Porthcurno and The Telegraph Construction & Maintenance Company Limited

A look at UK archive material including that held at Porthcurno relating to the world's biggest telegraph cable manufacturer and its successor companies at Enderby Wharf in Greenwich.

The first submarine cable was landed at Porthcurno in 1870 linking Britain and India. This was the beginning of a submarine cable network which was to grow in the following years to link all corners of the Empire. The Eastern Telegraph Company under the Chairmanship of John Pender had, within 15 years no less than 64 telegraph stations worldwide linked by almost 30,000 miles of cable.

By 1934 the network had come into the ownership of Cable and Wireless and at the outbreak of the Second World War this comprised no less than 350,000 miles of submarine cable.

Before becoming Chairman of Eastern Telegraph Company John Pender had been from 1864 to 1868 the Chairman of what was to become the world’s largest and most successful submarine cable manufacturing company - The Telegraph Construction & Maintenance Company better know as Telcon. This company based at Enderby Wharf in Greenwich manufactured cable, owned cableships and laid and maintained almost all the cables for The Eastern Telegraph Company. For decades the close working relationship between the two companies was totally unchallenged in world telecommunications and was extremely significant in the expansion and development of trade in the British Empire.

Telcon was by no means the only manufacturer of submarine cables but it was by far the biggest and they claimed that by 1950 to have produced, in total......... " more than half a million miles of cable which represented 90% of the world network and much of it being laid and maintained by the 19 cableships they had owned over the years...."

Whichever way we might look at these figures Telcon was a very major player in the development of world telecommunications. Their history and the history of Enderby Wharf is a fascinating subject and worthy of much more research. Archive material relating to Telcon is abundant but scattered. The following research notes prepared by Allan Green are a guide to that material as well as providing an outline of the evolution of both Telcon and the companies which succeeded them at Enderby Wharf Greenwich.

Archives in UK collections which relate to the Telegraph Construction & Maintenance Company ("Telcon") at Enderby Wharf Greenwich (PDF, 55KB)