BACK in the era when fathers-to-be were kept well away from all matters pertaining to labour and birth, a worried husband in Cork left his home at 3am and scurried to the local phone box.
He called the telephone exchange and asked to be put through to Youghal District Hospital, anxious to find out if his heavily pregnant wife had safely delivered their child.
The operator found the number engaged, but, this being Ireland, he still had news for the impatient, stressed man: “The hospital phone is busy... but congratulations, I overheard that your wife had a baby son about half an hour ago!”
This delightful tale - as told by Mike Hackett to the Holly Bough several years ago (his father was the operator) - sums up the ‘small town’ nature of Irish life, and also the intrinsic role once played in it by the ubiquitous public phone box.
For the bones of a century, these kiosks scattered across cities, towns and villages were places where all human life played out.
Down crackling lines, while you shoved in twopences to keep the chat going, friendships and romances were kindled, deaths were imparted, babies were born, and gossip was exchanged.
In the days before the now-universal mobile phone, if you were out of the house - or needed a little privacy - and wanted to make plans, cadge a lift home, get a job, or make or break a date, this was where you did it.
Those of who remember those days - and they weren’t too long ago - may have raised a poignant smile with the news last week that the last public phone kiosks left standing are about to go the way of the dodo, the telegraph, and the fax machine.
Almost 100 years after the first one appeared on Irish streets, eir announced they would all be disconnected over the coming months, and deactivated by the end of the year.
Truly, the end of an era.
The first public pay phone in Ireland was installed in Dawson Street, Dublin, in 1925, and, at their peak, there were close to 3,300 across the Irish landscape. They became part of the fabric of society.
They were so well-used that, in the early days, businesses like shops and pubs wanted them outside their door, to catch passing trade; sometimes, politics and who you knew played a part in their location.
And they weren’t just there for the chats; phone boxes could be handy little homes for the homeless and passing drunks, some were used as urinals, or by graffiti artists.
They also proved a handy shelter from the rain - courting couples might steam up the windows during a particularly heavy shower.
The privacy kiosks afforded was handy for gossips and lovelorn young men and women, in an era when the home phone was always within earshot in the hall or kitchen, and its fixed cord meant you couldn’t move the darn thing!
Often, at peak times, there would be long queues waiting to use the public phone.
New York-based Cork journalist Dave Hannigan recalled using the payphone on Clashduv Road in Togher in his youth, when, as a young fella, he craved a bit of privacy.
“You went and stood in a queue with your peers,” he said. “What I remember most about those queues, apart from the cold and the whispering into the receiver in case the people outside might hear you, was the orderly way the whole thing ran.
“Basically, your time was up when the other members of the queue judged it to be up. Once you were in there too long, somebody would bang on the glass and tell you to get off. And, most of the time, that was enough to do it.”
A fabulous documentary called Bye Bye Now, which won Best Short Film at the Cork Film Festival in 2009, recalled the era of the phone box, and in it, an elderly couple in Killaloe, Co. Clare, told of how their love blossomed through one.
The man was working away in Dublin and he and his girlfriend used to call each other by arrangement using their local phone boxes – come hail or shine or sleet or snow – at the same time each week.
“We only spoke for five minutes. It was expensive,” the lady recalled.
Eventually, frustration overcame the male suitor: “I’ve had enough of this, let’s get married,” he said on the phone one day. She said: “Yes.”
In the decades when emigration was rife, pubic phone boxes were a lifeline for families. As someone says in the film, “a chat was better than 20 letters”.
One lady relates how, in her Kerry village, there were three public phones - one in the garda station, one in the pub, and then the kiosk in the street. “My father was a guard, and in the pub the whole world could hear you, so I went to the phone box,” she says.
Also on Bye Bye Now, a Donegal man relates a story of two “average- sized ladies” seeking shelter together from a shower who got stuck in a phone box.
“When they closed the door, they couldn’t get out, they couldn’t use the handle. I’m still laughing...”
A man in the film shares the story of when he found out he had become a father.
“It was a Saturday morning in October, 1969, and I went to the phone booth, called the hospital, and was told my wife had produced a beautful daughter. I put down the receiver and walked out of the phone box as Superman. I went in as Clark Kent. I went home and cried my eyes out.”
You can see Bye Bye Now, directed by Aideen O’Sullivan and Ross Whitake, on YouTube.
Typically, the Irish often found ways to cheat the system with the kiosks. Some inventive wags discovered foreign coins that were not legal tender in Ireland, and were worth very little, could be used in the slots. Washers of a certain diameter often sufficed too.
When decimal currency was introduced in 1971, word got round that the 1p coin was the same size as the old sixpence and worked just as well in phone boxes.
Of course, despite kiosks being such a part of the social fabric of life for so long, we cannot stand in the way of progress. Be honest, when did you last use one?
It’s no surprise, then, that eir are taking the last kiosks standing out of commission, but it’s also heartening that some are being reinvented with a practical use.
Some have been turned into defibrillator booths, and there are plans to turn others into electric vehicle charging points. One phone box in Clonakilty was turned into a mini-library a few years ago.
I was also fascinated to discover that the phone box in Kinsale is actually an original red one from the UK, which has been painted green.
Few of us would stand in the way of progress, and clearly public phones boxes long ago reached the end of the line. Even so, I was cheered to hear that, when plans were drawn up to remove the public phone box from Castletownshend a few years ago, a local campaign sought to retain it for posterity.
When I checked this week, the kiosk is still there in the village, and the locals hope to put a defibrillator in there at some point.
After all, now that they have come for our defunct phone boxes, what is to stop them coming next for our post boxes?
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Salute to lifeboat crews across Cork and beyond who’ve been saving souls for 200 years More in this section
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