Written on 12 July 2008
Today, one of my young great nephews asked me, as he does regularly, why I make do with a very basic (aka boring) pay-as-you-go mobile phone. "Because," I tell him patiently, "It serves my purpose. I put £20 into it when I bought it 12 months ago and there’s still more than £13 left." He, like many of his school friends apparently, has an iPhone with unlimited texts and calls, plus unlimited mobile Internet. It costs his Mum a fortune each month. Curiously, when his Mum needs to contact him, he’s always uncontactable: "no signal", he claims. Strange that when he needs a lift home from sports or detentions and the school buses have long since gone, he always manages to get through to me on his mobile without any trouble.
Everyone seems to think that instant communications are something that we didn’t have in decades long gone. We didn’t, of course, but we managed pretty well on what we had: the Post Office Telegram Service.
On this day in 1953, a Sunday, one of my uncles living in Nelson, Lancashire, walked down to his local Post Office at about 11am. He sent a telegram to our house in Wakefield to say that they would be arriving for a short visit that afternoon. They were from the ‘posh’ side of the family and had just acquired their first car and presumably wished to show it off. My parents hadn’t seen them or had any contact with them, apart from Christmas cards, since before the War.
Normally telegrams would be hand-delivered to the addressee within an hour. We were very surprised, therefore, when a car drew up at our front door at 2 pm – just as a Telegram Boy arrived on his official pedal, non-motorised, bicycle to deliver the telegram. The relations, aunt, uncle and three bored kids, had taken nearly three hours to cover the 40 miles over the Pennines from Nelson to Wakefield. Uncle was very upset when he realised that it was his telegram that was only just being delivered to us. We learned later that when they got back home he complained to the Post Office, in person, about the late delivery of his telegram – and got an instant full refund and an apology from a manager.
My aunt's name was Ethel - I believe she came from my Mum's side of the family but I've been unable to trace anything about her from Ancestry. There is no record in my diaries of the names of this uncle or any of the children and, as far I can recall, I never met any of them again.
48 hours later I went off to the RAF Aircrew Selection Centre at Hornchurch - click here to read about that.