Beginnings

South West Cornwall is in many ways historic ground. The great stone menhirs on the moors, the stone circles and prehistoric chamber tombs speak of endeavours of the distant past. Castles, churches and chapels, the gaunt grey engine houses and the granite stacks of abandoned mines all tell a continuing story of the region's chequered history. But if Cornwall is an archaeologists paradise par-excellence, and the birthplace of metalliferous mining in Britain, it also claims the distinction, less publicised, of being the home of ocean telegraphy by cable, and the cradle of wireless in its early days. The story began a long time ago.

Cornish communications were originally visual. There is evidence to suggest that a chain of beacon fires extending westwards across Britain as far as Carn Brea hill near Lands End has been in use since prehistoric times. The traditional beacon sites are still used, if only for moments of national celebration, as during Queen's Jubilee year of 1977, and again to signal the marriage of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer in 1981.

A more sophisticated optical telegraph was the semaphore with its wagging arms, sometimes replaced by lanterns at night. In 1814 a semaphore was established atop a stone building known as the Corsican Tower on what then became known as Telegraph Hill in St Mary's, Isles of Scilly. This gave the islands their first instantaneous communications link with Cornwall and even further afield via a relay chain of such installations.(l) I have been unable to locate the mainland terminal, but the site of the ancient signal fires on Carn Brae would seem likely, from where the messages could have been passed on to another installation on the hills behind Penzance. The signalling was slow and liable to interruption by bad weather, but the islands were to wait for over half a century for anything better, and then they did not get exactly what they had expected.

(1) : One source implies a line of semaphores extending to London. Certainly by the mid-1700's there were chains of stations linking London with the principal naval ports. (Plymouth, Portsmouth, etc). The routes, particularly in the home counties, can be traced on large scale maps by the occurrence of names like "Telegraph House" and "Telegraph Hill.

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