Author: Eve Colpus

Our research explores the changing nature of children and young people’s telephone use and telephone cultures in late-twentieth century Britain. Within this wider focus, we have been keenly aware of the importance of place in this history. In this post, we think further about the memories that people have shared with us in the first year of our work collecting stories on our digital map. We examine the importance of place to our research methods, how people articulate their memories, and in the experience of growing up (and using the telephone) over the last four and a half decades.

Place and our research

When people submitted their memories through our website, one of the things that we asked for was the ‘Address of Memory’. This information (as set out in the Privacy Notice) was required in order to create an interactive online map through which users could explore other people’s memories. In our in-person engagement, if asked about the address, we told people that they could be as detailed as they liked—many chose to give a street address including house number and postcode, but others chose to link their memories to particular neighbourhoods, towns or villages. This ensured that, as closely as possible, the pin on the map aligned with the contributor’s own geographical imagination.

As we have discussed previously in other posts on this site, our project focused initially on our home city of Southampton and the surrounding Hampshire area. We soon broadened out the scope of our research to avoid being too prescriptive about the location of memory submissions, especially as many of the people we spoke to in our public engagement work at locations around Southampton did not grow up in the city. Our use of social media also returned submissions from people from across England. We wanted to honour this engagement, and so adapted our geographical focus.

We did also receive memories from people who grew up in countries other than the UK. This again presented an important methodological and ethical challenge, and we adapted our practice to invite these contributors to submit a memory linked to a place in the UK. These submissions are a reminder that some people’s geographical imagination of their childhood and youth are global, and even if they spent their youth in the UK, the memories they most wanted to share were linked to other places.[1]

A geographical analysis of the submissions to our website did not reveal a substantial difference between memories linked to urban and rural locations. In part, this is a result of the small sample size, with the greatest differences evident over time. It is also a result of Britain’s heavily urbanised society and the massification of (youth) culture, of which the telephone was part, that there was a striking similarity in experiences.[2]

Place and people’s memories

Some of the memories we received provide forms of evidence of what geographers and social scientists call ‘sense of place’. Broadly speaking, sense of place is a term used to describe the links between people’s identities, the meanings they give to particular places, and their attachment (or lack of) to them.[3] The way that people talk about places and spaces in their memories might therefore be illustrative of their sense of place and how they, now as adults, have given meaning and developed attachments to the sites and spaces they frequented as children.[4]

One example, submitted by someone who lived in Southampton in 1996, gives an insight into how a ‘sense of place’ might work in some of the stories on our map:

Growing up I lived at number 5 Turnstone Gardens, and my friend lived at number 40. It was probably a 2 minute stroll to her house. And yet, every time I went to her house or she came to mine, we had to call our house phone for two rings then hang up, so our parents knew we were there safely.

(5 Turnstone Gardens, Southampton, UK, 1996)

The individual also shared a map of the route from their house to their friend’s house (see the Main Image of this blog post) indicating the dissonant senses of place between the short, relatively safe route travelled by the contributor and the danger implied by the parents’ insistence on the then near-ubiquitous rule to give ‘two [or three] rings then hang up’ to let them know that they were safe.

Alongside the physical mapping by the contributor above, some memories suggested a process of mental mapping. Examples included measuring the distance to a phone box and inferred the theme of safety, which we discussed in our previous blog. Some submissions pointed to this usage within an emergency situation. One contributor, who recalled a memory linked to them being of an age when they were legally able to drive a car, submitted: ‘I can remember having to walk almost 8 miles to find a telephone box this was because I had broken down and had no clue where the next telephone box would be’.

Another contributor, who attended university in Hull, recalled that ‘one of the first things you learnt about Hull was it had its own telephone exchange and distinct white phone boxes’. In their memory, the colour and location of the phone boxes provided a vivid recollection of a significant aspect of their time as a student—calling home—with the distinct character of Hull’s street furniture adding to their sense of place in their university town.

Photograph of four cream telephone kiosks in Hull. Photograph by David Wright (CC BY-SA 2.0) <https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/244069> [Last accessed 4 October 2022]

Place, childhood, and youth

In the submissions we have collected in the first year of our digital mapping work, the most significant shift in terms of the places and spaces associated with children and young people’s telephone use have been the result of technological change. Of the 58 memories shared with permissions to use in publications, 19 (33 per cent) were of using a telephone kiosk (phone box); 34 (59 per cent) were memories of landline usage; and 13 (22 per cent) were related to mobile phones. The phone box memories were primarily from the 1970s and 1980s, with five dating from the 1990s and one from the 2000s. This should not be surprising. The number of BT phone boxes in the UK peaked in 1992, when there were 92,000 in operation, alongside those offered by other providers.[5] Since then, their numbers and usage have declined.

The continued increase in ownership of domestic landline phones and, from the late 1990s, mobile phones, meant that, over time, children and young people’s telephone use became disassociated from the phone box.[6] The significance of phone boxes as landmarks within young people’s everyday lives—as highlighted by the mental mapping discussed above—likely slowly diminished.

Within the home, the location of the landline—often in the living room or hallway—shaped children and young people’s experiences of telephone use. The fixedness of the landline meant that privacy was an issue, but it also situated emerging telephone cultures—whether this is understood as extended phone calls to friends and romantic partners or the burgeoning use of the telephone for other forms of entertainment, including television phone-ins—within a limited distance of the phone socket.

Portability and personalisation, in contrast, are defining features of mobile phone and smartphone use. Yet, childhood memories shared with us suggest there was a gradual uptake of the practice of using a mobile phone outside of children’s immediate local geographies. Submissions to our map have included two memories of mobile phone use dating from the late 1990s, one being a child’s first use of a mobile phone (using a parent’s work mobile phone in the kitchen of the family home), and the second, a recollection of using a friend’s mobile phone at school to play games during breaks. Although only two examples at the time of analysis, these submissions remind us of the value of looking at evidence of young people’s mobile phone use within family and peer settings, as much as ‘personalised’ modes of use.

Our reflections in this blog, as in our previous two blogs, are based on the submissions we had published on the Telephonic Youth Digital Map by 15 August 2022.[7] We are continuing to collect memories on our map, and you can add your own submissions here.

[1] We discussed our approach and some preliminary conclusions on this theme in a seminar paper we gave at the Britain at Home and Abroad seminar, at the Institute of Historical Research: Aaron Andrews and Eve Colpus, ‘Community histories and the challenge of scale: a global history of Britain’s telephonic youth, c. 1984-1999’ (10 March 2022).

[2] There is a great deal of writing on the massification of culture, but for a very influential theory see the essays in T. W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, edited by J. M. Bernstein (London, 1991).

[3] On sense of place, see Maria Lewicka, ‘Place attachment: How far have we come in the last 40 years?’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 31, 3 (2011), pp. 207-30.

[4] On children’s sense of place, see Lucy Grimshaw and Lewis Mates, ‘“It’s Part of Our Community, Where We Live”: Urban Heritage and Children’s Sense of Place’, Urban Studies, 59, 7 (2022), pp. 1334–52.

[5] Nigel Linge and Andy Sutton, The British Phonebox (Stroud, 2017), p. 55.

[6] See statistics of the increase in domestic landline phone ownership cited in footnote 4 in ‘Tracing themes in our digital map’, Telephonic Youth website, 25 August 2022 <https://telephonicyouth.co.uk/tracing-themes-in-our-digital-map/> [accessed 4 October 2022]. The UK General Household Survey began publishing annual data on mobile phone ownership in 2000.

[7] Following the completion of the research project and the period that the website remains publicly available, the dataset of submissions to the Telephonic Youth Digital Map will be deposited and made accessible through a repository, in accordance with Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) / UKRI policies.

Main Image: Map submitted by a contributor as part of the memory they shared to the Telephonic Youth Digital Map.

As we look back on a year of submissions to the Telephonic Youth digital map, in this post we identify key themes in the memories that are now published on our map.* A thematic analysis of the memories which have been shared with us reveals some interesting factors in the way that people articulate their memories of using the telephone. It also provides an insight into how memories shared by individuals relate to the wider history of childhood, history of youth culture, the history of the family and history of technology in the late twentieth century.

Technologies

In articulating their memories, 47 per cent of contributors specifically engaged with the telephone as a piece of technology. Submissions often reference distinct factors relating to its changing form and function during our time period. One contributor, for example, noted:

The phone was on a cord (no cordless in those days). In later years I remember sitting for ages on the stairs talking to school friends on the phone planning the latest shopping trip or junior nightlife activity for teens! […] The day we went cordless was a momentous one with much excitement.

(Clare Court, Loughor, Swansea, 1990s)

This technological change was significant as it continually reshaped how, where, when, and why children and adolescents used the telephone, reshaping youth culture and youth leisure in the process.

Submissions shared by contributors suggest the process of adapting to new technologies—whether this is understood as being new to the user, such as a cordless phone, or a relatively new innovation like mobile phones—was understood often to be a significant ‘moment’.[1] However, as many as 10 per cent also remembered being taught to use long-established telephonic devices.^[2]

One especially important experience in two contributors’ childhoods was learning to use a telephone kiosk (phone box) in Brownies, a section of the Girl Guides for girls aged between 7 and 10.^[3] As one former Southampton-based Brownie recalled:

[Brown Owl] taught us to how to use a public phone as part of a Brownie Badge. I remember waiting anxiously for my turn rubbing my coins together (two big 5 pences I think), would I remember all the instructions? Snowy Owl was back in the Church Hall answering all our calls!

(Water Lane, Totton, Southampton, 1984)

The Cub Scouts also taught their members to use the telephone as part of various badges but we received no memories of this, despite efforts to engage the Scout Association and its followers on social media. Given the small sample size of our dataset (61 memories submitted at the time of this analysis), it would be difficult to draw firm conclusions about the relative significance of telephony training to Girl Guides and (what was then called) Boy Scouts, though it seems clear that the experience of learning to use a phone box in Brownies was of such significance that it was recalled decades later.

Safety

There were many reasons that children and young people were taught to use telephone kiosks in organisations such as Brownies and Cubs. For most of the twentieth century, they were the most accessible means of making a telephone call either because people did not have phones in their own homes, or because they were away from their fixed landlines. However, public payphones were also crucial for what we might define as personal safety, with memories on this theme recorded in 21 per cent of submissions.

One contributor, for example, submitted a general recollection of using the payphone to keep in touch with parents:

I remember using telephone boxes, these were used to tell my parents what time I’d be home. You could do a return call where you would be connected to the other line. Just before you were connected, the operator would say to your parent, you have a call from…would you like me to connect you.

(Lewisham, London 1994)

For another contributor, the phone box itself became a physical refuge from a dangerous animal:

I was on my way home from school, when I got chased by [a] German Shepherd. I hid in a red phonebox and phoned the operator, asking them to reverse charges and call home. I spoke to my mum who sent my uncle to come and rescue me. I waited in the phone box til he arrived, I’ve been scared of German Shepherds ever since.

(Boundary Way, Havant, 1995)

Access

By far the most widely mentioned theme, occurring in 59 per cent of the memories we received, was access. Ownership of a telephone is a key issue here. Across our time period, although the number of households with a landline steadily increased, some did not have a landline.^[4] Access is defined broadly also to include factors such as having to share the telephone with other family members or neighbours, and billpayers attempting to restrict the amount of time (and money) spent on the phone.

Underpinning the question of access, and often linked to it, was the issue of money. 47 per cent of submissions mentioned money as a factor in their childhood or adolescent telephone use. Some recalled the requirement to take spare change in case of an emergency and the noted ability to reverse charges as a way to avoid having to pay. For others, finances were a concern for parents trying to reduce or control telephone bills. Submissions to our map show that this was a financial issue of which children and young people were aware acutely, either because their parents made them contribute to the costs of the bill, or because their own subversive use of the telephone was exposed upon receipt of a bill.^[5] There are many conclusions to be drawn about the significance of money in shaping children and young people’s telephone use. Certainly their awareness of the financial implications provides an insight into the way young people understood their position within the domestic economy and the decisions they might take to participate within telephone cultures —whether calling friends, or, in the 2000s, voting for participants on reality television programmes.

Play

The submissions we have received so far suggest the use of the telephone in what we might define broadly as ‘play’ or recreation was becoming increasingly important in our period of interest. The theme of ‘play’ was present in 29 per cent of submissions, the majority of which were memories dating from the 1990s and 2000s. While, especially from the 2000s, many of the submissions referred to phone-based games, such as ‘Snake’ (first featured on the Nokia 6110), earlier memories point to playful or creative uses of telephones.^[6] For example, one story of siblings recalled humorously responding to cold callers in the late 1990s:

As young teens at the end of the 90s/early 00s, my sister and I often used to answer calls from marketing firms asking for our mother. We always said she had run off with the window cleaner & not to call again as we were v upset.

(Conkell, Winsley, Bradford-on-Avon, BA15 2JF, c.1999)

What might this tell us?

In our previous blog we noted that as engaged researchers we need to be attuned to the implications of our research practice and the ways in which public engagement as a research method might have shaped the kinds of memories we have received. Nevertheless, the striking overlap in the themes which people have shared can tell us much about the key reasons why children and young people used the telephone in late twentieth and early twenty-first century Britain. There are notable continuities with earlier periods in some cases, whilst also the novelty of the new. The submissions also provide a useful insight into the cultures which children and young people created as conscious consumers and users of telephones. Memories from some contributors link to the idea of ‘children’s worlds’, but others point to how children and adolescents negotiated spaces shared with adults. Our third blog post in the series will explore this topic further by thinking about the importance of place in the telephone memories we have received.

* The analysis in this blog post is linked to the data collected in submissions to the Telephonic Youth Digital Map during the first year of data collection. Following the completion of the research project and the period that the website remains publicly available, the dataset will be deposited and made accessible through a repository, in accordance with the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) / UKRI policies.

[1] For discussion of cordless telephony as part of the development of the idea of ‘personal communications’, see John Gardiner and Wally Tuttlebee, ‘The Future of Personal Communications’, in W. H. W. Tuttlebee, Cordless Telecommunications in Europe: the Evolution of Personal Communications (London; New York, 1990), pp. 223-250. On the history of the mobile phone, see Jon Agar, Constant Touch: A Global History of the Mobile Phone (Cambridge: 2004).

[2] This finding fits with Sonia Livingstone’s argument that new media supplement rather than replace old media and ‘new forms of media transform or are transformed by patterns of use surrounding older forms of media’: Sonia Livingstone, Young People and New Media: Childhood and the Changing Media Environment (London: 2003), p. 15.

[3] The junior section of the Guide Association was officially recognised in 1914 (first known as Rosebuds, then Brownies), and by 1920 the age range of the Brownie section was fixed as under 11 years:  Tammy Proctor, Scouting for Girls: A Century of Girl Guides and Scouts (Santa Barbara, Calif., 2009), p. 37.

[4] The percentage of UK private households with a fixed-line telephone increased from 50% in 1974 to 78% in 1984, to 91% in 1994 and 92% in 2004. Statistics taken from: The General Household Survey 1974 (London, 1977), p. 83; General Household Survey 1984 (London, 1986), p. 63; Living in Britain: Results from the 1994 General Household Survey (London, 1996), p. 26; General Household Survey: Results for 2004 (London, 2006), p. 178.

[5] BT trialled itemised telephone billing in some areas of the UK as early as 1983. See ‘BT’s Innovation Timeline’ <https://shop.bt.com/mini-sites/techinnovation> [last accessed 25 August 2022].

[6] Nokia introduced the game of Snake into the Nokia 6110 in 1997. See Nigel Linge and Andy Sutton, 30 Years of Mobile Phones in the UK (Stroud, 2015), p.33.

Main image: Word cloud showing the most common words used in written memories submitted to the Telephonic Youth Digital Map in its first year.