The Telegraph at 170: How war first pushed us to put innovation at the service of information

Telegraph

a day ago

It was in the middle of a war with Russia, which was not going well, that The Daily Telegraph was launched in 1855. The title of the new paper came from the world-changing technology of the electric telegraph. (The additional words on the masthead '& Courier' were soon dropped.)
In May 1855, a month before The Telegraph came out, a telegraph cable had been laid between the Crimea and Varna in Turkey. It meant that the war was covered live instead of after a lapse of days and weeks. News from the battlefield reached London before it reached St Petersburg.
Electric telegraph cables became possible only because of the Victorian equivalent of plastic – gutta-percha, made from the sap of a Malayan tree. Undersea cable had to be laid from a ship in a continuous length. In 1855, The Telegraph reported on the laying of a cable from Sardinia to Africa. The 150 miles of cable, weighing 1,200 tons, was stowed in a single coil in the hold of the ship Result.
Criticism of the conduct of the war, a fixed idea of its first proprietor Col Arthur B Sleigh, was the very motive for starting the new paper. The moment was commercially auspicious because the government was removing the last penny tax from newspapers. The Times and The Morning Post still cost 5d; the new Telegraph sold its four broadsheet pages, packed with up to 12,000 words per page, for 2d.
Thanks to the electric telegraph, a day after its first issue The Telegraph was able to report the death of the commander-in-chief of British forces in the Crimea, Lord Raglan. A special edition was rushed out that Saturday afternoon.
Lord Raglan, who absent-mindedly referred to the Russian enemy as 'the French' (then our allies), was, in the infant Telegraph 's opinion, a man 'whose deeds more properly belonged to a past generation, and who ought to have been left to pass the winter of his life in comparative tranquillity and comfort at home'.
Raglan's death scarcely raised morale. 'Public sympathy and indignation,' said an article at the time, 'were aroused to the utmost by the conviction that the soldiers of the finest army Great Britain had ever sent forth were ingloriously perishing of disease, overtasked and underfed.' In freezing weather the winter before, lightly clothed men lacked tents and even firewood and had nowhere to lie but the mud. They ate raw meat for want of a fire and coffee beans were issued without the means to roast them.
The front page of the very first issue was one-third filled with the names of officers and men killed or wounded ('lightly' or 'dangerously') in the Crimea. The other two thirds of the page was full of small advertisements.
Nothing brings home so vividly the strangeness – to us – of life in Victorian London as those small ads. 'Colt's Holster or Cavalry Revolver,' announced one ad in the first issue. 'Great length of range, force and penetration.' The price was £7, and the firearms were available at Samuel Colt's premises at 114 Pall Mall. Anyone could buy one.
The small ads shouted for attention like the street cries of London: railway accident insurance; superior hats; money lent; 'Scotticisms corrected'; 'Chronic rheumatism completely cured'. And why, asked an advertisement temptingly, 'give such a high price for your Paris and other wove stays, when you can get any size you require for 3s 11d?'
An alarming invitation was to sell your 'old artificial teeth' to a shop in Oxford Street. Just send them by post and their value would be dispatched by return. At a time when trains had no corridors let alone lavatories, Walter's Railway Convenience could be bought at the private entrance of 16 Moorgate Street, where a female attendant would be on duty. 'No lady should travel without one.'
The rough sharpness, energetic enterprise, reforming zeal and daily jollity of the Victorians burst from the pages of early issues of The Daily Telegraph. That year saw riots in Hyde Park against new laws limiting pub opening hours on Sundays. Above the leading articles were notices for plays at Drury Lane, the Theatre Royal, the Lyceum and Astley's Royal Amphitheatre, which staged dramas performed entirely on horseback.
Modernity in 1855 meant the electric telegraph and proper sewers. 'In contempt of past experience,' declared The Telegraph in a leading article, 'we still continue to inhale a poison-laden atmosphere and to drink water the multitudinous organic and inorganic impurities of which almost defy the combined labours of chemist and microscopist to describe.' That was three years before the Great Stink overwhelmed Parliament with the effluvium of the Thames.
A grand modernising proposal in June 1855 was the Great Victorian Way, an astonishing arcade following a 10-mile oval, looping round St Paul's in the east and cutting through Hyde Park in the west. It was the brainchild of Joseph Paxton, triumphant from the success of the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace in 1851. A covered road and shops in the middle would be flanked by a railway on the second floor with flats above. The Telegraph was not convinced and advocated instead a network of underground railways.
Modernity also meant the 36-year-old Queen Victoria, with her consort, Albert. Windsor Castle in Modern Times was the title of a painting by Edwin Landseer of the royal couple at home, the Prince dressed in tights and Puss-in-Boots boots, the carpet strewn with dogs and game. Princess Vicky plays with a dead kingfisher.
At 1.40pm on a hot August day that year, Victoria and Albert landed in the steam yacht Victoria and Albert in Boulogne, and the Queen became the first English monarch to visit Paris since Henry VI in 1431. Triumphal arches were woven with 'the colours of England and France'. (Britain was seldom mentioned in those days.) The Parisians were struck by Victoria's huge handbag embroidered with a poodle.
The Telegraph was at first wary of any popular frenzy for royalty. But as its circulation rose, a high point was reached at the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Princess Alexandra in 1863, with sales of 205,884. By the 1870s, the paper was confidently promoted as having the 'LARGEST CIRCULATION IN THE WORLD'.