Progress

I can remember the days when people who had telephones were a very exclusive set. Most ordinary folk wouldn’t have known how to go about having a telephone. Later, when the general population felt entitled to have a telephone if they wanted one badly enough, it was having two telephones that marked you out as being among the elite. No one owned their telephone; they could only rent it from the GPO (General Post Office).

In order to acquire a telephone within the foreseeable future, you had to have a damn good reason for wanting it. You had to be a doctor, or belong to some other profession that absolutely necessitated having one; everyone else went onto a waiting list. When your turn eventually came, however, you were granted the choice of having either an ivory or green one.

It was a serious offence to tamper with your telephone; punishable with a heavy fine, or even imprisonment. Once your phone had been installed, that is where it stayed. You couldn’t just plug it in wherever you wanted to, like you can today. Working class families who were brazen enough to apply for a telephone were often quite nervous about using it for anything other than the most justifiable of reasons, like a medical emergency, or their home being on fire.

It was Margaret Thatcher who changed everything; she took telephones away from the Post Office and let the free market have them. Now we can have a phone in every room and one in each pocket if we like, and we don’t have to ask for anyone’s permission. For those of us who grew up with how it used to be it felt like a very radical event when they freed up the telephone; a bit like the first time they let us see a pair of tits on the BBC.