A British Western Electric (BWE) Swing Arm was put up for auction on UK eBay in July 2016 with an opening bid of £2000.00 ($3300.00). There were no bids so one might assume that the current value of a BWE Swing Arm is less than £2000.00. On the other hand, the same phone using the same photos sold in Spain about a year ago but that is another story.
If the transfer on the front can be believed, this telephone was used by the National Telephone Company in the UK some time up to 1912 when The National was taken over by the Post Office. These are often referred to as BWE telephones but were they really made by BWE?
Swing Arms were available from the final years of the 19th Century through the first decade of the 20th Century; that is 1896 to 1910.
From The Power of Speech:
BWE bought the Fowler-Waring Cables Company at North Woolwich in January 1898 and it became their Cable manufacturing plant and telephone warehouse for the sale of BTMC and US WE telephone equipment. After a serious fire, the plant was redesigned and rebuilt in 1904 when a telephone instrument factory was added. Telephones were made using imported parts. By 1908, complete switchboards were being made.
Up until 1904, BWE didn’t manufacture any telephones at all – it sold telephones imported from Belgium and the USA. From about 1905 it was assembling telephones from imported parts. By 1908 it was manufacturing switchboards and possibly telephones as well but by 1910, the Swing Arm was no longer being produced. That leaves a window of less than two years where BWE may have tooled up (an expensive exercise) to produce a telephone that was at the end of its life.
My conclusion is that it is highly unlikely that BWE manufactured the Swing Arm. I believe the same argument can be applied to other ornate telephones such as the BWE Eiffel Tower. Such telephones were most likely made at the BTMC factory in Antwerp, Belgium.
Western Electric advertisement taken from a book printed in 1902. The telephone shown, like the Swing Arm, cannot have been made in the UK as British Western Electric had no telephone manufacturing plant at that time.
References:
The Power of Speech, Peter Young, 1983
Catalogue of Telephone Apparatus & Supplies, British Western Electric, 1910