According to Lynne Jordan,  former president of the Cortes Island Museum, there have been telephones on Cortes Island for more than 110 years. They arrived in 1910, along with telegraphs, but only in the stores.

“Telegrams were really cheap. They were so much for 10 words and so much for 100 words.  People got really good at confining their messages to 10 words. Telegraphs that came in for people were just put in an envelope and then pinned on the bulletin board at the store.  Then they either had to check themselves or a friend would tell them that there was a message there for them,” she said.

Related: a series with former Cortes Museum President Lynne Jordan about the island’s history

There are two slightly different accounts of the early phone service arrival in the Cortes Island Museum’s history booklets. The Mansons Landing volume states telegraph and hand crank phone services went into the stores at Mansons Landing, Seaford, Squirrel Cove and Whaletown in 1910. 

The Squirrel Cove booklet states: 

“David and Mary Forest lived with their children in a tent in 1912 near Mansons Landing, while he scouted out the best spot to settle. He chose Squirrel Cove to build his home with a small store on the front. By 1914 David Forest had built a wharf in front of his home. The following year he built a small post office close to the family wharf.”

Telephones started going into private residents not long after that. 

“Going back to the Mary Island logging family, in the 1920s they had a crank phone on the wall in their house. There was no one from British Columbia telephone to string the lines. It was all done by locals and work bees and they strung the lines on poles in some cases, but also they used the trees,” said Jordan.  

“Ned Breeze and his wife Eliza, who lived right on the shallow side of the entrance into Gorge Harbour, had a crank phone in their house in the late 1920s. The line for that was strung from the Northeast corner where Ben Fulton lives today. It’s at the bottom of the hill where Hanson Creek comes in and the road has two little bridges over the creek.  It would’ve gone along the shore all the way out to the entrance of the Gorge Harbor and it was strung on trees all the way out there. There was nobody else living on that side.  There was later, but they would’ve had phones added in from the same line.”

Four phone networks sprung up, in connection with the regular Union Steamship stops at Whaletown, Mansons Landing, Squirrel Cove and Cortes Bay. There was no operator and participating households could only phone people within their network. (i.e.,- someone in Whaletown could not phone Mansons, etc.) 

Eventually, Jordan believes it was during the 1930s, radio phones were installed on Union Steamships so they could notify ports when they expected to arrive.

She told the story of Frederick Hawkins, who lived at the mouth of Mansons Lagoon, who was shipping hundreds of eggs to hotels in Vancouver every week. So he had a phone strung across the lagoon, from the Mansons Landing Store, to his house. 

One day a new float plane pilot delivering some passengers from Campbell River, found a crowd of people cheering him when he pulled up to the dock at Mansons Landing. 

“It was evening and the light wasn’t all that good. So he came in and everybody who happened to be around there, people on boats and people from the store, everybody came down to the dock to welcome him. They gave him a round of applause and started congratulating him.  He had no idea why they were doing this. He had actually flown underneath the phone line that Hawkins had strung across the entrance which at that time did not have any markers on it.  Very shortly after that, there were markers hung on that line, but nobody had told him about the line.  He just came in really low to land,” said Jordan.  

She does not know when the old crank telephone system ceased, but believes it was probably a gradual phase out. 

The next step forward was the radio phones developed by Spilsbury and Tindall between 1941 and 1972. Initially they were big radios with a huge battery pack that took up considerable space.  They were installed on some of the early fish boats and homes close to the water.

“Spilsbury and his wife lived on their boat most of the time, because not only did he go all up and down the coast to sell and install  those big radios, they required a lot of service. You may remember the old glass tubes and big batteries. He called in regularly at various docks and they’d stay there for  a week or so, and service all the boat radios that were using that dock. He went as far as the Northern part of Vancouver island,”said Jordan. 

He eventually bought a small float plane, which led to further purchases and hiring more pilots. Spilsbury eventually sold his airline to CP Air ‘and that was the beginning of CP Air’s expansion on the coast.’

It wasn’t until the 1950s that, looking at the development of telecommunications elsewhere in the province, Cortes Island residents started thinking they needed something better. 

“In 1961 the Whaletown Community Club (WCC) contacted the Public Utilities Commission drawing  attention to the very unsatisfactory state of the phone service. Four years later, they wrote again. The British Columbia telephone company had by then let them know there was a proposed  route  from Whaletown to Mansons Landing along the shore outside of Gorge Harbor all the way around. Not many people lived out there. So they wrote a letter asking for them to change the route,” explained Jordan. 

“The surveyors arrived a year later, in 1966. They followed the main roads.  It was a hot summer.  The roads were gravel, so they were dusty.  They had one of those measuring wheels that they had to wheel along everywhere to map the root and make all the measurements. Of course, all the residents that were wanting phones kept them well supplied with cooling refreshments so that they could continue their job.”

In 1968, a submarine cable was laid between Sarah Point, on the mainland, and Cortes Island. From there, it went across to Quadra Island and Campbell River. BC Tel seriously underestimated the demand, which greatly increased after the ferries arrived in 1969. (That was also the year that the island’s first telephone booth was set up in Whaletown.)

“In 1971, there was a major glitch in the system.  The highways department road crew inadvertently cut the main cable that was coming into the  transmitting station on Rexford Road.  That particular news story was picked up by a Campbell River radio station who broadcast it repeatedly, in every one of their newscasts. They  told who and how the cable had been cut, much to the chagrin of the department of highways for their faux pas digging up the cable,” said Jordan.   

By 2014, there were phone booths installed at all the wharves except Gorge Harbour, which had a booth at Gorge Hall. 

The advent of the cell phone made most of them obsolete. The Whaletown phone booth was covered by California lilac and blackberries by the time it was removed. There is only one booth left, at the Gorge Harbor store,  because of the campground and the number of boats that come in at the dock. It’s still in use because the Gorge Harbor is such a dead zone for cell phones. 

Top image credit: One of six magneto wall telephones the Cortes Island Woman’s Institute purchased from Northern Electric Telephone in 1955. (The phone was made around 1918) – Photo courtesy Cortes Island Museum

Top image credit: Old rotary dial telephone – Photo courtesy Infrogmation of New Orleans via Wikimedia (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License)

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