Where have the telephone boxes gone?

Who now remembers the telephone box? My friend Lawrence and I spent a happy 20 minutes trying to think where they all still were in Chorlton.

They have been with us for nearly 100 years, came in all sort of sizes, colours and designs but like the snow in the winter sunshine they are fast disappearing.

In June 1885 the South Manchester Gazette reported that the Lancashire and Cheshire Telephonic Exchange Company was about to open “a number of Public Call Offices, on a s similar plan to those in operation in the city, where anyone may converse by Telephone, not only with Subscribers to the Company’s Exchange System, but also anybody who, by a previous appointment between the parties concerned, has gone to some other Call station to receive a message.”*

I have yet to find out when they began appearing on our streets in Manchester, but the iconic red kiosk designed by Giles Gilbert Scott in 1924 was rolled out nationally from 1929 onwards. And there were the emergency Police boxes and this delighful fire alarm which stood on Manchester Road opposite the Gaumont cinema.

My own favourite story says much about the early years of the telephone in Chorlton. In 1887 in the event of a fire residents in the area of New Chorlton could use the telephone at the Lloyd’s Hotel which would patch the emergency call via the Withington Board Office to the Manchester Exchange who would pass it on to the fire brigade at Jacksons Row.

It was however fraught with difficulties as the manager of the Lancashire and Cheshire Telephonic Exchange pointed out in the February of that year, because it only needed “the switch at the Local Board’s offices to be left out of its proper position” and the signal from the Lloyd’s Hotel would not get through to the operator in Manchester. His solution was for the Withington Board to pay the annual fee of £30-40 to secure a direct line to the exchange.

But I digress. There was a phone box on the green by the 1930s which was later moved to a position near the church yard, but it has now gone, along with so many. At one time we had boxes on the corner of Beech and Wilton Road, more on Beech Road by the post office and a bank of them by the bus station.

In the 1980s during the fierce competition between BT and Mercury everyday seemed to bring more out on to the streets. So why and where have they all gone?

I guess the mobile phone is the clue. Who now needs to go and stand in a box with its mix of spells and cards advertising all sorts of services when a small hand held device does the business? To be fair the telephone companies fought back... There were boxes where you could use a card instead of money and even an arrangement where toy could tap into your own telephone account to make calls.

But in the end it was just so much easier to use a mobile. The old days of pushing button A so that the coins could fall into the box and allow the call to proceed or pushing B to get your money back are as much a part of history as telegram.

I do occasionally see the old red boxes, usually in somebody’s garden or in a museum, but they are rare and it would seem their all glass replacement may soon be equally rare.

Picture; the fire alarm on Manchester Road, opposite the Gaumont cinema by A H Downes November 1 1958 m17988, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council and the telephone box on the green from the Lloyd collection

*South Manchester Gazette, June 12 1885
**Manchester Guardian February 1 1887