This week has seen the preparation of a set of biographical notes which are to be mounted on the web-site. These include
Henry Crocker, who was on duty the night the Great Eastern cut into the 1865 cable
Robert Halpin, First Officer and later Master of the Great Eastern
John Gott, Superintendent of the 1869 French cable station at St Pierre
George Oslin, Press Officer for Western Union
John Moores, one-time CCC telegraph operator, better known for Littlewoods Pools etc
J.V. Foll, the saviour of Muirheads
This Foll biography is from an anonymous document in my collection. Moore’s is particularly interesting because my late father-in-law, Arthur Hearnden remembers him peddling his luxury goods at the Valentia station
Am trying to track down biographical material for Jules Despecher, who was one of the prime movers in the French cable of 1869. It seems that he spent a lot of time promoting such enterprises. Another subject is Henry Labouchere, well known in British politics. The Labouchere Amendment led to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde. Anyway, he did play a part in trans-Atlantic telegraphy, largely attempts to destabilise the status of the Anglo American Telegraph Co and support for the Direct United States Telegraph Co. These contributions are virtually unknown to historians in UK, but figure quite large in histories of Newfoundland.
A further item concerned with Italian cable history has been mounted. This addition looks in details at the various messages that were in transit at the exact moment when the Italian cable was cut.. Background researches show that Gino Bandini (b. 1881) was appointed Director General of Italcable in 1936. Was he the 'Professor Bandini' cited in the message from Italy to the US or was it a relative? Does anyone know?
Am planning a Bits and Pieces section for the web-site. There are snippets of information like the succession of Superintendents at Valentia and Heart's Content. There is also a record of the succession of Medical Officers that were appointed for these stations, although here the precise dates are less clear. There is a series of photographs of staff at Valentia in the period 1914? - 1916 and my late father-in-law was able to identify many of the people there. Another item is the record of wages/salaries paid to different staff at these stations. Just bits and pieces that might be of relevance to other researchers.
And now to some musings. Obituaries are always a good place to start and the 'engineer' noted the Times entry on 18 October 2008 (p.75) for Thomas Coughtrie, who invented the Mole, self-gripping wrench. The 'curious conspiracist' saw that the Times for 9 January 2009 (p.70) described the contribution of Vladimir Rubinstein to the BBC Monitoring Service, first at Evesham and later at Caversham
The death of the Conor Cruise-O'Brien (Times 20 December 2008, P. 68) had the 'Irish man' thinking. Here was someone who was for so many years was at the centre of Irish politics, but always seemed to be in opposition to the status-quo. He had a major role in the aftermath of the withdrawal of colonial Belgium from the Congo (there is a major topic there, the role of the Irish military in the Congo - another time). Anyway, Cruise-O'Brien was clearly a genius, but one suspects, a flawed genius. Perhaps there was much about his background that might have contributed to this. At the age of ten, following the death of his father he came under the conflicting influence of his two aunts. Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington was an agnostic radical, whose pacifist husband had been murdered by an insane British officer during the Easter 1916 Uprising (perhaps more of that again another time). Hanna's sister was a pious Roman Catholic whose husband, the poet and former MP, Tom Kettle had been killed on the Somme. Now if we add to this mix the distillation from a fascinating biography of John Charles McQuaid by John Cooney, maybe we have a new perspective. McQuaid was the despotic archbishop of Dublin from 1940 - 1972. Many felt that he was the real ruler of Ireland during that period and perhaps even before when he had been president of Blackrock College. Eamonn de Valera had been a mathematics teacher at the same school before entering politics and it is rumoured that McQuaid had a very strong influence on deValera's drafting of the 1937 Constitution of Ireland. Cooney's book has helped to clarify some early confusions. When I was young I was aware of the 'rantings' of W.B Stanford and Owen Sheehy-Skeffington who represented Trinity College Dublin in the Senate (the upper house of the Irish Parliament). These seemed to mirror Cruise-O'Brien's opposition to the status-quo, whatever that was. Hindsight permits us to see the extent to which life in Ireland was dominated by the views of McQuaid. We can now understand that these were amongst the few people who were brave enough to stand up to the public opinion of the time and act as a bulwark against the monopolistic Catholicism which McQuaid epitomised.
