How a phone directory helped me track down the Yorkshire Ripper

Imagine a list anyone can access, for free, containing the home phone numbers of everyone in the country, along with their address.

To anyone under 40, it must sound like a privacy nightmare, not least because it involves making a phone call. Having a person’s number is like being able to direct dial into their brain at any time, wherever they are – even social media lets you take a break if you put your phone down.

Yet from the 1880s until the end of last month, there was such a list in the form of the telephone directory, or the phone book. Until 2019, when it went online-only, it was a great slab of paper delivered free each year by BT, and before that, by the Post Office.

The printed edition was so massive that London required four volumes, while many big cities had two. As it listed only landlines, however, it became functionally useless around 25 years ago when important calls began to be made on mobile phones.

But its slide into pointlessness really began in the 1980s, when large numbers of people exercised their right to “go ex-directory”, or as it was known in the US, “unlisted”. Aside from privacy concerns, the move was prompted by the rise of telemarketing and other junk calls.

Up until the mid-century, only 5 to 10 per cent of people were ex-directory, and to be so was considered rather pretentious. You could find the number and address of almost anyone “in the book”, from John Lennon to Agatha Christie.

As a 10-year-old prankster, when the summer holidays started dragging on, a friend and I would look up people called Smellie in our local phone book, ringing them, and asking, “Are you Smellie?” Remarkably, they would say, “Yes,” to which we would say, “So what are you going to do about it?” How we laughed.

There was also an unfortunate Mr A Hitler listed in London E12 – Hitler is a rare but authentic name in parts of India. We may have given him a ring a few times, too.

Only 15 years after such childhood larks, I managed to find the Yorkshire Ripper in the Bradford phone book.

As the leg-man for the Yorkshire Post’s crime reporter, the legendary Roger Cross, I got a call from Roger on the evening of 2 January, 1981, to say the man who had killed at least 13 young women had been arrested. All he could find out for now was that he was called Peter Sutcliffe and lived in the Heaton area of Bradford.

He dispatched me to the house and hopefully to interview the man’s neighbours before the world’s media – and it was a global story on our patch – found them, so I set out to Bradford from my home in Leeds.

I had the Leeds phone directory at home, but not Bradford, so the first job was to find a phone box there with a directory still in place – they used to be ripped out routinely by vandals for entertainment.

The third phone box I found had a phone book, which listed three P Sutcliffes in Heaton. There was no sign of anything amiss at the first two, but the third not only looked like the Addams family house but had a police panda car parked outside.

Thanks to the phone book and a friendly copper in the car reassuring me I was in the right place, I got the scoop of my career – an interview with Sutcliffe’s immediate neighbours. By the time the media hordes descended, the neighbours had been told by the West Yorkshire police to shut up.

“We kept telling the police he was the Ripper,” the couple told me excitedly, “They interviewed him again and again, but never took any action.”

What the neighbours were saying was more than fascinating gossip; it was the nub of inquiries into the policing of the Ripper case that went on for years afterwards.