ONCE UPON A TIME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 110, 1 August 1941, Page 49

ONCE UPON A TIME

When Typists Were Just Female "Typewriters" F you walk into almost any Government department today you will hear. the chatter of a hundred typewriters manipulated by a hundred girls. As you walk along the corridor they will flit past you with sheaves of papers in their hands. Their faces will smile at you from the enquiry desk. The brightness of their clothes will relieve the monotony of the piledup files and the paper-strewn desks. Yet fifty years ago the Government typist was a comparative rarity. In England to-day there are 10,000 typists in the government service. Yet as late as 1914 there were only 600. In 1890 there were six. At the close of the last century the women thus employed were known as "female typewriters" and it was some time before it was realised that they were something more than machines. In 1888 the head of the Inland Revenue Department wrote "these typewriting women can beat me two to one in writing, and that shows the amount of work we get from them. Besides being quick they are also intelligentthey can even turn a letter from the third into the first person. Moreover they are cheap and there is no superannuation" The actual machine was still in its infancy and was regarded as an innovation not to be greatly encouraged. But we hear that "there is now a new typewriter which has capital letters, and we are getting them by degrees." Bold Foreign Office In 1890 the Foreign Office took the bold step of employing one "lady typewriter," and the innovation worked, we. are told, extremely well. Departments were, however, still fearful of the consequences of employing men and girls in the same room. In the Board of Agriculture the one woman typist was secluded in a dingy little room in the basement, and the chief clerk issued an imperative order that no member of the staff under the age of fifteen was to enter her room. Another department, aghast at the idea of employing a woman, was brought to make the bold experiment by receiving a letter from a high official in a neighbouring department. "We are delighted here with the typewriting . . . I had a separate room fitted up which would leave .the ladies completely to themselves and free from any danger of interference. We have employed two young women at (I think) 23s. and 21s. a week, and they do their work excellently. They do as much as four coypists and give no trouble at all." This letter encouraged the timid department to engage, in 1890, two "female typewriter copyists" in place of three men copyists (who had cost (Continued on next page)

FEMALE "TYPEWRITERS" (Continued from previous page) £200 a year each). They were supplied to begin with by the firm that supplied the machines, in the same way as ‘today adding machine manufacturers supply ready-trained operators. The typists were apparently regarded as part of the machinery. They worked in a locked room in the upper part of the building, and their work and meals were served to them through a hatch.in the wall, They left a quarter of an hour before the men (perhaps the seclusion was worth while on this account) and no man was allowed to take work up to them without a special permit from a responsible official-only granted with great difficulty. The Men Were Curious All this, of course, made them intensely interesting to the men, who used to hide behind the pillars in the corridor to see them pass. Some difficulty was experienced at first about the title to be given to these new officers. It was suggested that, in order that their sex might not be disclosed, they should be called just "typewriters," and a notice saying "To the Typewriters" was put up at the foot of the staircase. By 1892 we find women typists employed in seven departments of the British Civil Service. They were not, however, content with being "cheap and without superannuation," and so the British Government was soon the recipient of a petition from women typists asking that their rates of pay might be increased and that they should be placed on the permanent staff of the Civil Service. The "female typewriter " was beginning to feel, and to wish it publicly known, that she was -not only a machine. (Adapted from "Women Servants of the State,’ by Hilda Martindale.)