Museum of ANTIQUITIES

A catch-up on some of our recent vintage items starts with a telling off by John Wynne for confusing No. 21 Chamber pot (March 15) with a great American writer.

The reader in St Leonardson-Sea, East Sussex, says: “Your misspelling of ‘po’ as ‘poe’ is ironic. I remember a Steptoe And Son episode in which Harold, ever anxious to keep up with the times, acquires a divan bed. Albert’s reaction is to ask, scornfully, ‘Where yer gonna put the Edgar Allan?’.”

As a side note, John also reveals that the officers of the Household Cavalry drink toasts by passing round Joseph Bonaparte’s silver chamber pot. “It was given to him by his brother, the Emperor Napoleon, and captured at the Battle of Vitoria in 1813.”

All that liquid reminds Mick Stokes in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, of a “what’s the difference between” joke. “What’s the difference between an elephant and a pofor?” he asks. “What’s a po for? Piddling in!” Thank you, Mick. Don’t give up the day job. The nostalgic photos of Pete Perry and his mum Doris answering their first phone calls in No. 23 Home Telephone (March 18) reminded Mike Smith from Chatham of when his family got a telephone installed at home.

“It was in 1968 and the excitement surrounding the event created a buzz not experienced since we purchased our first fridge,” says Mike. “My mother sent me out on a cold night to test it. I had to phone home – more BT than ET!

“Never could I have imagined then, as I fumbled for change in my pocket, that a few decades down the, erm, line, I would be producing a phone from my jacket pocket.”

As Mike notes, although mobile phones are a handy convenience, it’s sad that the iconic red telephone box is vanishing. “Although some have been converted, like one in Brighton which is now a coffee shop.”

And like many readers, Maureen Andrews in Waltham Abbey, Essex, never had a phone growing up. “My mum, who was born in 1903 and passed in 1982, never had one. I worked with phones in a bank, but still had to use the local red phone box to speak to friends.”

She adds: “My mum would be amazed now to see all the mobiles in use in the street, supermarkets and even at the dinner table!”

Suggest long-gone items to me at siobhan.mcnally@mirror.co.uk