The man who helped devise the UK’s best-known telephone number lived in Elgar Avenue. Though humble about the role he played, Tom Fallon takes much of the credit for setting up 999. Born in London’s Docklands at the turn of the 20th century, he joined the police after serving in the Royal Navy in the First World War, beginning his career, as he put it, “pavement pounding in the East End”. He married Mary, began a family and transferred to Scotland Yard in 1934, where he took charge of the information room where calls to the then emergency number, Whitehall 1212, were fielded.

The birth of the 999 service followed a horrific early-morning fire on November 10, 1935 at 27 Wimpole Street. Neighbour Norman Macdonald tried to raise the alarm by ringing the fire brigade but was delayed because the operator at the local telephone exchange was busy dealing with a queue of other callers, and had no way of distinguishing between routine and emergency calls.

The first problem they faced was that each local police station had just one telephone line. As head of the police information room, Fallon’s input was key. Working with General Post Office officials (the GPO then controlled the phone network), he ran through options for a memorable number that could be fed through to a central control room from anywhere in London… and eventually anywhere in the UK.

The simpler, snappier 111 was ruled out because when telephone lines flapped together in high winds they generated rogue ‘1’ diallings. Numbers beginning 2-8 had already been commandeered by exchanges, so 999 became the favoured option. Fallon laughed, and called it destiny. His first police shoulder number was 999K. Modestly, he later played down the significance. “I helped launch the new radio crime-fighting system known as triple nine,” he said, adding: “While it was the number I first wore on my tunic collar as a constable on an East End beat, the coincidence of numerology was entirely unconnected with my early pavement pounding in the force.” Tom and his colleagues also realised that on an old rotary dial it was possible to easily locate 9 in the dark, or in a smoke-filled room, thanks to the metal bar next to the digit.

War interrupted a national rollout, and amazingly it wasn’t until 1976 that the whole of the UK was covered by an automatic system.

Fallon transferred to Wapping to take charge of the Thames River Police, and he and Mary bought 166 Elgar Avenue (pictured) from the previous owners, Clarence and Lucy Purdy, settling in just as the Second World War broke out.

As head of the river police, he commanded 200 men and 30 boats for six years – right through the war. Elgar Avenue got off lightly. Even on the notorious night of February 23, 1944, when 700 incendiary bombs blanketed Berrylands, the road escaped a direct hit. Fallon retired in 1948 at the rank of chief superintendent, and he and Mary moved to Africa, where he took a security job in Tanganyika, now part of Tanzania, and helped found the ‘peanut police force’. After a year or so the Fallons returned to Elgar Avenue where he reinvented himself as a writer, publishing River Police – the story of London’s waterborne coppers – in 1956, drawing on boyhood memories of the capital. “I remember with what fascination I watched the Thames policemen in their tiny patrol boats, weaving in and out of the river byways and backwaters,” he said. Fallon was technical adviser to the B-movie River Beat in 1954, and the television series Dial 999 in 1959, its cast including future Doctors William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton. Fallon also wrote a radio crime series. He lectured to church groups and townswomen’s guilds, and took up photography and golf, playing at Surbiton Golf Club for 10 years.

Tom Fallon died on 21 June 1964 following brain surgery. The funeral was held at the Sacred Heart church, Wimbledon. Mary continued to live in the Elgar Avenue house for a further 15 years.