Designated Collection Award for Porthcurno Telegraph Museum

Media release: 30 September 2009 (PDF version, 331KB)

Porthcurno Telegraph Museum is delighted to announce that it has recently been granted 'Designated' status. It has become the first museum in Cornwall to be granted this award.

This prestigious award, which is only open to non-national museums, has been granted by the Museums, Libraries and Archives council (MLA). The award recognises the significance and outstanding quality of the museum’s pre-eminent core collection of submarine telegraphy objects and its historic archive collections of key international telegraph cable companies. These collections are of both national and international importance, since they have been recognised as being the most complete collection of such objects anywhere in the world and tell the story of how the development of international communication changed the way the world operated for ever. The museum is therefore recognised as caring for a significant part of England’s cultural heritage.

Although the museum is housed in WW2 tunnels, that is not the beginning of the story. For Porthcurno it all began in 1870, with the opening of the first cable station when a new undersea cable was laid from Porthcurno to Bombay. This changed life in the remote little hamlet forever, bringing in staff to operate the cable station as well as students who came to the training school which was set up in the valley. Again, that’s not the whole story as a total of 14 undersea cables were eventually laid from Porthcurno, making it the largest and most important cable station in the world by the start of WW2. The strategic importance of the telegraph station was recognised at the beginning of the war and the tunnels were dug to protect the instruments from enemy attack. It was vital that the station continued to operate during wartime as the majority of British telegraph messages went through Porthcurno. After the war, the cable station continued to operate until 1970, ending 100 years of communications history. The site became a museum in 1998 and visitor numbers have increased steadily since this time.

The subject matter of the museum is unfamiliar to most people because although there were hundreds of thousands of miles of telegraph cables, they were not visible. Modern cable networks which superseded these telegraph networks, are equally invisible and most people have no idea about the relevance of the telegraph industry to the modern world. Today’s fibre optic communications cables still follow the routes of their ancestor telegraph cables, through Porthcurno, and with their greater operating speeds and massively increased traffic capacity, form the communications infrastructure of the world carrying over 80% of traffic. The four working cables that come ashore at Porthcurno enter a microwave transmission network nearby. Most people who use their mobiles and their computers all day at work and at home have no idea about submarine cables, although it is these cables that provide their access to the modern world, or of the part played by Porthcurno in this history.

The newly Designated collections at Porthcurno Telegraph Museum make it uniquely placed to tell the stories of the peculiar life-style of the telegraphers, of the global importance of the industry and of the technology that set precedents for the modern world of communications.