SHORTHAND

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 64, Issue 4523, 14 January 1942, Page 6

SHORTHAND

THE ANCIENT ART USED FOR CENTURIES From Demosthenes and Cicero to Winston Churchill; from Caligula and Attila to Adolph Hitler, mankind’s faculty of speech has been accomplished by the art of caligraphy and the desire, or necessity, of taking notes of public utterances. And, as necessity early established a claim to the now proverbial relationship with invention, a form of “short writing,” or “swift writing,” was being practised long before the days

of “Hansard,” the phonetic stenography of Isaac Pitman and the “chiel amang ye, taking notes” with the idea of printing them. The Greeks had a word for it, and while they do not appear to have made the same progress with the art as the Romans, most of the words used by the Romans to describe shorthand were until post-classical times of Greek derivation. In contemplating the history of shorthand from the perspective of modern times, the 17th-century use of it by Mr Naval Secretary Pepys probably comes more readily to the mind. Nevertheless, references from classical times have left posterity with good reason to believe that forms of stenography, tachygraphy (swift writing), or brachygraphy (short writing) were associated with reports and records of historical events dur-

ing the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome. Whereas the shorthand of England’s naval secretary during the early days of British sea power was used by him for private diary purposes and a record of passing events, which, however, was not translated into public print until the early part of the 19th century. This diarist’s private news commentary and personal record of domestic life, and of the manners and customs of his time, reached a new generation at a time when shorthand was nearing a transition from an orthographic basis to the definite status of a phonetic science. Now, in a decade of the introduction of shorthand machines, fyesh interest in the Pepysian use of shorthand has been stimulated by the publication in America of a shorthand-written per-

sonal diary "’of an Anglo-Virginian, whose -lifetime was overlapped by that of Pepys and whose diary was written about 50 years from the beginning of the period covered by Pepys’ work. AND SO TO VIRGINIA The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1709-1712, is the title of the publication from the Huntington Library, California, edited by Louis B. Wright and Marion Tinling. H. I. Brock introduces his notice in “New York Times” Book Review with the claim that what Samuel Pepys did for Charles Il’s England, William Byrd, of Westover, did for Queen Anne’s Virginia, and he suggests that “as Byrd was a man about town in London when he was not a colonial magnate in Virginia, this Stuart Virginian may have got his stenographic idea from “whispers of what Mr Pepys was up to.” The “New York Times” prints a facsimile of a page of the shorthand showing notes covering four days of July, 1710. The diary lay concealed in cipher for over 200 years compared with the 160 that Pepys’ diary waited for translation into print. Part of the diary was preserved in collections of the late R. A. Brock.

William Byrd, second of the name in Virginia, was educated in England, studied law at the Middle Temple, was admitted to the Royal Society, and, at 32 to Virginia on the death of his father, the owner of about 25,000 acres of land, to fill a position of some wealth and influence in the country. From Westover, on the James River, he directed numerous plantations and had white and black bond servants. He had a share in ships that took tobacco across to England, from which country he imported a library reputed to be the largest in the English colonies. He was a member of the council at Williamsburg, colonel-in-chief over two counties, and receiver-general of Royal revenues. His first wife was the daughter of a fellow-Virginian who had been the Duke of Marlborough’s messenger of victory to Queen Anne after the battle of Blenheim. Attendances at court or council, at musters of militia, the arrival of ships, occasional marine losses due to the depredations of French privateers, dinners with the Governor (an officer who had served with Marlborough), and almost every visit to a neighbour’s plantation are chronicled in the diary, together with Pepy-sian-like domestic details and reflections. The shorthand is neat and firm-

in a story which Mr Brock characterises, in somewhat Pepysian vein, as a “picture of life, of men, women and goings-on in Virginia when the 18th century was young—which will shock the fastidious, but will mightily fortify the historian and enlighten the student of human behaviour.” CLASSICAL STENOGRAPHY In classical times, Ovid’s reference to an “insidious note, legible only to the indoctrinated,” is taken as definite allusion to an equivalent of shorthand writing. As evidence of the use of shorthand in letter writing rather than for reporting speeches, there is Cicero’s comment that a friend has misunderstood a passage in a former epistle because it was written in a form in which marks had the power of many words. The industry of Rev. John Smith, at Oxford, between 1819 and 1825, was instrumental in bringing about the publication of Pepys’ shorthand of a previous century. A 15th century Benedictine monk had a lot to do with chemists’ shops!” From. the days of iron stylos to quill pens and onward to the modern “self-filler” and the shorthand machine, the art has accompanied humanity. From tables to notebooks post-classical posterity’s interest in the shorthand writing system of Tyro, 63 8.C., a freedman of Cicero who stands out a prominent figure in the antiquity of short-writing reporting and who was destined to provoke some 19th-century difference of opinion as to the efficiency of classical systems. Apart from Tyro, Suetonius speaks of the Emperor Titus being able to take short-writing notes with the greatest expedition and to Octavius teaching the art, while there is record of a youth “who wrote quicker than his master could dictate or think.” As for early Senate reporting, Plutarch, in his “Life of Cato the Younger,” states that Cicero placed shorthand writers, notarii, in various parts of the Senate House on the occasion of the vote on the fate of Cataline and his fellow conspirators in order to take down the speeches of Caesar and Cato, two foremost Senators. Among the lawyers elsewhere, there is a case in which validity is questioned of a will which had been- taken at dictation in shorthand, but not written “into words at length” by the notary until after the death of testator. ON THE RECORD Modern politicians who go abroad with a retiilue of stenographers, etc., may attract the professional attention of the Auditor-General or the political criticism of electors. But they can at least plead classical precedent. Pliny the younger has placed on record how Pliny the elder was always accompanied, “even when abroad,” by a shorthand writer with his writing materials at hand. Modern shorthand writers, on the other hand, who may become irritated by modern speakers, should ponder the let of some classical scribes. Emperor Sgverus sentenced to transportation and the cutting of finger nerves a

reporter who had misreported a cause in the Imperial Court. There was the case of one, Cassein, reporting the trial of a centurion who had turned Christian and declined to continue in the army. The reporter, incensed by the verdict, hurled his tablets at the magistrate's head. The magistrate, with grim humour, said the reporter could show his sympathy by dying with the centurion. And then, with an addendum that would have excited the envy of W. S. Gilbert’s potentate of Titjpu, he ordered some disgruntled pupils of the shorthand writer to act as executioners, using their iron stylos in the process. .. . Most of the early systems in England were orthographic or alphabetithough some attention had been given to the aspect of sound before Isaac Pitman, in the year that Queen Victoria came to the throne, issued his stenographic sound-hand. The system used by Pepys was that of Shelton, issued nearly fifty years after Dr Timothy Bright had dedicated a work to Quden Elizabeth. More than a eentury later came Gurney, Dr Byrom, Blanchard, and, at the end of the 18th century, Samuel Taylor’s system, in which Isaac Pitman later interested himself before embarking on his own new system. Pitman, who had left a post as school master at an endowed school after a disagreement on a religious question, manifested a desire to improve and extend the use of shorthand, and it was with the advice of an experienced reporter that he finally embarked on a step that added a new chapter to the history of shorthand. Charles Dickens was a reporter at the House of Commons “as a very young man,” and was regarded with great favour by his chiefs for his accuracy and speed. There is the story of an occasion on which Mr Stanley, afterwards Lord Derby, expressed dissatisfaction with a report he found in print of a long speech—except the beginning and the end portions of the report. Inquiry showed that the satisfactory alpha and omega had been reported by Dickens. Whereupon Mr Stanley sent for Dickens and told him he wished to go over the whole speech and have it all written out by him. In a reminiscent speech at the Newspaper Press Fund dinner in 1865, Dickens recalled an election speech of Lord Russell that he had reported “in the midst of a lively fight maintained by all the vagabonds in that division of the county,” and “under such pelting rain” that two colleagues held a pocket handkerchief over his notebook, “after the manner of a state canopy in an ecclesiastical procession.” He had reported many times in the “old back row of the old gallery at the old House of Commons, and in a preposterous pen in the old House of Lords . . . huddled together like so many sheep kept waiting, say, until the woolsack might need restuffing.” DICKENSIAN DOTS Highly proficient as Dickens became in the art of shorthand writing, he shows compassion for the learner through young David Copperfield, who admits to a “sea of perplexity" over “changes that were wrung upon dots, the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles, the unaccountable consequence that resulted from marks like flies’ legs, and the tremendous effects of a curve in the

wrong place.” Before taking the learner’s hurdle, represented by the circumstance that proficiency in “taking” may precede proficiency in “reading back,” David bemoans the fact that, after keeping pace with Traddles, he would have been “quite triumphant” had the characters not. looked like the “Chinese inscriptions, on an immense collection of tea chests, or the golden characters on all the red and green bottles in the varied mediums have sustained its characters. One unusual Melbourne example is that provided by a long-established manufacturing' fi|rm of agricultural equipment. At the whim of the •founder of the business, in bas-relief and well-defined “Pitman” on the iron fronts of mobile water tanks—of a type often seen in the metropolis on road construction work such as the Yarra Boulevard—is the following temperance homily: “Water is the gift of God; drink is the concoction of the devil. Don’t drink beer.” The curious-minded may wonder how many of the generations of workers who have moved such vehicles about have been transcribers of Pitman’s shorthand. Where they do not agree with the stenographic exhortation they have been wheeling about, they may console themselves with thoughts of the “Hansard” reporter dispassionately “taking” throughout an “all-nighter” political assertions with which his own political creed is at total variance—and doing the job with no thought of “hurling his tablets” at the speaker.