TYPIST-IN-CHARGE, Episode 19,

Hi there

1     Typist-in-Charge, Education Department Head Office, First Floor Government Buildings, Wellington.  1974-1978

 

above: Government Buildings, Lambton Quay, Wellington

I had put in for a higher-graded typist-in-charge position, this time at Customs Head Office, and it may as well have been the moon for all I knew about what one did at Customs.  But it would be a break-through for typists, as opposed to the superior reign that shorthand-typists had in the in-charge typing area at this time.  Shorthand-typists-in-charge rarely did shorthand.  They supervised.  So it always felt unfair that only shorthanders could apply for higher jobs.  But imagine my surprise when I spotted an in-charge position in the Public Service Official Circular that didn't have the word 'shorthand' in front of it.  It was exactly one level up from my present grade. 

Right back when I was a teenager of about sixteen, terrible at typing, but with a kind caring mentor boss - Mrs Rowley - I was stationed in room 305 typing pool at Government Buildings   I'd been listening to Mrs Rowley and Miss McNeil who was the Supervising Typist of all education typists, talking about overseas trips.  I gestured to Miss McNeil and said enviously, "I want to be just like you."  I had meant travelling the world -

Mrs Rowley giggled, "She wants to be the Supervising Typist.  Hahaha..."

And everyone at that typing room morning tea giggled.

It was the only time I felt sad about what my idol had said, and that everyone in room 305 thought I wanted to aspire to the dizzying heights of Miss McNeil's job.  To them all, I was so obviously scatty-Lorraine who loved rock'n'roll and movies, couldn't do maths, talked a lot, and was pretty crap at typing. According to the sniggers, there would be no way I could ever take on Miss McNeil's position.

Um...

Well...

First, I had got the Senior Typist job at the Curriculum Development Unit.  Then I got the Typist-in-Charge job at Health Regional Office.  This was followed by my present position as one of three typists-in-charge at Education Head Office...

But now...?  Now, I'd got the Customs Typist-in-Charge job!  Another grade closer to that supervising typist position at Education that I had set my sights on; I was so  determined to work my way through the ranks to get up to it, to prove I wasn't that highly hopeless typist everyone had once thought I was.

It was sad to leave Education.  I walked the long wide Government Buildings  corridors the day I left, memories bouncing around in my head:

There were two enclosed staircases, one at each end of the building, north and south.  I must have run up and down those stairs thousands of times, delivering work to officers on the various floors.  Maybe the staircases were enclosed because of a danger to stair-climbers falling over the bannisters?  

Sometimes I would take the easy way between levels and rattle around in the old 'cage' lift at the south end of the building.  I had once seen a gangster movie where the guys in a cage lift had been machine-gunned between the bars as the lift descended.  I never once rode this lift without thinking of that movie.

 Above: stock photo.  During a later building upgrade the staircases had been freed of their enclosures. You can now see the surroundings.

I walked into typing room 305 where I started out as a junior typist. Everyone now had electric typewriters, and some, the IBM golfball.  

 I remembered the day of the Wahine storm, 10 April 1968, when the winds reached a scary 230 km per hour as the ship Wahine sank in Wellington Harbour. We typists in room 305 had looked out the typing room windows to see a petrified business woman clinging for dear life to the wind-blown tree at the foot of the inside road leading up to Parliament Buildings.  

above:  Inter-island ferry, Wahine, sinking. Stock photo

I stood in Room 305, above the exact place we "girls" from the 1960s had stashed a time capsule.  The floor had been sloping so workmen had come in to install a new floor.  Before the new floor was added we tossed a plastic bag full of memorabilia in the gap under where the new boards would be fitted.  There was the day's newspaper, that year's coin, and a few words from each of us, listing our most interesting points.  I said "Lorraine loves Elvis", another typist said she was "Tall Pat", another "Frances is an indoor bowls fanatic"...

Room 305 still had the same mirror on the wall that I had used 15 years before.  I thought back to the time when one of our typists had found a foreign language on the back of the 30 or so hand-written pages she was working from. None of us could figure out the words...  until .... 

"Hey look - " Pam was holding a page up to the mirror.  

The words had been in mirror writing.  The writer had been using the backs of the papers for his long departmental draft. How the handwriting got to be in mirror vision we had no idea.  Perhaps the Gestetner duplicating machine was somehow responsible?

Holding page after page up to our mirror we saw that it was work-in-progress of a novel.  So, the guy in Buildings Division was a closet novelist?  A romantic-thriller one?  Who'd-a-thunk?  And... who'd also have thunk that he was having an affair with one of the typists.  Well, me.  I knew.  But I had been sworn to secrecy by the pair.

The same went for the typist who was having an affair with one of the married directors.  It was all supposed to be so super-secret-squirrel, though most of the typists knew about it.

And that reminded me of the time I was walking along the ground floor corridor and politely talking to a director as we made our way out of the building. Single-lady Marta, another typist, waved to us as she passed.

The director acknowledged Marta as she scurried away.  He turned to me.  "I can't understand why you aren't married?" he said.  "I mean.... you're pretty.  Marta is ugly."

Whaaaaaaaaat!!!!!????  

I never said anything.  Much to the regret of future-me.  Typists had definitely been tamed....

2     Typist-in-Charge, Customs Department Head Office, PSIS Building, Whitmore St, Wellington 1978

 

above photo, 2025:  PSIS (Public Service Investment Society) Building where I worked from 1978.  It now has a new name.

My first day at Customs -  I was now in charge of 12 typists.  Wow.  As well as my two Trades Certification Board Typing certificates (A and B), I had arrived with my fully-recognised Trades Certification Board SHORTHAND-TYPING certificate grade I.  It had only been for taking down 80 words per minute but this didn't deflate me one iota.  I had taught myself over the past year, using old TCB shorthand exam papers and I had passed this bloody exam on my second attempt.  'Nuff said.  Now I could apply for every Shorthand-Typist-in-Charge job that came up.  Heck, I could even put in for an overseas embassy post.  I was in raptures.

Side-paragraph:  Within a few months of passing my shorthand exam, the tight hold of shorthanders in the government was loosened drastically.  Typists didnt want to learn shorthand anymore and the dictators of shorthand were (politely) informed  that they wouldn't be wasting two people's time if they dictated into a dictaphone.   Dozens (hundreds? millions?) of times officers had taken phone calls, made phone calls, greeted visitors, burrowed in a drawer, wrote memos, lost trains of thought, left for the loo ... whilst the poor shorthander sat patiently, writing pad on the corner of the desk, pencil poised, worrying about the urgent job she was in the middle of doing back in the pool.  And practically every time the boss did receive or make a phone call, that man  would grandly proclaim into the receiver, "I'm just dictating a ministerial to my shorthand-typist, you know...?". Or scrub the word 'shorthand-typist' and substitute 'girl'; the two were interchangeable .

I was led into the typing room at Customs by my Director Admin.  A dozen faces looked up at me.  I would be stationed in the room with them.  And wonder-of-wonders, at interview I had been told that I wouldn't be typing.  I would only be checking the typists' work when they finished it.  

Hooray, I was in seventh heaven...

... until my boss left the room.  Mavis turned to me.  "We don't want you," she said.  "We want Edith-"  She indicated a woman sitting to my side.

Huh?  

Edith, it turned out, had been understudying in the typist-in-charge job until I arrived.  She had been at Customs for five years.  She was three grades beneath me. She was a Senior Typist as opposed to my last two in-charge positions.   People in those days in the government never skipped grades.  By working upwards, an appointee had a good background behind her (or him).

"We understand you do have a background in the government," said Mavis, whilst Edith was silent, "but we know Edith, and she knows this department, and no hard feelings but we want you to go someplace else...."

*****

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TYPIST-IN-CHARGE, Episode 18

 Hi there

Supervising Typist, First Floor, Education Head Office, Government Buildings, Wellington, 1977

When a newcomer joined the govt, Probation Report time came round after a year.  After 2 years, the typist was off probation and ready for her yearly Personal Report, as were all workers in the govt.

 Mrs Rowley, the top-graded supervising typist of all Head Office pools, asked various bosses who sent their work into our rooms what they thought of the service.  She and Miss McNeil, the (supremo) Supervising-Typist-in-Charge worked on the reports together.  A report was all about what a boss thought of a minion's-sorry-employee's initiative, judgement, accuracy, supervision, etc.  There was also a box for Mrs Rowley to give a rating out of 10.

I got a 9!!  I was so excited.  I'd never had a 9.  No typist ever in the history of Education typing had ever got a 10 (please wait with bated breath for Episode 19 where there will be a blow-up over this rating!!)

At the bottom of the form were the words "Your Job Aspirations?"  I had always put "Higher Graded Position".

So, enclosed in that full glow of being a 9, I worked even harder to cement my supervising typist position.  I became a work-horse of the highest degree.  I typed my fingers almost to the bone, I raced through a job with accuracy and speed...  Oh, and as a side note, here's a trick question that was asked at interviews,  "What is more important: accuracy or speed?"  Most interviewees proudly said "Accuracy" and it was then pointed out that accuracy and speed together were important.  Oops. 

I hated working on Saturdays to get the pool's work-pile down, especially when the hand-writing of the officers  couldn't be read and there was no-one around to ask.  I often volunteered to work solo (whatever happened to teamwork?) because I knew that I was both accurate and speedy. and could work non-stop without the disturbance of pool chatter and stopping for cups of tea, and ringing up boyfriends on the one phone that the pool had.  Most letters and jobs to be typed were clipped to a huge file containing everything to do with the subject in question and, yes, sometimes, it was fun to read back through the files.  When the bosses arrived at work on Mondays, one couldn't see the work desk for all the typing.

An officer who sort of cruised through his job had the 'girls' in the pool coming up with theories and ideas about him.  He was in Administration, just across the corridor and, unlike us with our window vista of the wooden Annex at the back of Govt Bldgs he was under the big outside clock with a great view of the Cenotaph, Lambton Quay and Parliament Buildings.  This older guy was sort of the Admin run-around.  He drove Head Office's one car.  If an officer wanted to go to the airport or around town, he would ring Admin, book in a time and this guy would take him to his destination.  I remember once seeing Mr Pinder, a director, racing down the hallways, yelling back to his secretary to ring the airport and tell them he was on his way.  He rarely remembered to tell his secretary that he was leaving the building.  The only way she could figure it out, was if his hat was no longer hanging from the hat-stand.

One day, our junior Helen came tearing breathlessly into the pool, "Guess what?"

"Your boyfriend has a secret girlfriend?" Maureen asked dryly.

"Of course not!  It's that guy in Admin.  He opened the bottom drawer of his desk.  And there was a bottle of...whisky!"

No???  What gossip...

Mind you, it wasn't that much of a surprise because he often smelt of beer.

While all the usual shennanigans were going on in the typist areas, I was studying Pitmanscript.  I had realised over the years that I would never be able to advance higher if I didn't have a shorthand qualification.  For some silly reason the higher supervising typist positions were for shorthand-typists.  Silly, because supervising typists never went to take shorthand, leaving it to a pool minion instead.  It was better that they stayed in the pool to supervise.  And type.

Shorthand-typists were thin on the ground.  Schools were finding it hard to get teachers of the subject and women attending business colleges, like Gilby's, didn't want to learn regular shorthand.  It took too long and was too finnicky with it's accuracy.  In exams, pupils were marked wrong if they so much as slipped up on the slightest little penciled line.

So, in obvious panic because no-one was learning Pitman shorthand anymore, Pitman came up with Pitmanscript.  It was half-english.

I did a Pitmanscript course over six Saturdays at a local college.  At the end I triumphed with a 60 wpm certificate from the school.  However, that 60 wpm equated to words the equivalent of 'the cat sat on the mat'.  In real-life, if trying to take more complicated dictation from a boss, it would be like I was writing about 20 wpm.  I wouldn't keep up.  Pitmanscript could never be as fast as regular Pitmans Shorthand.

So I studied further.  I brought my "Pitmanscript 500 most common words in the english language" to work and practised going over them again and again every morning and afternoon tea-time until I could all but Pitmanscript the words in my sleep. As I passed shop awnings on the bus ride home, I mentally  pitmanscripted the names of shops.  When the teenage music programme "Ready to Roll" came on Saturday evening tv, I frantically Pitmanscrpted the words to songs.

 I practised an hour every night in front of my text books and my cassette recorder (sorry I wiped you off the tape, Elvis).  I read out loud the long texts from my advanced exercise book - eyes focussed on my watch, to get the words evenly spaced to the minute  - then played the texts back as I furiously tried to keep up. Once I finished the book, I started again, at a higher speed.  

I sat the Trades Certification Board Shorthand-Typing Exam, 80 Words Per Minute.   The piece the teacher read out from had the word "Monarchy" in the title.  I couldn't figure out how to Pitmanscript that word. I hesitated too long. After that, all was lost.  I scrawled everything else, missing out on so many sentences.  

I failed the exam.  I had sat it at a regular college, alongside fifth form girls.   My fault that I failed, nothing really to do with the reader (though instead of reading the whole thing at the same speed as she was supposed to do, she tended to read phrases rather fast.  Maybe because the kids in the class were used to the shortened phrases of regular Pitmans Shorthand, so she was helping them out.  No-no-no, I'm not bitter...)

above:  the department gave the above notebook to all sitters of School Certificate Shorthand.  We had loads in the department....

Noone at the office knew I'd sat the exam, thank goodness, what with me being a supervising typist and all.   I vowed to sit again the following year.  I figured that my writing size was too big.  I wasn't getting that many words on a line, thus losing time.  And with it being Pitmanscript, I was allowed to make up anything I wanted to in order to speed everything up, unlike Pitmans Shorthand where every stroke had to be perfect or there would be a fail.  So ...I came up with a few symbols to get me faster through a piece.  I have never written anything so small in my life as I did in my practise pieces.  The exam piece had taken about six shorthand-notebook pages.  With my new teeny writing and word abbreviations I was down to one and a quarter  pages.  Roll on exam try no 2... And, maybe, a higher graded position

Every Thursday, the Public Service Official Circular (PSOC)  came around the rooms.  Everybody looked at it to see what graded jobs were going over the whole of the govt, including for typists. We all knew everybody's salary because the PSOC included it.

 I flipped through the pages.  Then flipped back again -

What -?

There was a position for a Supervising Typist at Customs Head Office, just down the road from where I was working.

It was a supervising typist job.  Not a supervising shorthand-typist job.  And it was one grade up from my present position.  The gods couldn't have been kinder.  Angels were singing.  Not one alarm bell rang in my head.

Little did I know.....

TYPIST-IN-CHARGE, Episode 16. Education, Head Office, Wellington, New Zealand

 Hi there

Episode 16, TYPIST-IN-CHARGE

1st Floor and Ground Floor Typing Pools, Education Head Office, Government Buildings, mid 1970s

Being Typist in Charge of seven typists in the ground floor typing room at Government Buildings brought home to me that being in that exalted position was not all a cake-walk.  I realised, even more so than when I was at Health Regional Office, that the typists I was supervisor of could sadly never be my close friends.  I was the boss and there would always be a divide.   I would be partly responsible (with top supervising typist,  Mrs Rowley) for writing up their annual reports, partly responsible (with Mrs Rowley) for working out problems, and wholly responsible for making sure that the work got out on time.  Mrs Rowley did all the interviews for vacant positions and I was glad for this.  I could never ever visualise myself as an interviewer; the thought scared the pants off me.

There was a typist that had joined our little bunch a few months before:  Annette.  She was in her late thirties, dressed gypsy-like, with raven-black curls hanging past her shoulders.  She was a vibrant, smiley, talkative soul, with the kindest of hearts and she loved the world.

On 4th of July morning she came rushing into the typing room screaming at the top of her voice.  "It's Independence day!  Freedom!  Freedom!   I'm free!  Free!"

Annette's divorce had come through.  She had been married to a not-very-nice man.  There was a boyfriend in the wings who, for months had been waiting patiently for Annette's freedom day.  He came rushing into the room behind Annette, and they danced around together.  This young man was in his mid-twenties.  The love and pride for Annette shone from his eyes whenever he looked at her.

We typists crowded around the pair.  We were so happy for them.  "You're invited to our wedding," said Annette.  "You have to come."

And we did go to that wedding.  Annette was in two-toned blue, a beautiful long evening dress with flounces and ribbons, and she wore flowers in her hair.  Flowers were everywhere around The White Heron Lodge in Kilbirnie where the two were married.  Because Annette had been dieting furiously to fit into her dress, the meal at the White Heron was diet-orientated too.

While they were on honeymoon, work carried on in the typing pool.  We closed ranks and took on the extra work that Annette would have done.  And this was the great thing about typing pools:  ranks close when a typist is away.  If a boss's secretary was sick, everything in that area stopped.  Or it was brought to a pool for us to add to our already heavy work-pile.

Whether a typist was in Room 305 or Room 206 pools, or the ground floor pool like I was, it didn't matter when ministerials were given to us; they were top priority.  Any letter signed by the Minister of Education was to be treated as gold.

"So much red tape," sniffed Maureen.

"Nope."  Megan smled wryly.  "It's green tape now, remember?"

 "I can't say 'so much green tape'," Maureen argued.  "It doesn't make sense.  The underlying meaning of Red tape means there's so much piffle to get through.  Green tapes means ....  green tape!"

above: a sheet of A4 ministerial letterhead.  And some green tape.  A4 sheets took the place of the longer foolscap-sized sheets that had previously been used in govt departments.  Not so much was tied up with any tape by this stage, except perhaps big files in Records Division.

After a time, we typists in the ground floor room were shifted to the 1st floor, a back room that looked out upon the annex behind the building.  

One morning, Annette was deep in thought as she looked out the window. "We're in Government Buildings, right-?"

 " -Not to be confused with Government House, " I contributed helpfully.  Government House was where the Governor-General lived.  He ruled New Zealand's dominion as the queen's representative.  

 "Its the largest wooden building in the southern hemisphere, right??'

" So? "

 "So-". She loosely gestured toward the annex.  "the fire escapes are made of wood.  They'll pretty much be the first to burn."

 It was a subject to think about.

Many years back the annex had been erected as a sort of fill-in temporary place, not meant to be a forever structure.  When I had first arrived at Education, way back in the early sixties, there was a canteen on the ground floor of the annex.  It was for the workers of Government Buildings.  Within a very short time, the annex served as the place where the Golden Kiwi Lottery winning numbers were drawn from a large barrel, and with the aid of a long ladle to scoop out numbers.  Mrs Rowley allowed new typists to go and watch.

She also allowed interested typists to race outside to the narrow (land) island in front of our building whenever gardeners were pulling out last season's flower plants - roots and all - and giving them out to passers-by.

Annette, lover and protector of all things earth-grown, would return to the typing pool covered in dirt, and triumphantly clutching three waste-paper bins crammed-full of half-dead blooms. 

 "Do you have a big garden?" asked Helen, our teen newbie.

 Megan laughed. " Annette and her hubby - '. Annette giggled. "They don't have a garden to their flat."

" I give the plants to anyone in my street who wants them, " Annette said.  My last end-of-spring rescues bloomed wonderfully this year. "

After the excitement of Flower Garden Time and other such exciting Education Department activities, we 'girls' would - between the typing of annoying ministerials and all that form-filling for Stores Division -  go back to contemplating the annex, the only view from our windows.  Drat, having to give up our large and sunny ground floor room with a view, just so as one or two higher-up officers could be accommodated in style.

The annex was temporarily used for official enquiries.  Now, my memory isn't that great but I can recall there was an enquiry over several months relating to either the Erebus Air New Zealand flight that downed over the South Pole...or .... the sinking of the Wahine inter-island ferry in Wellington Harbour.  My memory isn't too spectacular in my old(er) age....

There was another annex to the south side of Government Buildings.  It was known far and wide as The Tomato House.  There were lots of windows and in the summer, as you can no doubt figure out by the name Tomato House, the heat was unbelievable.

During my time, both The Tomato House and the back annex were bull-dozed down.  The narrow-ish road between Government Buildings and the law courts was widened.  

In the 1st floor pool we often typed results onto School Certificates.   School Certificates were considered all but essential when a young person left school.  A pupil had to pass in four subjects but was allowed to sit five, just as a sort of security blanket.  In my last school year, there weren't enough teachers in New Zealand.  Our headmistress had asked over assembly if anyone knew a secretary who could take over the shorthand, typing and commercial practice classes which shows how desperate schools were in those days.  Neither could Wellington East Girls College get a geography teacher  So, bingo, there was me not able to sit typing, Geography, or Office Practice. Readers of this blog will know I have a problem with numbers so Maths was out.

"You can sit Art as a fourth subject," said my teacher.

"Huh?'  I could hardly draw a straight line which I proved when I was all but forced to sit that dreaded School Cert Art.  I got something like 17 marks out of a hundred, even though I'd smuggled in a copy of the design on my bedroom mattress of a duck flying through some reeds.  If the design had been good enough for mattress manufacturers it should have been agreeable for the markers of School Cert Art 1960, the pattern challenge.

Anyway...  back to the typing pool, mid nineteen-seventies, and the typing of School Certificates -

We typed results onto the actual certificates if there had been a recount.  Blank School Certificates were given to our pool.

Seeing those certificates was too much not to play around with for our junior typist Helen -

She waved a certificate in the air. "I've made one out for my boyfriend," she said.  "He gets 150% for his rugby knowledge, 100% for kissing, 50% for helping his mum, and 10% for his ability to whisper sweet nothings in my ear..."  *

end

*Singer, Brenda Lee, has a lot to answer for.

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TYPIST-IN-CHARGE, Episode 15

 EDUCATION DEPARTMENT, HEAD OFFICE, GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS, 1975-ish

above:  ground floor typing room was north (left) side of the building, out of vision.

I was back!  Back in Govt Bldgs on Lambton Quay, back under the guiding arm of Mrs Rowley, the supervising typist who had mentored me since I joined this department in 1960.  I had truly loved working at Health Regional Office, not-so-much the Curriculum Development Unit, but all of that was in the past .... I was home!!

But not in Room 305 typing pool.  Or even Room 206.  I was in a new pool on the ground floor.  The department was expanding and, here I was, pride-of-place, Typist-in-Charge of seven (count 'em, seven).  Was I scared?  On that first day, you bet I was.  I girded my loins and pushed open the door -

The typists in this pool worked for sections on the ground and first floors (first and second floors, if you're American).  Maori Education Foundation and UNESCO were our main customers.

Mr Joliffe ( many years later he was fifty-percent of the first couple to get an official civil union pairing in New Zealand) was a head honcho at Maori Education Foundation.  The Foundation was responsible for giving grants and bursaries to students.  Often we typists saw applicants as they came in for interviews.

"Guess what-?" said Maureen as she burst into the room.  Maureen was in her forties.  Her children had now left the house so she had come back to typing, and finding it a little difficult getting the hang of a basic electric machine rather than an old manual one.  This woman did love her gossip.   "I was introduced to a new applicant.  She's blonde and blue-eyed."

" Going for a job in UNESCO?" asked Megan, a young British immigrant, working her two year stint, and only been in the country a few months.  Megan was the best typist in the room.  Heck, she was the best typist I'd ever come across.  She was so perfect, she could have apprenticed Mary Poppins.  Only have I ever come across two absolutely perfect typists in my entire typist career, and Megan was one of them.  Never a typo brought back for this girl.  It was the bosses who made the mistakes, changing their minds again and again and again.  With a sigh we would have to retype what had been a perfect page, trying desperately to jam in the extra sentence an officer had added.  We could do this by raising, dropping or widening margins or - here's a serious no-no -  the squashing of some letters together (the lower-case 'l' was probably the only alphabet letter a typist could get away with squashing).  Otherwise it could be many pages that would have to be retyped, just for that one sentence. 

"No, no-"  Maureen was all agog:   "The girl's here for a grant from MAORI EDUCATION FOUNDATION."

Mmmmm....  We pondered the fact that a blonde blue-eyed young woman was applying for a grant from MEF.

"She speaks fluid Maori," said Maureen.  "She can trace her roots back a century.  A great grand-father was a chief...."

After a time, an Islands Education Foundation also opened up on the ground floor.  Many young polynesian teens were brought over to New Zealand for schooling.  They were given some money to buy clothes.  However, as these young people had never come across cold, windy, wild New Zealand winters, the clothes they ended up buying were terribly inappropriate for that season.  Soon remedied though, and the students were given snuggly-warm winter coats.  Lesson learned by our officers.

In the pool, we also dealt with Pitcairn Island, the place where the historic mutineeers of 'The  Bounty' ended up.   I loved reading the newsy information sheet about the island.  It was a wee bit reminiscent of the writings by my Medical Officer of Health at Health RO: gossip galore.  A teacher had been sent over to the island.

The head of our UNESCO office was a lovely person, vibrant and intelligent.  She went over to India on a business trip, and brought me back a ring that she'd picked up at the markets.  She'd known I liked rings, the gaudier the better -

One day she came bursting into the typing room with two prints of etchings in her arms.  They had been signed and dated by the artist.  She whispered the price to us. We were horrified by how expensive they were.   Maybe about $80 each.

Megan raised her eyebrows to me.  "Prints?" she mouthed.  "For that price?"  And I remembered the time when Miss Hopkins from room 305  (and now truly retired)  had brought in a framed print of Van Gogh's Starry Night from the gallery on Lambton Quay, and she hanged it on the typing room wall.

"The man in the gallery said I could bring it here and see if it suited our wall," she proclaimed.   "I'll buy it for us, if we all like it."   We typists huddled around her, ooohing and ahhhing over the picture. Yes, we'd have it!  But then the Admin Officer walked into the room and said no way could Miss Hopkins buy the print.  Tch, tch, it was not allowed.  Sadly, Miss H took it back to the shop.  We would have to stick to our boring faded prints of early Victorian New Zealand.

We mostly delivered our typing, giving a curt knock on the door, and placing a completed typing job right in the middle of a desk if the officer wasn't present.

I liked to walk along the wide lengthy corridor that went from the north entrance of Government Buildings through the building to the south entrance. I imagined I was in some english country mansion swanning along a long gallery.  Halfway along the corridor, beside the post office, there was the building's elegant foyer and main entrance.  This area had not been used in years, but painters were now working on the walls in preparation for a re-opening.  They were hurriedly packing up their gear - 

"What's up?" I asked.

"Asbestos," said the foreman.

"What's that?"

I went back to the typing room and told the others.  We'd never heard of asbestos, and when I relayed everything that the painter had told me, the typists were horrified.

Especially Maureen.   Like me, she was a bit of a scaredy-cat.  One day I said to her, with a shudder,  "Is there still a mouse problem in the walls?"

"What?"  She leapt out of her typing chair so fast that the chair's castors spun her chair halfway across the room.  Good thing she had not tried to stand on it.

I told her that a few years' back mice were often found in waste-paper baskets, fat and helpless to get out again once they'd gorged themselves on peanut-butter sandwiches and the like.

"Mr Ivers from Records pulled them out by their tails and flushed them down the toilets."

Maureen vowed to always look down into the Government Buildings' toilets from then on.  I think she was scared of the appearance of some weird mutant-like monster mouse peering back up at her.

Poisons were brought in.  Some mice died in the walls.  The smell had been awful.

But now ... 

... there came a typing shake-up.  Our typing style was changed.  It was decreed from the State Services Commission (all bow down!) that typists would save a high percentage of typing time by not indenting paragraphs.  Or including much punctuation.  Or capitals.  On the day of changeover, an officer raced into the pool-

"Who's the left-handed typist?" he demanded to know.

We tried to keep straight faces, but he waved a typed letter at us.  The block paragraphs flummoxed him, but it was the signing-off that shook him -

Yours sincerely

J D Brown
Director-General of Education
per 

Gone were the full stops after the initials, the comma after each line and the colon after 'per'.  We still kept 'Yours sincerely' if it started with 'Dear Mr Smith' and 'Yours faithfully' if it started with 'Dear Sir'.  However the addressee's name and address, along with the date, were moved across to the left too.

Oh dear, the officer was so confused.  In the body of a letter we would previously type phrases such as "The Commission said...".  This would now be "The commission said...", unless you were typing "The State Services Commission said...".  He just couldn't get his head around the new style.  Neither could most of the officers or, at least, the ones who hadn't read Mrs Rowley's memo advising about change-over day. And this was most of the staff.

Probably, the new way of typing was a direct result to the time-testing all govt department typists had been doing for several years.  Each morning we had been given a scrap of paper and every job we typed - be it short, long, or even an envelope - necessitated us crossing off strokes of five (like a prisoner crossing off days on a cell wall). What a rumpus this caused -

"I've typed 50 envelopes.  Hoorah, I've put down fifty strokes.  I win today - !"

"Oh, no, I've just finished a job of 90 pages.  It's taken two days.  I have one stroke to put down-"

"Mr Evans has brought back his ministerial.  Yet again!  He's changed his mind so many times.  Why aren't we allowed to rub out on letters signed by the minister (side-note:  notice the small 'm').  I can only class this as one job-"

Thankfully, with the advent of the new typing style, filling out the daily forms became a thing of the past...

Mrs Rowley had amended her "Typists' Guidebook" to include all the new changes.  The 'book'  included any typing problem that could ever arise for her 'girls'.  We even knew how to address the mayoralty, members of parliament (all parties), how to correctly spell "milage" (not "mileage") - the daily newspaper somehow picked up this mileage/milage decision and gleefully mentioned it in a column).  

The "Typists' Guidebook" was handed out to all the officers.

It didn't make their handwriting any better...

TYPIST-IN-CHARGE, episode 8

 Typist-in-Charge, Episode 8, Typing Room 206, Government Buildings, Wellington, NZ, 

I was  concentrating on the typing of a ministerial.  No rub-outs allowed for anything the Minister of Education had to sign (grrrhh, so many retypes).  Ministerials were always 1+9, which meant one original page and 9 carbon copies.  Most of the +9 had individual minutes (messages) to departmental officers typed on them, and the solitary rather carbon-ed out last page had to have everybody's minutes typed there.  On any letterhead job, and via the stencil key, the typist's initials were hidden in the departmental monogram so that an officer knew, through the carbon copies, who to return a job to for amendments.

above:  A true used typing artefact:  one of my actual government-issued rubbers (tee-hee, that's an 'eraser', if you're from the United State). 

 Since most of  Room 305 pool had split to go downstairs to the utmost middle/front of the building, Room 206, and new typists had been added, I had decided to be a good little typist, proof-read my work, and not have as many mistakes.  Or at least show as many mistakes.  Mrs Rowley acknowledged me as the best rubber-outerer of the entire two floors.

There was however one huge typist mistake that I am still berating myself over.  Know this please, gentle reader, that to type four accurate foolscap pages an hour was considered the average.  It had taken me several days to type 68 stencils.  My desk was crammed with stuff (a govt poster on the hallway wall proclaimed "Don't have a mesk!", ie a messy desk) and so I tidily set all my stencils in a stencil box on top of my waste-paper basket.  And ... forgot to retrieve them at day's end.

That evening they were whisked away by the cleaners.  Sometimes we arrived at work to find mice in the bins.  The cleaners were reluctant to empty the bins of mice, so it was up to us to call on Mr Ivers in Records to retrieve the rodents and drown them in the gentlemen's toilets.  How I do wish, as well as mice, the cleaners had been turned off by my typed stencils.

Here I was, without my typing...

And ...  I never typed so hard in my life to get those stencils re-done by the original end-of-that-afternoon deadline.  I swear my fingers turned stubby.  I worked through lunch-hour and tea-breaks, and didn't natter to anyone, severely doubting I would finish in time.  But I did do it, finishing 68 stencils with 7 minutes to spare before sign-off  time at 4.35 pm.  There were a few mistakes that came back to me the next day, but most of the alterations were because the officer had changed his mind about whole paragraphs which meant that some pages had to be done again to re-figure the entire job (elongating or shrinking margins, less or more words per line, lowering or raising top or bottom lines or where the page number sat on the page) ...

...  Francie called out, "Hey, who's got the Bijou Gothic - ?"  She needed the small print typewriter for a 10 page job that consisted of many columns to fit sideways on a foolscap page.

Mrs Rowley said, "The Bijou Gothic is up in 305."  She pointed to a corner of the room.  "Trolley's over there."

Francie wrangled the trolley out of the room and over to the lift ... 

I wasn't sent relieving so much nowadays.  But there had been a bit of a blip when I decreed I wanted to stay at School Publications in Willis Street, never to return to the pool.  I liked working at School Pubs, from where they edited The School Journal.  There was one other typist.  And the editors were fun.  Poet James K Baxter had worked there; whenever he'd got in a row with his wife, he'd slept in the old house's bathtub. One editor, regardless of chastisements over public servants not being allowed to take part in protest marches, was not only a marcher, but usually helped carry the banner in the very front marching row.  Another one, wanting a late morning lie-in, put on his vacuum cleaner to simulate the background noise of printing presses.  He rang into the department and shouted he'd be in later because he was at the Government Printer. 

But I missed 'the girls' and the pool.  I'd come straight from school and knew nothing else but a typing pool environment.  With a bit of a sigh, Mrs Rowley welcomed me back.

We had carted down, from Room 305, the pool's bunch of Christmas decorations.  Mrs Rowley allowed us time to put them up in this much bigger room.  Racing out to McKenzies chain store on Lambton Quay, we bought more crepe paper, and twisted it into garlands and hangings.  Mrs Rowley was so nice, she let new typists outside to see openings of Parliament, royal passers-through, Prime Minister's  funeral.

All Education typists and secretaries, both inside Govt Bldgs and in any of the outlying areas, were invited to the annual typists' Christmas morning tea -  

Franci is in the foreground.  She'd let someone else use her brand-new camera to take these slides!  Val is behind Franci.  

Typist-in-Charge, episode 7

 TYPIST-IN-CHARGE

Episode 7

Typing Room 305, Government Buildings, Wellington, NZ, 1960's

It was a rite of passage in Typing Room 305...  21st birthdays were a big thing.  So were marriages, Christmas, farewells, and going away to Australia for a 2 week holiday (such an adventure for me!).

Today was the day I was celebrating my 21st.  I was relieving at Stores Division in Thorndon.  But the office sent a car for me and I was feted like a queen at a special morning tea.  They'd even invited my mother.

The 'girls' chipped in with food from home, and there was a 21st birthday cake.  The cake probably came from the Art Craft Cake Kitchen which was up the road, opposite Parliament Buildings;  all our  sponge cakes and sausage rolls  came from there.

I was presented with a lovely jewellery box which I still have to this day.

above:  that's my mum behind me

above:  room 305.  We shoved two typists' desks together.

above from right:  Miss Hopkins, Mrs Parr

above: from right front: Sheila, Val.    Val had her 21st three months before me and she received two beautiful vases.

 

PS: I was burrowing away in an old suitcase and I found the above slides (slides? huh?) that Francie, typist, had taken of my 21st birthday.  Wow, was I ever so young?

TYPIST-IN-CHARGE Episode 6

TYPIST-IN-CHARGE

Episode 6

Typing Room 305, Government Buildings, Wellington, NZ, 1960's

Mrs Rowley, Typist-in-Charge, sent me to the Child Welfare Division in the Dominion newspaper building to relieve there for a week or two.

"I've given instructions to the office that you are not to type abuse cases," she said. 

I didn't really understand what she was talking about.

Later on, when I found out the types of terrible cases involved, I was so glad that my boss had kept me away from it all.

However, I still smile when I think of an overseas person who had written a letter to Child Welfare headed up "Dear Mr Bag-"  The envelope was addressed "Mr P. Bag".  Child Welfare's address was "Private Bag, Wellington".

Not only was I sent relieving around Education outer offices, but after my first year away from school, I was paid an extra 50 pounds per annum to be a dictaphone-typist.  I wore head-phones on a cord connected to the dictaphone on my desk.  There was a choice of a connected foot pedal to operate the dictaphone or a connected hand control which was a wide bar that sat in front of the typewriter, and I would bring my thumb down to buttons to 'stop' the machine, 'fast forward' or 'reverse' the tape.  A taxi stand was in front of Government Buildings and often I would get their messages through my earphones.  Knowing that one guy was going to knock off and get fish and chips for lunch was somehow exciting listening. The speaker of the very first job I typed from the dictaphone kept using the word 'period'.  I typed the word 'period' all through the manuscript.  It didn't seem to make any sense.   Turned out the old-fashioned word meant 'full-stop', and was an instruction to me.  

Dictators were supposed to preface every instruction during dictating with the word 'typist...'.   For example, "Typist:  I want the following set out in two columns, thank you."  Otherwise a typist  would be halfway through typing the instruction before she realised it was meant for her, and not to be typed.  Sigh, paper to be pulled out of machine, new paper to be rolled in, job to be started again....

The secretaries to the directors were the elite of the typing force.  They breezed into the typing room every now and then because their bosses had demanded they at least look busy and they should go and help out the pool (one secretary was quite vexed when told that knitting on the job was a bad image to project to the public). The secretaries rummaged through our pool's in-box and always took long drafts that were to be done in double-spacing.  With a saint-like sigh they never forgot to announce, "I'll take this long job to help out."   We basic grade typists sniggered because double-spaced drafts were the easiest things in the world to type.  All of a director's most difficult typing jobs, like tables and columns, came to the pool.

However, there was one secretary's job I craved: secretary to the Director (Admin).  For the first hour or two each morning, she would sit at her desk and read all the newspapers.  If she saw any article referring to the Education Department she would clip it out, put it in a folder and give it to her boss.

Way before ex-supervising typist-in-charge Miss Hopkins, ended up in the 1960's typing pool as a retiree worker, she had been secretary to Dr C E Beeby who was Director (Admin) for a time, followed, in 1940, by Director of Education (the position was later given the title 'Director-General')

Dorothy Hopkins was on holiday when she was a young secretary. She was on the inter-island ferry going down to Christchuch.    Leaning over the ship's railing and looking at the sea, she suddenly sensed a man at the other end of the railing, slowly shuffling his way closer and closer to her.  She was frightened, staring straight ahead, not daring to look at the guy.  He got so close to her that Miss Hopkins felt his arm against her coat sleeve.

She gave a yell, and raised her handbag to rain it down on this would-be pervert- 

Dr Beeby grinned.  "I'm glad to see you're a good girl, Dorothy," he said.  "... prepared to defend your honour at any cost."

above: Miss Hopkins and me (Sheila's wedding, 1960's)

above:  Dr C E Beeby

TYPIST-IN-CHARGE, Episode 4

 Hi there

Typing Room 305, Education Department, Government Buildings, Wellington, NZ.  1961.

***

Miss Hopkins was now a Staff Typist, sitting in a typing  pool like we other peasants, but until her recent retirement she had been the Supervising Typist-in-Charge of all Education typists, with her own room no less.  We loved hearing her stories about how she started in Education some forty years back - 

When Dorothy Hopkins was a sprightly junior typist, about 17 years old, there was a stiff protocol involved when addressing others.  It was all 'Miss', 'Mrs', 'Mr';  no first names allowed.  The Typist-in-Charge at the time was a Miss Peggy Patrick.  One evening the typists were all out to dinner.

Dorothy Hopkins, no doubt with a gleam in her eye, and in some trepidation but with a hint of a rebellious soul in her young body, asked "Would you pass the salt please ...  Peggy?"

There were a few sharp intakes of typist breath across the table.  Quickly muffled giggles came from a couple of the juniors.

Peggy Patrick passed over the salt.  "Here you are ... Miss Hopkins."

When I joined Education in 1960, I called all the older typists 'Miss' or 'Mrs'.  They called me 'Lorraine'.  By the time I got to senior status, everybody in government departments were called by their first names, so I never got to experience the heady pleasure of being addressed with a prefix.

As a junior I was required to sit the Public Service Typing Exam.  It was the most recognised typing exam in NZ.  My work typewriter had been  bundled up on the day before the Saturday November 1961 exam and sent to Gilby's Business College in Willis Street.  I'd brushed inside the keys basin with methylated spirits, picked out the gunk from the letters 'b', 'd', 'e', 'p' and  'o'' with a bent paper clip, wiped the wax off the main roller where I'd used a stencil* the previous day, and polished the keyboard until it gleamed.

The speed test was to be scheduled first.  Then an hour's break for me before it was time for the confused manuscript part of the examination.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, dear reader,  exam day was the exact day Cliff Richard, Britain's King of Rock'n'Roll, would be in Wellington.  Did I also forget to mention that I was a rabid Cliff Richard & The Shadows fan?  Cliff had turned 21 the previous month, and was young and gorgeous.

In my hour's exam gap I sprinted down Willis Street to the Hotel St George where the boys were staying, and I met up with two friends.  There was a metal fire escape clinging to the side of the hotel -

We climbed it, of course.  Right to the top floor (seventh?).  It was a scary escapade but, hey, this dare-devil climb was done with the hope of seeing Cliff in his - sigh - bedroom, and breathing his same air, swooning over him.

We peeked through a window and, heavens(swoon!), there was Jet Harris, bass guitarist of The Shadows.  He gave a girlish shriek and ducked behind an open wardrobe door.  Oops ....  We scuttled back down the fire escape.  First one off the contraption, I raced up Willis Street but my friends, not so lucky, were caught by the hotel manager.

I arrived at my exam venue puffing, panting, heart racing, mind exploding, and it was one minute before the exam started.

I failed the exam.  Any wonder why? 

above:  Hotel St George, Wellington.  The Beatles stayed here in 1964.

PS:  I passed the exam the next time around.

PPS:   * a stencil was a foolscap sheet of lightweight cardboard with a waxy sheet atop.  A cardboard strip ran across the top of the stencil with perferated holes in it so that the typed stencil could be slotted into a Gestetner machine and hundreds of copies of the typing could be run off.  A red liquid could be brushed over a typed mistake and after a few minutes the typist would type the correct letter on top of the set liquid.  Stencils were not typed with a ribbon.  There was a small lever at the side of the typewriter that would move the ribbon down from its usual place to enable a key to heavily penetrate the stencil.