Berkeley Series in British Studies

London's Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital

Katie Hindmarch-Watson

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780520975668
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

In the public imagination, Silicon Valley embodies the newest of the new—the cutting edge, the forefront of our social networks and our globally interconnected lives. But the pressures exerted on many of today's communications tech workers mirror those of a much earlier generation of laborers in a very different space: the London workforce that helped launch and shape the massive telecommunications systems operating at the turn of the twentieth century. Asthe Victorian age ended, affluent Britons came to rely on information exchanged along telegraph and telephone wires for seamless communication: an efficient and impersonal mode of sharing thoughts, demands, and desires. This embrace of seemingly unmediated communication obscured the labor involved in the smooth operation of the network, much as our reliance on social media and app interfaces does today. Serving a Wired World is a history of information service work embedded in the daily maintenance of liberal Britain and the status quo in the early years of the twentieth century. As Katie Hindmarch-Watson shows, the administrators and engineers who crafted these telecommunications systems created networks according to conventional gender perceptions and social hierarchies, modeling the operation of the networks on the dynamic between master and servant. Despite attempts to render telegraphists and telephone operators invisible, these workers were quite aware of their crucial role in modern life, and they posed creative challenges to their marginalized status—from organizing labor strikes to participating in deviant sexual exchanges. In unexpected ways, these workers turned a flatly neutral telecommunications network into a revolutionary one, challenging the status quo in ways familiar today.

ONE

Dispatches from Underground

FOLLOWING THE NATIONALIZATION of the telegraph system in 1870, London journalists described the outer and inner workings of Telegraph Street, the location of Britain’s first state-run Central Telegraph Office. The street itself, known as Great Bell Alley before the Electric and International Telegraph Company set up headquarters there in 1859, was a small lane off Moorgate, near London Wall. Just a few blocks north of the Bank of England and the Royal Exchange, Britain’s new telegraphic headquarters lay in the center of the global powerhouse that was London’s financial district. According to an article in Temple Bar, the street itself was “by no means inviting, and those who have never penetrated its somewhat dismal recesses are little aware of the important part which it now plays, commercially as well as socially and politically, in the ‘story of our lives from day to day.’ ”¹

The article employed a rhetorical device common in Victorian discussions of telegraphy: a contrast between the all-encompassing, global ramifications of wired communication and its enigmatic, closed-off, and slightly forbidding internal workings. The telegraph network, that “sensorium . . . the nervous system of Empire,” was everywhere, yet difficult to fully access or comprehend. Noting “the ‘Strictly private’ which meets our view the moment we enter,” the reporter observed: “A portion of the pavement is ‘up,’ and over a hole . . . partly to shelter the workmen, and partly to hide from view their mysterious operations—a canvas tent of not the most handsome proportions.”² Temple Bar painted a vaguely ominous picture of what was taking place across London. The General Post Office (GPO) had decided to route London’s telegraph lines underground, both to protect the wires and to remove the poles and lines that clogged London’s streets and skyline. At least, that was the aim. Despite its image as a city of increasingly ordered mobility, London in the late nineteenth century was a cluttered network of railway construction sites and road-widening projects. Workmen engaged in “cut and cover” tunnel and trench construction perpetually deferred the promise of easy urban mobility.³ In Temple Bar’s depiction, they were also perpetuating telegraphy’s “mystery”: shielded by rough canvas and laboring men, the system lurked underground, in the private recesses of public thoroughfares.

Telegraphy’s multiple layers of opacity, from the science of electricity, Morse code, and underground wires to its high cost and its affluent users’ various practices of encryption, reflected its social utility. Its visible elements included established class, gender, and imperial hierarchies, and while some high-minded reformers envisioned a democratized (yet profitable) system of ever-increasing knowledge accumulation and social uplift, telegraphy’s fiscal priorities dominated the system’s design and implementation. Nationalization of the telegraph network was effected by an alliance of influential groups who wanted the state to protect the system from market uncertainties. Like previous technologies that spurred Victorian state intervention, telegraphy encapsulated liberal aspirations: the ever-increasing mobility of goods, money, people, and information. The imperial metropolis became a global electric information hub, with nodes that, as Chris Otter has noted of other “liberal objective” systems, were “stratified and knotty,” connecting socially and commercially powerful constituencies.⁴ Journalistic attempts to elucidate telegraphy’s mysteries were exercises that represented modern urban life to affluent consumers as coherent, knowable, and aspirational. It was important, however, that many aspects of electric information remain mysterious, in order to assure those consumers that the private discourse being transcribed in the nation’s telegraph offices was protected. Many of telegraphy’s consumers embraced codes and ciphers to further safeguard their messages. A crucial characteristic of nationalized telegraphy for the liberal project was that the system did not scrutinize the millions of messages sent along the wires.

ENVISIONING TELEGRAPHIC NETWORKS

By the 1860s, physiological metaphors for telegraphy were clichés depicting Britain—and London in particular—as the heart and brain of a global operation. Temple Bar asked its readers to imagine the wires as “the veins . . . which convey the electric fluid from the main arteries of communication to the very heart of the telegraphic system, and from the heart to the extremities of civilization itself.”⁵ The metaphor of the circulatory system represented a visible, vital, orderly flow whose workings Victorians had more fully discovered. For another journalist, the nervous system was a better analogy than the circulatory system: “The complete web of mysterious nerve-fibres which spring from the central ganglion of an animal . . . giving and taking intelligence from one to the other, is obviously for the creature what the telegraph system is for the Earth. Telegraph lines are the nerves of the world.”⁶ According to the historian Iwan Rhys Morus, this was a common association: “Both were systems that seemed to transmit intelligence instantaneously,” and both were involved in regulation.⁷ Mid-Victorians embraced this technomedical fantasy of imperial order, celebrating the telegraph “for its capacity to make their world smaller and more immediately manageable.”⁸

Originally conceived as a subsidiary technology for railway operation, telegraphy had developed with the railway companies in the 1830s and 1840s, and the spread of wires throughout Britain followed the train routes. Its first transnational manifestation in 1858 was short-lived—the Atlantic Company’s transatlantic cable lasted less than a month before breaking—but seven years later, telegraph wires directly linked the Atlantic British Empire via western Ireland and Newfoundland. By the 1860s all major British urban centers were connected either by railway telegraphs or by one of five private telegraph companies.

In 1860 London’s internal telegraph market was effectively taken over by the District Telegraph Company. The Electric and International Telegraph Company, the largest of the national networks, had installed over fifty thousand miles of wire by 1868.⁹ The “Electric” and its competitors charged rates based on the number of words transmitted and the distance covered. There was uneven collaboration between the companies, which consumers increasingly railed against as telegraphy’s importance increased.

As a result of telegraph expansion, over three thousand telegraph stations were opened for public use throughout Britain and Ireland, ninety-five of which were in London.¹⁰ The rest were clustered in the other large cities, generally in or near railway stations. By the 1860s, millions of telegrams were being sent every year. Telegraphy had become essential for government officials, industrialists, bankers, merchants, and journalists.¹¹ The private companies defended their high rates in terms of exclusivity, explicitly catering to state actors, business networks, and cultural elites rather than the masses (gamblers being an important cross-class exception). The telegraph might have gone global, but direct access to electric knowledge depended on proximity to wires and the ability to pay for telegrams, which were a rare or emergency expenditure for the vast majority of British and imperial subjects.

NATIONALIZATION

Those who could afford telegraphy often sung its praises and complained about it in the same breath. In the later Victorian period, commentators still evoked the quasi-mystical capacities of electricity to keep the Empire informed, regulated, and cohesive, but grandiose descriptions of the dazzling speed and civilizing powers of telegraphy increasingly served as preambles to frustrated criticisms of Britain’s current network. Articles in the Times during the 1860s regularly complained about “ridiculous” and “costly” errors committed by private telegraph companies.¹² Observers bemoaned the exorbitant and complicated rate system, the inefficiency and unreliability of transmissions, and the inconvenient locations of telegraph offices. As early as 1854, commentators demanded some form of government intervention to untangle the mess of private wires.¹³ Nationalization of the telegraph network under the postal system gained traction as a viable remedy even among those who usually opposed any government intervention in industry.

Reformers argued that the telegraph was the younger sibling of the postal system, which had enjoyed a period of successful reform and expansion. The penny-post innovations of the 1840s, introducing flat rates and the prepaid stamp system, had revolutionized the British public’s relationship with letter writing; by the 1860s postal reforms proved fiscal successes as well. The GPO improved communication across the nation and empire and remained a valuable source of revenue. Early experiments with private telegraph company interconnectivity had proved expensive and unpredictable. Influential figures, including the political economist William Stanley Jevons, argued that under the auspices of the GPO, a nationalized telegraph network would be cheaper, faster, more accessible, and more accountable than the private systems.¹⁴

In rhetoric evoking the civilizing power of imperial communications, a group of powerful business and state representatives fueled the push for nationalization. Commentators repeatedly invoked metaphors of the “web,” “nervous system,” and “arteries” of empire in celebrating telegraphy’s potential. These metaphors almost invariably relied on an implicit logic of control from a powerful center. News organs were almost universally in favor of nationalization, as the government had promised generous subsidies for news cables in order to maintain the competitiveness of the British press.¹⁵

Nationalization’s adherents further argued that Britain’s reputation as a world power was at stake if its telegraph system continued to lag behind the state-run systems on the Continent. Frank Ives Scudamore, second secretary of the GPO and the chief administrative architect of nationalization, published statistics-laden reports of the private companies’ shortcomings and the success of nationalized European services.¹⁶ The Pall Mall Gazette cited Scudamore’s figures to argue that the success of nationalized Swiss and Belgian systems made it “quite clear that England, with its immense commercial engagements, its wealth, its social activity of every kind, must have incomparably greater need for quick intercourse by telegraph than the Belgians or the Swiss.”¹⁷ Besides imperial chauvinism, there were other powerful ideological prompts at work in the telegraph “debate.” As the Pall Mall Gazette asserted, the ubiquity of the telegraph represented progress: “quick intercourse” was now a prerequisite for Englishness.

The parliamentary bills that transferred the wires to the Post Office were passed a year after the Second Reform Act, which extended suffrage to 1.5 million men. C. R. Perry has argued that underlying some telegraph reformers’ rhetoric was a belief that a more accessible telegraph system would foster the spread of knowledge and thus improve British society. With respectable urban working-class men casting ballots in parliamentary elections, a small but well-connected group of administrators thought it all the more important that greater numbers of subjects be properly informed.¹⁸

These interests met with little resistance, even when it became clear that state telegraphy was a much more expensive endeavor than the penny post or the recent GPO savings bank scheme. Scudamore had predicted that with an initial expenditure of just over £2.5 million, the state could acquire all the wires, dramatically expand the system, reduce telegraph tariffs, and swiftly turn an annual profit. ...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 • Dispatches from Underground
• 2 • The Public Service of Discretion
• 3 • Gendering the Central Telegraph Office
• 4 • Bodied Telegraphy
• 5 • Unintended Networks
• 6 • Tapped Wires
• 7 • Martial Mercuries
• 8 • Voices on the Wires
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index