page 185

XXVI
Telephones

A scandal that you think should be
   By all the wide world known?
In the dead o' the night just whisper it me
   On the country telephone.

When telephones became a practicable proposition, "earth return single" wires were soon spread all over the country by private enterprise. There was no bother about way-leaves or rent. You said to your neighbour, "I should like to take a wire along such and such a fence through your place," and the request was never refused. The wire, single galvanised steel, was hung, always very slack, on light scantlings wired on to the fence posts, with private switch-boards at the small country stores. When, later. Government wires reached these stores, the question arose of some plan by which privately owned and maintained exchanges could be switched on to the Government system. The Post Office, of course, declared that it was beyond the power of human wisdom to compass any such adjustment However, as the page 186Home Secretary, Sir Joseph Ward, happened to be in the district just then, a small deputation met him in the back bar of a Gisborne "pub," and over drinks and cigars we laid our little plan before him.

The permanent head of the Post Office, also present, made all sorts of objections, but these were overruled seriatim, and he was then and there instructed to carry out our suggested arrangement.

Sir Joseph had his faults, but a love of red tape was not among them.

The thing worked without a hitch, and for all I know, does so still.

In some ways our easy-going private lines were wonderfully flexible and convenient; In the matter of getting down mobs of sheep to the Freezing Works, for instance, the gain was immense. I have often sat in my office in conference with the Freezing Works four miles away, the manager of one run thirty-five miles away, and of another, fifty miles away, and discussed all the details of carefully-timed deliveries exactly as if we were all in the same room together each hearing all that the others said. Concluding the same arrangement would have previously meant a week's hard journeying, with no certainty of things fitting in right after all.

On the other hand, induced currents were page 187so generally prevalent that it was generally acknowledged that by far the best and cheapest way to advertise anything in our district was to tell it to someone on the telephone as a very particular secret.