I have a confession to make. I once stole an elevator.

Yes, an elevator, not a lift. This was no ordinary device for conveying humans between levels.  

It was a cage style design that travelled up through the centre of a staircase. Painted black, all gloss black and in beautiful condition with polished brass controls and fitments. Each floor had a cage door that had to be pulled to to enable transit. The external cage continued up through the centre of the stairs to the top of the building. There was another cage door internally which wouldn’t allow the elevator to move until the door was shut properly. Once moving it was wise to keep fingers out of the cage gaps.

The elevator moved by manual operation of a brass lever. One direction for up, the other for down, and by returning the lever gently to the centre the elevator would stop. If the elevator was called from another floor a bell in the cab would ‘ding’ and a white enamel disk would flick into one of the holes on the floor indicator panel at the top rear of the elevator.  Multiple floors could be indicated on the horizontal panel as there was a hole for each floor, the floor number painted at the back of each hole.  There was a moving arrow on another brass plate near the top front of the elevator, this indicated where the elevator was in relation to the floors.  This machine was straight out of Raymond Chandler, exactly the thing a client of Philip Marlowe’s would travel in up to his office.

Usually an elderly man operated the elevator, but on this day the he wasn’t in his seat. The elevator was empty.  I decided to take it.  I shut the outer cage door and then the inner.  I moved the lever in the ‘up’ direction and almost silently it lurched into motion, I had no finesse.  I started and stopped a few times, and tried both directions. Up and down, and lurching less.  There’s a limit to how much touring can be done in an elevator and I had an appointment to keep, so after a short while I decided to get out.  On finding my floor I had to nudge the lever up and down to get it to settle at the right point which would allow the inner cage door to open.  I left the elevator and went in to the offices.

When I came out the elevator was gone.  I walked down the stairs and past the operator now back in his seat at the ground floor.

That was in 1979.  I went back to the building some years later, the 1930s style elevator had been replaced with a completely enclosed modern design.  A shame.  As a 15 year old those few minutes controlling the elevator were quite entertaining, and there must have been plenty of others that had fun doing it too.  I didn’t think of it as time travel but in retrospect it was the tail end of an era that had somehow clung on in a Manchester side-street, hands-on history.

The NHS orthodontist I visited has gone too.

I cannot find any pictures of such an elevator.

This is the building now:

On Google Streetview St John Chambers