The story of one house in Lausanne Road over a century and a half, and of one family who lived there in the 1950s.*
Now a full half century after we left Lausanne Road I can still remember our telephone number.
Long after I have forgotten the divi number, our immediate neighbours and most of my school friends NEW 6251 is locked firmly in my mind.
Not that I got to use it very often.
Back in the 1950s few of the people I knew had a phone and making a call was still regarded as less of a social thing and more one reserved for emergencies.
All of which of course begs the question of why we had one any way.
My grandparents in Derby didn’t have one and most of our friends lived just a few doors away.
Added to which both my parents were of that generation who wrote and received regular letters and were quite content to wait a few days before carrying on with a story or picking up on the local gossip and news.
And phones in the 1950s were not the most user friendly of things.
Ours was heavy clunky and of course the number had to be dialled. Not only that but we were on a party line which meant we shared with somebody else, which was fine if you wanted to listen in to a stranger’s conversation but maddening if you couldn’t make a call because the line was in use.
Nor were the public phones much better. Back then there were fewer of them and there was that quaint system of the two buttons which had to be pushed. Button A to connect, button B to get your money back and if it was a long distance number the faff of talking to the operator and asking to be connected.
So in the age of mobile phones which can pretty much do everything you want this picture of a 1968 GPO standard issue household set brings back memories.
We have one here in our home and like the one in Graham’s picture it comes in one colour.
There were other colours, I remember ours in Well Hall Road was grey and the swanky people behind us had a white one.
There is something very reassuring about using a dial instead of buttons, and I only wish ours still worked.
But it was damaged long ago and now will only slowly complete its return half circle from the last number dialled.
Its successor the trimphone now looks less elegant and even more dated. Ours was put in sometime around 1969, and I can’t say it was a success.
As I remember it was too light and had a tendency slide across the table when you were dialling and worse still could fall off the table as you moved around using it.
But at the time it came to represent all that was new and shinny and by the time ours arrived the GPO had become Post Office Telecommunications.
A decade or so later and I had my first push button set which was exactly like the one above but with of course a set of buttons, and finished in handsome grey.
Over the years new phones have come and gone including the revolutionary one which displayed the caller’s number.
More recently there has been a bewildering selection of cordless phones which we have bought and temporarily lost down the back of armchairs or on one memorable occasion in a pair of jeans.
So I am rather fond of the old sturdy dial a friend phones.
Graham assures me that the one installed in his uncle’s house in 1968 still works perfectly, “but no use if you call an answering machine” which I suspect is no bad thing.
But I wonder if the days of the landline are numbered. The eldest three who long ago left home do not have a landline and all of us communicate with each other using a mobile leaving just a hand full of friends and the family in Italy who still call us on the big phone.
But the reason in our house for the demise of the landline is simply because most of the calls are just people wanting to sell us something.
The product has changed from double glazing and help with accident insurance to solar panels and dodgy computers but it remains a nuisance call and goes unanswered.
So we longer lift up the phone or bother to dial back and those terms themselves have all but passed into history.
For why would you dial or lift the receiver when most phones have key pads and even cordless phones only sit on a cradle for as long as it takes to charge them?
In less than a few decades and certainly in the lifetime of our children what we use to phone out on and just what the device can offer has changed out of all recognition.
I doubt that our old black Bakelite sturdy phone with its little draw underneath to a keep the address book would be much use today, and that is one of those yawning gulfs that separate me from Lausanne Road in 1958.
But then I have just upgraded from a clockwork Nokia to one that pretty much does everything, but that is another story
Pictures; 1968 which I rather think is a GPO Telephone 711, courtesy of Graham Gill and the 1969 GPO 1/722F MOD Grey & Green Rotary Dial Trimphone Telephone by Diamondmagna and two generations of Nokia phones, 2000-2015 from the collection of Andrew Simpson
*The story of one house in Lausanne Road, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20one%20house%20in%20Lausanne%20Road
 |
| Dial a friend on a wsll mounted 1968 model |
Long after I have forgotten the divi number, our immediate neighbours and most of my school friends NEW 6251 is locked firmly in my mind.
Not that I got to use it very often.
Back in the 1950s few of the people I knew had a phone and making a call was still regarded as less of a social thing and more one reserved for emergencies.
All of which of course begs the question of why we had one any way.
My grandparents in Derby didn’t have one and most of our friends lived just a few doors away.
Added to which both my parents were of that generation who wrote and received regular letters and were quite content to wait a few days before carrying on with a story or picking up on the local gossip and news.
And phones in the 1950s were not the most user friendly of things.
Ours was heavy clunky and of course the number had to be dialled. Not only that but we were on a party line which meant we shared with somebody else, which was fine if you wanted to listen in to a stranger’s conversation but maddening if you couldn’t make a call because the line was in use.
Nor were the public phones much better. Back then there were fewer of them and there was that quaint system of the two buttons which had to be pushed. Button A to connect, button B to get your money back and if it was a long distance number the faff of talking to the operator and asking to be connected.
 |
| The Trimphone, elegant and likely to slide off the table, 1969 |
We have one here in our home and like the one in Graham’s picture it comes in one colour.
There were other colours, I remember ours in Well Hall Road was grey and the swanky people behind us had a white one.
There is something very reassuring about using a dial instead of buttons, and I only wish ours still worked.
But it was damaged long ago and now will only slowly complete its return half circle from the last number dialled.
Its successor the trimphone now looks less elegant and even more dated. Ours was put in sometime around 1969, and I can’t say it was a success.
As I remember it was too light and had a tendency slide across the table when you were dialling and worse still could fall off the table as you moved around using it.
But at the time it came to represent all that was new and shinny and by the time ours arrived the GPO had become Post Office Telecommunications.
 |
| Nokia 3310, 2000 |
Over the years new phones have come and gone including the revolutionary one which displayed the caller’s number.
More recently there has been a bewildering selection of cordless phones which we have bought and temporarily lost down the back of armchairs or on one memorable occasion in a pair of jeans.
So I am rather fond of the old sturdy dial a friend phones.
Graham assures me that the one installed in his uncle’s house in 1968 still works perfectly, “but no use if you call an answering machine” which I suspect is no bad thing.
But I wonder if the days of the landline are numbered. The eldest three who long ago left home do not have a landline and all of us communicate with each other using a mobile leaving just a hand full of friends and the family in Italy who still call us on the big phone.
But the reason in our house for the demise of the landline is simply because most of the calls are just people wanting to sell us something.
The product has changed from double glazing and help with accident insurance to solar panels and dodgy computers but it remains a nuisance call and goes unanswered.
 |
| Nokia 635, 2015 |
For why would you dial or lift the receiver when most phones have key pads and even cordless phones only sit on a cradle for as long as it takes to charge them?
In less than a few decades and certainly in the lifetime of our children what we use to phone out on and just what the device can offer has changed out of all recognition.
I doubt that our old black Bakelite sturdy phone with its little draw underneath to a keep the address book would be much use today, and that is one of those yawning gulfs that separate me from Lausanne Road in 1958.
But then I have just upgraded from a clockwork Nokia to one that pretty much does everything, but that is another story
Pictures; 1968 which I rather think is a GPO Telephone 711, courtesy of Graham Gill and the 1969 GPO 1/722F MOD Grey & Green Rotary Dial Trimphone Telephone by Diamondmagna and two generations of Nokia phones, 2000-2015 from the collection of Andrew Simpson
*The story of one house in Lausanne Road, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20one%20house%20in%20Lausanne%20Road
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