Constant Touch by Jon Agar Page B

eavesdroppers and aimed at the mobile owners cheerfully declaring that they were ‘on the train’, was a sure indicator that an invisible social boundary had been transgressed. In the early 19th century, the stagecoach had been alive with gossip and chatter, as the novels of Jane Austen or the essays of William Hazlitt record. With the arrival of the steam locomotive, however, the talk stopped. Partly the smooth, speedy – almost unworldly – motion of the railway carriage on iron tracks was more conducive to contemplation of the landscape outside the window than to discussion with fellow passengers. Trains transported the body
and
the mind. But a more severe problem lay with those passengers themselves.
Who
were they? Railways were symbols of an industrial age, and in the sprawling industrial city people became increasingly anonymous. Although the division of carriages into different classes – first, second and third – gave some clues, it remained extremely awkward to strike up a conversation on a ‘suitable’ note. Rather than commita social gaffe, travellers on trains in Britain chose silence.
    â€˜I’m on Westminster Bridge.’ Telecom Pearl in 1986. (BT Archives)
    Delicate issues of class had created social protocols of communication – rules governing when to speak and what could be said, rules that may never have been written down but were more powerful for all that. Against a century and a half of mutually-sanctioned quiet ran a device created by a new set of protocols. GSM, at heart, was also a set of rules governing communication. But these were hard and explicit, and individuals – not society –accepted them upon the purchase of a cellular phone. It was the individual, not society, that spoke loudly: ‘
I
’m on the train.’ Listeners were annoyed not only because the older tacit rules had been broken, but because their particular complaint against the owner of the mobile phone was of
selfishness
. How dare they disturb everyone else! What makes their conversation so necessary, so important, to justify shattering the collective trance? What makes
them
so special? Indeed, the history of mobile phones in Britain is intimately entwined with social transformations, class transgressions and competition – not only between technical systems but also between the politics of selfish individuality and the social bonds that tie us.
    In the summer of 1954, the Marquess of Donnegall was jealous. The Duke of Edinburgh, he had heard, possessed a telephone built into a car. The Marquess’s information was correct. The Duke’s Lagonda coupé sports car had a radio telephone with which, via an Admiralty frequency and a Pye relay station up on the Hampstead hills in north London, he could speak directly to Buckingham Palace. He enjoyed this perk of the job, as the breezy
Daily Sketch
told its royal-friendly readership: ‘The Duke takes a keen delight in making surprise calls to the Queen ... Sometimes he disguises his voice when speaking to Charles and Anne.’ (The newspaper also hinted at fears concerning the combination of royalty and speeding cars: ‘He is a skilful driverbut some concern was felt that he should use so fast a model,’ while adding the reassuring statistic that the Duke, as Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, held the unofficial record among his fellow naval officers for the 98-mile run from Bath to London. In his 12hp MG he had covered the distance in one hour and 40 minutes.)
    The Marquess of Donegall asked the Post Office whether such a radio telephone could connect to the public network, and if so, whether he could also have a set. The Post Office’s reply is revealing in what it tells us about British mobile radio telephones in the mid-1950s:
    You probably know it is possible for passengers on certain ships to make radio-telephone calls to the United Kingdom public telephone system; and shipping in the Thames, if