AHRC award for neglected histories in telecommunications

A highly innovative project to re-examine the concentration of telecommunication industries in late-Victorian and Edwardian Cornwall has been awarded £300,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.  The collaborative project between Porthcurno Telegraph Museum and the University of Exeter’s Department of History at the Cornwall Campus, Penryn (known locally as Tremough) will be conducted over an 18 month period. 

The aim for “Connecting Cornwall” is to transform the understanding of some of the key aspects of telecommunications history; drawing on the underexploited archival material at the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum. 

The project will focus on two themes that have largely been neglected in histories of telecommunication.  Rather than focussing solely on the technology, the research examines the lives and careers of the telegraphers who trained at Porthcurno which was the location of the major operating station and training school of the Eastern Telegraph Company.  The trainees went on to manage the global telecommunication network which helped keep Britain’s empire together in a period of fierce international competition. 

Director of Porthcurno Telegraph Museum, Libby Buckley explains, “A trawl of the archives reveals new insights into the way they were recruited and trained as well as the technological and practical innovations they devised.  We are finding out how they coped with stresses and illnesses caused by working in often harsh conditions far from home.”

She added, “Using diaries, photographs, instruments, and a wealth of other items Porthcurno Telegraph Museum’s “Connecting Cornwall” exhibition, publications and website will give voice to a largely forgotten community of workers.”

The original project will combine the expertise of academic historians and museum professionals to create a major new exhibition, a new website featuring a fully-searchable database of research materials, and virtual tours of Porthcurno and other major sites of Cornish telecommunications history.

University Lecturer in History, Dr Richard Noakes explains, “Preliminary research is already yielding material that will transform our understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of building and operating remote telegraph stations, the responses of local inhabitants to symbols of metropolitan power, and the way that cable and wireless telegraphy came to be seen as part of the identity of locales not associated with cutting edge technology.” 

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