Post
If you wanted to contact somebody: you sent them a letter or a card.
If you wanted to say thank you: you did the same. The postal service
was efficient and letters were delivered in a day or two, with often
two deliveries each day.
One feature I used when travelling abroad was "Poste Restante".
You designated in advance a post office in a town as your address --
then called in person to collect the letter. This was useful when
touring, camping, etc. I remember picking up letters from Marilyn in
Nantes and in Thessaloniki.
Telegrams
If urgent contact was needed you could send a telegram. This required
going into a post office and filling out the letters and numbers on a
form. An abbreviated style was usual. The message was then sent (by
telegraph) to a post office near the recipient and a telegram boy then
delivered the printed out message to the address.
This was an expensive way to send a short message - so was mostly
used for emergencies or for important information. I remember getting
my A-level results while on holiday by telegram.
Telephones
In the 1940s, very few houses had a telephone. When my father became headmaster and moved to Whitchurch, he applied for a phone. After waiting months, a phone was installed. At that time, Whitchurch still had a manual exchange: you lifted the phone off its cradle which alerted an operator sitting in the exchange [after they had finished their row of knitting according to folk-lore] and then spoke to give the exchange and number required. I passed the exchange in one of the terraced houses in Old Church Road, Whitchurch, on my way to school and I remember seeing the operators sitting confronted with banks of plug panels. Our house was allocated Whitchurch 373 and, I remember, my grandmother who lived alone about a mile away, was Whitchurch 4.
In due course automatic local exchanges were progressively introduced and you could dial local numbers. As well as those in your exchange, several nearby exchanges could be reached automatically using suitable short codes. When we wanted to communicate between Maesycymmer and Newport; this was deemed to be not a local call. But by using the Maesycymmer to Cardiff code and then the Cardiff to Newport code, you could get through as a local call. Manual operator intervention was needed to make a non-local call.
Subscriber Trunk Dialling came in progressively from 1958: allowing direct dial within the UK.
When away from home, you had to rely on phone boxes to make contact. The early ones were the classic shape and had a phone with two buttons. It took 3 (or four) old pennies and then you pressed A to start the conversation or B to get your money back. It was always worth pushing B on entering a box, in case someone had forgotten to get their money back. It was possible to make a call without paying by pushing the cradle up and down to give the required numbers of clicks - but rather hard to achieve.
Mobile Phone
After having to make a call from my boat via a coast radio station (using VHF) at significant cost, I decided to get a basic mobile phone. I duly obtained a Motorola d170 (brick style with extendable aerial) in 1997. This had an 04.. number which was in use at that time. Voice and SMS were the only useful options and it only had the GSM 900 band. The good feature was that it would take standard AA batteries if needed.
I later (2002) bought a more compact (2 band mobile): a Siemans A50. [so Marilyn got the "brick"].
Since it was always stressful to make a call from a foreign call box, to make it easier for me, I later bought a phone which had US bands as well as UK (3-band): a Sagem V55 (with basic camera too).
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