You raise a very good point which I had completely forgotten.
In the 1960s when I left school I was an apprentice with the GPO Telephones and one of the jobs I learned was “Planning”. I can’t remember the exact figures but the number of households in the UK with a phone was tiny. Even worse the planning fill for the GPO was absurdly small, something like one pair for 10 houses, hence the shared service (two subs on one line - you pressed a button to connect your line)
When I went to Australia in the mid 1960s I was amazed to find that just about every household had a phone including flat dwellers even boarding houses would have a red phone (privately owned pay phone) in the hallway. The Australian (then) PMG allowed one pair per house and fellow workers thought that I was joking when I told them about shared service.
Australia must be one of the few countries with plenty of street call boxes too, it wasn’t worth collecting the money so calls from them are free.
Totally agree.
I always check my walking route via Ord Survey Map before setting off and take my map and compass with me - but I also take my GPS and mobile phone as back-up. Your map and compass can’t call emergency services if something drastic happens. One can never have too many back up plans!
Same goes for sailing - you need proper navigation charts and knowledge of how to plot a sailing course - and we always check the charts to plot our routes and use official maritime weather reports before setting off - but we also use internet wind & weather reports and if we have a GPS SatNav on board, we are not too sniffy to use that too - whether you’re walking or sailing, you can never have too many back-up options!
I think U.K. lagged well behind some other countries in both telephone services and broadband / internet services when they were first introduced.
I remember when some of my family from Canada came to visit in the 1990s - my Canadian sister-in-law and her children didn’t realise that Brits were charged per minute for internet “dial-up services” because they had totally different pricing structures for internet services. Their service gave them unlimited access. They were mortified when they discovered they had been racking up our phone bill by spending so long online!
Fast forward 30 years and lots of areas in Britain are still relying on those old copper telephone wires for internet connections and telephone.
Haha! I’m sure you’ve got used to the vast distances between towns in Australia but if you think everywhere in Britain is only 10 minutes away from the shops, maybe you’ve been away from U.K. too long! - Come back and visit us in Yorkshire and we’ll show you some lovely Tesco-free countryside - or you can travel up to the wilds of Scotland!
Yeah, but it is not as if you can actually get lost, just keep walking and you are bound to come to a road, let’s face it there is nowhere more than about 100km from the coast for example.
I follow a bloke on YouTube called “Kent Survival” he goes camping and his biggest problem is keeping dry not dying of thirst or hunger.
Terrific, thanks for sharing that link Omah! I’ve just downloaded the OS locate app onto my phone and I’m having a little tinker with it over my flat white. I would defo take out a Silva compass too
Belt and braces!
The OS mobile phone app available when I was a regular fell-walker some years ago was adequate - surprisingly, the old Google Maps was better - but the ones now available are much more sophisticated. Now, I would be using the new OS ones alongside a third-party app PLUS my annotated OS-based paper maps and a compass …
Our parents house didn’t get a telephone until I was around 12 years old. If I’m right about my age at the time, that would be 1956. It was a party line, shared with the neighbours across the road. If voices were heard when the phone was picked up to make a call, the phone was respectfully put down again because it meant the neighbour was using it. Try again a few minutes later.
No telephone dial as I remember. Just pick up the phone and wait for the operator to ask what number was wanted.
Yep…annotated is good. I very recently bought an OS explorer that covers a large expanse of forest in my part of the world. I made sure it was a laminated version, the quality was reflected in the price but a standard paper copy wouldn’t last five minutes during the autumn and winter.
Surpeisngly, British physicist and polymath Robert Hooke from 1664 to 1665 experimented with sound transmission through a taut distended wire. An acoustic string phone is attributed to him as early as 1667.
Dover, hardly a small town, still had a manual exchange when I lived in the UK certainly until the early 70s. The large telephone exchange I worked in after leaving school was mostly Strowger Pre 2000 type switches which had been obsolete in 1936.
Post Office Telephones was its own worst enemy, it set the standard for equipment which was years behind the rest of the world instead of looking at what was available from modern telecommunication manufacturers and adapting it to its own use.
I had never even seen crossbar equipment until I came to Australia and then it was on its way out.
