Agent #1015* spent his entire working life building his company providing bitumen surfacing solutions for vehicle storage yards. But when Aaron Aardvark’s Tarmac Carparks closed in June last year Aaron took to telegraph pole spotting to fill the massive void in his life.
Here is his latest submission. This busy half pole with footpath sign and dual wide angle mirrors and obligatory missing cat poster is somewhere in Gwynedd, Plaid Cymru. Aaron tells us he aims to progress to whole poles very soon and hopes to find one with cross arms too. Good luck with that.
A close up of the aforementioned convex mirror reveals Aaron replete with camera and sidekick Shaaron and Terry Tesco driving a van at breakneck speed behind them.
*I’ve got your tystysgrif Cymraeg here Aaron. I haven’t forgotten.
Low productivity levels among telegraph pole linesmen was causing serious concern among New Zealand P.O. bosses as the 1960s came to a close. Research led them to believe this was because of unhappy home lives and if they could somehow spice up marital harmony then this trend could be reversed.
A short-lived experiment ensued in which 120 pairs of No. 1 S&M kits were handed to linesmen across three districts: Rotorua, Auckland and Christchurch. They failed however to provide explicit instructions as to their intended use and the baffled pole engineers took them home to humour their bosses.
However by the end of the six month trial period productivity had actually increased in these key areas. Dramatically so in the case of Rotorua. It turns out that the enterprising linesmen had discovered that these fierce looking devices could be attached to their legs and thus enabled them to climb poles way quicker than they ever could using a ladder. Whilst the love lives of the workers hadn’t changed, their speed up a telegraph pole had accelerated four-fold.
Embarrassed bosses back-tracked and reported that this had been their intention all along and that “leg irons” should thenceforth be issued as standard to the workforce.
The set you see below was bought by Judy Pittman at a car-swap meet in Nelson, S. Island. She was delighted to learn the history of them from me but intimated she would be keen to sell them to any of our readers were interested in adding these fascinating love-aids to their paraphernalia collections. She would be happy to post to the UK but reports that postage would cost £36. If anybody is interested, do drop me a line to martin@telegraphpoleappreciationsociety.org and I will pass on your details.
Welcome to the TPAS virtual gallery. Wayne Firth is an honorary member of this society. He didn’t become such via the usual vulgarity of a cash donation delivered personally to my doorstep. Nor did he offer me a non-executive seat at some dubious investment company. And he didn’t marry my sister either.*1 Whilst these are all perfectly valid means of suffixing your membership with the esteemed “H”, Wayne went one better and used his position within the echelons of Openreach to access photos of poles of great interest. These he then sent to us under plain cover.
I’ve been hanging on to these for a while with the intention of spreading them out over a year. Truth is, my email inbox stretches off for over a mile now and so if I left it any longer then they may be lost to the silt at the bottom. (Apologies to those still waiting a reply from me for anything at all – don’t lose hope).
Anyway, thanks to Wayne #0985H for all these fabulous pole pics. Click a pic for full sized gallery.
*1 All are also valid, and oft used, means of acquiring peerage and/or PPE contracts.
PS the descriptive captions whilst seemingly blooming obvious… to the sighted, are from the alt text which we include with each image so as not to exclude so to speak…
For sure I have to earn my six figure salary* here at Telegraph Pole Towers. I put in a full shift every day sifting through endless internet cat videos and films about Class 37 locos. That is until Mrs TPAS reminds me that I’m meant to be looking at telegraph pole stuff. Then there’s the correspondence. Often involving extended exchanges such as that which followed recently with Mazzy from S. Gloucestershire.
Being one of those people who notice things, Mazzy was thrilled to find her streets at Winterbourne Down had a run of metal poles adorned with finials – these, to the uninitiated are the pickelhaube ornamental spikes at the topmost pointy end. Encouraged by our polite request not to send in such crap photos she came back with those you see below which are more befitting our reader’s discerning eyes. It turns out that Mazzy keeps an unhealthy number of photos of telegraph and other poles.
The latter pole – the one that looks like a hollow flag – is my favourite. This is a particularly rare find which I believe are used to carry wires past and over obstacles. They may also help in taking out a degree or two of bend in the wires. Bent electric has lower retail value than that which arrives in a straight line apparently. I didn’t know that until recently.
Anyway, I got to thinking what an exotic name is Mazzy. Two Z’s indeed. Subtract one of those and you have Mazy – which is how, in days of yore, my football skills were described. Not that I was dribbling around defenders to slam in the winner from 25 yards – more like mazy runs by way of avoiding a stinging slap on the thigh from a cold and muddy ball. Scoring winners was what other players did.
Back to Mazzy. She’s a bit shy about her own writing prowess. She suggests that the intersection between telegraph pole enthusiasts and short fiction fans is fairly modest. I disagree. She’s won awards and things. The most I ever won was a British Sausage Time watch in a raffle in the Evening Leader 30 years ago. She can be found at unfurling.net. And if that doesn’t encourage her to update it more often I don’t know what will ;-
*In the interest of transparency, the 6 figure salary to which I refer is £000,000. After deductions.
Normally this award would be given to the Openreach employee who most recently fixed my phone line or got my internet going again. But for August 2019 a TPAS Order of Merit (see right) has been specially minted for us to give to Wayne Firth. Wayne used to be a ringer-of-wood and laddersman trapeze artist in the alfresco world of telegraph pole inspecting. Now, though, his hands are clean and splinter-free, his collar only slightly grubby and his life a whirl of acetate overheads and powerpoint system crashes in the murky world of the office interior as he trains up tomorrow's pole rattlers.
Wayne kindly sent us the collection of photos of poles, various, that you see below. 3 pics of extremely hirsute poles, 4 photos of pole stacks - where all the different types of pole are laid out in their categories before being selected for installation and finally a pole/tree hybrid that he found out on his rounds. This is a tree that is growing completely around the pole itself.
One final thing. Wayne didn't say where he was from, but judging by the fact that every one of these photos it seems to be soaking wet from recent rain I would say he must be from Blaenau Ffestiniog.
Always a delight to hear from our East Dorset Branch chair, Willie Montgomery Stack:
Sir,
I came across this unusual telegraph pole recently while walking near Richmond in the Yorkshire Dales (and definitely NOT loitering, despite the words on the charge sheet; I intend to plead not guilty).
I am assured it is the sole remaining pole from the ill-fated Swaledale trunk route, a 40-mile line across the Pennines which locals say was doomed from the start. They warned the GPO that the terrain was highly unsuitable but their advice was seemingly ignored. Within weeks of the line's completion in 1953, half the poles had sunk into the disused lead mines which honeycomb the dale. One actually disappeared into the ground while an engineer was up it. They're still looking for him. Another, as it plunged into the earth in the village of Muker, dragged to destruction six bikes belonging to members of the Swaledale Cycling Club and a border terrier called Arthur, all of which had been left chained to the pole while their owners were in the Farmers Arms, Arthur's owner being the notorious drinker, womaniser and pugilist Algernon Swinson, then suffragan Bishop of Ripon.
Remarkably, this pole has taken a full 66 years to lose some 24 feet in height. But these could be the last photos taken of it. Its descent is finally accelerating, according to villagers. They mutter that it may vanish altogether by "Reeth fair twemmunth", whatever that means.
What’s this – Pole of the month two months in succession? We are grateful, not to mention gladdened, always, to receive missives from the East Dorset Branch of T.P.A.S. and this time even more so as they have provided us with this splendiferous p.o.t.m. I shall leave you in the delightful company of East Dorset Chair, Willie Montgomery Stack for the rest of this post to describe this serendipitous chance-upon.
“Esteemed Sir,
Can a post be a pole? And might this one be the last surviving example of its type?
During the Spring half term outing of the TPAS East Dorset branch last week, our members stumbled across a truly remarkable edifice which we would like to bring to your attention. Approaching a road junction a stone’s throw from Coverham Abbey in North Yorkshire, our members glimpsed with delight a proud array of cross arms and insulators. Naturally we all leapt from the tour bus to take a closer look but it was several seconds before we realised that, while it meets the TPAS’s strict criteria of being wooden and sticky-uppy, the thing is distinctly unpole-like in one respect. Rather than being rounded (part of the Oxford English Dictionary definition of a pole), it is SQUARE in section, resembling a railway signal post rather than a telegraph pole. It is a distribution pole (DP 2) for the tiny Coverdale telephone exchange and was clearly stuck there by the GPO, although no further identifying marks can be seen upon it.
Our excitement knew no bounds at its discovery. Mrs Pringle was heard to remark that she’d never been so grateful for Tena Lady. And we are all agreed we haven’t seen anything like it anywhere else.
Have any other members ever chanced upon such a thing, and might you be willing to consider it as a candidate for Pole of the Month, if not the decade?
July, as is usual for the time year, and The Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society closes its extensive office complex and our entire HQ staff buggers off on holiday. For this trip we chose Ireland again and whilst there took the opportunity to visit the famous Leaning Poles of Gleneely. That Ireland has had a troubled political history is a well established fact. That the Irish choose their political leaders according to which way a run of telegraph poles leans is less well known.
These simple telephone poles first started their movements some time around the proclamation of Irish independence in 1916 but their association with political bias remained largely unnoticed until around the time of the first constitution in 1937. Their movement back and forth was assumed to be due to prevailing winds and the weak structure of the soil locally.
The poles forecasting the rise of Bertie Ahern in 1992
The poles can be found on the R238 between Gleneely and Culdaff in Co. Donegal. They were planted perfectly perpendicular but by the mid 1930s they were most definitely leaning in a westerly direction – coinciding with the election of Éamon de Valera of the Fianna Fáil party to the position of Taoiseach*1. The poles leaned this way until over the course of five nights in 1948 they changed direction and swung over to lean eastwards once more. This was just prior to the election of John Costello of FIne Gael where both he and the poles remained for the next three years.
These six poles have swung east and west ever since and the switch is always complete at least a whole week before the elections take place. There was a seventh poll-predicting pole but one reverted to its original upright position following the resignation of Charles Haughey in 1992 has not moved an inch since.
With Leo Varadkar (Fine Gael) incumbent in office, the poles, for now, lean towards the east. All Irish eyes are watching for even the tiniest change in direction.
*1literally translates as “Man*2 with biggest desk”
*2Mrs TPAS says this should say Person otherwise I’m a sexist.
I recently attended an evening hosted by the Dull Men’s Club which turned out to be anything but dull. Our host for this conviviality was the wryly enthusiastic assistant vice-president of D.M.C. Grover Click – who doubles as founder of the Park Bench Appreciation Society. Wine, beer and cashew nuts were consumed as we heard talks and presentations from luminaries of the world of esoterics. One of whom was Richard Gottfried, who together with his wife Emily are Crazy Golf champions (possibly) of the World. And they are on a mission to locate, play and document every crazy golf course on the planet – to date, more than 700 courses and counting. Now, I’ve sat through scores of presentations over the years but rarely so engaging and educating as this.
Anyway, on a search of crazy golf courses in Cumbria, and in particular around Barrow in Furness, Richard stopped off at the Hatherthwaite & Lakeside heritage steam railway – as you do – where he spotted this fine pole across the platform at Hatherthwaite station. “Is it of interest to you?” he asks. As If !
One final synchronistic fact. Turns out 21st September is not only Telegraph Pole Appreciation Day, but it is also Miniature Golf Day too. Would you Adam & Eve?
MY LIFE IS NOW COMPLETE… Here, for your telegraphic delectation, the ultimate in home automata – a robot telegraph pole. Kindly brought into existence by London-based, Gloucestershire-born, artist Simon Handy www.simonhandy.com (and footage from Lottie O’Leary’s mobile phone). Simon, we salute you.
