Foreword (Alias……Preface, introduction, prelude, preamble and prologue…)

Earliest recollections

The fact that this tome was ever written I suppose is a matter of coincidence .In the first place there was the British Broadcasting Corporation during one of its more culturally uplifting Sunday evening moments showing an edition of the Antiques Roadshow.. In the second place there was myself open at moment to anything uplifting enough to dispel or at least postpone that “back to work Monday morning feeling”  and, in the third place my lodger, at that time a third year university student taking a break from considering potential subject matters for his BA thesis in Information Technology and willing to contemplate anything which might significantly uplift his bank balance whilst giving very careful consideration to what legal or practical means might be at his disposal for delaying, postponing or at least mitigating repayments on his already enormous student loan.

I will take a few words just to introduce Max my student spare room incumbent since, not only did he make a considerable contribution to what follows but actually manages a number of cameo appearances in the ensuing dialogue.

The fact that I had a student lodger apparently resulted from one of my on line sorties where I accidentally ticked the wrong box and inadvertently volunteered for some kind of student support scheme or other. Max duly arrived and now occupies our spare room during term time.  I have found some advantages in having a lodger. Apart from the financial income it’s refreshing sometimes to have deep stimulating and coherent conversations with an intelligent individual. I have also managed to turn his less desirable traits to my advantage. He is constantly dishevelled and unkempt. His dress sense is abominable. However, on those occasions where I have successfully coerced him into helping me on my allotment I find he functions admirably as a scarecrow. 

The inspiration for this tome, if indeed that is the right word, happened to appear on that evening’s aforementioned programme which were both watching and was wedged somewhere between a Georgian silver teapot, about the hallmarks of which one expert was pontificating enthusiastically, and a early Victorian cabinet concerning which another was encouraging the owner with a plethora of facts surrounding original hand made screws and a patina you could see your face in, and that inspiration was….

………….. An old telephone…….

It was one of those circa 1940’s Bakelite affairs. Big, heavy and black complete with chrome plated dial and brown plaited cord. “A nice example, in good condition” the resident expert on all thinks technical was saying. “Not particularly rare or valuable I’m afraid. Had it been a slightly earlier model and coloured cream…..”….. I think in the end it was valued at about forty quid or something but by the time the valuation came around I actually missed the exact figure because my mind had wandered off.

I suddenly realised that here was an instrument, a great invention that in the few short years that just about mirrored my lifespan to date had gone from being state of the art technology to a state of the ark museum piece. Almost certainly a twenty first century Noah would have had two of them.

I started romanticising I suppose. Reminiscing. For whatever psychological reason there are sometimes certain seemingly unimportant events from ones past life that suddenly and unexpectedly emerge from the depths of the old grey matter which one then remembers in vivid detail. The sight of this old telephone had prompted one such moment.

I mentioned to Max that I could recall exactly the very first time I spoke to someone on the phone or, in those days the telephone, since the popular abbreviation hadn’t been coined by then, probably because there weren’t enough private telephones around in those days to abbreviate.

The year was nineteen fifty-eight, of that I am absolutely certain. I was six. Of that I’m somewhat less certain….. (events I remember. The exact timing of said events sometimes evades the old grey matter)…. since if this event occurred after the fourteenth of February that year I would certainly have been seven…By the by. My parents at that time worked, as the expression went “in service” at one of the several large and rambling estates around which stood our village. The estate was owned by an elderly, somewhat grumpy and (to me at my then tender age) somewhat frightening lady for whom my mother worked as cook, housekeeper and, I suppose, general companion. We lived in the gardener’s lodge at the end of the drive. I was (I some years later learned from my mother) “tolerated” by the old lady, and, provided I was one of those brand of children who were “seen and not heard,” until errands needed to be run I had pretty much had the freedom of the house and its huge gardens, the upkeep of which was my father’s occupation.

The occasion which so vividly comes to mind was when I was in the old lady’s study having been on errand running duty.  Not that she studied but more fussed and fretted over the mountain of bills, letters and newspapers strewn over her old roll top desk. The room was full of old musty leather bound books, the smell of which combined with genuine beeswax polish emanating from the numerous and various sized shelves that contained them seemed to permeate everywhere, I suppose by certain standards it wasn’t really large enough to be called a library. Proudly standing on the carved oak bureau, itself, probably now an Antiques Roadshow candidate, and in the shadow of an oil painting of an old black cat, was the telephone.

I had just helped with my daily holiday errand of helping the old lady settle in her favourite armchair after her morning constitutional walk around the veranda, her huge old black cat, the subject of the aforementioned portrait, had just curled up in her lap, peace and tranquillity was at large in rural Sussex…. when it rang…. The telephone that is. I had never heard it ring before. I looked at the old lady. It rang again. I was genuinely terrified. It rang again.

“Well don’t just stand there gawking. Pick it up young man,” she ordered “Give the caller the number….It’s printed on the dial…and ask who is calling…Be polite mind….If not your Mother will hear of it  !!”

I looked at the old lady in disbelief but the imperial expression had not changed. The telephone rang again…….

I was conscious of my hand shaking and hoped the old lady wouldn’t notice my knees knocking together as I picked up the receiver. It seemed to weigh a ton. More by luck than judgement I didn’t drop it on the floor and actually managed to get the end you talk into and the end that the words coming from the person talking to you come out of the right way round. The numbers on the dial seemed to be running into each other.

“Dane Hill …er…214” I stammered. (Believe me that WAS the number at the time. Like I said there are some things you just never forget) “May I ask who is calling?”

Bear in mind this was also before what became known as STD (Subscriber Trunk Dialling) when places were encoded to just being a series of numbers.

It turned out to be the local village baker, Mr Cottenham, who I, prompted by the old lady, and with an air of growing personal self confidence as the conversation went on, successfully managed to instruct to deliver two French sticks, a tinned loaf and half a dozen Chelsea buns.

After the customary thank you and goodbyes had been duly exchanged I managed to put the receiver down without actually dropping it, and, as politely as a six (or maybe seven) year old could, I excused myself from the old lady. I closed the study door and paused. I was suddenly awestruck by the enormity of what had just happened. My voice…Yes MY voice… had travelled by electricity all the way up to the roof through the wires, over the width of the lawn to the funny looking bracket thingy, mounted on the lodge chimney and then along and past a host of telegraph poles stretching down alongside Church Lane to that strange little windowless hut by the village Post Office called the Exchange and from their diagonally right across the High Street and right into the Bakery. I was staggered. I tried to work out the distance…Wow…. It must have been…Wow… over a whole mile? Well, if not then almost. Ignoring the shouted reprimand of the old lady of “Don’t run down the hallway.” I rushed headlong into the kitchen to tell my mother of this wonderful new and exciting experience.  I must have impressed the old lady for later my mother passed on a whole sixpence with which the old lady had apparently deemed to reward me.

When you think about it, in terms of what it was and how it functioned compared to the functionality we expect modern phones to have, that type of phone, like the one on the TV programme is an antique. Whilst one generally expects the articles featured on that particular programme to be anything up to, say, six centuries in age, here was an item that had gone from being state of the art technology to becoming totally obsolete and nothing more than a collectors item or a museum piece in less than six decades.

Me? I’m sixty four so the old Bakelite phone previously mentioned and I are about the same age. Whether I too am a collector’s item or a museum piece is a matter of opinion. My functionality? That’s my business. In terms of value at auction?….According to my wife….Priceless.

Communications technology has advanced at such an incredible pace that the average citizen simply can’t appreciate it. That compound pace increases year on year.  More words in some way connected with information technology have been added to the dictionary in the last twenty odd years than almost every other subject added together. It seems that in little more than a blink just about everything can be done or found “on line” whilst in the days of my youth the only thing found on line was the washing. What young people, and here I’m talking about those born in the last decade and a half or so, fail to realise is that to many people now in their sixties and beyond, in particular those who have not grown into the technology by virtue of their perhaps not working in industry or commerce where such changes that have come about have been more apparent,…to them even the basic computer is totally alien. Virtually all of this advance has happened within the last twenty-five years…a  single generation.

If I had said to my mother or father in the nineteen fifties, bearing in mind that they were still getting used to that brand new consumer item called the “wire-less” because that’s what it was, that within fifty years I would be able to telephone anywhere in the world from my car or whilst walking the dog using a piece of kit that also had no wires, was less than the size of a deck of playing cards and that had bounced my call back from a satellite orbiting the earth in space and that that same piece of kit could take voice messages, send and receive messages in text (though they would have called it type), and take pictures (though they would have called them photographs) they would have thought I was absolutely crazy….before or after asking me what on earth (or in space) a satellite was supposed to be is a matter of pure conjecture.

Equally if either of them had said to their parents when they were a similar age, …..so that’s around the first world war years…. that by the mid nineteen fifties they would be able to plug in to a socket in their wall and switch on an electric box in the corner of their own front room which would be connected by a piece of cable to a funny shaped aluminium thingy mounted on the chimney and have entertainment programmes in both pictures and sound which they could watch and listen to from their own armchairs, their parents would not only have had similar reservations about their complete sanity but equally their level of expectation would have led them to sincerely doubt whether anyone other than the members of the rich and privileged upper classes would even have this new fangled thing called electricity in their own homes by that time or indeed at any time.

My mother always wanted me to have a good education and make something of myself like her sister’s son, my cousin. My aunt had struggled, scrimped and saved very hard to buy my cousin (who was several years older than me) a set of encyclopaedias that had helped him through a grammar school education and eventually a scholarship. Some years later via what was then called the 11 plus examination I was invited to study at that same school.. My mother petitioned her sister hard for her to let me have this set of books of knowledge such that I could follow in my cousin’s footsteps. She succeeded in her quest and I treasured those books as my main source of knowledge well into my teens.

She would be utterly astonished that a few decades later all of the information contained in those twenty odd volumes, plus just about every important world event that had happened since they were published, could be condensed onto a four and a half inch (115mm) diameter plastic disk (she would have spelt it disc) with the capability of accessing any single scrap of information at the click of an electronic gadget which would become known as a mouse or printing pictures in full colour at the touch of a button. That articles on the same subject or associated theme could be enticed from the same disk with a few deft wrist movements and a few simple clicks after following an arrowhead shaped pointed across an electronic screen, itself no thicker than the frame in the front room holding her own mothers old sepia photograph. The fact that in contrast to the two dimensional black and white books with their very occasional “Colour Plate” the same disk would enable the playing of video (or in her parlance cinema) clips with full wraparound stereo sound affects would be entirely beyond her comprehension. Indeed. In fact, in the age we are discussing here, the late nineteen fifties, I doubt if should would have understood the abbreviation “Stereo”.

Furthermore, far from having to scrimp and save for years to obtain such a thing, such disks would be given away absolutely free with a whole range of home computer related magazines.

What therefore follows is the result of that Sunday night Antiques Roadshow inspiration. It is a mixture of fact and fiction. It takes a light hearted and strictly non technical look at the rise of technology and communication during my lifetime examining things that the generation of the early twentieth century could not venture to dream of, that the generation of the mid and late twentieth century could only watch the development of mostly with unknowing awe and that the present and future generations can luckily (?) take almost for granted.

It also takes a fly on the wall look at the way modern people, particularly in a business environment, talk to each other. It will become apparent that I abhor modern commercial or so called “Corporate” office speak and it’s inherent, incessant, meaningless and totally useless jargon that now seems to afflict every business moment. I’m not suggesting that this is either the fault of or the rise in information technology but the latter, as discussed further in another section of this tome has certainly made it much simpler to proliferate the former.

Author's Note

Spelling mistakes and mis-punctuation is deliberate