On Wed, 19 May 2004 19:50:16 +0100, Annabel Smyth
wrote:

On Tue, 18 May 2004 at 21:13:51, Keith J Chesworth
wrote:

Then, if you waited long enough, you may be honoured by having a
shared line phone fitted. This meant that when you picked it up you
would hear the other sharee if they had beat you to it.

Indeed; my father said that even as long after the 2nd World War as 1952
(when he was engaged to my mother and seconded to London from his normal
offices near Oxford), a domestic phone was not a priority. I don't
remember us not having one, but I would have been 3 or 4 before I became
aware of it.

But I was probably ten or eleven - or even older - before we lost the
girl who said "Number please" when you picked up the phone....

The great Revolution came somewhere between 1971 and 1975. I was living
in Paris at the time, and sometime during those years I was able to dial
home - and, oddly, could dial my grandmother when my parents still
couldn't!

But would my grandfather, for instance, have believed that his son could
(for instance) catch a salmon in Scotland and, without leaving the
river-bank, telephone his sister in South Africa to tell her about it?

Add another 10years to that. It was more like 1962(ish) that we
finally managed to get a shared line and that was in Birkenhead

The joke being that my father was the 'toolie' at the old Automatic
Telephone Company in Liverpool who actually made the press tools which
stamped out the contact arcs for both the handset and exchange ends,
along with several other bits. Needless to say, being good scousers we
had ours and a few neighbors' houses wired up as a private system.

Keith J Chesworth
www.unseenlondon.co.uk
www.blackpooltram.co.uk
www.happysnapper.com
www.boilerbill.com - main site
www.amerseyferry.co.uk