To The Talking Means

The Telephone Is A Delight

By J. Edward Brown

Next to the Bible, the telephone directory, printed in English and Tongan, is probably the most thumbed book in Nukualofa, Tonga.

PR people like the Tongans, who love to talk, it is the ideal device, and there is a long waiting list of people wanting a telephone.

Nukualofa has a modern telephone system which replaces an old crank system first installed in 1922. There are some 480 subscribers.

When the new exchange was built, it was thought that it would serve the needs of Nukualofa for many years. But the new, improved automatic service, proved amazingly popular, and soon all equipment was in use. The only way to get a telephone now is to persuade a nearby subscriber to give you a party line. r An incongruous sight, entirely out of place in a tropical setting, is a telephone pole leading wires into a Tongan native house with a roof of thatched coconut palm leaves and reed sides. Inside, there will be no furniture but a bully beef case on which sits the instrument.

Band Played On - There are many stories that can be told about Nukualofa’s tele phones. • There was a complaint from a party line subscriber that one of the others on the line was playing a string band over the phone to friends, for hours at a stretch. • Some Tongans are not very happy about paying the bill for the service, and every month a sizeable list of subscribers is disconnected until the bills are paid. • The common saying of a Tongan when he asks you to go to the phone is either, “The telephone wants to talk to you”, or, “The telephone wants to see you”. • The steward at the Nukualofa Club bends deferentially over a member and says quietly, “Tele phone, sir”, And if it is a woman calling, he adds, dead pan, “A long haired voice”. • One of the night exchange operators had a taxi. You might phone another taxi number and be told promptly by the operator that the line was busy. However, he would offer to send his around.

It was a good business until he was fired, such operations being against the regulations.

An Ancient Model

In the telephone storeroom at

Nukualofa there used to be more than a hundred telephones that had been used on the old tele phone system.

They were old fashioned crank phones, amongst them one so old that you could imagine it having perhaps stood on the desk of the King in the Premier’s Office before the turn of the century—before there was a telephone exchange— so that he could call up the Palace to tell the Queen he would be late home for lunch.

Also in that telephone store was a small portable telephone exchange that had been left behind by the Americans at the end of the war.

Above the six lines it had the names of the persons connected to it. These read: “Secretary”, “Nr

8”, “Premier”, “Income Tax”, Nr 2”, “Joe”.

I often wondered who Joe was.