When a reader brought in a 1943 telephone directory he’d found in his garage, it shed light on the days when not everyone had a landline and cellphones were 40 years away.
Scots-born Alexander Graham Bell had been granted a patent in 1876 for his invention of the telephone. The New Zealand Government was quick to embrace the idea and less than two years later, on February 2, 1878, set up wires between Dunedin and Milton to test the new technology. A plaque at the Milton museum (formerly the post office) commemorates the event.
Christchurch opened the country’s first exchange in 1881 with 30 subscribers. By 1910, there were 14 exchanges catering for 25,000 families and businesses, who paid an annual fee of £17.10s (about $200 today) to rent a telephone.
In 1927, just before automation, a full shift at the Dunedin exchange had 40 operators, three supervisors and an officer-in-charge.
The first phones were wooden, wall-mounted units with a ledge for a notepad and a winding handle on the side to call up the operator who answered, "Number please".
Exchange operators sat in rows and connected calls by inserting a plug from the caller’s number into a socket for the number called.
Dunedin man Don Shaw (82) remembers his New Plymouth childhood, saying: "Our phone, like most others, was a wooden contraption in the hall. As long as I can remember there was an old carved chair, originally my great-grandmother’s I think, and maybe a couple of hundred years old, that was the telephone chair. I still have it.
"Dial phones came later and were black, made of Bakelite. Then we got a green one, very flash, made of plastic."
The first telephone directory was printed in 1909 and in 1943, the directory cover was a no-nonsense fawn with navy print. The hole in the top left corner was so a loop of string could be threaded through to hang the book under the telephone.
Despite the war and rumours of German spies everywhere, the 1943 directory was extremely detailed with addresses for the army, navy and air force headquarters. Private addresses for doctors and public officials were included, although Dunedin Mayor Andrew Henson Allen was not among the officials. However, the A.H. Allen, "cr Queen and Dundas Sts, N1" was possibly him.
A future mayor, T.K.S. Sidey, appeared with his mother, the widow of Sir Thomas Sidey of daylight saving fame, above him. She appeared simply as "Sidey Lady, ‘Corstorphine’, City SW1.
Doctors — including future Labour MP Gervan McMillan — butchers, hairdressers and hotels (City, Criterion, Grand, Terminus, Bowling Green) were plentiful, alongside chemists, opticians and jewellers (Peter Dick, Dawsons, G & T Young).
There were plenty of options for buying clothing, with Wolfenden and Russell, Arthur Barnett and DSA among the Dunedin companies, while furniture came from Calder Mackay, Butterfields, Brazendales or Nees and Cadbury Fry Hudson provided chocolate.
Dunedin boasted about a dozen taxi companies in 1943. Car numbers were rising but still out of the reach of most working-class families, so public transport was the principal means of getting around.
Telephones, still something of a luxury in Dunedin at the time, were direct-dial for local calls, which were free. Calls from a red telephone booth were tuppence — two pennies in a slot — while toll calls were costly and had to be made through an operator.
There was a number to call when your telephone was out of order, which assumes one had to find a willing neighbour with a phone to report the issue.
The directory had 34 sub-exchanges. Although Balclutha’s boasted "continuous attendance", it was bad luck if you lived in Clydevale, Glenorchy or Hawea Flat and wanted to make a phone call on a Sunday or public holiday — the exchange was closed.
Hyde was worse: hours were 9am-1pm and 2pm-5pm on weekdays, and 9am-12.30pm on Saturdays. There was no Sunday service. Presumably there was a sole operator and the exchange hours reflected her work schedule.
Other Dunedin sub-exchanges were better served but still limited. Some towns, including Mosgiel, Alexandra, Cromwell, Heriot, Lawrence, Milton and Middlemarch, operated 6am to midnight, Monday to Saturday, and 8am-8pm on Sundays and public holidays.
Elaine Miller (92), of Wendon Valley, lived in Heriot in the 1940s and remembers when the family got its first telephone around 1947.
They lived about 1.3km from Heriot village and her father, an agricultural contractor, frequently worked away from home for weeks at a time. The nearest neighbours were some distance away, so her mother was quite isolated.
"I think getting the phone was just for convenience for Mum, to keep in touch with her mates," Mrs Miller said.
"We were on a party line, just two lines, so we were lucky. I think our number was 35M."
A party line could be up to 10 subscribers and the letter after a number was Morse Code. Simpler letters — A, D, M, R and S — were allocated first on party lines and people learned their code, such as two long rings for M or three short ones for S.
To check if the line was in use, it was etiquette to lift the receiver and say, "Working?" before making a party-line call. Mrs Miller recalled a younger sister thinking their mother was answering a question about their father’s whereabouts when she said, "Working?"
"Are you there?" was a common way of answering an incoming call.
The directory also listed private lines, mainly for farms in isolated areas. Some had half a dozen co-owners, others just one, like Gimmerburn’s P.R.H Clarke and Waitiri’s I.W. Cowie.
Although Dunedin was automated by the 1930s, self-dialling was slow to be introduced in other parts of the country.
Moira Hastie worked on the Milton exchange before automation.
"I was there from 1962 to ’64 and we still had the [switch] boards," she said.
Operators were trained in Wellington, a week-long course.
Although the popular image was of young women at the switchboards, Mrs Hastie said, "There were quite a few men and they worked the night shift.
"Our earliest start was 7am and 10 at night was the latest women worked."
She wanted to go further but couldn’t, as men were always the supervisors.
In 20 years with the Post & Telegraph Department, she had several roles, including working in the Post Office Savings Bank, on the counter and in telegrams.
Telegrams were used for conveying wedding greetings and often used to advise news of deaths. They were delivered by hand or phoned through.
Operators were sworn to secrecy but sometimes that wasn’t enough. Mrs Hastie recalled one occasion when the news came through that Milton town clerk George Melville had been awarded an MBE.
"We had to stay back until the news was published," she said.
She looks back on those days with fondness.
"I did enjoy it."
Alexander Graham Bell visited New Zealand in 1910 and was impressed with telephone progress. One wonders what he would think now.
