The Electric Mrs. Mac: Violet McKenzie and the Creation of the Women’s Emergency Signalling Corps

In the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese armed forces fanned out across the Pacific, taking in quick succession Manila, Singapore, and Sumatra, and with the dropping of bombs on Darwin on February 19, 1942, it was apparent that Australia was the next target of Japan’s relentless offensive. The subsequent War of the Pacific was one carried out by ships, yes, but success hinged more often than not on communication, with battles won and lost on the basis of the accurate movement of information among the combatant fleets. 

At the onset of the war, Australia stood particularly flat-footed when it came to the possession of a dedicated and trained cadre of communications specialists, a situation that would have persisted with untold consequences had it not been for the efforts of one woman who, using her own financial resources and inexhaustible reserves of energy, made it her business years before the outbreak of war to prepare a group of women in precisely those skills that Australia would need most in the years to come.

Her name was Florence Violet McKenzie (1890-1982), but to the thousands of men and women she trained she was simply Mrs. Mac, and every element of her story is remarkable. She was born in Melbourne but at the age of two she and her family moved to Austinmer, a small mining community that was experiencing the tail end of its boom years. The local school was struggling to keep itself open, and unemployment was rife, but the sharpness of Violet’s young mind cut through the pervasive gloom. She was fascinated by science, and from a young age developed her knack for constructing circuits to help her mom out throughout the house, including cabinet lights that turned on when the door opened and minute burglar detectors. 

She was clearly a unique girl, with gifts that called out for development. She applied for and won a scholarship to the prestigious Sydney Girls High School in 1904. This was where the best and brightest of Australia’s young women went for their schooling, and young Violet took advantage of the opportunity to broaden her mathematical horizons, with the expectation of becoming a mathematics teacher, which Australia stood in particular dire need of at the turn of the century. She attended Sydney Teachers’ College, graduating in 1913, and taking up her new post, as an instructor in Armidale, a town with population less than 5,000 (and today hovering around 24,000) which she found irredeemably confining and miserable. Within a year, she was back home, with her eyes set on finding a way to get a degree in electrical engineering.

The small problem was that, in 1914, no woman in Australia had ever received such a degree, and the system seemed purposefully designed to make sure that it was impossible to do so. To enroll in classes, you needed to already be an apprentice to an existing electrician, but as all of those electricians were men, and did not as a rule trust women as viable electrical engineers since none had yet gotten their degree and shown their worth, apprenticeships were all but impossible to get. Violet’s solution to this vicious circle was characteristic of her Gordian solutions to problems throughout her life - she simply acquired her own electrical company (by buying out the struggling business of her brother), and took herself on as her own apprentice. Producing contracts showing that she had done paying electrical work for clients, the technical college she sought application to could not help but find that she had satisfied their criteria, and she joined the rigorous seven year program to receive her electrical engineering license, while attempting to keep her business afloat by taking jobs that no other electrician would accept, because that was the only way she was going to find work as a woman electrician.

In 1921, McKenzie took a prime opportunity of buying out the shop and inventory of a struggling electronics business. One fateful day, a customer came in asking for iron pyrite crystals. She had not heard of them, and had no idea why anybody would want them, but after inquiring from among her customers, she soon found out that they were the core elements for constructing crystal radios, which were able to receive signals without needing any power source by using the radio wave’s own energy. This was the very start of the amateur radio craze, and Violet was among the first to catch the bug for building sets, and learning Morse code to transmit and decode signals. The idea of reaching over vast distances and wirelessly communicating with other radio heads out in the darkness was an exciting one, and McKenzie soon positioned her store as Sydney’s premiere location for wireless enthusiasts. 

In 1922 she formed her rag-tag group of shop regulars into a new association, the Metropolitan Radio Club, which in September held the second ever Wireless Exhibition in the world, attended by some two thousand people. McKenzie and her fellow members of the Metropolitan were lovers of wireless communication and its spirit of free experimentation, and as such they stood solidly against the growing forces seeking to commercialize the medium, as represented by the Wireless Institute of America, which served largely at the behest of Ernest Fisk, who sought to shut out amateurs from the marketplace, and impose dial-less radio devices on the nation which could only pick up one signal each (the so called “sealed unit” system), those broadcast by his companies. 

To fight back against the monopolization of the radio waves, McKenzie pushed for the creation of a new publication to represent the genuine interests of the amateur radio community. They called their publication Wireless Weekly, and it was a hit from the launch of its first issue in August of 1922, remaining in circulation in one form or another (mostly as the periodical Electronics Australia) until 2001. The publication took a stand against attempts to render radio sets with dials illegal, and for the rights of individuals to build their own sets and broadcast on their own frequencies. 

Violet would sell Wireless Weekly in 1924, one of several canny business moves she would make in the 1920s and 1930s that allowed her to finance her great philanthropic effort of the War years, but kept closely involved with new developments, including attempts to use wireless broadcasting to send pictures over the airwaves. On a personal level, 1925 saw her marry fellow radio enthusiast Cecil McKenzie, who would for the rest of his life put his knowledge and time at the service of helping her realize her visions of a better future through science. 

She made a go of the domestic life, but after the loss of a stillborn daughter in 1926, she decided it was time to return to business.  The Radio Shop, launched in 1928, would become the center of her new drive - to bring the benefits of electricity into the domestic sphere. As Australia’s only woman to earn a degree in electrical engineering, she was uniquely positioned to pitch the benefits of the Electric Home to the nation’s women. She wanted to counter the horror stories that were circulating about women getting electrocuted to death in their homes by their electrical devices, and preach instead the liberation to be had by letting machines handle the more onerous chores of the work week. She created space in her store to demonstrate the proper and safe handling of devices, and inspired by the Electrical Association for Women which had been established in England in 1924, decided to create a branch in Australia to push for greater electrical education for women, more support for women seeking jobs in electrical engineering, and more outreach programs to allow regular women to learn about the safe use and benefits of available domestic electrical appliances. 

The Electrical Association for Women was formed in 1934, and soon experienced an influx of funding from McKenzie’s next effort, a cookbook dedicated entirely to how to produce practical and useful dishes entirely on electrical equipment. The Electrical Association for Women’s Cookery Book, written by McKenzie and containing some 600 recipes, was a smash hit, and did even better under its subsequent title, the All Electric Cookery Book, which went through several editions in the years to come. The success of that book allowed McKenzie to fund the creation of a model kitchen in the EAW’s clubrooms where women could see demonstrations of all the newest machinery that, used safely, could give them back untold hours every day to employ however they saw fit. 

Shortly after the publication of the cookbook, McKenzie gave her time to the development of yet another organization aiming to expand the experience of women, the Australian Women’s Flying Club. She was one of the founding members upon its creation in 1938, and arranged for it to meet in the AEW clubroom, while at the same time undertaking herself to train the young women seeking to become pilots in Morse code, setting up training stations in the AEW that would be the germ of her great war efforts. Watching the news from Europe about the advance of Hitler and the Allies’ conciliatory policies, McKenzie believed that war must soon be coming, and that Australia’s women should prepare themselves to take a role in it. While a few might train to be pilots, McKenzie felt that a far greater number might train themselves in Morse code and other signalling conventions to serve their nation as communication specialists. 

In May of 1939, McKenzie established the Women’s Emergency Signalling Corps. Funded entirely by her own money built up over the course of her various successful business enterprises of the 1920s and 1930s, the new organization vowed to give free instruction in Morse code and visual signalling to any woman who wanted to learn it. Within six months, she had 150 students, and had developed a curriculum involving a series of clever mnemonic, rhythmic, and musical tricks which allowed her to train women in twenty-word-a-minute Morse signalling in half the time that the traditional armed forces could. 

Her girls, wearing the distinctive green uniform she had designed for them, were dedicated and effective, and wanted nothing more than to put their skills to use in the war effort, but that was not such an easy proposition. The first branch that McKenzie approached, the Air Force, was dead set against the idea in spite of their growing need for trained communications specialists, and powerful voices within that branch of the military did everything they could do delay and derail consideration of McKenzie’s offer, causing her to turn towards the Navy, who were more than happy to accept her gift of dozens of crack signal experts, setting them up in their own dorm at Australia’s primary communications center in Harman and eventually training the cream of the crop to receive and transcribe Japanese military signals. 

Soon, between the women seeking instruction and the military men who had been sent to “Mrs. Mac” as their best hope of learning Morse quickly, the premises of the EAW proved insufficient, and McKenzie took out new facilities in a building known as The Woolshed, which her husband rigged up with facilities for the graded teaching of mass amounts of signalling students, from dark rooms for Aldis Lamp training to multiple stations where students would evolve from two-word-a-minute Morse learners to twenty to thirty word per minute experts ready for use in the armed services. By war’s end, her facilities had trained some 3000 women and 12,000 men in Morse code, with 1000 of those women going on to work for the WRANS (Women’s Royal Australian Naval Service) in various capacities. She was the government’s go-to signals trainer of its armed forces, though she never had a military rank of her own besides that of honorary flight officer, and she paid for the entire massive operation out of her own pocketbook out of a sense of duty, both to the cause of the war, and to the cause of women’s wider educational and professional responsibilities.

After the war, she continued for some time training civilian pilots and merchant marine sailors in Morse, ultimately instructing some 2500 flight personnel and 1100 merchant sailors between 1945 and 1952, when the landlords of the Woolshed pushed her out of the building and no government agency could be bothered to help her secure new premises. Officers who had benefited from her training and mentorship during the War were adamant that something was owed to her in thanks, but though the nation would make her an officer of the OBE in 1950, it would not extend itself to any form of support that would cost money, reasoning that as she was never a member of the military, and that her school had never been an official branch of it, that the military had no obligation to aid or support her. 

By the late 1950s, the McKenzies were largely out of the teaching business. McKenzie was then in her sixties, and had burned through most of her financial reserves supporting the WESC during the war, but still received the odd student, including one whose difficulty with Morse led her to the discovery of the phenomenon of Morse dyslexia. Over the 1960s and 1970s, however, the memory of what she had done was kept alive by the Ex-WRANS Association, which invited her to speak at their functions and made efforts to celebrate her birthday, small but important acts of gratitude to the woman who had never accepted anything in exchange for the time, expertise, and money she devoted to giving thousands of women a chance to learn an important skill, and use it in work that meant something on a global scale. 

Violet McKenzie passed away on the 23rd of May, 1982, at the age of 91. Her last recorded words were, “Yes, it is finished. And I have proved to them all that women can be as good as, or better than, the men.”

That she did.

FURTHER READING:

David Dufty’s Radio Girl (2020) is a thoroughly wonderful book, detailing everything he was able to uncover about the remarkable life of Violet McKenzie. The writing is brisk, and the subject is positively magnetic. It is an outgrowth of the research he had done for his 2018 book, The Secret Code Breakers of Central Bureau, which is also worth a read! McKenzie’s books, The All Electric Cookery Book, and her children’s guide to electrical theory, The Electric Imps, are harder to come by (especially the latter - if anybody finds a copy of it for sale, Let Me Know!) but are magnificent pieces of electric history for those able to flag one down!