candlestick phones
wind-up phones
public phones1920s-1930s manual telephone exchanges letter area
codes and
direct dialling using a dial phone 1940s-1950s public phones 1940s-1950s costs of calls 1940s-1950s illegal
free calls 1940s-1950s house
phones 1940s-1960s telegraph poles, phone lines about telegrams telegrams in transit
Telegraph poles and outdoor telephone lines in 1940s and 1950s Britain
When I was a child, the wires connecting telephones to the exchange were not buried underground. It was quite normal to see roads and railways lined with them, which may have been why they were known as telephone 'lines'. They were carried up high, strung between poles known as telegraph poles.
Telegraph poles strung with telephone wires along a railway in the 1940s and 1950s before the lines went underground. Detail from an old painting.
Engineer climbing a telegraph pole with special grips on his legs. Detail from a picture in Milton Keynes Telephone Museum.
Station platform showing telegraph wires along railway lines. Photographed along the Swanage Heritage Railway.
Telephone wires running along the side of a road. Screenshot from an old film.
It was almost hypnotic to look out of the windows of trains and fix one's eyes on the telephone wires. The train windows were very much narrower than those of later trains, so it was rather like viewing through a slit - albeit a wide one. So the telephone wires seemed to go up and down as the train moved from the high points of the poles to the sagging points mid-way between.
If you can add anything to this page or provide a photo, I would be pleased if you would contact me.
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