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THE MAN HISTORY FORGOT (PART 4) BY STEWART ASH AND BILL BURNS

As we described in November’s issue, James Stuart-Wortley and George Saward returned from France in July 1862 with high expectations of attaining French Government support, and there is then a five-month gap in the correspondence collection.

On 2 December 1862, Stuart-Wortley wrote to Josiah Latimer Clark (1822-98), who was the partner of Sir Charles Tilston Bright (1832-88). This letter was written on the same day as an Extraordinary Meeting of the Atlantic Telegraph Co. Clark had been in the Middle East, presumably on consultancy work, and Stuart-Wortley, having met with him on his return, wanted a written record of their conversation. On the recommendation of the late Robert Stephenson (1803-59) and with the approval of the Directors, Stuart-Wortley had offered Clark the position of titular Engineer of the company (possibly as a replacement for Bright). This was to be for the purposes of recovering and reconstituting the existing 1858 cable, and only if they were successful in raising sufficient capital for that purpose would they need the services of an experienced engineer. Until such time, the position was to be ‘merely honorary’. He then explained to Clark that the offering in the company’s latest prospectus had raised only £60,000 to £70,000 of the required £600,000 and that unless at least £300,000 could be promised, the

Josiah Latimer Clark

project would fall stillborn.

Stuart-Wortley’s next comments were telling:

‘Since then we have had some difficulty in keeping our Company alive, and it has only been the steadiness of the Directors in standing by an undertaking which they believe to be sound, and by personal contributions of individual Directors that we have been able to keep the office open and the rights & privileges of the Company intact during the constant exertions of other parties, by open as well as invidious means to thwart and deprecate our project. I will not refer particularly to the quarter from which I believe this active hostility to have principally come, except to say that it is the last from which in honour it ought to have come considering the profit and honours which its authors had derived from the early operations of our Company.’

There is little doubt that Stuart-Wortley is alluding to Latimer Clark’s partner, Charles Tilston Bright. He went on to explain that the existing company would be restructured with a new Board of Directors, and that if he were still Chairman, he would recommend that the company should not employ a salaried engineer, but instead rely on the system Contractor for those services. Finally, he thanked Latimer Clark for his services to the Company and Government Commission, ‘notwithstanding your recent commercial & professional connection’ but advised him to apply to Captain Galton for remuneration for his services to the Commission, as he had made it perfectly clear to the Government that the Atlantic Telegraph Co had no funds to defray the cost of the Commission and in any event the use of Clark’s services had been suggested by the late Robert Stephenson (180359). Stephenson had been the preferred Chairman of the Commission, but he died on 12 October 1859 and had to be replaced by Galton.

Now in a somewhat precarious financial position, with no income and having difficulty raising sufficient funds through stock offerings, the Atlantic Telegraph Co set up a Consulting Committee to ‘investigate and advise upon the electrical and mechanical questions involved in the work’. The

Committee’s main task was to take the conclusions of the Board of Trade’s Inquiry on the shortcomings of the 1858 cable and design an improved cable for the next attempt at the Atlantic. Three former members of the Board of Trade committee, Captain Douglas Galton, Sir William Fairbairn (17981871), and Sir Charles Wheatstone, were joined by Sir Joseph Whitworth (1803-87), the Manchester industrialist, and Professor William Thomson (1824-1907) of Glasgow, all of whom ‘gave zealous and gratuitous assistance’ to the Board.

At the same time, a number of influential men were invited to join the Board, perhaps in the hope of also persuading them to invest in the company, but mainly to be able to demonstrate to potential investors that the company had confidence in the project.

On 4 December 1862, Stuart-Wortley received a letter from William Henry Stephenson (1812-98) Chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue at the Treasury, accepting the offer of an Honorary Directorship of the Atlantic Telegraph Co. The next letter, dated 12 December, is from the previously mentioned Sir William Fairbairn, 1st Baronet Ardwick. Based in Manchester, he was a Scottish civil and structural engineer, who from 1854 became president of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers. He also accepted a position on the committee of Honorary Directors. The company was less fortunate with an offer made to the Honourable Robert Grimston (1816-84), younger brother of James Walter Grimston (1809-95), 2nd Earl of Verulam. Robert was a barrister and already a board member of the Electric Telegraph Co. In his letter of 13 December, he politely declined the offer to join the full board of directors.

John Pender MP Illustrated London News January 1863

James Young Simpson (1811-70)

Towards the end of 1862, the Atlantic Telegraph Company had issued a prospectus for an additional capital of £600,000 in 120,000 shares of £5 each. The directors were now listed as James Stuart-Wortley, Curtis M. Lampson, George Peabody, Francis le Breton, John Pender, John W. Brett, Edward Moon, Samuel Gurney, William Brown, Edward Cropper, Captain A.T. Hamilton, and G.P. Bidder. W.H. Stephenson was now an Honorary Director with Cromwell F. Varley as Electrician Engineer, George Saward as Secretary, and the Consulting Committee as listed above. It is interesting that John Pender is named among the directors. This is not consistent with family correspondence of the period. In a by-election on 12 December 1862, Pender had been elected as Liberal MP for Totnes.

Pender had agreed to stand, in order to have a voice in the House of Commons to lobby the Government on behalf of the Manchester merchants for the increase of cotton production in India to compensate for the loss of cotton from the Confederate states due to the Unionist blockade of their ports. The cotton industry in the North of England was in dire straits, and at this stage in Pender’s life, textiles was his primary business concern. However, once elected, he took a twenty-one year lease on a London residence, 18 Arlington Street. He was still the Chairman of the British & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Co and remained greatly interested in the Atlantic Telegraph. Every time Cyrus Field came to England they would meet and discuss the subject. An additional concern for John Pender at that time was that his wife Emma (1816-80) was still convalescing from two serious operations that had been carried out in the summer of 1861 by

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the Scottish pioneering doctor James Young Simpson (1811-70).

The most likely explanation for Pender’s name being included in the prospectus is that he had agreed to lend his name to the proposal on the basis that if the capital were raised, he would re-join the Board.

The initial uptake on commitments to buy shares was not encouraging, so Stuart-Wortley set out on a roadshow tour in the hope of attracting investors from some of the great industrial cities of the North of England. On 10 February 1863, he met with merchants and manufacturers in Sheffield, not far from the ancestral home of the Wortleys, and this was repeated in Liverpool and Manchester.

A letter from George Saward to Stuart-Wortley, dated 8 May 1863, advised him that ‘all matters are now settled with Glass & Co – They have signed the Contract and subscribed our book for £40,000’. This was only a preliminary contract for the cable, as we will see later, but the Atlantic Telegraph Co was now in a position to continue planning the great project, and at the same time, despite the Civil War, Cyrus Field was doing the same work in America. As a result of these combined efforts, a subscription list for a total of £300,535 was in place by the end of May 1863.

Meanwhile, in France, perhaps concerned by the progress being made by the Atlantic Telegraph Co, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs convened an international conference to examine a project for a telegraph line to connect Europe to the American continent. The proposed route would run from the Cape de Verde islands to the Brazils, and from there to North America via the Antilles. Unsurprisingly, the Viscount de Vougy was involved in this. Again, nothing came of this proposal, and France’s first transatlantic cable was not laid until 1869, made and laid by the Telegraph Construction & Maintenance Co, and largely supported by British finance. It used a conventional route from Brest in France to Saint-Pierre et Miquelon (off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada), with an extension to Duxbury, Massachusetts. This cable would be

Portrait of John Pender. Attributed to George Frederic Watts 1864 acquired by Pender through the Anglo-American Telegraph Co in 1873 and diverted to the UK.

As 1863 advanced, further progress was made, but there was still a large gap between the subscribed capital and the required £600,000, a gap that neither Glass, Elliot & Co nor the Gutta Percha Co felt able to bridge. This was the situation that existed when Cyrus Field returned to England. It was then that Richard Atwood Glass (1820-73), the Managing Director of Glass, Elliot, made the suggestion to him that the only way this gap could be bridged would be for a single company to be responsible for the supply of entire project. Cyrus Field put this concept to John Pender during a one-mile stroll from Pender’s Arlington Street residence to the Houses of Parliament and, as we know, Pender thought this eminently possible and took on the challenge of making it happen. Stuart-Wortley’s role in what happened next is unrecorded, but it was probably significant.

On 16 March 1864, the Ordinary Annual Meeting of the Atlantic Telegraph Company took place, and Stuart-Wortley lavished praise on Cyrus Field, noting that:

‘I cannot help especially alluding to Mr. Cyrus Field, who is present today, and who has crossed the Atlantic thirty-one times in the service of this Company, having celebrated at his table yesterday the anniversary of the tenth year of the day when he first left Boston in the service of the Company.’

Stuart-Wortley must also have been party to the planning and directly involved in the re-appointment of John Pender to the Board of the Atlantic Telegraph Co, which occurred the day after the meeting. It is probably fair to say that due in large part to the groundwork already done by James Stuart-Wortley, the re-engagement of John Pender in the project was to become the catalyst for progress to finally gather pace.

At first, the Directors of the Gutta Percha Co and Glass, Elliot & Co were difficult to convince about the

benefits of a merger, but Pender was able to obtain their support by putting up a personal guarantee of a quarter of a million pounds (today around £14 million). This was an incredible show of confidence in the business opportunity and because of it, on 7 April 1864 the Telegraph Construction & Maintenance Company (generally known as Telcon) was formed, with Pender as its first Chairman, and the directors commissioned a portrait to be painted of John Pender, to hang in Telcon’s Board Room in Old Broad Street in London. This is the first known portrait of Pender and it hung there until Telcon merged with BICC on 9 February 1959. As part of the reorganisation of the merged companies the Telcon headquarters, and with it the Board Room, were no longer required.

On 20 March 1961, Sir John Dean, the Chairman of Telcon, wrote to John Jocelyn Denison-Pender (1907-65), the great grandson of John Pender and the 2nd Baron Porthcurnow, who was at that time the effective head of Cable & Wireless (C&W), offering the portrait to the company. John Jocelyn would become the Chairman of C&W, replacing 85-year-old Sir Edward Wilshaw (1879-1968) when he retired in 1964. John Jocelyn wrote back to Dean the following day and accepted his offer. The portrait was transferred to C&W in June that year, at which time John Jocelyn had it cleaned, and assessed by experts, who attributed it to George Frederic Watts (1817-1904). When John Jocelyn died on 21 March 1965, the portrait was given to John Willoughby Denison-Pender (1933-2016), 3rd Baron Porthcurnow, and it remains part of the Denison-Pender family archive. On Friday 15 April 1864, Cyrus Field held an Inauguration Banquet for the ‘Renewal of the Atlantic Telegraph Company (After a lapse of Six

Charles Francis Adams & John Bright

Years)’ at the Palace Hotel in London. As was common with many cable banquets and celebrations in this period, the main purpose of the event was almost certainly fundraising and policy making, with all the key figures in the cable industry on the guest list, as well as a number of politicians. Cyrus Field introduced two special guests: ‘His Excellency Charles Francis Adams, the American Minister’, and ‘a distinguished member of the British House of Commons, John Bright.’. Adams (1807-86) was the US Envoy to the UK at the time, and Bright (1811-89) was a Manchester businessman who had invested in the Atlantic Telegraph Company in 1856. Bright was a Liberal MP from 1843 until his death and a renowned orator, probably best known for his role in the repeal of the corn laws. Like John Pender, he was an opponent of Gladstone’s plans for Home Rule for Ireland.

On 4 May 1864, Telcon was awarded a contract for a new cable by the Atlantic Telegraph Co, replacing the contract with Glass Elliot, something that Stuart-Wortley must have approved. Now what was needed was a single ship that could carry the load of 2,000 miles of cable. Earlier that same year, on 14 January, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s great iron ship, originally named Leviathan and now the failed passenger liner SS Great Eastern, had been put up for auction in the Cotton Room of the Liverpool Exchange. A reserve of £50,000 had been placed on her, but no offers that met this reserve were received. It was then announced that a second auction would take place in three weeks, with no reserve. This gave the oppor-

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tunity for a consortium led by Daniel Gooch (1816-89) and Thomas Brassey (1805-70), supported by John Pender, to purchase the Great Eastern for £25,000, despite the ship having an estimated value of upwards of £100,000.

The Great Eastern Steamship Co was formed with Daniel Gooch as its Chairman and Pender as one of its Directors. The vessel was chartered to Telcon for £50,000 worth of their James Anderson & Robert Halpin shares and converted for cable work. As part of this refit, one of her five funnels, the second from the stern, had to be removed to make room for one of the three massive cable tanks. Telcon needed an experienced Captain and crew to undertake this unique operation and, once again, John Pender took it upon himself to solve this problem. Pender approached Charles MacIver (1812-85), Managing Director of the Cunard Shipping Line for over thirty years, and negotiated the secondment of Captain James Anderson (1824-90). The SS Great Eastern was placed under his command, with Robert Halpin (1836-94) as First Mate.

The Great Eastern was too large to sail up the Thames to Greenwich for the cable to be loaded, so she was anchored at Sheerness and the cable was moved to the ship section by section,

using hulks each carrying 150 nautical miles of cable. They were loaded at Telcon’s Enderby and Morden Wharf factories then towed downriver to Sheerness. Over a period of several months in early 1865 the entire cable was transferred to Great Eastern by the hulks and distributed among the three large tanks onboard the vessel. The Great Eastern sailed from Sheerness on 15 July 1865 and, as is well documented, the laying operation from Valentia towards Newfoundland went well until 2 August, when, with only 600nm left to deploy, the cable parted and was lost in deep water. Several unsuccessful attempts were made to recover it, until on 11 August they ran out of lifting tackle and the struggle was abandoned.

In the document collection there are two charts; the first one, signed by James Anderson, plots the progress of the lay, and at the point where the cable was lost it is annotated with the following note:

‘Aug 2 Cable parted. 3 times hooked again Wit grapnel. Each time The grapnel gear breaking

The second is a chartlet covering the initial attempts to recover the cable between 2 & 9 of August, overlaid with a small drawing depicting the attempts made on 10 & 11 August. This chartlet is signed by Henry Augustus Moriarty (1815-1906), a Royal Navy Staff Commander who sailed with the expedition, and we know that he was instrumental in carrying out revised calculations to establish the cable’s position for the latter two attempts.

A buoy was deployed to mark the position and the Great Eastern returned to England, arriving at Sheerness on 20 August. During the return passage, Daniel Gooch, who was also on board, wrote a letter to a friend in which he expressed confidence that they could return the following year and complete the project. However, it was not that easy, as the Atlantic Cable Co had again run out of money, and for legal reasons was unable to

raise new capital. There is no mention in the document collection as to how Stuart-Wortley took this major disappointment. He was still struggling with back pain and associated bouts of depression, so we can only imagine the impact on his already fragile health.

The collection contains four letters from the end of 1865, after the Great Eastern had returned to England. The first is from Stuart-Wortley to James Anderson, dated 14 November and written on the headed notepaper of Credit Foncier and Mobilier of England Ltd, a company of which Stuart-Wortley was also the Chairman. It appears that there had been speculation in the press that the cable was irrevocably lost, as it was believed that the marker buoy would sink over the winter months. Stuart-Wortley had received confirmation from Sir

Captain James Anderson’s 1865 Lay Chart

Edward Cunard (1816-69), owner of the shipping line and then resident in America, that the same stories were circulating on that side of the Atlantic. It should be remembered that Anderson was an employee of Cunard and Stuart-Wortley was asking him for an opinion that he could place before the Board and shareholders to scotch these rumours. Anderson replied two days later, and the opening sentence of the letter, written in his cabin on the Great Eastern, is as follows:

‘In reply to yours of the 14th inst I can again assure you that the Buoys placed near the end of the Atlantic Cable were never expected to remain there longer than a few days are not of any consequence whatever.’

He then went on to describe in some detail why this

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was so, how they had set about fixing the cable position, and the sequence of grappling attempts, concluding as follows:

‘I really feel that I am not unreasonable nor yet too sanguine in believing that with one more chance we must succeed in both our Objects’

This letter appeared to be just what Stuart-Wortley was looking for, and he intended to use it in some way to rebuild public confidence in the project. We can only speculate what happened next, but Anderson appears to have become concerned, because he wrote again to Stuart-Wortley on 20 November indicating that Samuel Canning at Telcon had some concerns with what Stuart-Wortley planned to do and asked him to send his previous letter to Canning. It appears Stuart-Wortley acceded to this request, because on 22 November Samuel Canning wrote a terse, indignant letter to Stuart-Wortley:

‘I avail myself of this opportunity to remind you, that all matters relating to the laying of the cable and raising the cable are entirely within the province of the Engineer, and to the Captain belong all questions as to the navigation of the ship.

I feel compelled to write thus because I am advised that the public are led to believe by such published correspondence that the whole responsibility and direction of this important work is and has been vested in Captain Anderson which in justice to myself and those employed with me I cannot allow to proceed further without giving it a contradiction.’

Clearly, Stuart-Wortley’s intent to counter public scepticism by using the opinion of a well-known and respected Captain had crossed boundaries and upset Telcon’s management.

As is well known, the two Atlantic cables were successful completed the following year, but there would be more battles for James Stuart-Wortley to fight, and we will relate these in our final article in the March issue. STF

BILL BURNS is an English electronics engineer who worked for the BBC in London after graduation before moving to New York in 1971. There he spent a number of years in the high-end audio industry, during which time he wrote many audio, video, and computer equipment reviews, along with magazine articles on subjects as diverse as electronic music instruments and the history of computing. His research for these articles led to a general interest in early technology, and in the 1980s he began collecting instruments and artifacts from the fields of electricity and communications.

In 1994 a chance find of a section of the 1857 Atlantic cable inspired a special interest in undersea cable history, and soon after he set up the first version of the Atlantic Cable website <https://atlantic-cable. com>, which now has over a thousand pages on all aspect of undersea communications from 1850 until the present.

Bill’s interest in cable history has taken him to all of the surviving telegraph cable stations around the world, and to archives and museums in North America and Europe. He has presented papers on subsea cable history at a number of conferences, and in 2008 he instigated and helped organize the 150th Anniversary Celebration for the 1858 Atlantic cable at the New-York Historical Society. Most recently, in 2016 he was involved with the celebrations in London, Ireland and Newfoundland to mark the 150th anniversary of the 1866 Atlantic cable.

Since graduating in 1970, STEWART ASH has spent his entire career in the submarine cable industry. He joined STC Submarine Systems as a development engineer, working on coaxial transmission equipment and submarine repeater design. He then transferred onto field engineering, installing coaxial submarine cable systems around the world, attaining the role of Shipboard Installation Manager. In 1986, he set up a new installation division to install fibre optic submarine systems. In 1993, he joined Cable & Wireless Marine, as a business development manager and then move to an account director role responsible for, among others the parent company, C&W. When Cable & Wireless Marine became Global Marine Systems Ltd in 1999, he became General Manager of the engineering division, responsible for system testing, jointing technology and ROV operation. As part of this role he was chairman of the UJ Consortium. He left Global Marine in 2005 to become an independent consultant, assisting system purchasers and owners in all aspects of system procurement, operations, maintenance and repair. Stewart’s interest in the history of submarine cables began in 2000, when he project managed a celebration of the 150th anniversary of the submarine cable industry. As part of this project he co-authored and edited From Elektron to ‘e’ Commerce. Since then he has written and lectured extensively on the history of the submarine cable industry. From March 2009 to November 2015 he wrote Back Reflection articles for SubTel Forum. In 2013 he was invited to contribute the opening chapter to Submarine Cables: The Handbook of Law and Policy, which covered the early development of the submarine cable industry. To support the campaign to save Enderby House—a Grade II listed building— from demolition, in 2015 he wrote two books about the history of the Telcon site at Enderby Wharf on the Greenwich Peninsula in London. The first was The Story of Subsea Telecommunications and its Association with Enderby House, and the second was The Eponymous Enderby’s of Greenwich. His biography of Sir John Pender GCMG The Cable King was published by Amazon in April 2018.