Person:Thomas James (23)

Thomas was one of three men to pioneer Victoria's (and Southern Hemisphere's) first electrical telegraph service (replacing the semaphore system) in 1854, with the first line from Melbourne to Williamstown. He applied in 1 April 1854 to start the first electric telegraph service in the Southern Hemisphere. Thomas, along with his father William Hill James, was involved with the original laying of the Telegraph lines from Melbourne to Williamstown and Melbourne to Tasmania. He took out a Patent on his under ground cables invention at the Melbourne Patent Office, as well as several other patents. Thomas later rose to Deputy Postmaster General (the head of the postal and telegraph service in pre-Federation Victoria) before retiring on his 60th birthday in 1893. He died in an accident involving a tram 25 years later.

His Official record contained the following:

1. Appointed station master Melbourne 1/4/1854.

2. Station master at Sandhurst, Bendigo 1/1/1857 on £350 per annum.

3. Station master Melbourne, 1/1/1858 raised to £400 p.a, 1/1/1864 £500 p.a.

4. Telegraph Manager on £583/6/8, raised to £600 p.a on 1/1/1870 with the additional posting of acting postmaster 2nd class, at Ballarat, with £150 allowances.

5. Returned to Melbourne 12th June 1880 as manager/telegraph manager with pay increase to £700 p.a in 1884.

6. Appointed Assistant Secretary 27/11/1889.

7. Appointed deputy Postmaster General 22nd February 1890 (Victorian Government Gazette 1890, page 828).

8. Retired 30/6/1893 on a salary of £750, taking a pension of £487/10/- a year.

Thomas was working in Melbourne when the Kelly Gang was involved in the siege at the Glenrowan Hotel in June 1880. In the midst of the fight at Glenrowan, which followed a failed attempt to derail a train of policemen outside Glenrowan - an act of insurrection which was planned to spark a general uprising and secession of north-eastern Victoria from the state of Victoria - Governments in other colonies were kept abreast of events through the telegraph system. As the head of the Telegraph Service in Victoria, Thomas Reynolds James composed at least one such message and sent it to his counterpart, P. B. Walker, in Sydney. It read:

"Latest re Kelly Gang. Ned Kelly mortally wounded. Byrne said to be lying shot dead in the hotel. Dan Kelly and Hart in possession of hotel, keeping up incessant fire on the police who are returning it under cover. None of the police, exception superintendent, are injured.

"Dan Kelly and Hart covered with shot-proof armour, have thrown doors of hotel open and have let all civilians out and are now calling upon police to come in. Bullets flying in all directions. The two remaining members of the gang cannot hold out much longer."

The original telegraph and another, from the Victorian chief Secretary to the Colonial Secretary in Sydney, came to light in the middle of 2001 when two N.S.W brothers, who were said to have inherited them from their father, tried to put them up for auction, expecting some $80,000 return. However, the N.S.W. Government stepped in and claimed them for the Public Records Office, seeing they had disappeared from this office in dubious circumstances some time in the past.

Also sent on this day, another telegraph by Thomas reads:

"I'm happy to inform you that the outlaw Ned Kelly has been taken. The others are surrounded in a house at Glenrowan and they will, it is hoped, be captured today."

The following as a summary of an interview by 'Table Talk' magazine with T R James on his retirement:

Samuel McGowen, in the early 1850's, brought with him from America two sets of the newly invented Morse Code instruments and about ten miles of wire, enough to link Williamstown with Melbourne. With McGowen and through his acquaintance with Dr Davy, head assayer of the Government Assay Office in Melbourne, Thomas James made up the trio who started and then controlled the first telegraph. He had been connected with assaying since his youth- his father, William Hill James had been for many years geological surveyer and mining assayer in Cornwall England for the celebrated Williams family, with extensive mining interests in both Cornwall and Peru.

Thomas was born in the village of Poole, near Portreath, Cornwall, England in 1883, and when he was five, went with the family to Ireland where, from 1838 to 1848, his father was geological surveyor and assayer to the Mining Company of Ireland, with company interests in copper, silver, lead and gold mines in Wicklow and other countries. In 1849, William Hill James accepted the position of geological surveyor and assayer to the South Australian Mining Association, whose principal interest was the Burra Burra copper mine at Kooringa. The mine produced great wealth for South Australia and is said to have been the making of the colony.

With Victoria's gold discoveries, Victoria looked even more tempting and, in 1853, William Hill James, now newly married to his fourth wife, Grace Anna Tucker, and beginning his fourth family, accepted the position of government assayer in Melbourne. During the previous year, 1852, the lure of gold had already taken Thomas Reynolds James and with two others, Philip King Tucker and James or Thomas Tucker, to their fair success in the goldfeilds of Victoria. They were first at Forest Creek and then among the first to mark out a claim at Eaglehawk, Bendigo.

In 1853, a government assay office was mooted for Melbourne, to which Thomas' father William was appointed, under the distinguished Dr Davy. Thomas went to Melbourne to join his father but the project fell through. However, Dr Davy, one of the original inventers associated with the electric telegraph (he invented the relay instrument) introduced them both to the new means of communications. In March 1854 Thomas, still only 20, took charge of the Melbourne Office (under Samuel McGowen, the superintendant, in charge of the feild work of extending lines) on the salary of £300 a year. His father was to be appointed station master at the new Geelong office six months later on a salary of £350 a year and the telegraph link with Geelong was made by the beginning of December.

The entire Melbourne head office staff at the time comprised only three men- McGowen, Thomas James and a battery man who acted as line repairer and messenger. The office, at the corner of William and Little Bourke streets (now the Law Courts) was so small that it could hold just one stool and in the first month of operation, while Thomas was transmitting messages around the city and to as far as Williamstown, intrigued onlookers - regularly including Governor La Trobe- could just squeeze in and stand as they watched the miracle at work. Over the following six weeks before La Trobe left Victoria, the two men spent many hours talking about telegraphy and La Trobe's adventures around the world.

In January 1857, Thomas James sat in intense heat inside a tent, back in Bendigo, receiving congratulatory messages on the completed link to that city. Ballarat had been linked the previous month, followed by lines to other parts of the colony. South Australia was joined up to the network in mid-1858 with N.S.W three months later.

Then came Tasmania. A submarine cable, three quarters of an inch thick, was laid across Bass Strait in July 1859, from Cape Otway, via King Island to Circular Head (Stanley). It worked for only a few months before a break developed and communications were cut for the following ten years until the eastern Extension China and Australasia Telegraph Company laid a second cable which was still working well into 1893 when the retiring Deputy Postmaster General was interviewed. The final link which connected Australia to the world came in 1872 with the overland Telegraph from Adelaide to Port Darwin and the submarine cable from Darwin to Banjowangie in Southern Java, putting and end to exploitation and profiteering by unscrupulous traders in Australia.

By 1891, when the telegraph operating room had taken the entire new third floor of the GPO, there were 9009 miles of telegraph wire in Victoria and a staff of more than 300. From the 3800 messages of 1854, there were more than 3 million in 1891. Charges, on the other hand, had diminished.

Thomas Reynolds James himself had devised a new method back in 1869- considered either heretical or visionary - of a flat rate of 1 shilling anywhere in the colony. He also was responsible for keeping the lines open at night as well as day, and on Sundays for emergency messages. He made the equipment the world's most advanced, changing receiving to sound rather than tape. In 1884, Thomas James invented a way of running telegraph wires underground in conduits because of the unsightly nature of the complexity of overhead wires. By his retirement in 1893, much of the city was serviced well by underground wiring, although the overhead wires still remained. He hoped though, that the wires would go underground "before I do".

The last three years before his retirement on his 60th birthday, 30th June 1893, was spent as head of the PMG in Victoria, as Deputy Postmaster General. (There is confusion on this point, however- the Table Talk Magazine interview suggests the position was an "acting" one only and had not been gazetted, but PMG records indicate he was appointed Deputy Postmaster General on 22nd February 1890 and his image adornes the PMG's Christmas -New Year greeting souvenir of 1891/1892.)

The following is a summary from the Inquest Documentation obtained from the Public Records Office, Melbourne, describing Thomas' death:

It was 3.15 in the afternoon of August 27th 1918 - a Tuesday - ten weeks away from the end of World War One. Thomas was an old man but he was in good health, had all his faculties including good hearing, but was a little short sighted. It was an early spring-like day and he was crossing Swanston Street at the intersection of Bourke Street. There were no traffic lights and pedestrians weaved between the slow moving motor vehicles and horse drawn carts.

A cable tram was heading up Swanston Street from St Kilda Beach to Queensberry Street and, at the Bourke Street intersection, it got the 'all clear' from a signalman in the centre of the intersection who had to wave a white flag to call the tram across. As it moved slowly ahead, people in the tram and in the street recalled seeing the old man step out from in front of a near-stationary lorry into the path of the tram. He was looking up Swanston Street with his head turned from the tram.

The impact was not great, but it threw him onto his back, his head hit the road and the front section of the tram caught up his legs and pushed him about 15 feet along the pavement. The gravity of the incident was amplified by the screams of one or two women bystanders. The old man seemed to have suffered only slight concussion and was taken to the hospital, but his condition rapidly worsened and he died about 8.20 that evening. The tram driver was only into his second day of operating a tram, but the subsequent inquest found no blame lay with him - it was simply a case of "misadventure".

Witnesses were not to know that the 'elderly gentleman' knocked over in front of their eyes had been the head of Victoria's postal and telegraph services some 20 years earlier. At the time of his death, he lived comfortably at "Carelon", The Avenue, Royal Park, the rather exclusive collection of villas which look across parkland towards the Melbourne Zoo. His son Louis, contacted by the authorities, was a merchant living at "Elinara" in Fitzroy Street, St Kilda.

1. ↑ Vic Death Reg. No. 9852/1918.