ON the front of Memories 210, our New Year edition, was a seasonal postcard view of Saltburn which had been taken from the Ha'penny Bridge.

This was a remarkable bridge, 130ft high on slender, spidery legs, scurrying across the deep glen. Tourists could pay half-a-penny to cross it, and for those who didn't suffer from vertigo, it was quite an attraction. But it may also have had a remarkable part in the development of the telephone.

It was built in 1869 by JT Wharton of Skelton Castle. Darlington's Pease family was developing a railway seaside resort on the west side of the glen, and Mr Wharton wanted to capitalise with his land on the east side, so he got the Middlesbrough firm of Hopkins, Gilkes and Company to connect the two sides with a carriage bridge.

The bridge was demolished in 1974, but it still fascinates.

"I well remember passing over it once or twice," says Clive Wilkinson in Langley Park. "I didn’t find it rickety but I was very aware of its height and its fairly light construction."

During the 1960s, Clive worked for the electricity board which gave the Skelton Castle estate some free power in return for running its cables across the bridge.

"The wayleave payment to the estate was a free supply of electricity for a 60 watt bulb in the tollkeeper's booth," says Clive, "but during the severe winter of 1962-63, the estate wanted to install an electric fire in the booth and believed it was entitled to more free electricity. I was able to recover our copy of the very old wayleave agreement and had to tell the estate that it would have to pay for its own heating energy."

But it was not only electricity cables that ran across the Ha'penny Bridge. Telephone cables once did, too.

On March 10, 1876, in Boston in the US, Graham Alexander Bell made the first audible telephone call. His assistant, Thomas Watson, in a neighbouring room, clearly heard him say down a wire: "Mr Watson, come here, I want you." Later that year, this astonishing apparatus was demonstrated in Britain.

Living in Saltburn, was a 32-year-old engineer, Francis Fox. He was the son of railway engineer Sir Charles Fox – the inventor of the railway points – who had sent him to work in the Cleveland ironstone mines.

Francis' entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says: "This gave him experience in underground excavation and ventilation which was to prove invaluable in his later career." He went on to extend the London Underground and dig out the Mersey Railway Tunnel before being knighted for shoring up the cathedrals of St Paul's and Winchester.

"While there," continues the entry referring to the Saltburn years, "Fox hosted a visit from Sir Stafford Northcote, chancellor of the exchequer, and a deputation of MPs. In September 1877, Fox was party to some of the earliest telephone calls in the UK – initially from his home at Saltburn-by-the-Sea, and subsequently over the 17 miles between Middlesbrough and the Huntcliff mines."

The first of these phone calls was over a wire stretched from his house in Balmoral Terrace (a line of villas overlooking the glen) over the Ha'penny Bridge to Cliffden, a mansion on the east side which was the home of William Ayrton, a retired barrister.

In later life, Francis claimed that this call was the first phone call in Britain. This was probably an exaggeration, but the Ha'penny Bridge clearly has an engaging place in early telephone history.