Did you make phone calls when you were a youngster readers? I can count on one hand the number of calls I made on our landline at home in the Sixties and early Seventies!
As I recall, the phone just wasn't that important to young people, unlike today when mobile phones are the very basis of teenage life.
In fact our single home landline had a lock on it for which my parents had the only keys! Making phone calls was simply not encouraged! I am struggling to remember the number forty years on!
Looking back, I probably made more calls on pay phones than I did at home.
So readers, was the telephone important to you when you were young? What sort of phone did you have at home? Pictures and stories welcomed!
We didn't even have a phone until the mid 70's. Odd that without one it was still perfectly possible to arrange to meet up with friends.
ReplyDeleteYes, how did we do that? Make arrangements?
DeleteThe weird thing is, I don't remember how we did it but somehow it was never an issue.
DeleteLike Kevin, we didn't get a house phone until 1974-75. It was a bog standard cream plastic 700 series. I distinctly remember it always smelled of strong furniture polish. The big thing for me was when it was replaced by a cool futuristic red trim phone with its distinctive trill. I can remember phoning Dial-a-Disc. Remember that Woodsy ? You could dial a GPO number and hear a fave song from the 70s charts. I love the nostalgia of old vintage telephone and have the old one at home. I often wonder what sort of calls were made on them, especially during the war years. Ironically though, I don't, by choice, carry a mobile.
ReplyDeleteFunny you should say that, our first phone was a trimphone (lime green), it also smelled of polish owing to my Mum polishing most things if they didn't move quickly!
DeleteHaha, yep Kevin, Mum's were like that... they were the best :)
DeleteDial a Disc! Wow! I'd forgotten that one. I remember ringing up for cinema times. they went through the whole programme!
DeleteYou could still dial a number regardless of the lock by tapping on the black pips on the receiver part,you had to tap 10 times if there was a zero in the number.It worked and my dad still won't accept the fact to this day we could dial out using this cunning method!
ReplyDeleteI think I knew about this but never tried it Tony! Hannibal Lecter does it in one if his films! Yikes!
DeleteTrimphones were pure UFO! Didn't they have them in that series! I loved the sound of them. There was a dial at the side to increase the volume of the trill. I once heard a Blackbird doing a perfect copy of a trimphone back then!
DeleteNot sure if they were in UFO but they had the look. The dial glowed in the dark too!
DeleteGlow dials! I remember them! What will they have used to make them glow Kev? What was in it?
DeleteNot sure to be honest, probably not the radioactive stuff they used in the 40's and 50's!
DeleteBlimey, was it radioactive?
DeleteYeah, we used to have an old aircraft navigation instrument at work that gave a higher geiger counter reading than our demonstration radioactive sources!
DeleteBelated comment: yes, those memories have awakened a few of my own (thanks for that!).
ReplyDeleteEarliest memories of a phone are from when I was six. I can still remember our phone number from then, which I actually use as a password for certain things (as did my late Mum, I once happened to notice :)
I can recall also using the trick of clicking the button the receiver rested on, which was also reputed to make the exchange think you'd interrupted the call so you'd be calling for free :) though I've never known if that was actually the case (perhaps Tony would know that?)
My dad being a collector of 78rpm Blues records (pretty well-known in his time) meant that we'd also get calls late in the evening, with an American voice asking for "Mex Vree-dee" (not how you pronounce it :) so some of the first words in my English vocabulary were "I will get him for you."
Trimphones I came across as a student in the early Eighties, in fact there was a classmate who could do a perfect imitation of the "ffrrrp-ffrrrrp" sound it made to the confusion of whoever picked up the real one in the studio.
Used British pay phones quite a lot in those days as well, fond memories including their distinct smell which I can't really describe. Shame most of them were taken away. (Once had the idea of buying one and converting it into a shower stall, but on second thoughts it would probably be too small...)
And to round off I too have a couple of old phones knocking around. One is a British bakelite set very similar to what Tony is showing (little drawer underneath and all), one is a Swatch cordless, and the last is a simple wooden box with a funnel on top to speak into, separate earpiece on a lead, and a push-button on the front to call the exchange with, no dial. Had that hanging on the wall in the kitchen in my first flat in Brussels (where we also survived without a phone); anybody wanting to use our phone would be told about its existence before being directed to the bar across the road which had a payphone!
@Woodsy: I'd offer to take some pics, but that oldest (and most interesting) phone is boxed away somewhere...
Best -- Paul
superb! I shall post them tout suite.
DeleteHang on - found the old phone, pics coming up!
ReplyDelete