Long before the invention of the mobile phone, we only had the landline phone, which meant if you wanted to speak to someone they needed to be home to take your call (II know right lol). Our version of having a mobile phone meant you had a really long wire and could take the phone into another room :-)
If you weren’t lucky enough to have your own phone (or wanted to make a call away from prying ears) you could use a public phone box. This was basically a rotary phone fixed to the wall of a red booth with glass doors and windows. You’d dial your number then as soon as the other person picked up, quickly push you 10p into the slot. When your call was ready to go you’s get a rapid beep beep beep that we knew as ‘the pups’ and either had to end the call or put more money in. Sometimes when ringing home to say you’d be late etc and a sun king would answer you’d already put your 10p in and be like ‘quick get mum or dad before the pips go’. Depending how fast your parents walked from the lounge to the phone would determine how much you got to say ‘I’ll be late I’ve missed the…beep beep beep beep’ was sometimes all you got out lol. This wasn’t always a bad thing if you knew you were going to get in trouble. In our house mum or dad never answered the phone they would send me or Kirsty first in case it wasn’t for them. So when I had to deliver bad k res I’d slowly say ‘kirsty it’s Neil is mum or dad there, will you put them on the phone?’ Knowing by the time they got there I would have time to deliver a quick message and no credit left for them to argue lol. “I’ll be home for 9:30 I’ve missed the ….beep beep, right got to go that’s the pips”. Bang, slam phone down, happy days, face the music when you get home lol.
I remember our very first home telephone was a rotary phone you had to put your finger in the hole with the corresponding number and rotate the dial all the way to the right until it hit the final point. Back in those days not everyone could afford their own phone line and even if you could you didn't all have your own phone line you sometimes had what was known as a 'party line' that you shared with a neighbour. We shared ours with Lynne Booth next door, so if she was on the phone (which she often was) it meant when you picked up the receiver you could hear her conversation and had to put it back down and try again after a while when she was hopefully finished. Many a time I would hear my mum after several failed attempts, say "come on Lynne I need to use the phone" LOL.
The dial phones used to take SO long to dial a number especially if they had 9’s in them cos 9 was the furthest away and you had to wait for the dial to go all the way back before you could do the next number. God forbid anyone who interrupted you mid-dial and made you lose track. You’d have to put the receiver down and start again GGRRRR.
Thinking about it I don’t know who thought that having the emergency services as 999 was a good idea? 111 would have been much quicker to dial. By the time you’d dialled 999 you could have trained to be a fireman and but the chip pan fire out yourself. Lol
Often if you were on the phone and an new incoming call came through for the person on your party line you would simply be disconnected and next door would suddenly be on the phone to someone and you’d get a ‘crossed line’ lol.
Oh and because in the 70's they loved all things rotary we even stored our addresses and phone numbers in a little rotary flip-up address book. The front of the 'book' had a dial but had letters inside instead of numbers. You dialed the letter of the person's first or last name (depending on how you organised yours) and the flip thing popped open revealing your names and phone numbers for that particular letter.
Sometimes people would pop around to use the phone if they didn't have their own phone or their party line was busy. For those purposes we had a little wooden box with a slot in the top and people would pop 10p in the slot to use the phone for a quick call.
In fact I think this is the actual box we had lol, but it rarely had money in it because dad would empty it when he needed money for the pub after work :-). The bottom of the box had a small stopper that you opened with a key (or a 10p would fit in the same slot and rotate the stopper to open it up, as we found out.
All of these lovely items sat on top of a telephone table that we had at the bottom of the stairs so you could sit in comfort on the cushion part of the table while you made your calls.
This isn't the exact telephone table we had but you get the idea. Ours had a glass table top and a velvet cushion for the seat which was made from a metal frame not wooden.
When more people started to get phones and more of my friends also had them, the phone bills started to creep up and so parents all over the northwest started purchasing phone locks, which stopped you from being able to use the dial to make a call. I remember when ours got fitted and it was the end of long chats to friends at night when mum had popped next door to see Lynne.
What most parents didn't know, but we kids soon spread the word was that if you lifted up the receiver, there were two plastic things that the phone rested on. When you lifted them up that gave you the dial tone. What you could do instead of using the dial is 'Tap' out the phone number by pressing these two down leaving a pause between each number (you only tapped one as they were linked and both went down if you pressed one. So you had to tap 10 times for zero then leave a gap then 1 then leave a gap and so on. So when the phone bills were still high we could profess how it's nothing to do with us as we don't have the key for the phone lock ;-)
After a while push-button phones were invented but to ease people into them gently they made them look like the rotary phone but you just pressed the buttons instead of using your finger to rotate them clockwise. Mum was going through her "Eternal Bow" phase (more on that on another post) when we got this fancy French-looking phone lol.
It was quite a while after this one when we got what they called a slimline phone, named so because the handset was less bulky and quite slim.
By the time we got one of these slimline phones, I think we had two phones in the house, one on the telephone table (with lock) and then this one upstairs in mum and dad's bedroom. What they failed to realise is when you went up to bed, if you were quiet you could sneak into their room and make a call on the new slimline phone.
You only ever got rumbled if you didn't notice them come out of the lounge while you were on the phone. They would sometimes pick up the downstairs phone to make a call and hear you on the phone. Oops.
The one thing all these phones had in common is that in order to disconnect the call the person who made the call had to put the handset back down onto the cradle so that the call was ended. Oh and on a heated call nothing gave you more satisfaction than slamming your phone down on someone. Pressing ‘End Call’ doesn’t give you that same feeling lol.
There was also nothing more frustrating than when you wanted to end the call but it was the other person that had rang you and they hadn’t put the phone down properly their dnd, This meant the line stayed open, so every time you picked up the receiver you could hear the background noise (or conversations) in their house. This resulted in having to scream and shout down the phone, of whistle to get their attention. Ev Eventually after a certain period of time I think ‘the operator’ would disconnect the call.
Who would have thought all those years ago that we would be able to have our own personal mobile phones that allowed us to not only make calls, but video calls, take photos (photos is defo another post), and do everything you are currently able to do on the one device. I love how technology advances and can't wait to write a new post, years from now about how phones have advanced further still (probably holograms or something who know).
Watch this space ;-)
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