Long before mobile phones, there was the electrical telegraph. Although a number of working prototypes were developed in the early 19th century, it was the single-wire telegraph system invented by American Samuel Morse — and its eponymous alphabet of dots and dashes — that quickly became the international standard, including in Canada. In 1917, train dispatcher Vincent Coleman saved 300 lives by sending a heartbreaking warning to an inbound train moments before the Halifax Explosion. Two decades later, Canadians used Morse code to intercept German messages during the Second World War.

This year marks a historic milestone: the 175th anniversary of Canada’s first telegraph message. On Dec. 19, 1846, the Niagara Electro-Magnetic Telegraph Company sent a message from Hamilton to Toronto, which simply read: Who is in the office? The telegraph was the first technology to connect Canadians across the country, but the true pioneers are the people behind the wires. They call themselves “brass pounders,” and Lavina Shaw is proud to be one of them.

Lavina was destined to be a telegrapher. Her father, grandfather and uncles all worked as railway operators and used the telegraph to deliver train orders to conductors and engineers. As a young child, Lavina would lie in bed listening to the repetitive clicking and clacking of the register. It was a language she couldn’t understand, and yet it was as familiar as the scraping of wheels on steel tracks and the stream of disembodied voices drifting from the train platform into her childhood home, the railway station in Sifton, Man. When she turned 10, Lavina asked her father to teach her the code.

“I was always going to be a teacher,” says Lavina. “I just kept on learning telegraphy and when I got to be 17, I decided that I didn’t want to live in a small village anymore. So, I went into Winnipeg and tried out as a telegraph operator. I passed right away.”

Lavina decided to become a commercial telegrapher — a career which, surprisingly for the time, earned her the same wage as her male colleagues. Two months after completing her training, she was sent to Saskatoon for her first assignment with Canadian National Telegraph, working six days a week translating messages mainly sent from railway stations across the province. Much like modern-day texting, telegraphers used a series of abbreviations to speed up their communications. The word that for instance, was shortened to tt: two dashes in Morse code. Recently, the now-92-year-old Lavina overheard a few people bemoaning the fact that teenagers are butchering the English language: “I got up and said, ‘50 years ago I used all those abbreviations, and I don’t think the language was ruined!’”

During a typical shift, Lavina copied an average of 20 telegrams an hour, ranging from birthday messages to horse betting results. “That was a scandal, actually,” she says. “They [the telegraph operators] would already have the results before they put [their own] bets in. They actually made quite a bit of money. I was told I don’t dare tell anybody.” Lavina was already sworn to secrecy: handling peoples’ private communications meant everything she copied was confidential. 

Life as a telegrapher was fast-paced and never boring. By 1946, sending and receiving telegrams had become a regular part of daily life, but some people were still getting used to this “new” technology. “People thought that they could send flowers over the telegraph, and one person wanted to send a pair of shoes, thinking it would travel along the wire,” Lavina laughs.

From Saskatoon, Lavina moved on to several smaller communities: Moose Jaw, Sask., Fort William, Ont., (now Thunder Bay) and Flin Flon, Man. As a female telegrapher, often working late into the night, she had several uncomfortable encounters. One evening she received a telegram from a man claiming to be a judge’s son, whom she presumes may have been running from the law. He threatened that if word got out he was in the area, her life would be in danger. Her love for the job kept her going. In Flin Flon, she covered local breaking news for the Winnipeg Free Press and even moonlighted as a sports broadcaster, doing play-by-plays at local hockey games. 

When work was slow, she would play checkers with other operators over the wires, tapping out her every move. Soon, she could tell each telegrapher apart by their “fist,” or distinct style of transmitting. “I could still do that, hear somebody on there and know that’s so-and-so,” she says. “They say women have a smoother method of sending.” 

In an example of online dating that long predates the internet, Lavina’s “fist” caught the attention of Earl Shaw, a telegraph operator in Melville, Sask. By then, Lavina had returned to Saskatoon and copied lots of messages to and from Melville, nearly 300 kilometres away. A good majority were from Earl, who also grew up on a railway station and came from a family of telegraphers. Gradually, they started corresponding by regular mail to avoid any uninvited listeners along the line. The shared language that brought them together resurfaced after they were married in 1949. “When we had our two girls, we’d converse [in Morse code] with a fork and a knife…the kids couldn’t understand what we were saying,” Lavina recalls with a grin.