Open Writing

Have you ever noticed how some decisions have a powerful influence on your life, though you might not realise it at the time?

You might not have been competent to make them but they had to be made at the time and you did your best from what you knew.

The decisions to be made in your teen years are huge – whether you will go to university, what sort of work you will undertake.

My first big decision was made at the age of 17 years and six months. I was in the science sixth form of a county grammar school in the North Riding of Yorkshire.

I had already asked my father if I could go to the university.

“I’ve got three boys,” my father said. “A tuppeny bun costs me tenpence. You’ll have to get a job.”

The headmaster used to give us pep talks about how Britain needed scientists and engineers. He called me to his study one day and said he thought I would do better as a cadet engineer at the Blackburn Aero Company at Brough rather than continuing at school with the aim of winning a county bursary for university entrance.

The company had won a contract to develop fighter planes for the Royal Navy and they were looking for new technical people to train in their ways.

It would have meant years of external study part time but I would have been on a small salary. At the time, I used to earn a penny a line writing soccer reports for the local weekly newspaper. I rarely earned more than about three shillings.

An adult wage in those days was about eight pounds sterling per week – equivalent to about $16 Australian.

I applied for a cadetship as a journalist on the local newspaper – they weren’t advertising, but I applied anyway – and was appointed on six months probation.

I left school and to the astonishment of the headmaster, turned up at the school’s evening classes to learn shorthand and typing.

My decision to learn to touch type and to write Pitman’s shorthand was sound. Within a few months I got a rise because I could show a proficiency certificate in shorthand. Because I could touch type – through those evening classes – I was in great demand to type out results of agricultural shows and lists of mourners at funerals, and also re-writing pieces sent in my correspondents.

Through the touch typing, my copy was always clean – relatively free of literals.

When I came to Australia in 1960 and worked in a country town, a lawyer came to see me. He had heard that I could write shorthand and wanted me to cover a court case for him, a full transcript, and had arranged with my employers for me to have the day off, and to be paid separately by the lawyer.

Later, when I went to Sydney to work for the Daily Telegraph, I had been there only a few days when the chief of reporting staff came rushing up to me late in the evening – an hour before the first edition front page deadline.

“Mr Harris,” he said. “I understand you can write shorthand.”

At the time, I didn’t own a suit, and was living at the YMCA in Central Sydney. Everybody was called “Mr” by the chief in those days. The theory was to be nice to guys on the way up because you are surely going to meet them on the way down.

“I have a reasonable shorthand note,” I said.

“Excellent,” he said. “There’s a man on the phone in my office wants to talk to you. He’s from Brisbane.”

At the time, all the major reporters were working on a kidnapping. Some of them didn’t write shorthand.

The chief transferred the call to the copytaker’s booth and in I went.

The man from Brisbane told me about how a passenger on an Ansett airline flight between Sydney and Brisbane had gone berserk in midflight and had to be subdued by the co-pilot and a stewardess.

I took the notes in a half page format – shorthand outlines on the right hand side – and between pauses, rewrote an edited version suitable for publication on the left hand side, also in shorthand.

When I emerged from the booth after about 15 minutes, ready to transcribe the written account immediately, the chief said “Good story?”

“A crackerjack story,” I said. “You’re going to love it.”

He raced off to tell the editor.

I typed it out line by line on perforated copy paper with the chief tearing it out of my tiny portable typewriter, sentence by sentence.

The story made the second lead on page one next morning. It also made me famous as “the shorthand writer.” After that, whenever there was a Royal Commission or a major court drama, I was assigned to it.

In next to no time, I’d bought myself a new suit and a year later was sent to Canberra to cover Federal Parliament.

That little shorthand proficiency certificate from the old country certainly worked for me. What a great decision to go for it. Who would have guessed at the time what it would lead to? – Richard Harris.