These days, in the streets and cafes, on buses and trains, or sitting in the park, every second person you see is talking on a mobile phone or otherwise fiddling with one of these electronic devices.

When I was a child living in Brighton, a “telephone” was something quite different. For one thing, it was not portable because it was attached by a wire to a socket in the wall. For another, the cost of installing a handset and subscribing to the telephone service meant that only reasonably affluent people could afford to have their own telephone.

We therefore did not have a telephone at home. If the need arose to make a call, we could use the telephone at the house next-door-but-one with the kind permission of the owners. More usually, we would go to one of the local public telephone booths of which there were several not far from the house. These familiar iron and glass installations, painted bright red, were a common sight in the streets of the time but have all but disappeared today.

In those days, there were two sorts of calls, local calls and trunk calls, that is, long distance calls to other parts of the country and even abroad. Local calls, as the name implies, were calls within the local area and, throughout my time in Brighton, cost 2 old pence. Yes, you paid a fixed rate of 2d no matter how long your call lasted!

You have perhaps seen pictures of these old telephones, or even a surviving one in a museum. Below the receiver and dial was a big black metal box and beside it a shelf for telephone directories. The box had painted on it the large white letters ‘A’ and ‘B’. These labelled the two buttons which operated the payment mechanism.

To make a local call, you lifted the receiver and inserted two copper pennies in the slot on top of the box. You then dialled the number and waited for the other party to respond. On hearing the response (they could talk to you but you could not talk to them yet), you had to press button ‘A’. You would hear the pennies drop into the interior of the box and you could now speak to the other person. If no one answered your call, you could instead press button ‘B’ and this would result in your pennies tumbling down a chute into a little collecting tray.

People sometimes forgot to press ‘B’ after a failed call and we kids would sometimes do the rounds of the local phone boxes, pressing the button in case there was uncollected cash to be collected. Another trick was to roll up a ball of paper and stuff it in the chute. If someone pressed ‘B’ the money would be caught by the paper and the chances were that the person would think the return mechanism had failed and would leave without checking further. The miscreants would return later, pull out the paper and collect the harvest.

If making a local call was simplicity itself, the same was not true of phoning further afield. This was called “making a trunk call”. For this, you needed to come supplied with plenty of small change.

First you would dial 0 (later 100) and when the operator answered, ask for “trunk calls” or simply “trunks”. You would be connected to the trunk call operator who would start by asking you what number you wished to call: “What number do you require?”

The operator would tell you how much miney to put into the slot atop the black box. She (the operator was almost inevitably female) would then attempt to connect you via the network. If she succeeded, she would say “Press button ‘A’ now, caller”. Having done so, you would have three minutes in which to talk to the other party.

Electronic beeps would warn you when your call was about to end or the operator might break in and ask whether you wished to continue talking. If so, you needed to insert another payment and press button ‘A’.

How did the operator know that you had inserted the correct amount and not just any old coins? Because each coin made a characteristic ping as you put it in the slot. It must have taken practice to recognize the pings and add up the amount.

When I speak of dialling the number, I am referring to the old style rotatory dial, not to anything resembling the modern keypad that is now used on mobile phones, secured doors and a thousand and one other devices. I read somewhere that modern schoolchildren, on being presented with a rotatory dial couldn’t work out how to use it.

Old-style telephone with buttons ‘A’ and ‘B’

The dial was a metal disc, perforated around the edge with 10 holes numbered 1 to 0 and with the 0 following the 9. (See the photo above.) To dial one digit you put your finger in the hole in rotating disc that showed the digit concerned, and used it to turn rotate the disc clockwise until your finger met the stop. Then you let go of the dial which rotated back to its rest position sending a signal corresponding to the chosen digit as it did so. You would do this for as many digits as were in the phone number. Though this may seem clumsy in an age of keypads, it was really quite an ingenious solution to the otherwise difficult problem of how to communicate the required number to an unintelligent (“dumb” in modern parlance) machine. This is indicated by the fact that it was adopted worldwide.

These days, phone numbers are given as purely numeric strings. In the UK, a phone number has 11 digits which is not easy to memorize. In the days of which I speak, the telephone dial included letters as well as numbers. The letters were grouped three to a digit on the dial. (Some modern mobile phones still show these letters.) Dialling a letter, of course, was the same as dialling a number but the use of letters helped in remembering someone’s phone number. Whereas today the leading digits of the phone number indicate the area (for example, 0207 and 0208 represent areas of London), letters served the same purpose. Each exchange had a name and to make a call, you dialled the first three letters of the exchange name, followed by the numeric digits. So, for example, one London exchange was called Gulliver and to call a number in that area, you might dial something like GUL 1234.

Because it took time to connect a trunk call, not to mention an international call, you might have to spend quite a while in the telephone kiosk if you were using a public phone. Often you would exit to find a queue of impatient people, forced to wait while you dialogued with the operator and inserted heaps of coins. Sometimes, people would thump on the glass in the hope of hurrying you along. Again, it was not unknown for a call to be disconnected prematurely as a result of some fault in the system. You would then have to call up the operator, explain the problem andf start all over again, much to the joy of the people waiting…

Today’s portable phone users, chatting away to friends here there and everywere don’t know how much fun they are missing!