Good Night Old Man

Good Night Old Man

What it was like to be a Morse Telegraph Operator…

By George Campbell

Copyright © George Campbell 2011

Good Night Old Man

Cover Art by wildhorse creative arts

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Let this book be dedicated to the memory of my beloved wife, Ruth.

And to these two pre-eminent Canadians:

(1) H. K. ‘Keith’ Jack, commercial operator (HK) with Canadian Pacific Telegraphs in WN office, Winnipeg and (2) W G ‘Bill’ Owens, railroad operator (O) with CN Railway, Edmonton. Both were professional Morse operators of the highest caliber.

All three were role models without equal.

...oOo...

Acknowledgements

I learned a long time ago that we accomplish very little all by ourselves. No matter what we undertake to do, we invariably rely on the help of other people, one way or another, somewhere in the process.

So too, when writing books. A great many people helped me in odd little ways to write this one, and most of them never realized they were doing so. But I couldn’t have done it without them. So please, Lord, bless them all.

Most of what I’ve written here is my recollections of my own personal experiences and conversations with other operators. The historical information has come from many sources, which is why I don’t include a bibliography or footnotes. The facts are all easily verifiable in numerous reference books, and on the Internet.

I have very fond memories of all the people I name here, and I hope that whatever notoriety their names acquire from my mentioning them will, in no way, reflect unpleasantly upon them or upon their heirs and descendants. When I knew them, they were all good and honourable people who I was proud to know, and I have no desire to cause any of them embarrassment.

My twenty years with Canada Pacific Telegraphs were among the happiest of my long life, and I still feel very proud of my association, therewith. They are also among the saddest, because we who served in those final decades knew that we were, in effect, giving palliative care to a grand old lady on her death bed.

The pictures I use here were given to me as acknowledged, with the understanding they would be displayed in public many times, including use in this book, which was written for the sole purpose of educating. I still present historical talks on Canadian telegraph, to whoever asks me to do so, as do my colleagues in the Morse Telegraph Club. And, we do not charge for our services.

Finally, if I have forgotten to thank anyone specifically, for whatever, I humbly apologize and thank you now. And I wish you good health, joy, comfort, and peace.

May your days and nights be painless and your memories secure.

Good Night Old Man

The Morse Code: Letters

A . _ B _ . . . C . . . D _ . . E . F . _ . G _ _ . H . . . . I . . J _ . _ . K _ . _ L ___ M _ _

N _ . O . . P . . . . . Q . . _ . R . . . S . . . T __ U . . _ V . . . _ W . _ _ X . _ . . Y . . . .

Z . . . .

The Morse Code: Letters and Punctuation

1 . _ _. 2 . . _ . . 3 . . . _ . 4 . . . . _ 5 _ _ _ 6 . . . . . . 7 _ _ . . 8 _ . . . . 9 _ . . _ 0 . .

Colon: KO, Comma AA, Dash DX, Decimal DOT, Dollars SX, Hyphen HX, Paragraph MM, Parentheses PN PY, Period UD, Question Mark DN, Quotes QN QJ, Semicolon SI

The Morse Code – devised by Alfred Vail, Samuel. F. B. Morse’s assistant. This is the original code used from the Great Beginning. – May 24th, 1844. It became known as American Morse or Railroad Morse. When telegraph entered Europe and bumped into accented letters, another code was devised. It became known as Continental Morse and later, International Morse. Land-line telegraph throughout North America used American Morse the length of its lifetime.

Foreword

I can’t keep a handle on the decades anymore, because, at my age, one birthday is hardly gone when the next one arrives, and the numbers get worse as the years add up. To me, birthdays are all just lies anyway, because the real person who lives inside this ancient body is still the same 15-year-old kid who walked into the CPR Telegraph office in Brandon, Manitoba, on July 17th, 1941, and asked for a job. The kid who said, Yes, when the boss asked, Can you start tomorrow? No job description. No interview. He just needed a boy with a bike, and I was a warm, breathing body that walked in and asked for the job.

So the next day, I began a career that I came to imagine might last for the rest of my life, or at least until I was pensioned off in my old age, away off beyond time somewhere, when I‘d be so old that I’d shuffle as I walked, drool as I spoke, and have no hair at all.

Well, I don’t drool even now, and I’m 85 in 2011 as I write this. I exercise, so I can still walk. But I got one of them right. My hair’s long time gone, dang it!

Actually, as things turned out, I had three careers. Telegraph, education, and the media, with telegraph being the shortest of the three – a mere 20 years. But during those two decades, I made it from messenger to telegraph agent, to commercial operator, to wire chief, to broadcast controller. (Yeah, I know. I was only a T&R Chief, not a wire chief, per se, but we did the same work, so why not call ourselves by the same name, eh?) And while I was doing all that, telegraph began to die, and I watched it go.

Actually, I find it odd now that I remember my first career and relate to it much more than I do to either of the other two. I enjoyed teaching high school, and meeting the fine young people who were my students. I liked being a freelance writer and broadcaster. But the career that defines me as a person, that says, This is who you really were, kid, is still a commercial Morse operator. I’m proudest of that one.

I fondly remember the evening in 1974, when I sat in our den with Ruthie, my beloved wife, and our three wonderful kids, to watch another episode of Pierre Berton’s National Dream. In it, Van Horne strides into a station somewhere out west, and says to the operator, Send this message! He begins to dictate and the operator starts sending, and suddenly, from the telegraph sounder, in beautiful, perfect Morse, comes ‘HR RS’ exactly as it should have!

Oh, yes, Berton was meticulous in his research.

But what I remember most about that moment is that I realized I could still read Morse, 13 years after I’d left it!!!

At that time, we were living in Thunder Bay, which had a repeater office. One of our neighbours was an inspector, so it was easy to get back in touch. It wasn’t long until I joined the Morse Telegraph Club, Winnipeg Chapter, and extended my search for former colleagues. After retiring as a teacher, we moved to Alberta, and there were Morse club meetings to attend, public demonstrations to volunteer at, and even a thing or two to be written. The latter, of course, led eventually to writing this book.

Most of what I’ve written here is recollections of my own personal experiences and conversations with other operators. The historical information has come from many sources and, in many cases, there are several sources for a particular piece of information. Sometimes, the sources are obvious in the telling. And some not so obvious. Such as my comment about the absence of northern lights during the Northwest Rebellion. It’s my own deduction made as an experienced Morse operator, long familiar with the effects of the aurora on telegraph. The peak years in sun spots were 1880 and 1891, so the nadir would have been 1885.

In writing this book, I got so wrapped up in telling the story that I finished it before I realized I hadn’t told it all. I left out the Collins Telegraph project sponsored by Western Union which aimed at building a telegraph line from San Francisco to Saint Petersburg in Russia. They were 850 miles north west of New Westminster when the second Atlantic Cable came ashore, and worked fine, rendering the Collins project redundant, but leaving BC with a unique collection of interesting new towns that thrive to this day.

Even more pertinent to Canada, I said nothing about telegraph in the Arctic, handled so superbly by the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals headquartered at Edmonton. From 1924, until they handed it over to the Department of Transport in 1960, the service grew to involve five million messages per year, augmented to a certain extent, perhaps, by the CBC’s weekly Northern Messenger and a plethora of radio hams. I didn’t intend to omit anything. But at my age, things like that just happen.

I hope, as you read this, you get a sense of the fun and camaraderie that was telegraph. I hope you sense how much we enjoyed going to work each day – or more likely each night – and how good it felt to do our jobs well, and to know that we did them well; that unasked, we went an extra mile or two here and there, because we recognized a need and fulfilled it. Never mind all the unhappy campers who didn’t.

Let me reconstruct a quotation recently given to me by good friend, Jim Munsey. It talks about railroaders, but I’ve rewritten it a little, and it’s still true: There were really just two kinds of telegraphers: those who read Morse code, and those who were operators.

It still applies in this 21st century, even though telegraph has long since died, because it can be directed at any modern job, trade, craft, or profession that you care to name and it will never become obsolete.

So enjoy. Rekindle some memories. Thanks for listening. And . . . GNOM.

-30-

George Campbell

November 6th, 2011

Part I – Looking Back

I want to tell you about a job I had that was so much fun you never wanted to be sick. It was so satisfying that you could hardly wait to go to work, just to keep on doing it, and on top of that, it paid very well, too.

The job involved a technology that was simple, efficient, easily maintained, and fully respected by the public it served. It was a world-wide service that did exactly what it said it would do, and was cheap enough that most people could afford to use it.

As I write this in 2008, I’m eighty-two years old, and it has been over forty years since I left the service, but my memories are as clear as if I’d punched out only last night. Our new millennium has brought us so many new gadgets, that instant communication is rarely impossible anymore, anywhere on the planet. Cell phones, Blackberries, e-mails, I-Pods, digital imaging - ah, I can’t even list them all - work so well (when you know how to use them, and you have the necessary dexterity to punch the right keys), that the miracles they epitomize are neither noticed by their users, nor even appreciated. But long before these miracles evolved, we only had the good old Morse telegraph, and it was there long before any of the others were even thought of.

So what I want to tell you is what it was like to be a Morse operator, to live at a time when none of our latter-day toys existed; when we just had the telegraph, the telephone, and the radio for long distance communication. Of course, not everyone could afford a radio in those days, and even fewer had a telephone. Moreover, radios spat out static every time lightning flashed. Often, it was so loud that listening wasn’t pleasant, while long distance telephone calls could take a long time just to make the connections. But the telegraph was there when we needed it, and it was cheap enough and fast enough for everyone - even into the second half of the Twentieth Century. It was also what we might now call, ‘the mother of all that followed’, because it led directly to so many other things. I’m proud to say that I was a player in that technology, because I was one of the last commercial Morse operators ever hired anywhere.

I guess you’d have to say that I’m obsolete now, because I’m a craftsman whose craft has vanished; who still possesses his hard won skills, but can’t apply them because the system died a long time ago. Yet even if it still existed, the skills I had in my prime have gradually seeped away as my age advanced. My hands aren’t steady enough to send anymore. I can’t hear as well as I once did. Touch typing is now a skill to be dreamt of, and maybe I’m not as quick on the uptake anymore. But my memory is razor sharp, and I remember . . . Oh yes, I remember . . .

Back around the middle of the last century, as a commercial Morse operator with Canadian Pacific Telegraphs, I was doing a job that isn’t done anywhere anymore by anyone. The medium, itself, collapsed in Canada on May 30th, 1972, and our beautiful language is now a dead one. But once upon a time, I worked and conversed in Morse code every day. Speaking of which, I guess I’d better tell those born after 1972 that Morse code was an electrical language that people used to communicate with one another over a distance. It took patience and practice to learn it, and although I left it in the final decade of its life, I can still read it fluently, as all of us can who were ever practitioners of the craft.

The last of us were turfed out in the 1970s, when CN/CP Telecommunications closed its commercial telegraph offices, and our railway companies abandoned their stations. So, not only are we without a craft, but even the companies we worked for – Canadian Pacific Telegraphs, Canadian National Telegraphs, Northern Alberta Railway Telegraphs, and others – are long gone. Oh sure, you can still see telegraph poles and wires beside railway tracks here and there, but they only serve railway signals. Telegraph has gone forever.

A good number of us former ‘brass pounders’ are still alive as I write this, early in the Twenty First Century, because we were only in our ‘40s or ‘50s when they gave us the axe. We can still telegraph, even now, because it’s like swimming or riding a bike. Once you learn it, you never forget it. But nobody speaks our language seriously anymore, so when we die, our beloved language and craft will die with us – never to be heard again.

It was a lot of fun while it lasted. I never met a Morse operator who didn’t enjoy telegraphing. They may not have liked some of the things that went with the job, but the telegraph part was fun. Something you could get really good at and never stop enjoying as long as you did it.

It occasionally happened back in the ‘40s and ‘50s, when I worked in telegraph and repeater offices, that customers would get interested in the hows and whys of the business. People waiting at the counter for replies to telegrams would stand watching us work, listening to what glib writers sometimes called the machine-gun chatter of telegraph sounders and relays, but which we heard as clean, crisp words precisely written in graceful pen strokes of sound. People were often taken by the ease with which we focused on only one sounder out of many as we sent or copied telegrams, totally oblivious to as many as half a dozen other relays ticking away elsewhere in the office. Eventually, when there was a break, they’d ask me how I could possibly make sense out of something like the Morse code, especially when so many instruments were clattering at the same time. I’d tell them, quite truthfully, that it was just like listening to voices at a party or a banquet. There could be forty people talking at once, but if you’re chatting with one person, you concentrate on that one voice, and ignore all the others until someone says your name.

Likewise, in telegraphing, you listened for your call sign, and when you heard someone sending it, you answered the man, and then concentrated totally on what he said, listening to the words coming from that particular sounder, and typing them onto a telegraph blank as they came to you. Or, even simpler, you carried on a conversation with the guy at the other end for ten or twenty minutes, exchanging repartee or having a colossal fight, and never wrote down a thing.

Often people would say that they had tried to learn the code in Scouts, Guides, or the Armed Forces but hadn’t pursued it. In most cases, the memories hadn’t been pleasant, the experiences unrewarding. Still, there was something about being able to understand Morse code – sent at speed – that fascinated people, and made them wish that they, too, could understand it. In fact, even now, when Morse code has vanished from human communication, there’s still an interest in what it was like to be a Morse operator.

I’m often asked to explain the mystique when, as a volunteer at various Pioneer Days, and dressed in the costume of an operator – visor, vest, black sleeves (none of which I ever wore) – I demonstrate the code or give presentations on the history of the Morse telegraph. Yet whenever I try to do that, we get off on tangents, because you can’t describe the mystique in ten or fifteen minutes. There’s too much involved, and things tend to lead on to other things. So I’ve never yet been able to finish telling anyone what it was really like, which is why I’m writing this. Maybe, I can make it happen here.

Okay, you say. So what was it like to be a Morse operator?

Well, being a Morse operator meant a lot more than just being able to read letters sent in Morse code when conditions were ideal. It often meant intensely concentrating through a cacophonous racket, to read words being painstakingly sent by an arthritic fist on a wire that faded and surged, like a sonic apparition, as it accumulated a shroud of ice. Sometimes, it challenged you to pick out one message when two or more were mixing together, as often happened to wireless operators, but could happen on land-lines, as well. It could also mean trying to read Morse through an undulating solar wind of northern lights in which the relays and sounders rasped like doorbells, stuttered into silence, or fibrillated in spasms of unreadable throbs. It might involve reading a flashing lamp a mile away through a howling blizzard on the heaving deck of a tumbling ship. Sometimes, it even meant watching with unblinking eyes, a hair thin needle barely twitching on a milliammeter as it responded to a telegraph key far across an ocean, coming to you on a cable that lay along the sea bottom – two or three miles below the surface.

For those of us who were railroad operators – a separate breed from commercial operators – it meant much of the above plus having to copy train orders through the explosive screech of high pressure steam spewing from a 350-tonne locomotive parked just outside your bay window. Or straining to read what was being sent to you by a real, live dragon