There was no bigger event in the Free Church manse of my upbringing than the biannual Communion season. 

A five-day joust from Thursday to Monday, with two visiting ministers and eight services between them. Most in Gaelic.

Said clergy had to be fed. My father usually made breakfast: grapefruit, bacon and eggs, and slices of toast from which, for some reason, all crusts had to be cut off. 

My mother (and a helpful girl or two) saw to the rest.

Beefy lentil soup. The best ham in Glasgow: Henry Healy’s sweet-cured tenderloin. Silverside and sherry trifle for Sabbath lunch and something adventurous for Monday.

But supremely important, for high tea on Saturday, was the best, poached, wild Atlantic salmon.

The ‘Hello Girls’ worked on the old telephone exchanges, connecting phone calls

This my parents could never have afforded from any fishmonger and, accordingly, procuring a fat frozen fish was an annual sub-plot to our every summer holiday on Lewis – poached in every sense.

It was a fraught, furtive operation with telephone calls made in a sort of code. A ‘big fish’. A ‘silver tourist’. For, in those days, you never knew who might be listening…

At length, at deep dusk – it did not help that we had a distinctive family car; a limited-edition, mustard-yellow ‘Jeans’ VW Beetle with denim seats, probably visible from space – we would hit a certain West Side village, then still replete with thatched houses.

Where in a 40-second dash my head-scarved mother would complete the transaction and return, toting in thickly wrapped newspaper a great iced fish that had ceased to be.

As a young cleric, my father had been highly embarrassed when his Stornoway colleague dropped him a gentle note. Daddy was in the habit of calling his parents every Sunday evening, and him a minister. It was the talk of the steamie in a robustly Sabbatarian town: might he desist?

And then, on Thursday, October 14, 1976, in Portree on the Isle of Skye, Mrs Agnes Dewar ended an era.

The senior ‘Hello Girl’ at the little town’s telephone exchange connected the last old-style call with a deft jack-plug of a line.

Moments later, Britain’s very last manual exchange went automatic. The era of ‘Hello, number, please… hold the line, please: connecting you now, madam… I’m sorry, the other party is no longer there…’ was over. And the rite of calling the exchange back, with a single ring, so the ladies knew the conversation had concluded.

The Hello Girls were on no account supposed to listen in on private conversations. But, of course, many did – to the dread of those who had to make particularly sensitive calls: clergy, the local doctor, the town’s undertaker.

It was, in fact, a Missouri funeral director by the magnificent name of Almon Brown Strowger who in 1889 invented the ‘Strowger Switch’, by which automated telephone calls became possible.

It took Britain a long time to catch up.

In the age of the smartphone – when most of us tote what is not just a phone but a camera, a torch and a brilliant little computer holding untold data, not least all our contacts – it is hard to recall, not that long ago, the solemnity of the telephone.

I still remember stately navy signs outside little Glasgow shops – ‘You May Telephone From Here’. Back in the 1970s, you had to wait humbly for months for one to be installed at your home. The instrument itself from a tiny choice of models with an inbuilt or connected physical, raucous bell. You didn’t just hear a call: you felt it.

Invariably installed in your hall – you could buy low, special seats, with a padded end for you and a built-in table for said phone – and often with an upstairs extension.

By which even the most intimate conversation could be eavesdropped by a sly little brother or a helicoptering Mum. You explain this past order to young folk today and see the bewilderment in their eyes. No emails, no text messages, no social media… how did you fossils ever get a date?

You were charged not just for the duration of the call but for the physical distance involved and it was cheapest to make your calls in the evening. There was a strange etiquette. Most Hello Girls had rather affected RP accents. It spread in the wider arena: in her working days, my mother answered office calls like a Duchess. ‘Good morning. William Purves Funeral Directors, how may I help you?’

And you did not usually announce your name when answering the phone: lest there had been dread error, you gave your number – ‘Raasay 216?’

There has been quite the evolution in making phone calls since the days of the exchange

The bill was a monthly worry and I remember my father’s wrath – I was 18 or so – when I let slip I had called a Stornoway aunt to inquire how my grandmother’s minor operation had gone.

And a tragedy on February 4, 1977 haunts me yet. A much-loved young deacon, whose wedding to Annie Margaret my father had conducted two summers earlier, had excitedly learned he was going to be a father and decided to take out life insurance.

At the medical, they detected something odd about his heart and – long before scanners and modern diagnostic techniques – exploratory surgery was decreed.

I still remember my mother’s scream, back from the shops, that Friday afternoon. Hand over her mouth, wild-eyed, she brandished the note my inexplicably absent father had left by the phone – ‘Dollan is dead. Going to Annie Margaret’s.’

Having blithely stopped the 29-year-old’s heart, surgeons could not restart it. Had he never gone for that medical examination, he might be with us yet.

The old telephone order often crashed. On February 6, 1952, Hello Girls the length of Britain were overwhelmed as lights flashed all over the joint: King George VI, without the least warning, had died in his sleep and the land was frantic.

Even early this century it often buckled at New Year, it being Scots custom to call short-listed loved ones after the Bells.

Households, of course, had their own rituals. Mammy and Daddy called their parents, without fail, every Saturday evening – and immediately, before seeing to anything else, when we got home after that summer break.

Only then was that fine, well-insulated salmon – I recall a particular 24lb beauty – consigned to the deep-freeze. With much Stornoway black pudding, sausages, loaves and aromatic kippers.

As the Rayburn in the kitchen was re-lit and, still a bit wobbly from the ferry voyage, we were lulled to swift sleep, in the weirdly warm Glasgow air after a month in the Outer Hebrides, by the reassuring trundle of the ‘Blue Train’ scarce fifty yards away.

Britain’s first manual telephone exchanges were operated by telegraph boys, typically in their early teens. They proved poor at a job that called for alertness, dexterity and some social ease, and it rapidly became a realm of young women.

They had better concentration, interpersonal skills and quicker hands. ‘Suddenly there was a new employment opportunity for women,’ confides the Science Museum, ‘one that gave them some economic independence and an identity outside the home.

‘Hundreds of operators worked on each switchboard in towns and cities, and the service was efficient and largely confidential. In smaller neighbourhoods, the switchboard might be operated by a single individual.

‘The village postmistress’s ability to listen in on private conversations – strictly forbidden, but difficult to prevent – soon taught phone users to be careful what they said…’

But, as the telephone network expanded, it became hard to call someone quickly as you stewed in a queue: telephone companies had to hire yet more Hello Girls and, given wage bills, did so most reluctantly.

It was only in 1912 that the first automatic exchange was built – at Epsom, in Surrey – and further progress was slow, retarded by the costs involved and, of course, by two world wars.

And it was as late as October 5, 1960 before the last manual exchange in Greater London – Enfield – went fully automatic, just after the advent of Subscriber Trunk Dialling.

This allowed many to call ‘trunk’ or long-distance numbers, outwith your local exchange, without need for an operator – but necessitated new area codes: 01 for London, 031 for Edinburgh, 041 for Glasgow and so on.

Queen Elizabeth II made the very first call of that kind on December 5, 1958 – calling the Lord Provost of Edinburgh from a number in Bristol.

Behind all this was a profound technological change.

The black Bakelite telephones, which all over a certain age can recall, were electromechanical devices with physically moving parts, of which the most important was the rotary dial of Strowger’s 1889 devising.

In 1937, though, a British telephone engineer, Alec Reeves, proposed pulse-code modulation (PCM) – the basis of digital electronics – as a means of switching calls.

It would be far more efficient but it needed an invention. Which came in the 1940s with the transistor, allowing much smaller and lighter electronic devices.

On October 8, 1965 the Post Office Tower, London’s most dominating landmark, opened – complete with a revolving restaurant near the top.

The Postmaster-General of the time, Tony Benn, seriously proposed some stately dinner, with Her Majesty seated centrally. As everyone else circled around her, she would have a face-to-face moment with each guest. Met, no doubt, with Her Majesty’s usual unnerving response to anyone’s nonsense – ‘Are you quite sure?’

The restaurant sadly closed in 1980 and it became the BT Tower in 1991. More importantly, London’s first PCM digital exchange opened, in west London, in September 1968. It took time, but the keypad is now king and rotary-dial phones are history.

Still, more and more folk sought telephone lines, especially after British Telecom was privatised in 1984 and related liberation – the advent of competition, plunging prices, the friends-and-family discount, and suddenly a plethora of stylish new telephones.

Not to mention the first talking-brick mobiles. As demand soared, area codes had to be revised. On May 6, 1990, London’s 01 perished: inner London became 071 and the outer margins 081.

On April 16, 1995, an additional ‘1’ was added to every area code across the realm, to the joy unconfined of stationery purveyors – Glasgow’s numbers have since begun with 0141 – and, on April 22, 2000, London was reunited in a new area code, 020.

Meanwhile, rapidly, we lose our telephone boxes. The kiosk in my village vanished last year, though hardly anyone noticed; and surviving classic red K6 models – designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott to celebrate King George V’s 1935 Silver Jubilee – are locally cherished.

There were 200,000 in 1990, still 92,000 kiosks in 2002; only 10,300 abide. ‘Maintaining and operating a large estate of payphones costs millions of pounds each year,’ says a BT spokesman sniffily, ‘an obstacle that prevents more investment in full fibre broadband and mobile networks – which our customers tell us they want.’

One man, though, will not give up the fight – and this summer took advantage of a little-known Ofcom rule: that a telephone box used at least 52 times a year cannot be disconnected.

William Arnold, 43, travelled all the way from his home in Cornwall to Einacleit in furthest Lewis – and with a ton of pocket-change.

His chosen darling was the last double-doored classic kiosk in the United Kingdom. Wherein Mr Arnold solemnly burned through £36 worth of coins, calling fifty-two different people. Without, only the wind could listen – and no salmon perished on this occasion.