Number’s Up For The Phone Box

Last phone box standing… Victoria Road

or many years, the humble phone box was a portal into another world for people around here.

And not only for those who didn’t have a phone of their own at home.

There was a privacy about the phone box, the chance to have a conversation without your mum, dad, sisters, brothers, pet dog and the neighbours trying to listen in.

And now, the last phone boxes standing around Ireland are about to be retired completely, as Eir today announce their total removal over the coming months.

And that includes Greystones’ last phone standing, on Victoria Road, just outside the fire station, with a notice having first appeared there in February 2017 informing the town of its imminent demise.

At their peak, there were approximately 3,300 payphone boxes around Ireland, with another 5,000 indoors. They got stranded people a taxi home, drunk people a miniature hotel for the night, or, given that old school, inbuilt VPN, provided the perfect communication tool for secret affairs, blackmail and prank calls.

The anonymity of these old phone systems, with not even the Gardaí able to identify where the hell someone is calling from, seemed designed for devilment.

Such as the time Ronnie Drew was working as an operator (before the music took him elsewhere), merrily getting very much on the wrong side of a rather indignant and, by her own repeated insistence, very important lady. Exasperated, the caller finally snapped, “I want to talk to your superiors! Do you know who I am?”, to which Ronnie flatly replied, “Do you know who I am?“. When he heard the lady reply that indeed she did not, he said, “Good!”, and promptly disconnected the call.

And then there was the aspiring Greystones punk princess who, having worked up the courage to ask the Dublin delinquent of her dreams to her St David’s debs, gave him her number. What she forgot to say was that, her father being town sergeant, the family lived in the house connected to the Greystones garda station. And that they shared the same phone number.

So, when her excited young date from the big smoke phoned to arrange a time to meet for said debs, he was surprised to hear the voice on the other end simply say, “Greystones“. Something the gardaí always said when answering the phone at the Greystones garda station. Confused, and beginning to envisage that there there was just one man answering the phone for the entire population of Greystones, even in the late 1970s, the punk prince simply stammered out the name of the girl he was hoping to talk to. “I’ll put you through…,” came the prompt reply, instantly confirming the startled outsider’s suspicions.

And who can forget the time when a certain enterprising young lad about town (hi, Ronan!) figured out that if you simply attached jump lead clamps to the end of a handset cord, by exposing the wires running down to the public phone (in this case, just up from The Burnaby pub), you could connect directly to the line before the paywall, and spend not a farthing for your long-distance, six-hour calls to every ex-Pats and ex-Marys around the globe you could think of.

Jaysus, there were queues there some nights. Until two guys in a car with out of town plates parked across the road for a few hours, and everyone got the jitters.

And then there was always the lucky dip that was the crosswire, when your phone conversation could suddenly be joined by another, random chat. Or maybe the operator would suddenly pipe in, such as in the infamous story of a Cavan man phoning his friend for a loan of a tenner, only to be told, “I can’t hear you!”, an answer that was repeated when the request was repeated another two times. At which point, the operator cut in with, “I can hear him perfectly“. “Well, you give him the loan of a tenner, so.”

And what’s to become of these old, decommissioned phone boxes? In Finland, some have been converted into one-person saunas, whilst in New York, one enterprising young squatter lived in a phone booth for a month during the lockdowns in 2022. In 2020, Japanese artist Nobuki Yamamoto had the copyrighted idea of filling one with goldfish.

They’ve also become flower boxes, Ziggy Stardust shrines, outdoor libraries and all-weather homes for defibrillators.

Whatever happens to them, there was a certain kind of – quite often literally – windswept magic about calling from a phone box.

Especially when you learnt how to tap out the number…