Telegrams

Every now and then I spend a little time digging around in the old Arab chest which contains all sorts of oddments from our past. Today, in one of the three drawers in the bottom of the chest, I found this bundle of papers. The bulk of them are my reports, from my first school in Dar-es-Salaam through to when I left Bradfield in 1962, but also in there is a reminder of a now ancient technology, the telegram or, as my father referred to it, the cable.

At first sight this may look irrelevant. It's an invoice from the Dunlop Rubber Company to a Dar-es-Salaam business for the sum of 2792 shillings and nine cents, my father's company, The African Mercantile, being agents for Dunlop in East Africa. However, on the back of it is....

....a copy of the cable my father sent to his mother Edith in Wanstead, Essex, announcing the arrival of Ernest. It was sent on 3rd January, the day after I was born, and the reply came....

....on the 5th January at 3.45pm. It may not have been at the speed of modern internet communication but it really wasn't bad.

For the ordinary person, telegrams were sent from post offices. The receiving office then filled out a pro forma - like the Cable and Wireless one above - which was delivered by hand. There was quite an art in writing cables because they were charged by the word, and they weren't cheap. My father always maintained he was very good at composing them, not least because, in his line of business, he probably sent plenty of them. So his mother's cable was nine words, his six.

I'm so pleased that my mother was a hoarder of things like this for they bring alive an event of some 77 years ago. I can, for example, imagine her sitting up in bed in the European Hospital on Dar-es-Salaam's beach seafront, with the windows open and the breeze blowing in off the Indian Ocean, reading this cable. I'm just not quite sure what she thought of my being called 'Ernest' - but she soon put a stop to that.