The Room

The Sydney Chief Telegraph Office was located on the fourth floor of the Sydney GPO in Martin Place. It was big enough to accommodate around 400 telegraphists and a large number of auxiliary staff and took up most of the city block between George and Pitt Streets. It was rarely given it's full title. Sometimes it was abbreviated to "the CTO", sometimes it was called "the Telegraph Room" but to the men who worked there it was just "The Room."

There's much in a name and as "The Room" it began to reflect the personalities of the telegraphists—or "telegs" as they habitually called themselves. And a mixed bunch they were! The Room was rich in the character types that were commonplace in Australia during the first half of the twentieth century, the larrikins, the scallywags, the jokers, the drinkers—and much of its character was shown in the nicknames that were more commonly used than real names.

Try and imagine the characters associated with some of these names:

• Rudolf had a red nose.
• The Parson had studied for the Baptist ministry as a young man.
• Cheeky Charley locked his supervisor in the locker room one morning. The man was known as Lockout Les ever after.
• Squeaker had a high pitched voice.
• Foulmouth, who never swore, earned his name when, in a rare fit of exasperation, yelled out angrily, "Oh bother!" and Yabba said, "That'll be enough out of you, Foulmouth." It stuck.
• Breadroll Billy brought breadrolls instead of sandwiches for lunch.
• Buttercup, never the most energetic person, was named after a popular bread manufacturer who advertised as "the big Sydney loaf".
• Keggy obviously enjoyed a beer or two, but that wasn't his main problem. He was addicted to Bex powders (an extremely addictive analgesic that was sold opver-the-counter in Australia until it was banned about 1965). Occasionally one of his tormenters would say, "I feel like a Bex" and within minutes Keggy would be out at his locker taking one.
• There were two brothers named Keith and Kevin Light. Keith had red hair so he was naturally Blue Light, and Kevin was called Amber Light because he was always ready to stop. Kevin was an interesting bloke. Very quiet and self-effacing, he had escaped from a German prisoner-of-war camp during World War II and wandered around Germany for six weeks before being caught. He was then able to talk his captors out of shooting him as a spy.
• And there were lots of animal names—Harry the Horse, The Snake, The Octopus, The Fox, The Old Crow, The Bear. There were so many it was almost a telegraphic menagerie.

Back in the pre-decimal days of the 'fifties when trams still trundled through the city there was a man named Fourpenny Dark.
He lived at Manly on the north side of Sydney Harbour and every morning his wife gave him a shilling—that was comprised of fourpence for the ferry to Sydney, another fourpence to get back, and twopence each way on the tram.
Now Fourpenny liked a drink and he knew if he walked from the ferry to work and back he could spend the fourpence he saved on a small glass of port wine (known as a Fourpenny Dark, from which his nickname evolved).
He said he was standing in the Ship Inn at Circular Quay one night sipping his drink trying to make it last and a little man on his shoulder said, "Have another one."
He was startled but another little man on his other shoulder said, "No! No! It's your ferry fare home."
"Be a devil!" said the Devil. "Don't be silly!" said the other.
Fourpenny said he listened to both of them a couple of times but then, "The next thing I knew I was out past Fort Denistone swimming for my life." (Not a bad swim—it's eleven kilometres (seven miles) from Circular Quay to Manly.)

Bumpy Bill was an old style telegraphist. He wasn't going to get involved with modern contraptions like typewriters. He'd always written his telegrams with a pen (dipped in a bottle of ink he kept by his sounder) and he always would. He wasn't alone in that, a few of the old hands had never learned to type.
One day a wag substituted disappearing ink for the ink in his bottle and alerted the teleg sitting next to him who listened carefully to Bill's next telegram. Half way through Bill realised the ink was disappearing and said to the man, "Look at this."
"What's up, Bill?"
"Whaddayamean what's up? There's nothing on the page."
"Looks all right to me," said the man, and from memory recited what should have been on the page.
Bill was distraught. "I'm going blind," he wailed.
Yep, it's a true story. Bill probably worked out later what had happened but he was no rocket scientist.

Sending Morse Code has a relationship to handwriting in that some people write very clearly while others are quite illegible. If Morse signals are not crisp and clearly defined they can set problems for the person receiving them.
The problems became more pronounced around Christmas. It was always a busy time and we worked long hours for the few days leading up to Christmas Eve.
One afternoon I put in a four hour stint on a country line where the distant operator was obviously celebrating Christmas a little earlier than he should. Early in the afternoon his signals were crystal clear but they deteriorated as he continued to drink.
By the end of the day I felt that I was getting no dots and no dashes, but putting it down anyway.
(Fortunately Christmas telegrams had many similarities so it was possible to work out most of what was meant, and to query the bits and pieces that were indecipherable.)

The Room was a male environment. Male interests predominated and the things most popular were sport (especially football and cricket), horse racing and cars. Oh! yeah, and beer. We had a couple of bookies on the staff to help the punters lose their money, an unofficial money lender (who charged 10% until the next pay day, and got away with it), and lots of unofficial breaks when we could pop out to the pub for a quick drink. It was a pretty carefree environment and, because it was a Public Service job, the management were unable to control what was happening. (It's almost impossible to be dismissed from the Australian Public Service.)
For all that, the quality of our work was high. Most of us got into the job, and stayed in the job, because we loved the Morse and we would have been badly embarrassed if our workmates thought we couldn't cut it.
There were only five or six women working the Room when I was there and they were left over from the labour shortage of World War II. They didn't work Morse so they won't feature in this item, not because I'm sexist but because that's the way it happened to be away back then. (Women's lib and feminism were as yet virtually unpublicised and the Female Eunuch hadn't been born.)

Because of the peer pressure to drink and gamble some telegs held back part of their pay. "Cunning money". They figured that what their wives didn't know about wouldn't matter.
One man, let's call him Don, had a problem with his cunning money—his wife guessed what was happening and demanded that he bring his pay envelope home unopened.
Don didn't hesitate. Next payday he went to a stationers and bought a box of pay envelopes. From that point on he typed the amount she thought he was earning on an envelope, put in some money and pocketed the rest.
We had all types.

We had lots of drinkers and it was commonplace for them to leave their job when they got thirsty. Everybody knew it happened but mostly the management turned a blind eye. (They liked a drink, too.)
One character was trying to get down to the pub one morning but his job was too busy. Every time he had it almost cleared somebody would file a few more telegrams to be sent. Eventually he removed all the telegrams from his files, put them in his pocket, and ducked out for a quick beer.
He must have enjoyed it because he didn't remember the telegrams in his pocket till he got home from work.
Never one to panic he brought them in the next day, waited till the time he'd gone to the pub the day before, then sent them—exactly twentyfour hours late. He got away with it because nobody could work out what had happened.
A shocking thing to do? Of course it was, but that's how the Public Service operated in those days.
It still does!

The Old Crow was a keen golfer and earned his nickname when he arrived straight from the golf course, complete with golf clubs, and said with a big smile, "I look like an old pro, don't I!" The reply was immediate. "You look more like an old crow to me," said somebody and the name stuck. From that day forward whenever he arrived at work somebody would start a chorus of, "Aark! Aark!" in bad imitation of a crow's call.
His name was Neville and he was one of the all-time characters in the room. The things he did, especially when he was young and, even more especially, if he had been drinking were part of the telegraph lore.
Once while working the midnight to dawn shift he brought his motor bike up in the lift and when the supervisor objected chased him down the room on it. The poor man didn't have enough wit to jump up on one of the tables—he just ran, and Neville chased.
On another occasion he was working with Sydney Radio, the coastal radio station that received messages from ships at sea and passed them to an operator in the Room before they were forwarded on for delivery. Nev had managed an ale or two during the night and while he was taking down a radiogram (requesting supplies for the return voyage)addressed to a ship's providore he managed to add a couple of extra zeros to the order. When the ship arrived in port it was to find the wharf loaded with crates of tomatoes. No compensation was ever paid.

Unfortunately that kind of error wasn't confined to the Morse days. One of the worst cases occurred during the mineral boom of the 1960s and '70s.
A company named Poseidon was rumoured to have discovered a huge deposit of nickel and within six months Poseidon shares rose from 80c to $280. It was a phenomenon and fortunes were being made by people trading their shares.
Right at the end of the boom one investor sent his stockbroker an order for shares and the operator sending the telegram added an extra zero. There are checks to make sure that can't happen but, with the best of intentions, sometimes human error still plays a part.
The stockbroker's normal practise was to confirm the number of shares ordered by return telegram before purchasing and the buyer, who didn't have enough capital to pay for such a large amount, saw his chance to make a killing and confirmed.
Of course it was at exactly that time that the bottom dropped out of the market and the man went bankrupt.
I understand Telecom Australia apologised and offered to refund the cost of his telegram. They had no further obligation than that.

Reading through the list of nicknames supplied by Barry Edgar (see "A Ragtime History" in the Morse menu) reminded me of a story told by Gordon Olle—The Trumpeter.
Gordon joined the Army during World War II and, given his telecommunications background, was posted to a signals unit.
On the first morning his sergeant asked if he could read Morse sent by an Aldiss lamp. (I think it was an Aldiss lamp. I don't quite remember what Gordon called it, but it was certainly an optical device.)
"Of course I can!" trumpeted the Trumpeter.  He was nothing if not confident.
He was given a classroom test which he passed with flying colours then moved out to do some exercises in open country.
That was when the penny dropped! "I didn't realise when they were testing me in the class room that I could hear the relay, and that's what I was writing down."
Once he realised his mistake it didn't take him long to learn the visual version. He was a pretty good operator.

There are lots of stories about the Room and I'll add them as I get the opportunity. It was an oddball place to work with lots of oddball people, but it wasn't boring.