What is this? With photo.

[GlitteryFluff]

Any idea what this could be?
Found on a countrywide walk in a forest where houses used to be.
Electrical wires coming out the back? Ball joint means the wooden handle(?) can move in any direction.
Isn't important, just curious.

A light switch to turn on lots of lights? The cables don't look thick enough for power. Maybe using a string pull or lever mechanism, seeing as that wooden handle has a hole in the end.

Service bell?

You know how in Victorian/Edwardian country house dramas you see Milady call the butler by gently tugging on a brocade rope hanging by the fireplace? That says from the era when the bells in the service quarters were physically pulled by cables that ran through walls and ceiling voids from the upstairs rooms. When electricity replaced the mechanical bells, the houses were not fully wired, so switches or push-buttons would not have worked. The electric charge to ring the bell has to be generated by turning a handle. Like the earliest telephones.

Sunshade winder?

Wind-Up-Merchant?

Where I come from you never pick up an unidentified object with wires sticking out of it ...

I don't know whether to laugh or cry at that comment!

Definitely looks like a service bell to me - sometimes they would have a tasseled cord attached, which would attach at the end of the sprongle sticking out.

😂😂😂 think you're likely from the same neck of the woods as me!

My neighbours doorbell looks a lot like that. Very old house.

Aye very likely 😉

Thanks all for the ideas. Have spent some time looking into them.

Certainly looks similar to some kind of bell.
I can't find any photos of a bell where wood comes out of the centre with a ball joint, I can only find ones where there's a button in the middle. Or the middle doesn't do anything and there's metal/ string contraption around it. I can't work out why the wooden part can move 360degrees - unless that is a 'wind for electricity' type as suggested above. But again can't find a photo of anything similar. Who knows.

Given the basics of the photo, you have wires, indicating a means of transferring electric current and a handle providing rotational motion.

What you have there is I would guess, a simple hand-cranked electrical generator. I assume within the housing would be copper coils surrounding a magnet moved by the handle, which then generates electricity. The most obvious use, as others have noted, on this small scale is indeed some kind of service bell, or perhaps fire alarm even.

If I had it, I would so be undoing the screws on the back...

The reason it moves 360 degrees is that it generates direct current. Keep turning in one direction, keep generating current.

I must admit, I'm surprised a reverse image lookup doesn't provide an answer as it was clearly in its day a relatively mass market object, and I'm sure somewhere on the internet should be a photo of something pretty similar.

The inside...

Some kind of dynamo or generator?

Darn, can't really see enough to work it out as the interesting stuff would probably be under the (originally) white plate.

Is all the white stuff some kind of plastic? That would date it to after about 1920 or so I would guess as that's about the time bakelite was beginning to arrive in the UK.

Also can't quite tell what bits inside actually rotate - does the whole of the white surround around the handle move or is it something underneath?