Vin the morse code man

DURING the Second World War, Vin Tuddenham delivered a telegram to a soldier’s mother and over 75 years later it still makes him emotional.

“In late 1945, I took a telegram to this lady in Cranbourne Road, Frankston, Mrs. Jones; her son had been missing in action, believed killed for three years and I took the telegram to say that he’d been found alive and well.”

Vin’s career with the postal service began in late 1944 in Frankston, but he eventually made his way to Wonthaggi where he has lived in the same house for 50 years.

Before moving to the area, Vin learnt to send and receive morse code over a 12-month period, training in Melbourne for two hours a day every day and graduated at 20 words a minute. 

After graduating Vin’s first posting was to the Cowes post office in 1951, when it still existed on the foreshore, and he remembers it being very quiet in those days. 

It was with trepidation that Vin came to Wonthaggi to relieve a staff member who was taking annual leave. 

Vin completed his fortnight in Wonthaggi and when a vacancy came up in 1952, he applied for it, got it, and has been here ever since. 

In those days morse code was the only fast way to send messages. Mail from Melbourne to Wonthaggi would take a day, interstate mail could be two or three days while air and sea mail could take weeks and months. 

“If you want a telegram to go from Wonthaggi to a little place in the middle of NSW, you give it to the postal clerk, he sends it from Wonthaggi to Melbourne, Melbourne to Sydney, Sydney to the little place in New South Wales. Well, the postal clerk he’d get on his push bike and deliver it. That would only take half a day. That was quick in those days,” Vin said. 

Vin worked in Wonthaggi sending and receiving telegrams and could send them pretty fast, becoming proficient over the years and he especially enjoyed it if the operator at the other end was good too. 

“He would tell you to cut the words up, so you wouldn’t send the full words. So for a birthday message you could send HBTY, Happy Birthday To You. So, the kids think they invented abbreviations, but they didn’t. We did that,” Vin laughs. 

Vin loved working with morse code, but in May of 1959 morse code became redundant with the introduction of teleprinters.

Vin hadn’t heard the sound of Morse Code since 1959, until he went to the Sydney Royal Morsecodians annual event. 

“I only ever got there once, that was in 2005 and I hadn’t heard morse properly since 1959 till then, and all their business was done in morse code and the obituaries, and everything. The morse code, as soon as you walked in, it was just like the most beautiful music to hear.”

The old messaging service has recently seen a revival, as the Wonthaggi and District Historical Society have an original morse code set from the railways and the Society have asked Vin to show children how it worked. He’s also got a couple of gigs at the Wonthaggi library, and he couldn’t be more pleased. 

“It’s just like beautiful music. It’s like a language you never forget.”

“All this newfangled stuff goes straight over my head, but go back to morse code and I’m right,” said Vin. 

As for the telegram he delivered to Mrs. Jones, Vin got to meet her son when he returned from the war, and he has fond memories of being made to stop and have a cup of tea and a piece of beautiful sponge cake, even if he was running late.