All interesting replies, thanks guys. It seems throat mike usage was much more extensive than I had imagined. Was 'larynga-phone' (as mentioned in the original post) a brand name?
As young teenagers, my mate Dave and I would go to the local park armed with military surplus headphones and throat mikes and see if we could talk to each other using the wire fence around the park as the circuit - him at one end and me at the other. We could, but it got better when we managed to acquire a couple of sets of tank crew headphones and hand mikes (the ones with the conical rubber mouthpiece and pressel switch on the side) and reception got better still when we cobbled together an amplifier and introduced that into the circuit. (There was a lot of military surplus radio gear available in those days [mid 50s] and we were always down the local surplus store to see if anything new was in!)
The start of a lifelong interest in radio and telecoms/electronics generally!