The Times Great Letters: A century of notable correspondence

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Yours,

BERKELEY MOYNIHAN

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The Telephone Kiosk

22 May 1929

Sir, If this letter should meet the eye of the Postmaster-General, perhaps he will explain why he has christened the telephone box near the Royal Academy a telephone kiosk! It would not be easy to find a more ridiculous word.

Yours, etc.,

ALGERNON LAW

Replied on 23 May 1929

Sir, To Sir Algernon Law’s question anent the name “kiosk,” as applied to the street telephone box, the Postmaster-General could reply with official hauteur, as did Humpty Dumpty to Alice, “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.” Actually the word has travelled from Persia via France, gathering en route a veneer of Western civilization plus Post Office vermilion and shedding some of its Eastern trimmings, such as its veranda and balustrade. When the out-of-door telephone call station (open to the public day and night, Sundays and early-closing days) had to be given a name, “box” was already assigned to the first-born, the indoor public telephone. The resemblance to the Paris “kiosk” paper stall naturally suggested kiosk as the appropriate name.

Yours, etc.,

H. S. POWELL-JONES

Secretary, Telephone Development Association

Replied on 24 May 1929

Sir, Mr Powell-Jones seeks to defend the Postmaster-General for the adoption of this ridiculously inappropriate name for an out-of-door telephone station by the irrelevant argument that it is applied by Parisians to a newspaper-stall and that the word “box” had already been applied to the indoor public telephone. But “box” is not the only word in the English language. For instance, “stall” or “booth” or, better still, “hut.” We shall next have the General Post Office called the Yildiz Kiosk and the P.M.G.1 (#ulink_13da400f-58a9-5db4-a23a-0d199ce33175) the Padishah.

Yours, etc.,

ALGERNON LAW

1 (#ulink_977d6e4f-f99a-52d5-9054-cc92b24b253f) The Postmaster-General

Replied on 25 May 1929

Sir, In voicing a horror of foreign word immigrants that one would scarcely expect from his distinguished career at the Foreign Office, Sir Algernon Law is hardly consistent. In his short letter he uses at least 13 words of foreign derivation which at some time must have been as alien as “kiosk” is to-day. He does not even boggle at “telephone,” though one might well fancy that with its Hellenic ancestry it would feel itself more at home in an Oriental kiosk than in a Nordic hut, booth, stall or byre. After all, does it matter greatly what we name their local habitation so long as we are provided with public call facilities on a more adequate scale?

Yours, etc.,

H. S. POWELL-JONES

Secretary, Telephone Development Association

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When London was Noisy

23 September 1929

Sir, What is all this noise about noise? Only a few genuine antiques like myself remember what London was like when there were no quiet motor cars running on wood or asphalt pavements, and when all the traffic was drawn with iron tires running on either stone setts or macadam. If you want to know what the noise was like in those days you have to go to the docks or to one of those stone paved streets in a factory town and hear the horse-drawn lorries.

In spite of the motor-omnibuses which make most of the noise, you can talk going along Piccadilly. When I was a boy you could not, because the crashing of the hooves and the rattling of the iron tires made hearing impossible. And in those times on a wet day the windows of the shops in Bond Street were splashed waist-high with mud squirted out of the puddles by the air compressed by the hollow hooves of the horses. People have forgotten all those unpleasantnesses.

And the congestion in the streets was just about as bad. A hansom for two took up more room on the road than the biggest Rolls-Royce. And a pair-horse carriage cumbered the earth more than does a motor-omnibus. The old horse-omnibuses took up nearly as much room as a motor-lorry and trailer. The shouting of drivers and cracking of whips and whistling for cabs made far more noise than does the mild tooting of motor horns to-day. Let us thank Heaven that we are quit of those bad old times.

Yours faithfully,

C. G. GREY

newspaper of record

1930–39

The constant Reader

12 January 1935

Sir, A letter in The Times of 4 January signed “A Forty Years’ Reader” tempts me to tell you what has led to my having read The Times for over 74 years. In October 1857, at Florence, my father called me into his study and said: “My boy, circumstances beyond my control oblige us to remain in Italy for some years. I want you to be an English boy and to grow into an Englishman. What will do that more than anything else and teach you all about England will be reading The Times. Every morning after breakfast you shall read me one or two paragraphs.” I was filled with pride, and the one or two soon became a goodly number.

In 1862, when my father died, I had no Times; but I managed to obtain a copy when a week old and to keep it for one day. It made a heavy inroad on my slender pocket money. Pride gave way to interest, and I read The Times from cover to cover till I started for England in 1868.