Collect telegrams.
Following the introduction of the COLLECT telegrams and encountering the difficulties attendant with that system, Queensland Colonial Telegraph authorities introduced a system of REPLY PAID telegrams. For general details of this type of service, see the Reply Paid Overview page.In Queensland, the system of COLLECT telegrams had been used from the mid 1870s but the attendant difficulties of tracing and accounting for the payments became inefficient.
Change to Reply Paid telegrams.
After so many problems with the system of COLLECT telegrams - especially problems resulting from mis-use and scammers - the facility was abolished in 1884 and replaced by REPLY-PAID telegrams. There is some evidence that senders of telegrams had adopted the REPLY or REPLY PAID annotations used in other Colonies well before the 1880s - see the example elsewhere.
A letter to the Editor of the Queensland Figaro and Punch of 7 November 1885 reveals the murky implications for Telegraph Office employees of the Collect system in Queensland. It also underlines the poor conditions which were borne by these people without much complaint at all:
"One Shilling Collect.
The system operated for some time with little apparent support. There are no known transmission forms or delivery forms annotated COLLECT to indicate the operation. During the Interim period, a form was issued printed in a greenish-fawn colour which had serrations across the centre to enable the attachment of a REPLY PAID message. Only two of those forms are recorded - both used at Nanango - on 10 March 1910 and on 19 July 1911. The top parts of the two forms - used for the transmitted message and hence with the words REPLY PAID added at the end of the message - are known.An issue or two since, Figaro contained an article under the above heading, exposing and condemning an abominable system of fining the overworked slaves of bottled lightning who have often to work till all hours of the night and morning when the line is "crowded", must nevertheless be at the office again at 8.30 a.m., and are expected to be as precise and correct as if they had cast-iron constitutions and were a sort of Babbidge's mechanical calculator.
I have received the thanks of a large number of telegraph officials for my interference with a tyrannical regulation. Here is a sample one (we'll suppose that it comes from the centre of Tartary):
" Dear Figaro
I am very much pleased to see that you are taking up the cause of us poor devils in the Telegraph Department in respect of the 'collect' telegrams issued by the head office to any operator, who thereby has to pay his shillings into the till at his own office and is thus virtually fined in a cruel and unjustifiable manner. If the public knew all about these 'collect' memoranda, they would, to a man, insist on such infernal Russian tyranny being abolished. I have often gone for three months and not made a mistake in my checks and some morning have made the mistake of a penny or so; along will come this abominable 'collect' message and I have to put my shilling into the cashbox of my own office.
I and every officer in the Telegraph Department fully endorse all you say. If an operator makes a mistake in a telegram or commits some grave error or offence, he deserves to be punished, but not for trivial accidents that do not affect any one beyond the correction of the check in the office. If I am out on line duty and my wife, who is my assistant, makes an error in the checks, she is fined 6d.; and the smallest punishments of this sort make considerable inroads into the miserable pittance she is allowed for assisting me with the telegraph office and for being postmistress and keeping the Money Order Office and Savings Bank. With a large family to look after besides, it is little wonder that, when I am compelled to be away down the line, she makes an occasional mistake in the checks, but I think it is a burning shame that she should be fined for an error of perhaps a penny, and which can be rectified when the first batch of messages is sent our way.
The 'collects' forced out of poor devils of operators and assistants amount, on an average, to nearly one thousand a month, simply for slight errors in routine. I call it a robbery.
Yours, &c.—A Sufferer."
It is a robbery. No private individual, who was an honest man, would dream of treating his clerks in that outrageous manner. All human brains, especially if severely strained, must and will err in trifling details. Who has, for instance, never forgotten where he laid some document or other and had to recast some memorandum, thus giving a few minutes extra work to his office? Is such a one to be imposed upon by his employer with a shilling fine for such an accident? Are telegraph operators such more brainful beings than anyone else that they can never make a mistake? Or is it that no one but an absolutely perfect machine, which never gets out of gear, is to be a telegraph clerk.
The reasonable rule is simple enough. If a telegraph official is worth keeping, he's worth his salary. If he's worth his salary, he should get it in full — God knows it's pitiful enough! If he makes an accidental error of such consequence as to involve a strain on the department or any of the public, and his services are even then still worth retaining, let him, in such instances and such instances only, be fined and reprimanded.
But to harass men for the slightest mistake and to jew them out of part of their salary is not only dishonest and tyrannical, but it is also foolish, because it irritates the officers into a more confused state of mind and multiplies the liabilities to the commission of error a hundredfold.
Why not stop such fooling?