Anyone remember telephone party lines?

[wwcrazy 10]

Can anyone else remember having one of these?

 

I think we first had a phone in about the late 70s and we had a party line with our neighbours. Can remember you could pick the phone up and hear them talking.

[Nigel Womersle 10]

We had one too in the sixties. You picked up the handset and, if there was no conversation on the line, you pressed the button on top of the phone. This gave you the dial tone. The earlier black bakelite telephones (300 models) had a silver button and under it the message 'Call Exchange'. All it did was give you the dial tone.

[Halibut 12]

I think I remember it from being four or five years old, in the late sixties/early seventies.

[deelightful3 10]

yes we had a party line in the 70s,we shared it with a lady but never found out who she was

[JoeP 11]

The house we live in had been on a party line before we came here, and when we started wanting to use high speed modems (Whoa, dude, 33k.... ) we had some problems on the line which were eventually traced back to the fact that the line hadn't been properly 'converted' from being a party line.

[Guest]

We had one too in the sixties. You picked up the handset and, if there was no conversation on the line, you pressed the button on top of the phone. ...

One of these phones? My nan had one, and I was only thinking the other day what that button next to the receiver was for.

[*Cinderella* 10]

I remember not having a phone at all. We'd have killed to get a party line! For us it used to be the fifteen minute walk to the phone box, then join the queue.

At least you got to listen to some interesting conversations.

And then of course a proper phone in a proper box, once you'd heaved that heavy door open. Button A and Button B. The gentle tick of the clockwork timer. Telephone directories in every box. And everyone outside listening in in your conversation.

[cressida 1,570]

we had a party line, we had it disconnected and then later found out we shared it with a paedophile who ended up in prison eventually

[shoeshine 10]

We had a party line phone installed at our first house in 1964.

 

A choice of colours were available and it looked exactly like the one in Hecate's photo, but in green.

 

Our phone number was just 3 digits and telephone etiquette demanded one never listened in to the conversations of the shared party. I expect it was OK to break into such a conversation though if one needed to make a 999 call. Fortunately we never had to do that.

 

A few years later, we moved home within the village, and had a BT Trimphone with an unshared line.

[Darbees 10]

We had a party line with the old woman over the road and when my dad died one day we obviously had to use the phone quite a lot and each time we picked it up the old bag was on telling all her friends this gossip about us. Needless to say I told her what I thought over the phone.

[Kristian 11]

I remember my Grandma having a party line. One afternoon when I was six or seven, I spent a very pleasant afternoon listening in to a woman across the road swearing words I'd never hear of at a man (I assume her husband or boyfriend)

 

Grandma went mad when she found out (although I seem to remember she also had a listen before putting the receiver down!)

 

I get very geeky about retro telephony, for some reason I find it fascinating.

 

I bought a trimphone a few years back on eBay - it's exactly like this one, but sounds very crackly.

[Nigel Womersle 10]

One of these phones? My nan had one, and I was only thinking the other day what that button next to the receiver was for.

 

It was the same sort of thing, but the one in your picture has the actual button blocked off, but that's where it would have been.