Vintage

Yes, at last we get to talk about telegraph pole finials.  This prompted by John Woodall (#425H) who sent us the photograph (right) of his mystery object, described as 11″ x 8″ which appears to form part of his garden furniture.  The brass door-knob on the top is a later addition.

It was the Victorians who first started to decorate their telegraph poles with finials.  This, presumably, to pretty up this ugly [sic] industrial architecture which was springing up across their countryside.  But this is likely to be one as fitted by the GPO, in the 1930s.  If, like me, you have your head forever skywards, you will spot more of them.  The one at left, one of a run of them near More Church, Shropshire.

Later GPO finials were made of metal.  And amazingly you can pick one up on eBay for a song.  The selection below all sold at recent auctions – they ranged in price from 99p for the wooden one to £9.06.  Clearly nobody understands the value of these things.  Maybe it’s time I cornered the market?

W ell, almost. John Woodall (#0425H) sent us a few items of interest recently.

Firstly, some photos of a retaining wall in his garden at Inverness made from retired telegraph poles.  He says the poles came from Pocklington in East Yorkshire, and were used for a Pole Barn in Regent Street before they ended up in his wall 391 miles further north.  The barn housed electrical firms’ vans apparently. 

Now, we’re always interested in absolutely anything telegraph pole related here, but John sent us these because he thought we’d be particularly interested in the markings thereon.  We’ve zoomed and scanned and photo-enhanced these as best we can and the results are hereabout. Do please click on each photo for the fuller-sized version.

Due to the inadequacies of photographing something so fine as telegraph pole hieroglyphics, John kindly sketched the markings off this first one.

Lost in the creosote and dare I say, weeds, is another GPO stamp.  This one would seem to read GPO 1931.

W ere they a Civil Servant or Lollipop lady, then these poles would certainly have received a CBE or similar award by now. A long and useful working life propping up telephone wires in E. Yorkshire. Semi-retirement supporting the roof of a shed in the same town. And today still grafting at holding back soil as part of a wall up there in Inverness.  Somebody should write to the Queen.

Not finished there though.  John was busy dismantling an old government issue George VI table (as you do) and tucked at the back of a drawer he found a GPO work-docket for erecting a pole and wires in Tomnahurich Street, Inverness dated 1948.

I wonder if the job ever got done. Or did it, like so many work requests which land on my own desk, slip to the back of the drawer where they lie, forever undone.

As far as human aesthetics are concerned, beauty is bilaterally symmetrical. We choose our partners in life based on the relative wonkiness of their face roughly matching that of our own.

The same cannot be said for telegraph poles. Look at this asymmetric beauty sent in by our Waterlooville correspondent, Geoff Mawdsley (#0389). This forlorn railway pole stands along the old Fareham to Gosport line. Geoff thinks the builders of a small housing estate nearby must have mistaken it for a GPO pole and have consequently left it alone.

In its day this pole carried one of the first long distance telephone circuits from Osborne House on the Isle of Wight all the way to London for the holidaying Queen Victoria. A reasonably short mental journey then gets me to imagining this very pole having carried some of HRH’s sweet nothings back to her beloved Albert at home in the palace.  Or some sterner words if they’d had a regal row perhaps.

Or just maybe when she rang Benjamin Disraeli to tell him of his cupped armpit flatulence comedy sound effect that she and Albert were “not amused!”

And I don’t mean in a lonely-hearts sort of way…

Janice Edwards has written to us :

I know absolutely nothing about telegraph poles but I have just bought a postcard of a familiar place and one of the main features in it is the telegraph poles. I am trying to date the photo and wandered if there were any distinguishing aspects of the telegraph poles that might help.

The photo is of Drayton Park Road, Lowick which is in Northamptonshire. The railway crossing is narrow gauge, supplying iron ore to a nearby works, I am told.

 If any of our esteemed readers can help Janice, please drop me a line.   Click the image to see it in full glory.

Many people, my wife included, upon being gifted a parcel like that at left, might be inclined to think “what the hell did I do to deserve this?”  But to a severe sufferer of Anoraksia Nervosa, like myself, such a receipt is a delight.  It’s arrival preceded also by the entertainment watching our flimsy postman struggle first to lift it out of his van, and then to reach over our gate to wedge it into my letter bin.

I must confess that these have actually been through a scrub in the kitchen sink before being put back in the box for this photo.  One of them – the darkened one in the photo – is an old L.M.S. (London, Midland & Scottish) insulator.  It’s seen some severe high-voltage arcing in it’s working life by the look of it.

Very many thanks to Mark Taylor from Sutton Coldfield who answered my appeal for ceramics. A cheque to cover the postage is on its way, along with some carefully chosen pure thoughts and our good wishes.