The Journal · The Brantford Club

The Telephone Rule of 1911: A Member Is Never to Be Interrupted

On May 28, 1911, the Committee of The Brantford Club adopted a rule that no member was to be interrupted by the telephone; the boy answering it took the caller’s number on a tab and handed it to the member. The Club sits in the Telephone City, where the instrument was conceived in 1874, which is exactly why the rule matters.

Every city club of the era had house rules, but only one club in the world could pass this particular rule in this particular town. Brantford is where Alexander Graham Bell said the telephone was conceived; the first long-distance call ran from here to Paris, Ontario in 1876. Thirty-five years later, in the city that gave the machine to the world, the Club’s Committee sat down and decided, formally and forever, that the machine could wait until a member finished his sentence.

What the Minutes of May 28, 1911 Say

The Club’s centennial history tells it as standing decorum first: a member was never to be interrupted by the telephone, and the Committee’s rule of May 28, 1911 was adopted, in the history’s words, only to confirm the practice. The house was not inventing a courtesy; it was writing down one it already kept. The motion itself survives verbatim in the Minutes as the history prints them: “Moved by Mr. Harry Cockshutt and Seconded by Mr. C.H. Waterous, that in future all telephone calls for members, the boy answering the phone is to ask for the number, take it down on a tab to be provided for that purpose and hand same to the member.”

Look at the Two Names on the Motion

The mover and seconder are the point sharpened twice. Harry Cockshutt, of the plow works family, had been present on the Club’s opening night in 1898. C. H. Waterous carried the name of the engine works that helped make Brantford third in Canada by value of exported goods. These were two of the busiest industrial men in one of the busiest industrial towns in the country, the exact people a telephone exists to reach, and they are the ones who moved that it could leave a message. The men with the most calls voted for the quietest room.

The Rule Is Still on the Books

A hundred and some years later the instrument has moved into every pocket, and the Club’s current house policies say what May 1911 said, in the language of now: all cellphones and electronic devices must be silenced and used so as not to disturb other members and guests, and a member who needs to make a call is asked to use a private area of the Club. The boy with the tab has retired; the principle has not. In a room built for company, the person across the table outranks whoever is calling, and the house has held that line through party lines, rotary dials, and whatever arrives next.

The city invented the telephone; the Club decided when to answer it.

Questions readers ask about the telephone rule

Related: the full Telephone City story · the old rule books