The Scientific Toy & Thomas Holme

摘要

The title is unhelpful. The book is mainly a social history of Hull Corporation Telephone undertaking from its beginning to about 1945, together with a biography of its first manager. One has to have some sympathy with librarians and cataloguers when they are required to deal with titles like this, and with readers who will not necessarily be aware that this may be the book on Hull's telephones that they are seeking. The book is nevertheless welcome, as it draws attention to two aspects of Britain's telephone history which have long remained overlooked or downplayed: the era of the National Telephone Company (NTC) and of the Hull municipal undertaking. The City of Kingston upon Hull (to give its seldom-used full title) has, because of its geographical location, developed in its own distinctive way. The writer J. B. Priestley summed it up very well in his book English Journey in 1934: 'Unless you should happen to be going to one of the Baltic countries, Hull is out of your way. You cannot pass through it to anywhere. The long wide estuary of the Humber cuts it off from the south. It is not really in Yorkshire, but by itself, somewhere in the remote east where England is nearly turning into Holland or Denmark'. The opening of the Humber Bridge in 1981 was intended to end that comparative isolation but in practice has made little difference. The long-term effects of being 'UK City of Culture' in 2017 remain to be assessed. This may provide some clue as to why Hull stood out from the rest of Britain in 1912 and persisted with its own telephone system.