Telephonic Youth at Science and Engineering Day 2022
On 7 May, the Telephonic Youth team took part in our second SOTSEF 2022 event (after our Community Takeover at John Hansard Gallery), the University of Southampton’s Science and Engineering Day. Following on from our stand at Hands On Humanities Day in November 2021 and pop-ups at libraries throughout Southampton in February and March 2022, we once again set up shop with our old, disassembled telephones and laptops to gather visitors’ memories.
Although, this time we had even more phones: a set of mobile phones from the 2000s (liberated from a family member’s garage) and a Fisher Price rotary telephone toy. We were also supported, once again, by two wonderful University of Southampton History students, who gave up their Saturday to help us out and (we hope) get a chance to see community history in action.
Our toy phone
We knew that the old, disassembled telephones would be interesting objects for younger visitors. Many do not have landline telephones at home, let alone rotary phones, and enjoyed working out how to put them back together and – had we had the means to plug them in – make a phone call. What I, in particular, was less prepared for was how alien some of the older mobile phones would be.
Some of them had black and white only screens and no cameras while others didn’t have the ability to connect to the internet. The basic hallmarks of design were also fundamentally different: much smaller screens and many more buttons; one of them flipped shut while the other slid to conceal the buttons. The way that phones have changed over time was brought home by a comment from one young visitor who picked up a phone that I (a 31-year-old man) had owned brand-new as a teenager: ‘this must be 100 years old!’
But this post isn’t about me. Throughout the day, the team had lots of conversations with visitors about their memories of using the phone while growing up. Visitors kindly submitted these to our online map and we’ll also continue to share their stories via our social media. The sheer variety of memories which are shared with us is always heartening and really illustrates the many different ways in which children and young people acted as telephone users during our period of study.
Some people remembered vividly their parents and grandparents using bakelite phones and being made to answer calls in a certain way, whether listing the telephone number or the family name. Others remembered calling friends and ‘hoping that no-one picked up the other phone and listened in’ (Bishopstoke, Eastleigh, 1988).
SOTSEF was a wonderful opportunity to speak to people living in and around Southampton about their memories, and the team would like to thank our colleagues in PERu for all their hard work in organising the event. We’re still collecting memories of using the telephone while growing up anywhere in the UK from the 1980s onwards. We’d love it if you could share your memories too through our website.
The replica BT phonecards (courtesy of BT Heritage & Archives) and cookie jar we used to collect feedback
