A telegrapher's paradise

He meets us at the door. He’s leaning on a walking stick, his health has started failing, but his eyes are bright and the handshake firmer than most. Kyrre Bjugn is a veteran at Telenor, and one of the pensioners still on the company’s payroll. Today, he has driven the 500 meters from his home to show us the station and tell us about what was locally called the “Telegrapher’s paradise”.

At the beginning of the last century, Lødingen telegraph station was the main central for all tele-traffic in northern Norway. All telegrams from Bodø, Vadsø, Hammerfest, Tromsø and Vesterålen had to pass through this white timber building at Tjeldsund in Vestfjorden before being sent on. And we’re talking quite a number of messages: In 1917 over two million telegrams were sent from here. In old black and white photographs we can see corset-clad female telegraphists bent over polished Morse apparatus – like a snippet of refined society in the middle of the barren nature of the north. But how was it, working here at Lødingen? What role did the telegraph station play in village life? Is it correct that there were as many women as there were men working in the company?

Walking steadily, he shows us the way into the impressive Swiss chalet style villa. He has brought his own private archive; a red binder filled to within breaking point of anecdotes, reports, pictures and correspondence. Kyrre will fill the next four hours with detailed knowledge concerning the history of telegraphy in general and Lødingen Telegraph Station especially. 
-What Kyrre doesn’t know, is not worth knowing, says Bjørnar Pedersen, manager of the station. He too has worked his entire lifetime for Telenor.
-Bjørnar is a blessed man, says Kyrre.
-For twenty years I waited for someone to take over after me. I’ll turn 89, and you see the state of my health. That’s when Bjørnar turned up. I’m so immensely fond of that man. 
They have known each other for years. Ever since the time Bjørnar was sixteen and racing around Lødingen on a tuned-up moped. How did they meet? Bjørnar is smiling:
-We used to live here at Lødingen telegraph station at the same time, Kyrre with his family on the first floor and me in a flat in the loft. Kyrre counted 14 pairs of shoes outside my door, when I had the guys over once. 

The business grew, and the telegraph station soon needed premises of its own. After all, Lødingen had become the telegraph inspectorate of Northern-Norway, after inspector, Bødtker Lie moved here from Tromsø in 1875.
- Kyrre smiles contentedly, I usually say that Lødingen won and Tromsø lost.
In 1895 the new station was completed with two spacious floors plus loft and cellar. On the ground floor was the telegraph station with the reception, a Morse-hall, a Wheatstone-hall and a Siemens-hall. The inspector with family lived on the floor above while the loft contained flats for the employees.
-And there were outbuildings for the livestock across the yard, states Kyrre.
-They had animals?
-What d’you reckon? They needed milk!

Not only animals arrived at Lødingen. Despite gloomy predictions made by one of the first inspectors, (“This desolate and lonely place, surrounded by peatbogs and stony heathland is not very alluring to the young telegrapher”), the activities of the telegraph drew ever more professions to the village.
-Not very many lived here in 1865, just the priest, a tenant farmer and those belonging to the priest’s household. When Telenor (Televerket) arrived, there was a sudden need for tradesmen, and more; shoemakers, tailors, and masons, says Kyrre.
-So the telegraph station had become a cornerstone business?
-Yes, it was the key to the development of Lødingen.

At one point Lødingen was number three when counting the number of telegrams sent in Norway. But, Kyrre, points out:
-This was mainly relay traffic. Because the signals from the northernmost lines didn’t reach further than Lødingen, they had to be redistributed from here.
-All the tele-communication that that took place in Northern-Norway had to go through this room, says Bjørnar, and nods his head towards the green painted chamber entitled “the Circus”. Up to 36 people worked here at any time. The room carries a patina of use. In several places the solid floorboards are pitted from heels of shoes being ground against it.
-And what was it like, working here?
-It was probably good, thinks Kyrre.
-Down in Oslo they were saying that the telegraphers here in Lødingen were; “prone to melancholy and hypochondria”. Well, Telegraph Inspector, Strømsted, arrived in 1896, and didn’t leave until 1931. Surely he couldn’t be prone to melancholy and hypochondria.
Kyrre points to a cardboard cut-out depicting a uniformed man with a sleek moustasch.
-By the way, he was a great personality up here. So the people down in Oslo can accuse us of being prone to melancholy and hypochondria, but one thing is certain; the history of the telegraph here at Lødingen is absolutely unique.
-What are you thinking about?
-The activity! Their inventiveness!

Like the time in 1904 when they needed to construct some cabins. They got the local youth about to undergo their confirmation to transport the materials in exchange for waffles and fruit squash. Or when three assistants were out picking cloudberries on a neighbouring island, but lost their boat and had to spend the night out in the pouring rain. Or all the gossip produced by “the story of the cumbersome stove”, elaborately described in the correspondence between the canteen committee and the landlord, Schøning – correspondence which, of course, is preserved by Kyrre
-And if they had nothing else to do, they would practice with the Morse-key. It was said that one could tell if a telegraphist had been posted to Lødingen. They kept a particular beat when tapping out messages.
In time, Lødingen became a place where all young telegraphers did well to pass through. The stay would produce good references, says Kyrre.
-It does look quite grand in these old pictures?
-Yes, this was probably quite a posh place, thinks Bjørnar.
-If you were in the employment of Telegrafværket, you were seen as a professional. You really were someone, agrees Kyrre, not least because you were a state employee. This meant job security.
-Wasn’t it seen as a bit snobbish, this place? Bjørnar looks quizzically to Kyrre.
-They held classy garden parties in the park, where they even played cricket?
-Yes, it probably was, admits Kyrre.
-But that sort of thing was over when we arrived here. I’m of working class stock anyway, none of that causes me any grief.

The daughter of Telegraph Inspector, Strømsted, the man behind the cardboard cut-out in the exhibition, was her father’s equal when it came to gruff authority. With a steady gaze and rolled-up sleeves, the young telegraphist is reminiscent of the English suffragettes. Kyrre confirms that, yes; Telenor (Det Norske Telegrafvæsen) was one of the first workplaces to hire women:
-Norway’s first four telegraphists, engaged in 1854, were officials who had undergone the telegrapher training. Later, two women were employed towards the end of the 1850s. At Lødingen, the staff consisted almost only of women, says Kyrre.
The first women to be hired by Telenor (Den Norske Statstelegraf) were the sisters, Nielsine and Martine Breda from Kristiansand. They enter the story in 1858. Telenor was early on an important employer of women, but should not shout too loudly about the company’s innovative policies on equal rights. In a letter to the ministry, the Director General of the telegraph, Carsten Tank Nielsen, writes: “The female telegraphists would be adequately satisfied with a lower wage than that of their male counterparts.”

Kyrre joined the company by coincidence. As the son of a fisherman from Bø in the outer reaches of Vesterålen it was not granted that he would end up in Telenor, but in 1949-50 he did the “ordinary training” in Kirkegata 9, Oslo. After a few years climbing telephone poles in Finnmark, he ended up in an administrative position at Lødingen in 1963.
-I went straight into an awfully interesting case concerning property, he says enthusiastically. A leased plot was to be returned from Telenor (Telegrafværket) back to the ownership of the Church, a process involving a complicated survey of property and borderlines.
-We didn’t close the case until sometime in the 70s, he says.
-And every time I had any questions, I would look through the books. I always found more than I was looking for.

The interest in telecommunications history started then, and as time went by, it was Kyrre that people came to with questions concerning all sorts, from the telegraph station to genealogy and local society. What information Kyrre doesn’t carry around in his head, he can find in the books that are neatly stacked in the office that is still to his disposal up in the loft space. Here are boxes upon boxes of documents and papers, gathered throughout a long life.

1936 saw the end of activity in the old station due to the classic story of new technology making old occupations redundant. We are starting to get used to this effect by now, but for Lødingen in 1930, it meant catastrophe.
-New technology made it possible to send telegrams over greater distances. You could send from Tromsø to Trondheim, from Hammerfest to Trondheim, from Svolvær to Trondheim, there was no longer need for the redistribution services offered by Lødingen. Because of this the requirement for people dropped, says Kyrre
-Telegraph manager Kjeldsø who also sat in the local council, wrote a complaint against Telegrafvæsenet: How can they tear apart this society? People have built houses for themselves, and acquired mortgages. What are they supposed to live off when their jobs disappear?

But the future was unstoppable. Not only was it possible to send telegrams over greater distances, but people were about to stop sending telegrams altogether. The telephone was taking over. The remaining activity was moved to Lødingen station- and administration building, also called “Messa”, while the old station became living quarters for the employees. Among them we find Kyrre and his large family. Bjørnar lived here as well due to his father working in Televerket. A new room plan and wallpapered plasterboard walls turned the house from workplace to home, and that’s how it stayed up until the 90s when Telenor decided to renovate the station and restore it back to its original elegance.
-That’s when they found this beautiful skirting, says Kyrre, and points his stick towards some broad, carved boards running along the base of the wall.
-They also revealed the original panelling. It did of course cost a bit of money, but if they hadn’t done it then, it would never have been done.
His gaze travels around the room. It’s filled with artefacts of a different time, and a profession that no longer exists. Kyrre knows that all things perish in time, and that a story has to be told to be kept alive. Only then can we learn from the past. The old man grabs his stick, he has done his bit.