By Dr.
Elizabeth Bruton
During
early 1900s, British long-distance
telecommunication relied on the “All-Red Line”, the network of
British-controlled and operated electric telegraph cables stretching around the
globe and so called due to the colour red (or sometimes pink) being used to
designate British territories and colonies in the atlases of the period.
Image Attribute: 1902 British All Red
Line map, from Johnson’s The All Red Line – The Annals and Aims of the Pacific
Cable Project (1903). / Source: Wikimedia Commons
The Origins and Early History of the “All-Red Line”:
The
“All-Red Line” was operated through a mixture of public and private enterprise
with the Eastern Telegraph Company (ETC) operating many of the telegraph cables
in Asia, Africa, and beyond. By the late
nineteenth century, telegraphy cables from Britain stretched to all corners of
the globe forming a massive international communications network of around
100,000 miles of undersea cables.
News which
had previously taken up to six months to reach distant parts of the world could
now be relayed in a matter of hours. In 1902 the “All Red Line” route was
completed with the final stages of construction of the trans-Pacific route and
connected all parts of the British empire.
This
telegraph network consisted of a series of cable links across the Pacific
Ocean, connecting New Zealand and Australia with Vancouver and through the
Trans-Canada and Atlantic lines to Europe. Submarine telegraph cables remained
the only fast means of international communication for 75 years until the
development of wireless telegraphy at the end of the nineteenth century.
Security
and Telegraph Cables:
Security
and reliability were an important part of this vast international
telecommunications network: there were multiple redundancies so that even if
one cable was cut, a message could be sent through many other routes, operating
a bit like the modern day Internet (which actually has far more redundancies
built in). Further security was added in the location of telegraph line
landfall: the “All-Red Line” was designed to only made landfall in British
colonies or British-controlled territories although this may have compromised
on occasionally.
In 1902
and around the time that the All-Red Line was completed, the Committee of
Imperial Defence was established by the then British Prime Minister Arthur
Balfour and was made responsible for research and some coordination of British
military strategy. In 1911 and with the
possibility of a war in Europe looming, the committee analyzed the All-Red Line
and concluded that it would be essentially impossible for Britain to be
isolated from her telegraph network due to the redundancy built into the
network: 49 cables would need to be cut for Britain to be cut off, 15 for
Canada, and 5 for South Africa. Further to this, Britain and British telegraph
companies owned and controlled most of the apparatus needed to cut or repair
telegraph cables and also had a superior navy to control the seas.
British Telegraph Cables at the Outbreak of War:
British
officials believed that depending on telegraph lines that passed through
non-British territory posed a security risk, as lines could be cut and messages
could be interrupted during wartime. They sought the creation of a worldwide
network within the empire, which became known as the All Red Line, and
conversely prepared strategies to quickly interrupt enemy communications. Britain's very first action after declaring war on Germany in World War I was
to have the cable ship Alert (not the CS Telconia as frequently reported) cut the five cables linking Germany with France, Spain and the Azores, and
through them, North America. Thereafter the only way Germany could communicate
was by wireless, and that meant that Room 40 could listen in.
As a result, when war broke out in August 1914 and some isolated telegraph stations such as the one at Cocos Islands asked for further security and military protection due to the risk of German attack, they got none and were left to their own devices in terms of protection. Some of the staff on the Cocos Island station constructed a fake telegraph cable and this was one that was cut by the Germans in their attack on the island in November 1914 and so telegraph communication via this telegraph station was able to continue.
A few facts
put this dominance of the industry in perspective. In 1896, there were thirty
cable laying ships in the world and twenty-four of them were owned by British
companies. In 1892, British companies owned and operated two-thirds of the
world's cables and by 1923, their share was still 42.7 per cent. During World
War I, Britain's telegraph communications were almost completely uninterrupted,
while it was able to quickly cut Germany's cables worldwide.
Indeed, as
a result of the redundancies built into the system and British naval
superiority, the “All-Red Line” – a network which was strategically important
to businesses, government, and military and a keystone in British imperial
activities – remained robust, secure, and essentially uninterrupted for the
duration of the war.
About the
Author:
Dr.Elizabeth Bruton is postdoctoral researcher for “Innovating in Combat”.
References:
1. A Short
History of Submarine Cables
2. History
of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications from the first submarine
cable of 1850 to the worldwide fiber optic network
3.
Johnson, George. The All Red Line; the annals and aims of the Pacific Cable
project. Ottowa: James Hope & Sons, 1903. Available via Internet Archive.
4. Kenndy,
P.M. Imperial Cable Communications and Strategy, 1870-1914, The English
Historical Review, Vol. 86, No. 341 (Oct, 1971), pp. 728-752. Available via JSTOR.