Voices of the Island: History of the Telephone on Prince Edward Island

Maurice J. Scarlett is a geography professor at the Memorial University
of Newfoundland.

This book is a record of 100 years of telephone operation on Prince Edward Island. The author, Walter Auld, vice-chairman of the board of directors and a telephone man all his working life, has produced a book with both the merits and the disadvantages that this implies. In 229 pages he chronicles almost everything on the subject. In book one we are taken from the beginnings to about the Wall Street crash of 1929; in book two the story is brought up to the present; and book three looks at the subject in the context of individual island communities from Alberton to Wellington.

The book is attractively produced and well illustrated and is obviously a labour of love. The publisher’s blurb on the back cover says that “this intimate look at telephones and their impact on Island life will broaden the scope of social history and delight scores of Islanders at home and away.” Whether it does much more is debatable. For those with “insider” connections, the recording of even the most trivial detail is probably fascinating; for most others it is not. For such a small subject the book is long. But more important is the perspective. Despite an attempt to fit the story into a wider context, this is not social history. What is lacking is a critical sense, a shrewd appraisal that an author less closely linked to the company and its personnel could have given. Company histories tend to be partial, to ignore or gloss over conflict of personalities and to rest heavily on the blandly non-committal. This is no exception.