The fun of chats on the phone!
Every issue, Yours writer Marion Clarke will be reliving the best bits of our lives. This fortnight, phones ain’t what they used to be!
Like most teenagers, I used to spend hours chatting to my friends on the phone – incurring grumbles and stern warnings from my father when the bill came in.
Peggy Glew’s husband had a solution to this... “Faced with yet another expensive phone bill, he changed our phone to one that only took incoming calls.” Thank goodness my dad never came up with that idea or I would have had to join the queue outside the nearest public phone box.
Margaret Rymer remembers the red phone box in her village with affection. “For us country children it was a lifeline. We could use it as a shelter on cold days or a meeting place for the gang. We could easily pack four of us into it and it was a convenient place to do our courting in the winter. “We would spend hours practising the art of phone tapping in order to get free calls; you had to hold the receiver and tap out the digits of the number you wanted with spaces in between, a bit like Morse code. Not paying for calls meant we could have long chats with friends without parents listening in.” Pat Lowe remembers another cheeky little trick involving the phone kiosk in the Dorset village where she grew up. “My friend and I often played near this so we could watch out for anyone going in to make a call. When they left, we would nip in to see if they had forgotten to press button B to get their money back. Very often this was the case and we used the money to buy sweets or lemonade!” When Margaret Coxon’s friend Marlene became exasperated by the bad behaviour of some local children, she told them, ‘Right then, I’ve had enough. I’m going to phone the police’. “As she was making the call, the children got some wide sticky tape and stuck it round the phone box so she couldn’t open the door. When the police eventually came, they just stood there laughing. After they had cut the tape and let her out, Marlene gave them a few choice words. It was some time later before she saw the funny side.” Local calls cost pennies, but Lucy MacLeod recalls long-distance calls were 2s 6d for three minutes. “We had to book them in advance with the operator who would phone us back to say that we were being connected. She came back on the line to remind us when our three minutes were up. If we didn’t want to pay for more, it was a scramble to finish off what we were saying.”
Brenda Reed had to walk a mile to the nearest phone box for a pre-arranged call from her brother, who was in the Merchant Navy. “What a pleasure it was when he could get through and we would chat until his money ran out. Looking back, I do wonder why I used to wait outside, whatever the weather, and only went in when the phone rang!”
‘Long-distance calls had to be booked in advance with the operator’
It was a good thing that the nearest phone box to Kath Tuck was a lot closer than a mile away. When she was pregnant, she and her husband didn’t own a car or have a phone. “In case my labour pains started in the night, my husband used to lay out his clothes and the right money in case he had to make a dash to the call box for an ambulance.” As with the first TVs, people who were the first to have their own landlines made them available to the community. In the Forties, Audrey Warwick’s father was the village bobby. “We had a police house and a telephone. It was a candlestick type with a rotary dial. Sometimes we were asked by neighbours to make a call for them (usually to a hospital to enquire about a sick relative). Often they had no idea how to use it, but my sister and I would be delighted to do it for them – and probably did all the talking, too!” It wasn’t until the Fifties that people began to have their own phones. Mrs E Arnold remembers the thrill when her family had a black Bakelite phone installed. “That evening we had our first phone call – Dad had walked to the public telephone box specially to ring us.”
Heather Moulson’s first phone hung on the wall, near the front door. “It hardly ever rang as we didn’t know anyone else who had a phone, although my auntie used to ring us from a callbox in Clacton now and then. “Then my friend in Norfolk got one so I could actually talk to someone. I loved ringing the operator to be put through. However, our hallway was so cold I couldn’t talk for my teeth chattering so conversations – and telephone bills – were at a minimum.” Now there’s another money-saving wheeze my own dear dad failed to come up with!