Author’s Note
290 Words
First published 1989
Author’s NoteThe British invented submarine cables and by the 1890s had encompassed their Empire with them.
Between 1870 and 1897 the Colonial Office telegraph bill had risen from £800 a year to about £8,000.
The network had its weaknesses, but it was an amazing speeding up of communications which is unparallelled in history.
The first routes to India were unsatisfactory as they ran across hostile countries, and were constantly interfered with. In 1870 the British opened a submarine cable via Gibraltar, Malta, Alexandria, Suez and Aden to Bombay – all safely marked in red on the globe.
If any of these routes were cut there was no Southern link from India. The only alternative route was the vulnerable line to Australia through Java.
All over the world Englishmen were at work, laying and maintaining these cables or operating ‘booster’ stations along the line.
The centre station of the Overland Telegraph at Alice Springs, Australia, was one of the loneliest places in the Empire.
It was a thousand miles South of Darwin, a thousand miles North of Adelaide, the nearest towns.
Yet sometimes the sudden clatter of the Morse machine miraculously linked Alice Springs for a minute or two with Calcutta, Malta and the Imperial Capital on the other side of the world.
All this vast expertise of ships and mails and cable stations made the British master of international movement.
Nobody else operated on such a scale and, as Kipling wrote in his poem called, ‘The Deep Sea Cables’,
They have wakened the timeless things; they have killed their father time;
Joining hands in the gloom a league from the last of the sun.
Hush! Men talk today o’er the waste of the ultimate slime,
And a new word runs between, whispering, ‘Let us be one!’
- Writer
