Lødingen: The Mecca of the telegraph

He greets you in the doorway, leaning on a cane because his health has begun to fail, but with a clear gaze and a handshake that is firmer than most. Kyrre Bjugn is a Telenor employee and one of the pensioners still on the company's payroll. Today he has driven the 500 meters from home to show off at the station and tell about what was popularly called "The Telegraphist's Mecca".

At the beginning of the last century, Lødingen telegraph station was the main center for all telegraphic traffic in Northern Norway. All telegrams from Bodø, Vadsø, Hammerfest, Tromsø and Vesterålen had to stop by the white log house at Tjeldsund in the Vestfjord before being forwarded. And there were quite a few messages involved: In 1917, over 2 million telegrams were sent from here. In old black-and-white photographs, corseted telegraph operators sit hunched over polished Morse code machines – like a slice of refined civilization in the middle of the barren Nordland countryside. But what was it really like to work here in Lødingen? And what role did the telegraph station play for the village? Is it true that there were as many women as men working in the company?

Kyrre will tell the story.

With steady steps he shows into the impressive Swiss villa. He has his private archive with him; a red binder filled to bursting with anecdotes, minutes, pictures and correspondence. For the next four hours, Kyrre will entertain with detailed knowledge about the history of telegraphy in general, and the Lødingen telegraph station in particular.

- What Kyrre doesn't know isn't worth knowing, says Bjørnar Pedersen, manager and caretaker of the building. He has also worked for Telenor all his life.

- Bjørnar is a blessed man, says Kyrre.

- I waited twenty years for someone to take over after me. Now I'm 89, and you can see how my health is. Then Bjørnar showed up. I'm so happy for him that I can't even say it.

They've known each other for years, ever since Bjørnar was sixteen and was racing around Lødingen on a beat-up moped.

How did they meet? Bjørnar smiles:

- We lived here in Lødingen telegraph station at the same time, Kyrre one flight up with his family, and I in the dormitory in the attic. Once I had the guys visit, Kyrre counted 14 pairs of shoes outside my room.

It started with the Lofoten line...

Private memories mingle with memories of Norwegian telecommunications history as we enter what has been the Pilot and Telemuseum since 1995. Half of the first floor is dedicated to the pilot profession, the rest deals with the district's telecommunications history. In the middle of the two exhibitions is a table with buttered rolls.

- Take the cups in the right-hand cupboard, says Kyrre, when Bjørnar goes to get the dishes. The elder is in every way on home turf, and before we have finished our coffee he begins to tell us:

- To understand the origins of the Lødingen telegraph station, we must start from the Lofoten Line, he says.

- During the Lofoten fishing season in 1859-60, it was calculated that a telegraph line up here would increase the catch by 25 percent. After all, a fisherman in the west of Lofoten didn't know what was going on in the east of Lofoten, and vice versa. The politicians seized on that argument and allocated money for a local line in Lofoten. Over the course of five months in 1861, they stretched a 170-kilometer telegraph line, from Brettesnes to Sørvågen. Along the way, small telegraph stations were established in local fishing villages.

- 170 kilometers in 5 months, were they enterprising people?

- Yes, but the workers who were hired from Lofoten ran away after a couple of days. Do you know why?

- No?

- They weren't used to being paid. They were fishermen!

A weather owner with some pretty daughters

Such digressions make it fun to listen to Kyrre. For a subject like telecommunications can, truth be told, be quite dry and difficult to access. Not when Kyrre is telling the story. With infectious enthusiasm, the old man turns facts about technical and industrial cultural monuments into living history. For him, it's about people's lives and living conditions. Therefore, the answer to why there was a telegraph station in Lødingen may be about a weatherman with some beautiful daughters:
- In 1868, the Lofoten Line was connected to the main network for Norway, and the first telegraph station was built on Kjeøy. There, herring fisherman Roness had a house that had been transported from Bergen. (After the great fire, the town was forced to build.) It is a bit uncertain why the Telegraph Administration looked around for a new location, but after a few years on Kjeøy they looked west and east. On Offersøy in the west, there lived a weatherman who supposedly had some pretty daughters. The weatherman did not want these telegraphists near his daughters. So they turned their attention east, to Lødingen. And in June 1875 a telegraph station was established here.

- In this house?

- No, they rented premises from a merchant who had established himself in the harbor, Arentz Schøning.

A local community is emerging

The business grew, and the telegraph station soon needed something of its own. Lødingen had, after all, become the telegraph inspectorate in Northern Norway, after inspector Bødtker Lie moved from Tromsø in 1875.
- I usually say that Lødingen won and Tromsø lost, Kyrre smiles happily.
In 1895 the new station was completed; two spacious floors, plus an attic and a basement. On the first floor there was a telegraph station with a dispatch room, a Morse room, a Wheatstone room and a Siemens room, on the floor above the inspector lived with his family. In the attic there were dormitories for the employees.

- And then there was a barn on the other side of the yard, says Kyrre.

- Did they have animals?

- Can you believe it? They had to have milk!

It wasn't just animals that came to Lødingen. Despite gloomy predictions from one of the first inspectors, (“The desolate and lonely place, surrounded by marshes and rocky expanses is not very attractive for young telegraphers”), the telegraph business constantly attracted new work groups to the village.
- In 1865, not many people lived here, only the priest, the tenant and those who belonged to the rectory. When the Televerket came, there was a need for craftsmen, and more. Here were shoemakers, here were tailors, here were stone workers, says Kyrre.
- The telegraph station had become a cornerstone enterprise?
- Yes, it was the very basis for the development of Lødingen.

Enterprising northerners

And the basis for the telegraph station? It was, of course, the development of telecommunications, which really took off in the mid-19th century. In 1837, Samuel Morse developed the Morse code machine, and in 1895, the Italian Marconi invented wireless telegraphy. Northern Norway was in no way lagging behind, neither in a Norwegian or international context. The second wireless, civilian connection in Northern Europe was established between Røst and Sørvågen in Lofoten in 1906, across the dreaded Moskestraumen.
- A telegraph operator named Øwre wanted to see if it worked, and it did! But they didn't have a transmitter on Røst, so you had to row 60 kilometers back in a boat to tell people that the experiment was successful. When the rower saw people on Sørvågen, he stood up in the boat and shouted: "We heard it, we heard it!"

Another example of progress-friendly northerners can be found in Kyrre even further north:

- The first telegram in the world was sent in 1844, between Baltimore and Washington. Just 26 years later, in 1870, we had telegraph lines all the way to Vardø.

- That says something about how quickly people realized the usefulness of telegraphy up here?

- Yes. That's when eternity set in.

- It must have been terribly new and exciting what happened right here, says Bjørnar thoughtfully. As the curator of the exhibition, he is constantly reminded of the tremendous development in telecommunications - for example, when schoolchildren appear who don't understand the point of a wire in a telephone.

- Many times I have thought about the first telegraph lines, and messages sent via Morse code. I was in Tromsø in 1990-91 at a large congress with scientists from all over the world. There were some Japanese participants who were going to have something called an "internet line". On the internet line they could check their mailbox in Japan. It sounded completely strange. How on earth could they sit in Tromsø and look in a mailbox in Japan? We didn't understand. Probably the same feeling was felt when the first telegrams ticked out from here.

"The decline into melancholy and hypochondria"

At one time, Lødingen was number three in terms of the number of telegrams dispatched in Norway. But, Kyrre points out:
- It was mostly relay traffic. Because the signals from the northern lines did not reach further than Lødingen, they had to be relayed from here.

- All communication in Northern Norway went through this room, says Bjørnar, tilting his head towards the green-painted room called "Circus". Up to 36 people worked here at the same time. The room bears the mark of activity. In several places there are deep pits in the solid wooden planks, from heel irons that have been rubbed into the floor.

- What was it like to work here?

- It was probably nice, Kyrre thinks.

- Down in Oslo, it was said that the telegraph operators in Lødingen "easily fell into melancholy and hypochondria". Well. Telegraph inspector Strømsted came here in 1896, and did not travel further until 1931. He could not have fallen into melancholy and hypochondria.
Kyrre points to a cardboard figure of a uniformed man with a tight mustache.

- Incidentally, a big personality in the place. So they may well say in Oslo that people fell into melancholy and hypochondria, but the telegraph story at Lødingen is completely unique.

- What are you thinking about then?

- The activity! That they came up with things!

Like that time in 1904 when they were going to set up some cabins, and got the confirmants in Lødingen to transport materials in exchange for juice and waffles. Or when three of the assistants were going to pick mullets on a nearby island, but lost the boat and had to sleep outside in the rain. Or all the talk that came out of the "story about the troublesome stove", described in detail in the correspondence between the fair committee and house owner Schøning - an exchange of letters Kyrre has of course taken care of.

- And if they had nothing else to do, they would go down and practice with the key. It is said that you could tell if a telegrapher had been to Lødingen. They had their own rhythm on the Morse key.
Eventually Lødingen became a place all young telegraphers should have visited. It was a good laugh, according to Kyrre.

- It looks quite stately in the old pictures?

- Yes, it must have been a bit fancy here, Bjørnar thinks.

- If you were employed by the Telegraph Works, you were a pro. Then you were something, nods Kyrre.

- Not least because you were employed by the state. It came with security.

- Wasn't there a bit of snobbery attached to the place too? Bjørnar looks questioningly at Kyrre.

- They had nice garden parties in the park down here, where they played cricket?

- Yes, it probably was, admits Kyrre.

- But that kind of thing was over when we came here. I come from a working-class family anyway. That doesn't bother me.

Women's workplace

The daughter of telegraph inspector Strømsted, who has also become a cardboard figure in the museum exhibition, is no match for her father when it comes to harsh authority. With a fixed gaze and folded arms, the young telegraph operator is reminiscent of equality advocates in the English suffragette movement. Kyrre confirms that yes, Telenor (Det Norske Telegrafvæsen) was one of the first women's workplaces:

- The first four telegraph operators in Norway were civil servants who took telegraph training, in 1854. After that time, two women came, in the late 1850s. In Lødingen, it was mostly only women, says Kyrre.

The first women to be employed by Telenor (Den norske Statstelegraf) were the sisters Nielsine and Martine Breda from Kristiansand. It happened in 1858. Early on, Telenor was an important workplace for women, but should not brag too much about the company's innovative equality policy. In a letter to the ministry, telegraph director Carsten Tank Nielsen writes: "According to the circumstances, female telegraphers would be satisfied with a lower salary than men"

Kyrre entered the company by chance. As the son of a fisherman from Bø at the far end of Vesterålen, it was not a foregone conclusion that he would end up at Telenor, but in 1949 - 50 he took "the ordinary education" at Kirkegata 9 in Oslo. After a few years of mast climbing in Finnmark, he ended up in an administrative position in Lødingen in 1963.

- I plunged straight into a more interesting property case, he says enthusiastically. The attached plot was to be returned from Telenor (the Norwegian Telegraph Administration) to the rectory, a process that involved complicated mapping of property and boundary crossings.

- We didn't finish the case until the 1970s, he says.

- And every time I wondered about something, I went to the books. I always found more than I had been looking for.

My interest in telegraph history had been awakened. Gradually, people came to Kyrre with questions about everything from the telegraph station to family and local communities. And what Kyrre doesn't have in his head, he finds in the books that are neatly stacked in the office he still has in the attic. Here are boxes upon boxes of papers, collected over a long life.

End of the telegraph station

In 1936, operations at Gammelstasjonen came to a complete halt. It's the classic story of new technology making old jobs redundant. We're starting to get used to it now. In Lødingen in the 1930s, it was a disaster.

- The new technology meant that you could send telegrams over longer distances. You could send from Tromsø to Trondheim, from Hammerfest to Trondheim, from Svolvær to Trondheim. There was no longer a need for the relay traffic here on site. That meant they didn't need as many people, either, says Kyrre.

- Telegraph manager Kjeldsø himself was on the board, and he's the one who penned the complaint against the Telegraph Administration: That they could tear this community apart. People had built themselves houses, they owed bank loans. What were they going to live on when the job went bust?

But the future couldn't be stopped. Not only could you send telegrams over long distances, people soon stopped sending telegrams altogether. The telephone took over. The remaining operations moved to Lødingen station – and the administration building, called Messa, and the Old Station became a residence for the employees – including Kyrre and his large family, and Bjørnar, who had a father in Televerket. New room layouts and wallpapered plasterboards changed the house from a workplace to a home, and that was how it was until the early 90s. Then Telenor decided that the station should be renovated and returned to its original style.

- That's when they found these beautiful moldings, says Kyrre, and places the log against some wide, carved floorboards.

- And got the original panel. Of course it cost money, but if it hadn't been done at the time, it would never have been done.

He looks around the room. It is filled with relics from another time, and a subject that no longer exists. Kyrre knows that things are transitory, and that history must be told to be kept alive. Only then can we learn from the past. The old man takes his stick. He has done his part.

* Kyrre Bjugn died in 2018.