

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Few more examples of RatCo ephemera: