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Eastern
Telegraph Company
With the opening of the Suez Canal Aden became an
important communications hub, not only on the sea but
also under it. The first effort at laying an undersea
telegraph line from Suez to Karachi in 1858 had been an
expensive failure. Named the ‘Ocean Line’ the sheathing
wires were slight and gave no protection from corrosion.
There was not sufficient slack and the route selected
was rated a few years later as having been ‘poor’. There
were several landfalls along the route besides Aden and
within a few weeks of laying one or more sections were
u/s. In fact the line was never working throughout and
it had cost £800,000 – a huge sum in those days.
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There was then a 12 year interval until 1870, by
which date considerable advances in the
technology needed had been made including in
1865 the laying of a transatlantic cable by the
huge SS Great Eastern. At 32,000 tons this ship
was by far the largest in the world when it had
done its maiden voyage in 1860 as a passenger
ship. |
SS Great
Eastern laying cable in the North Atlantic in
1865. |
With its great space it was ideal to be used as a cable
ship. On 14 February 1870 the Great Eastern sailed from
Bombay with a full load of deep-sea cable. She arrived
off Aden 12 days later and the shore end was landed on 5
March in what became known as Telegraph Bay.
Eastern Telegraph Company on Ras Boraldi
in Telegraph Bay
The cable was then laid overland to the offices of the
British India Submarine Telegraph Company in the Prince
of Wales’ Crescent in Tawahi. Later that day the cable
section from Bombay to Aden was certified as being
electrically perfect and properly laid. Also on 5 March
the shore end of the Suez section was landed at
Telegraph Bay from the Great Eastern which the next day
began laying the Red Sea section towards Suez. She
passed Perim through the large strait and on arriving
off Jebel Tir laying operations were transferred to the
SS Hibernia, one of the other three cable ships
involved.
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SS Hibernia |
These three were much much smaller ships and on
the 13th the Hibernia handed over to
the SS Chiltern. Meanwhile the SS William Cory
began laying from Suez, the splice being
effected on 22 March some 110 miles from Suez.
The cable from England to Alexandria and
overland to Suez had already been laid.
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The line between England and India was opened on 26
March, the Bombay to Aden section being 1,818 miles and
Aden to Suez another 1,465. The Bombay to Suez sections
had cost £1 million. In the next seven years there were
two interruptions to the line in the Red Sea and another
off Perim, whilst there were no interruptions to the
Aden to Bombay section.
In 1872 the British India Submarine Telegraph Company
was renamed the Eastern Telegraph Company (ETC). Four
years later the ETC duplicated both sections east of
Suez. Aden was the vital link as it was a repeating
station as all messages in both directions were read off
and then passed on. In 1872 a duplex system called ‘The
Recorder’, invented by Sir W Thomson, was introduced
which allowed messages to be passed in both directions
simultaneously on the same cable. In 1877 or 1878 the
ETC moved its offices to a new complex at Ras Boraldi
where quarters were also built for all the staff.
Bearing in mind that Aden was a repeater station the
staff consisted of a Superintendent and an electrician
and seldom less than 16 clerks and signallers.
Eastern Telegraph Company on Ras Boraldi
in Telegraph Bay
As one might have expected it was not cheap to send a
cable. In 1877 the charge per word from Aden to London
was three shillings and nine pence (and one penny more
to outside London). Cables to India were a little
cheaper but those to China were more than double the UK
rate. One can appreciate why there was almost a
dictionary of phrases abbreviated to four or five letter
‘words’.
The ETC also had an important hub on Perim (see
Perim Island – ETC).
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