Mary's Write: Telegraph Cables at Morden Wharf and Enderby

TELEGRAPH CABLES AT MORDEN WHARF

However, the story starts on a site a few hundred yards further north at Morden Wharf – now a development site. In the 1830s as Morden College began to parcel out sites to those who were willing to develop them this large site was let to a Charles Holcombe. He began to sub-let areas within this site to 'suitable' industrial tenants. One of these was a William Kuper.

The story of the development and laying of submarine telegraph cables is complicated and involves many people and companies. The first cables were made of twisted wires in a similar way to the 'wire rope', used for haulage in mines and quarries and William Kuper was a manufacturer of this with works originally in Camberwell.

By 1851 Kuper’s company had been taken over by George Elliot. He had begun as a mining engineer working for the Durham coal owner, the Marquis of Londonderry. He had been advisor to Newall’s of Gateshead where most of the early telegraph cables had been made. A submarine telegraph cable which was to be laid across the English Channel was being manufactured and a subcontract went to Kuper . The success of this contract led Richard Atwood Glass, Elliot’s accountant, to see an opportunity in protecting subsea cable with wire armouring. Many technical difficulties had to be overcome but some successes came and orders followed. At Greenwich Holcombe had erected a new building for them of a 'sound and substantial character' as Morden College had specified. Elliott then took Glass into partnership and W Kuper and Co became Glass, Elliot and Company. An early commission was to make the cable for a submarine link between Northern Italy and Corsica and for this they made sheathing to cover a core which had already made by the Islington based Gutta Percha Company. For this a temporary jetty was built in 1854 to load cable onto SS Persian.

The next cable was destined for a link across the Cabot Strait in America. Problems were encountered in loading the cable onto the ship from Morden Wharf and, to deal with this, cable pits were dug in which the cable was coiled up and tested underwater while it was still in storage. Contemporary drawings show the works at Morden Wharf with 'Glass Elliot, Submarine Cables' written on the roof of the main buildings, at an angle so as to be seen from the River. They also show two pits lined with bricks, and a bridge in-between with arched drainage ducts underneath. From these cables could be loaded on to the ship.

GLASS ELLIOTT AND THE MOVE TO ENDERBY WHARF

In 1857, Glass, Elliot got a contract for armouring half of the cable for an attempt to lay a cable across the Atlantic, and the Morden Wharf site was too small to accommodate the amount of cable which needed to be made. Glass, Elliot made an agreement with another submarine cable manufacturer, William Thomas Henley to buy the derelict Enderby Hemp and Rope works. By 1859 Henley had left Greenwich ad moved to North Woolwich and in 1864, Glass Elliot and Company merged with Gutta Percha Company, to form The Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Co. With Sir John Pender as Chairman and with Richard Glass as Managing Director. Gutta Percha is a natural product derived from trees grown in Malaya and elsewhere. It was discovered to be an effective insulator for underwater cables. Later Glass Elliott asked for permission to build a causeway at Enderby's together with another at the 'telegraph works' – still at Morden Wharf. So the long occupation of Enderby Wharf by Glass Elliott and their successors began, but for a while the works at Morden Wharf continued in use.

While techniques for handling the cable were perfected, survey work went on for the laying of the Atlantic Telegraph cable. For this a new company - The Atlantic Telegraph Company - was set up in 1856. A telegraph link between the old and new worlds was seen as something of great importance – submarine cables were now being laid to link countries round the world, but a link to America was paramount. There was much excitement and it was recognised that it could change the way in which business and society were organised. Interest by the public was enormous on both sides of the Atlantic.

The core for the first Atlantic cable was made by the Gutta Percha Company and the job of making the sheathing was shared between Glass Elliott, in Greenwich, and Newall in Birkenhead. This sheathing used eighteen wires woven around a core separated by hemp and soaked in tar, pitch and linseed oil in a system said to have been designed by Brunel. Enough wire would be needed to encircle the earth three times. The cable was made in 1,200 pieces, each two miles long, which were then spliced together into eight lengths of 300 miles each. Work began on December 1856. Unfortunately it turned out that the cable made in Birkenhead had a right-handed twist, while Glass Elliott, gave theirs a left-handed twist. This, and other problems, took time to sort out.

It was necessary to design a new method of paying the cable out from the ships into the sea. This was to allow control over the speed of the cable as it left the ship, and so that it could be stowed efficiently. This led to a recording machine being installed on board. Half the cable was to be laid from Valentia, the westernmost point in Britain on the Irish coast and the other half from Newfoundland. The Greenwich made cable went into the British ship, Agamemnon. She was an old 'wooden walled ship of the line' that and had been the flagship at the bombardment of Sevastopol. That the Government lent her for the project demonstrated quite clearly the level of their backing for this apparently private project. The cable was loaded from Greenwich in July 1857 and coiled into Agamemnon’s hold by sailors sitting on stools.

Agamemnon and the cable had a magnificent send off with a garden-party in Erith for the crew and Glass Elliot's workmen but the attempt was a failure. The cable broke in mid-Atlantic and was lost. The cable makers went back to Greenwich to start work again.

Glass Elliott was contracted to make the cable for the second attempt in the Atlantic. Once again the cable was loaded onto Agamemnon and, despite many difficulties, it was successfully laid by August 1858 - to rapturous acclaim in the press. Sadly the connection lasted just two months and by October nothing could be transmitted through it. Once again the cable makers returned to Greenwich and, in 1862, were ready to try again. Glass Elliott’s technicians had designed a new and improved cable for the next attempt.

GREAT EASTERN

A very great deal has been written about Isambard Brunel’s Great Eastern, so much indeed and so well known is her link with the cable, that a casual walk along the Greenwich riverside in the area of Enderby's Wharf will often lead to a chat with a stranger who will tell you about the Great Eastern and the cable.

Following the second abortive attempt to achieve a working cable across the Atlantic Glass Elliot set about make a new Atlantic cable which would be more robustly constructed, heavier, and nearly double the diameter. There would be seven strands of high purity copper, six of them twisted round the seventh and there would be four layers of gutta percha. Between the copper and the gutta percha there would be a layer of resin and Tar. As it was made, inch by inch, it was closely inspected – a break would mean another expensive disaster. The new cable was so big and heavy that Agamemnon could not carry it and it was thought three ships would be needed.

The solution was the Great Eastern. Launched seven years before from Millwall and, known as ‘The Leviathan’, she was designed to be bigger and more powerful than any ship before her. She had failed as a passenger liner and was thus bought very cheaply by Brunel's friend, Daniel Gooch, while he was a director of Great Western Railway Company. He promptly joined the Board of the Telegraph Construction Company and offered Great Eastern to them for free.

There was even greater interest in this new, third, cable and the Prince of Wales visited Greenwich to see it being manufactured. He sent a message through the 1,400 miles then being tested in the factory - 'I wish success to the Atlantic Cable'.

It took eight months to make the new cable and two weeks to load it into Great Eastern. The ship was so big that she could not be brought alongside Enderby Wharf and every bit of cable had to be ferried out to her and loaded off Sheerness. She left Greenwich for Valentia on 15th July 1865 carrying 21,000 tons dead-weight.

When they were 948 miles from Valentia and 717 miles from their destination, Heart's Content in Newfoundland, the cable was once more broken and lost overboard. Four times the cable was found on the ocean bottom, and four times it slipped away. Then storms set in and the cable was thought to be lost. For a while, in England, it was also believed that the Great Eastern herself had gone down - once the cable was lost no messages could be got back. Once again, the cable makers went back to Greenwich.

TRY AGAIN

The Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Co. made yet another new cable, which was finished in 1866. Once again they loaded the Great Eastern and once again she left the Thames for Valentia. The bands on shore played 'Goodbye Sweetheart' as she left with 2,730 miles of cable. This time, on 27th July, she reached Heart's Content and the cable was laid at last to great celebrations.

Great Eastern then went back to look for the broken cable lost in the previous attempt. There was no way to contact the ship once she had left but on 2nd of September instruments at the Valentia end of the broken cable began to move. Staff on board Great Eastern had found the broken end two miles down, fished it up, and it too was now connected. Within a few moments, both Europe and America knew where Great Eastern was and what she had done. It is one of the defining moments of the modern world.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of the Atlantic cable and the 'profound transformation' to which it led. It has been said that 'despite the romance of the workshop of the world ... it is in the under-publicised accounts department that the long-term future held sway'. The telegraph was a major agent of change and an instrument whose importance was not lost on City business interests, which controlled land on the Greenwich Peninsula and the companies, which made and laid the cable. The Stock Exchange was transformed by it, and by 1871 'trading on exchanges in New York and London were effectively integrated'.Within another two years connections were made to Tokyo and Melbourne and world markets were shifting towards globalisation.

At the end of the twentieth century there is much talk about the global communications revolution. The real revolution came a hundred and thirty years ago when wires twisted on Greenwich marsh crackled into life on the sea bed. It is said that for many years one of the Great Eastern's masts stood on Enderby Wharf as a reminder of what had been achieved.

Of all the sites involved with the cables only one has an exhibition to show what happened - at Heart's Content in Newfoundland although there has been talk of a World Heritage site between there and Valentia.

TELCON AND ITS SUCCESSORS

The submarine cable works at Enderby Wharf was to prosper greatly and by the 1920s they had made the vast majority of underwater telegraph cables around the world - so much indeed that no other works came near them in output. There have been several changes of company names and managements but the works continues, for some years now in French ownership. The research facilities at Greenwich have kept it in the forefront and many new technologies have emerged – in particular optical fibre transmission for which Charles Kao received a Nobel prize in 2009. There was also development of secialist materials – for example Mu Metal, and telcothene, a version of polythene.

In over 150 years work this site has been of vast importance internationally and has provided the revolutionary technology which today we take for granted. In the 1860s cables transmitted a few messages in Morse, today it jades the vast traffic on the Internet.

For many years the cable laying ships and repair ship there alongside the wharf and some of the loading gear still remains on the jetty as a monument. The wharf is no longer used, and the 'dolphins' at which and for the cable ships were loaded are gone. The John W. Mackay, a cable ship preserved there for many years has apparently now been broken up.

AND NOW

In the early 21^st century Alcatel, by then owners of the works, sold the river frontage to a developer for housing. The developer then went bankrupt and the area was left with no security. The original developer had planned a major terminal for cruise liners on the riverside but no work on this was ever done. A major public campaign began against the berthing of ships here, which would run polluting diesel power while there. This appears to have been resolved when the current owners admitted there were now no plans for the terminal but it has made ‘Enderby Wharf’ a ‘dirty word’ locally

Enderby House itself had been used as offices by the cable companies and was not in bad condition if a bit ‘tired’ . Once in the ownership of the developer it was neglected and was squatted, burnt, and left to rot. As a result a campaign group was formed - the Enderby Group - to try and save the house and get it used so as to reflect some of the telecoms heritage of the area. A new housing developer, Barratt’s, took over and soon the riverside area was covered in large blocks of flats painted in garish colours. People began to move in.

The planning consent for the flats required Enderby House to be restored and Barratts stabilised the property and restored the exterior. It was then announced that it would become a pub operated by Young’s brewery. We are still waiting to see what will happen but the hoped for telecoms heritage centre still seems near impossible to achieve.

Alongside Enderby House was an office building with decorative cable and gutta percha motifs above the lintels and around the door. This was demolished and apparently no features kept. Also demolished was a chimney which may have originated in neighbouring the Beale works. On the riverside the cable-loading remains on the jetty and some steps into the river,, covering a medieval sluice, have a carving depicting the history of cable manufacture and it is hope that this will remain. Barratts also commissioned a sculpture which will stand outside Enderby House - Lay Lines is designed to display cross sections of cable as tables and chairs. There is also an electronic information system,

Mary's Write

Sunday, December 29, 2024

Telegraph Cables at Morden Wharf and Enderby

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The Enderby loading gear

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