Telegrammarians’ time off

Press, 8 November 1986, Page 20

Telegrammarians’ time off

This week-end, for the first time in more than a century, no inland telegrams will be delivered in New Zealand. Telegrams from overseas will be delivered only if they are a matter of life and death. At weddings, then, those with the role of best man will have to rely on telegraphed messages, congratulatory and ribald, that were delivered yesterday. Centenarians whose birthdays fall today or tomorrow will find that it takes a day or two more than 100 years of living to get a telegram from the Queen. Such is the march of progress.

Back in 1862, when New Zealand’s first telegraph link was opened between Lyttelton and Christchurch, the device was still pretty amazing. Sam Morse had demonstrated his invention in New York for the first time barely 25 years earlier. The telegraph quickly shrank the distances in New Zealand. Within four years of the first message on the Lyttelton line, telegraphic communication had been established through the length of the South Island and across Cook Strait to Wellington. In another six years, by 1872, the network had spread as far north as Auckland and, by 1876, the trans-Tasman link with Australia brought New Zealand that much closer to the rest of the world.

Things have changed a bit since then. Other means of communication, such as subscriber dialling of toll calls, have provided a faster, cheaper, more personal and more private alternative to telegrams. The decrease in usage and the consequent decline in revenue of the telegraph has been

paralleled by sharp rises in costs, particularly for wages. The reduction in hours of service to 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on week-days is the result. The telegram’s eventual demise seems inevitable, and with it will go a slice of our history and culture.

Weddings excepted, telegrams were long regarded by ordinary folk as harbingers of bad news, such as illness or a death in the family. The cost and urgency of a telegram was, for many people, warranted only by a calamity. This gloomy association of ideas with the windowed buff envelope was. reinforced during the war years. Between 1939 and 1945, Mr Frederick Jones, who was coincidentally Postmaster-General and Minister of Defence, was an unwilling but prolific dispatcher of telegrams under his second hat, informing relatives of servicemen and women of death, injury, or capture. In lighter vein, telegrams have been a source of delight to the enterprising, who have waged an unending but creative battle to tell as much as possible in as few words as possible. Some of the hybridised concoctions that passed for words, and the frequent absence of (tele)grammar, provided mirth and caused confusion in roughly equal proportions. Sherlock Holmes, of course, could not have functioned without them and, as Dr Watson records, not only sent a great many in his investigations but was “fairly accustomed to receive weird telegrams at Baker Street.” Even the weird no longer qualify for delivery on a New Zealand weekend.