The ordinary house didn’t have a telephone. The only places that had telephones were business houses and many of them didn’t have any. The ordinary grocer, the ordinary butcher didn’t have a telephone.
I remember the day that I was sent up to Harold Watts by my parents to ask him to telephone Reading Hospital to find out how my grandfather was and Harold Watts said, “Of course.” He dialled the number and he said, “You listen and you ask the chap’, and it was a primitive instrument all together. The way it operated of course by today’s standards. Young people today would never credit the way the telephone worked because right up until, well into the fifties, I suppose, all connections were made by a hand-operated connection. It was the telephone exchange which was all hand-operated. Here at Wokingham there was a long bench with about a dozen girls. But if you wanted to call from here to—say—Liverpool it was a very nice, complicated business. You’d say to the girl when you picked up the phone and you eventually got through. You had to wait even for the girl to answer from the exchange. You would say to the girl, “I want a long distance call please to Liverpool”. And she’d say, “OK What’s the number in Liverpool?” and you’d give her the number and first of all there would be more crackling and a voice would say, “Reading—Can I help you?” and the girl on the exchange would say “Can you put me through to Oxford please” and a bit later more crackles and a voice would say, “Oxford, Oxford.” The girl in Reading would say, “Oxford, could you put me through to Birmingham I have a call to Liverpool?”
And so it went through. And if she left the line open you could hear the palaver and it took about ten minutes to get a call through. And quite often she would break off in the middle of it and say, “I’m having difficulty caller. I can’t get a line through and if you hang up I’ll ring you back.” Today you press a half dozen buttons and there you are.