Four or five years ago a group of us decided to get together to campaign on the derelict state of Enderby House which stands on the Greenwich Riverside. In addition to the house itself we wanted to draw attention to the amazing heritage of Enderby Wharf in that for over 150 years submarine telegraph cables had been made there along with many technologies associated with them. This article is not going to be about Enderby House or the cables, but one of the people associated with them.
A very pleasant place to go for an evening walk or on a Sunday afternoon is Foots Cray Meadows, on the other side of Sidcup. When my husband was alive we used to go there often and walk from Rectory Lane down past the little church to the River Cray and the pretty listed bridge which crosses it. The meadows had been the site of a very, very grand house called Foots Cray Place and you can see some outbuildings but the house was burnt out and demolished in 1949. There are plenty of web sites which will tell you about the importance of it as a great Palladian mansion and about its owners over the centuries but few mention the man who rented it in the late 19th century and who is buried in the churchyard nearby. That is a shame because he was one of the people most closely involved in the telecommunications revolution which is still with us today, and which began in the mid 19th century.
To return to Greenwich and Enderby Wharf. The most famous story in telecommunications in the mid 19th century is the laying of the Atlantic cable and many Greenwich people, not just the historians, will know that it was made at Enderby Wharf. The cable making company, by then called Glass Elliott, had moved there in the mid 1850s. But, as with all these stories it is not that simple. The Atlantic cable itself had involved numerous complicated deals between individuals – bankers, industrialists, scientists and technocrats. In addition the Atlantic cable was not alone. At the same time cables were being laid all round the world - many of them made in Greenwich. One of the most important players in setting up this vast international network – which we take for granted today was the man who rented Foots Cray Place
His name was John Pender. He was a Scot from a lower middle class background who had made a fortune speculating on the cotton market in the Manchester Cotton Exchange. By the 1850s he was extremely wealthy, still under 40 and taking an interest in the new ideas about telegraph systems and telegraph services. In 1852 he became director of the English and Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company, one of the earliest such companies set up to built telegraphs. In this case from England to Ireland. In those days there are many setbacks to the technology but that each failure was a lesson towards a better result the next time. It was clear that while cables were laid short distances under the sea and between nations that the one vital cable which needed to be laid was under the Atlantic between Europe and America – a distance which seemed insurmountable. In 1856 the Atlantic Telegraph Company were set up and one of its directors was John Pender. The first two attempts to lay a cable across the Atlantic failed.
In 1864 a new company was formed to be sited at Enderby Wharf in Greenwich - the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company – usually known as Telcon. Pender had become the chair of the company and from then on Telcon worked closely with the various companies Pender set up to build cable systems around the world. Around the same time a deal was reached whereby Brunel’s huge ship, Great Eastern, would be used to take the cable across the Atlantic, and, following another failure, the Atlantic cable was laid to great success. It had been made in Greenwich as successive cables were to be for the next hundred years.
In 1894 speaking after a celebratory dinner Pender said that they were by then eleven cables under the North Atlantic ‘where ever the British flag was flying and commerce promised a fair prospect of remuneration cables had been laid... there were 152,000 miles of submarine cable in the world...as well as 2 million miles of land line and a Pacific cable was projected ... his company had begun in business by sending 400,000 messages a year in 1894 it was two million’.
Pender’s role was that of an entrepreneur and it was one which required great skill and boundless energy. Telegraph facilities were provided by private companies yet needed the support of governments who often thought such facilities should be publicly owned, thus his role was partly to negotiate with governments in areas into which telegraphy was being introduced. He had to put together complicated financial packages involving bankers and investors on an international scale. He also had to ensure that the technology involved gave the best result possible and that improvements were introduced. Once installed systems had to be managed and this also had to be set up. For the vast majority of these contracts cables were made at Enderby wharf in Greenwich.
This story about the enabling of international communications has come a long way from our small group of people in Greenwich hopefully looking for a future for Enderby House and also the wide expanses of Foots Cray Meadows, which are now a public park. When Pender died he was buried in Foots Cray churchyard where his gravestone has recently been refurbished by the telecommunications industry. In Greenwich we have almost nothing which commemorates either Pender or the international network which he built up. The Enderby Group had done what we can to publicise what happened here on the Greenwich Riverside. Some of our members have written about our telecommunications heritage for various journals and magazines and a great deal has fone on the net. (We should thank Bill Burns in New York for Atlantic cable web site http://atlantic-cable.com/). The most recent book is one about John Pender by Stewart Ash and its publication by Stewart is one of the reasons I have written this article. It is not in bookshops but available from Amazon as an e book https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=node%3D341689031&field-keywords=The+Cable+King or as a hard copy with either black & white or full colour illustrations: https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=The+Cable+King
GW 2023
No comments:
Post a Comment