Porthcurno Telegraph Museum

Porthcurno Telegraph Museum used to be the largest cable station in the world and is situated in a small valley on the West Coast of Cornwall.  It was not only the hub of international cable communications from 1870-1970, but also a training college for the communications industry until 1993. 

A major project called “Connecting Cornwall” was set up with funding from the Arts & Humanities Research Council across the University’s Exeter’s History and Geography departments.  4 PhD students are being funded to research the project  “Historical Geography of Communication Themes: The Eastern Telegraph Company to Cable and Wireless, 1869-1945”.

The project began with the aim of transforming the understanding of some of the key aspects of telecommunications history by drawing on the underused and exciting archival material at the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum.  As a collaborative project, the “Connecting Cornwall” team focused on many aspects of the lives and careers of the telegraphers who trained at Porthcurno and who went on to be stationed throughout the global telegraph network of the Eastern Telegraph Company and associated companies.  

This project seeks to make Cornwall's telecommunications history more visible and the relationship between museum specialists and academics have proved dynamic with their research becoming the bedrock of a major new exhibition called Nerve Centre of Empire for the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum.  The museum already has an outstanding display of working telegraph apparatus and this new exhibition, opened in the presence of HRH The Princess Royal in June 2010, focuses on the period 1870-1918 and the lives of the workers in this industry. The Museum’s archive has also provided a wealth of material such as employment and work records, operating reports, maps and plans of various overseas telegraph stations as well as an extensive collection of images of both the telegraph school at Porthcurno and overseas stations.

One of the most enlightening projects has been transcribing the George Spratt diaries from 1871 – 1909, which has given an invaluable insight into life at isolated telegraph stations and how this isolation affected staff working there.  The diaries uncover revealing stories of life at Porthcurno for staff and their families and the harsh conditions of outstations around the world.  They also showed how recruitment was carried out and how workers were trained as technology changed and working practices were modified.  Staff were prone to physical and stress-related illnesses were common themes throughout.

Supporting the exhibition is a major website displaying the results of the research in different ways for different users.  For academic historians of technology, business and work there is a searchable database of the cultural, economic, social and technological aspects of work and training at Porthcurno.  The website will also contain virtual tours of other Cornish communications sites such as the wireless stations at Poldhu, the Lizard, and Bodmin, and downloadable podcasts for those visiting other sites where little tourist and historical information is available.

For schools, the team brought its experience of creating an educational resource that meets the needs of key stages in the history, science and geography curricula, as well as providing for academic researchers information about materials held in the Porthcurno archive. Various scholarly publications and presentations are being published for leading academic journals in the history of work, technology and business, and the project team will build on this to publish a book-length study of  the telecommunications industry in Cornwall from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the First World War.