Throwback Thursday: Phone box ruse that earned us free calls!

You never know what you’re going to hear from chance acquaintances in the street or in the shopping queue, do you? Here are a couple of marvellous yarns with which we were favoured recently.

“Did you ever hear about tapping phones?” enquired one friendly man with whom we had chanced to fall into conversation. (Let’s call him Frank.)

“Oh, all the young lads were up to it back in the days when we had those phone boxes on every street corner.

“Very few families had private phones back then, so the public call box was where you headed for if you needed to make with friends.

“Our gang soon got into the trick of the tapping. By manipulating the button under the receiver, you could mimic the dialling of a number and get through for free!

“Of course, we all used it for talking to our pals or to girlfriends – they would get together in another phone box elsewhere and we would keep in touch that way.

“I’d say that phone box we used never got too much money into its container!”

However, discovery and retribution came about in the most unusual of circumstances.

“We were there one afternoon round the box as usual, and a call came in, but we couldn’t tell who it was,” recalled ‘Frank’. “The voice was strange and kept shouting at us. We were teasing and saying, ‘Oh come on, who is it, own up Johnny, or Sean, or whoever.’ Then the receiver was slammed down at their end.

“We looked up and there was the priest from the corner house standing outside glaring at us. Would you believe it, he had been expecting a call from the bishop himself!

He was beside himself with rage when he realised we’d been treating the phone call as a joke. No word of a lie, he put his fist through one of those thick panes of glass in the side of the call box! And they were pretty strong, you .

Frank shakes his head in amused recollection of those escapades of younger days.

As always with technical details from yesteryear, I checked this one with my brother, Tom.

“Oh yes, we were all doing it back in the late ’50s, early ’60s, when the phone equipment was right for the trick,” he told me.

“If the number was, for example, 540273, you’d tap them quite fast, first five times, a small pause, then four times and so on... 0 would be ten times, which was a bit fiddly. If successful, you could make a free call. Myself and my pal were always at it.

“Funny thing, though – very often we ended up getting through to St Bonaventure’s out at Victoria Cross. Never could work out why, but maybe it was a message from Above that we should stop messing and behave ourselves?”

(St Bonaventure’s, older readers will recall, was the Capuchin hostel for religious students attending UCC. First opened in 1917, it closed in 1988 and was later demolished to make way for modern housing.)

And a recent mention of slogging apples awoke another memory in my brother’s mind.

“There was a house on Summerhill, right across from where we lived at Adelaide Terrace, just down from Mrs Cahill’s primary school at 4, Empress Villas,” recalled Tom.

“This house had a tiny front garden with its very own apple tree that bore fruit every autumn. The owners were so annoyed by local kids sneaking in to pick the apples that they fixed up a string to the tree and fed it in through the door to a bell in the hall. Whenever that bell rang, they knew some scallywag was outside slogging apples!”

And here’s yet another interesting fact Tom ed on, which he himself had garnered from chatting to local residents up at St Luke’s Cross. (Note to readers: never, but never up the opportunity to chat with people you meet. You never know what stories they can tell!)

Tom said: “This man said he knew for a fact that there was a secret tunnel running from that pub on the corner of MacCurtain Street and Bridge Street (now known as Gallagher’s, because of the connection with Rory] across under the junction and over to where Coburg Street meets Patrick’s Hill.”

Did Tom believe this?

Oh yes, all too likely. That first stretch of Patrick’s Hill is built up on ramps, and there are tunnels underneath. When the Cork Gliding Club had its headquarters at the Munster Hotel down there, they stored the long glider container in those tunnels.

“I didn’t have a torch back then, but I got hold of a box of matches and explored them as far as I could!”

Anybody else want to add to that continuing legend of De Tunnels Under De City? Don’t delay, write immediately!

Now to another wonderful story, this time of a disastrous drought that struck a certain distinguished hotel in a certain well-patronised harbour town, told by One Who Was There:

“1975 was a long hot summer,” recalls Brian Cronin. Didn´t rain for over three and a half months. And that was the year that Kinsale Council decided to employ a contractor to lay a new water main in the town. Talk about bad timing!

Even then, summer was a busy time for those involved in the tourist trade. The old mains had been in existence for over 300 years and leaked like a sieve.

“The work started in the early springtime; by early July, half the town was dug up but little progress was being made in laying the new main. The council´s fault of course. They opted for the cheapest quotation and the contractor drastically underestimated the cost of the project.” (Sounds familiar to anyone?)

“Local residents had a nightmarish year, with little or no running water and each stiflingly hot day following by another.

“As manager of the largest hotel in town, I had my own problems. Because of the heat and rapid water evaporation, the outdoor swimming pool had to be closed down. You can imagine the response from guests.

“Those were the days before air conditioned hotel bedrooms were the norm. To assuage the oppressive heat of the night, hotel residents left their windows wide open and then found their sleep disturbed by the noise of late night traffic and high-spirited teenagers making their noisy way homewards from a nearby disco.

“That was bad enough, but then the frustrated guests turned on their bathroom taps each evening to no avail, thereafter descending on the unfortunate receptionist downstairs to vent their spleen and demand that Something should be Done.

“This wave of discontent of course eventually found its way to the General Manager. Me!

Brian continues: “Worse was to follow. Many of those guests left their taps turned on, in the hope that some water might eventually trickle through. It invariably did; usually in the middle of the night when the town foreman, under immense pressure from desperate householders, would turn on the town mains supply for a few hours.

The problem was that as those unwashed, grumpy residents slept, many sinks overflowed, setting off the sensitive fire alarms of the ceilings below.

“So, night after night, panic-stricken guests were awakened by the fire alarm, poured down to the lobby for an emergency evacuation as per the instructions on their back of the bedroom doors, and then lined up to complain bitterly to the night porters and… yes, the General Manager who surely was the person really at fault!

“We came up with a temporary solution to the hotel water shortage and engaged, in strictest secrecy, a creamery lorry from the nearby town of Bandon to arrive each evening after dark with a tanker full of water and surreptitiously top up the hotel tanks and the swimming pool.

Doing this during daylight hours would probably have resulted in a lynching party of town residents arriving on our doorstep, so it had to be a covert operation.

“The council finally came up with their own solution to help alleviate the problem of leaks and water shortages. The ‘quick fix’ arrived in the persons of William Lawses and Son.

“‘Lawsie’, as he became affectionately known, was a water-diviner from Blackpool on the north side of Cork city. He spoke in a broad musical Cork city accent, never pronouncing his th’s, and had the defining characteristics of a true Corkonian: a certain cuteness and quickness of wit. He was also an expert at detecting leaks.

“His appearance was unusual for a man of his years. He wore shoulder-length grey hair, and he smoked 60-odd Woodbines daily. His long, lean frame was clothed in a grey striped suit.

“Before long, town residents became accustomed to the familiar sight of Lawsie, followed by his son, who acted as his assistant, wandering the back streets of the town - he with a large trumpet-like instrument clamped firmly to his ear as they went in search of leaks.”

Brian recalled: “On one particular occasion the council requested Lawsie to call on Mrs Murphy who lived up at the back end of the town. This elderly lady was complaining bitterly of a major water leak in the connection outside her door, which meant she wasn’t receiving any water whatsoever, day or night.

“Lawsie and his son duly arrived on her doorstep and within seconds confirmed that there was indeed a major leak.

“However, Our Expert Diviner also pointed out that the leak was under the street, between her house and the town main, so the cost of repairing the leak would have to be borne by her.

“‘Aw come on Lawsie’ she wailed. ‘ I’m only a poor ould woman and couldn’t afford to pay for it.’ The repair would, after all, have entailed the digging up and subsequent reinstatement of the entire street.

“Lawsie, by this time losing patience with the continuous litany of complaints which he had to take on board daily, reacted strongly. ‘Mam’ he said, ‘what do you think I am, like, a miracle worker or wha’?

“The old lady was lost for words, but only for a minute. ‘Eerah, go away boy and get yourself a haircut’, she yelled and then, turning on the doorstep, she pointed back at a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus which graced her living room wall. ‘Take a good look at him, boy,’ she yelled. ‘He had long hair as well, and he was able to work miracles!’

For the first time in his life, Lawsie found himself completely out-witted; game, set and match!

“The town water system was eventually upgraded the following year and Lawsie and son were seen no more. Until the town sewer system packed up a few years later. But that´s a story for another day...”

Gosh, Brian, you bring us back to those dusty hot days of 1975! Bad enough for the local residents, but to be running a major hotel under such conditions! At least you’re able to laugh about it now – from a safe distance!

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