ACN                  A split-phase supply in Paddington

One of the jobs I did in Paddington was to put another 15A s/socket into the apartment.  There were no spare outlets, or connection facilities at the fuse-board area.  This was common as consumer units had not yet arrived on the scene, and the lighting was probably an MEM Kantark switch-fuse.  So I added another 15A single pole and neutral switch-fuse but was unable to parallel it up with what was already there.  So I did the wiring and called in the LEB to connect up the tails.

"You can take that out straight away" I was told.  On enquiring what was wrong I learned that the 240V AC supply was live on both poles.  It was a split-phase or two-phase supply.  Marylebone wasn't, but this part of Paddington was.  I learned later that there were some other weirdoes in Waterloo and London Bridge.  I just assumed that the 240V AC supply was like I found it in almost everywhere else.

I changed the switch-fuse to double pole. and the LEB chap was quite happy.  It goes to show that the local electricity board were the best inspectors to have.  Incidentally, the Waterloo and London Bridge areas had 25Hz at that time.  To have wired in even a plain bell transformer would have given trouble.  It would probably have burned out at a frequency as low as 25 if it was designed for 50Hz.  I don't know if there was any DC in inner London, but in Notting Hill when I worked there for Troughton & Young, we rewired the nurses home and had to wait until the old DC supply was changed to AC before we could liven up the 13A switch-sockets.  Something I have never seen before, or since -- the front step of the house in Ladbroke Road was hot (not just warm) due to the DC cable breaking down below the ground.   It wouldn't have worried St Vincent's as it was the company side of the meter.  I tell a couple of other story about St Vincent's in my other yarns.

There was another oddity in that part of Paddington that had split phase --  the LEB used normal single-pole and neutral meters.  They were probably aware that you could get free juice if you connected between the black pole and earth, but relied on the fact that few folk would have enough knowledge to do that