History – Making a connection

In our modern world, with its many ways of instant communication, it is hard to imagine a world where local letters were hand-delivered by boat or horseback, or where you travelled to your nearest post office on mail day to collect your precious mail. These post offices were sometimes tiny sheds not much bigger than those old outside loos. One of these early post office buildings from Mahurangi Heads now lives at the Warkworth Museum.

Telegraph, using morse code which was decoded and then hand-delivered to the recipient, first came to New Zealand in 1862, and connected Christchurch and Lyttleton. It was a vast improvement for fast communication. By 1866, the Cook Strait and Trans-Tasman cables had been laid and telegrams were becoming used more widely. They were expensive, but much faster than letters.

By 1877, New Zealand had heard of Bell’s development and patenting of a practical telephone, where a voice message could be relayed almost instantly. It would have seemed like magic. One year later, a single line had been trialled and perhaps we could say the rest is history.

The first post and telegraph office in Warkworth was opened on March 11, 1875, when a telegraph line from Auckland to the Bay of Islands was built through the town (pictured below). This was on the corner of Alnwick and Neville Street. In 1911, it was replaced with a new building to serve the town for many years as telephone exchange and post office. Part of the building was a home for the postmaster and his family. This category 2 historic building still stands and now accommodates the Mahurangi Matters office.

Many small exchanges existed around the district and were often attached to private homes and operated for only a few hours a day. Those on a party line, where several properties were linked by one line, had a morse code ring and could dial and chat to each other without going through the exchange.

Our number at home was 23D – one long ring and then two shorts – much quicker than a walk up the road to exchange news. I have it on good authority that those operating the telephone exchanges were quite up with all the local news!

Telegrams were still an important part of communication, especially for overseas contacts. Maureen Young, whose father, Mr Best, was the postmaster and telegraphist at Warkworth from 1935 to 1956, tells of young Frank Otway, who took her father’s place during the war when he was called up to serve. Many of the war telegrams were to notify families of the loss of one of their sons. Once he had decoded the message, he would jump in the P&T truck and deliver the news personally rather than ring.

Post World War II, the use of telephones expanded quickly and many of us not-so-young folk will remember the old black Bakelite rotary dial phones. We can probably remember the five-digit phone number, too! Then came those brightly coloured rotary dial phones, now a collector’s item. By the 1980s, the first cellular phones were appearing on the market, just over 100 years since the first phones. Now we can all have digital phones and instant communication to almost anywhere in the world. It is hard to imagine how we might communicate in another 100 years.

There is a new display of old phones and related items at the Warkworth Museum. The collection belongs to Ray Jensen, one of the museum volunteers and an ex Post & Telegraph worker. Ray also has a small booklet available from the museum shop about telecommunications in the Warkworth area from 1874 if you are keen to learn more.