The Press and Journal (Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire)
Villagers save their phone box – in the nick of time
Phone box: Residents halt removal
A Moray village has saved its treasured red telephone box within minutes of it being pulled out of the ground and towed away on the back of a truck.
The booth in Tomintoul is one of the last old-style facilities in the country.
Residents thought they had saved the lifeline service, which is also a regularly photographed tourist attraction, when Moray Council objected to BT’s plans to remove it a year ago on the grounds of poor mobile signal.
However, locals were stunned to see contractors working on behalf of the telecoms giant in the village following a paperwork mixup from management.
It is understood that the staff were in the initial stages of removing the vintage phone box, which is in the village square, before they were halted by Cathal Breen, who runs the post office with wife Caroline.
Engineers then stopped to await clarification as more people joined the efforts to preserve it. The crew eventually stayed overnight while the fate of the red booth was decided.
Mrs Breen said: “It’s photographed every day by tourists. When we found out it was going to stay we took on the maintenance of it and had it cleaned down last year.
“In an area like this, it’s a necessity. There have been problems with the power to it recently, which I’ve reported, and we’ve had people come into the store asking to use our phone.
“It was quite a surprise to see people just turn up last week to take it away.”
The Kirkmichael and Tomintoul Community Association now intends to adopt the box to remove doubts about its future.
Plans are being drawn up to have a battery-powered phone inside the booth to allow visitors to make calls.
Community association secretary Liz Lettey said: “I believe there was a discrepancy in BT’s paperwork. The important thing is that it’s going to be kept and we’re going to adopt it.”
Moray MSP Richard Lochhead has pressed BT to return two other phone boxes which the council also wanted retained.
He said: “For BT to go ahead and remove the phone boxes at Bridge of Avon and Glenlivet, despite there being very poor mobile phone coverage in these areas, has not gone down well with local residents.”
Traditional red telephone boxes recently beat the Spitfire, Concorde and the Union flag to be voted Britain’s greatest design of all time. Such is their appeal that the increasing lyrare examples are to be found in every overseas visitor’s album of snaps from these shores. And they are so cherished within our own communities that they have been put to any number of uses to save them, from housing a tiny cake shop to life-saving defibrillators. So the spirited revolt that greeted the unwitting team sent to remove picturesque Tomintoul’s should come as no surprise. But it must not be forgotten that this was not simply a reaction born of nostalgia or an eye on the tourist trade – but one with a more serious message for telecoms chiefs. The age of the almost universal mobile phone might have rendered public phone boxes an expensive anachronism. But until they plug the “not spots” that still leave many rural communities without signal, phone boxes remain as important as ever.