When I worked in the Booking Office, on winter Saturday evenings after the local football team had played at home a man with a very loud voice would use the open payphone in the booking hall. He dictated a match report complete with all the 'full stop new para' and other punctuation. Presumably using the station he was travelling home but he seemed to be a regular.
A cheap and efficient way to transmit a report to his sub-editor, just a few sixpences in the slot.
Related to that, and still more or less relevant to this thread, there was a black American orchestral conductor named Dean Dixon. There was also a famous critic of both music and cricket named Neville Cardus, who in the 1960s worked in both capacities for
The Guardian. It was customary for a review of a concert to appear in the following morning's paper. One morning a review of a concert conducted by Dean Dixon referred throughout to "Dixie Dean", who had followed a different career path. I imagine that Neville Cardus had spent time in the bar during the interval and perhaps after the concert, and had eventually said, in an euphoric glow, "Well, I'd better phone my copy through." Whether it was Cardus who mixed up the names, or a young sub-editor who knew about the football player but not the conductor, I cannot say.
