Preface

My difficulty has been one of selection. Telegraph cables by their very nature tend to draw those who write about them into long-winded and rambling discourses, for what happens at one end of a cable is determined in part by events technical, geographic, and political that occur at the other. When the distant terminal is in a country a thousand miles and more away, and when cables are linked in tandem by relays, the chain of interdependence becomes global.

I have therefore tried to limit myself to a brief survey of events local to West Penwith, to happenings at places which the visitor can explore on foot, and to an explanation of the relics he will find. Occasionally I have strayed geographically as far as the Lizard, and technically into the realm of wireless, but in the main I have kept to the less well known but equally fascinating world of submarine cables. If the account seems parochial and ignores the wider implications of certain developments, then this is deliberate. To have done otherwise would have been to write an encyclopaedia, and that is a task for which I am not qualified.

The booklet stemmed from a period when I was working temporarily in London, but as a weekly commuter from Newlyn. This provided a unique opportunity to interleave visits to local sites of significance, and to the extensive London archives of Messrs Cable and Wireless Ltd (to whom my grateful acknowledgements are due) for records that would interpret what could be seen on the ground. The archives in their turn would pose questions to be answered by a further field trip and so on.

J.E. Packer, Newlyn, 1981.

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