Reader Willi Montgomery Stack, brother-in-law to Doreen Bracegirdle, (she of the Norwich TPAS sect) has submitted a small essay on the subject of telegraph pole appreciation. Mr Stack began preparing said essay some years ago whilst chair of the East Dorset TPAS – an unhappy time he says, given the police enquiry and all those wasteful and inconclusive proesecutions. Nontheless said essay aims to examine the origins of appreciating, some of the leading figures in the field, its growing importance in both scientific and artistic terms and its gradual evolution right up to the formation of TPAS itself.
Clicking the read more button will take you to Mr Stack’s opening paragraphs. He threatens more in the fullness of time, and by publication here we could be seen to be encouraging its production. However, despite the occasional robust terminology, it does make an interesting read.
That said, I normally like to punctuate my posts on here with a picture of a telegraph pole. So the one on the right is a sister pole to our very own TPAS pole. This one is from the midlands of Ireland somewhere, possibly Co. Cavan. We were running late and I had the words “What the hell are you doing stopping to take a picture of a bloody telegraph pole for we’ll miss our boat” ringing in my ears.
The appreciation of the telegraph pole as an object of beauty, nay veneration, is first to be seen in the works of the social thinker and art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900). The arrival of telegraph poles – on the Great Western Railway in 1837 – coincided with the Ruskin’s redefining of art criticism: combining polemic with aesthetics, scientific observation and ethics. Hence, his rebuke to his friend JWM Turner on seeing the artist’s great work Rain, Steam and Speed, depicting a GWR engine passing Maidenhead bridge: “Nice enough, Joey boy, but why the bloody hell did you leave out all the lovely poles?”
Around this time, Ruskin became acquainted with William Wordsworth and it is believed to have been Ruskin’s persuasion that led the elderly Wordsworth to update an earlier poem:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of gorgeous telegraph poles;
(The original version is now almost completely forgotten. It mentioned something about snapdragons.)
The newly-appearing telegraph poles had struck a chord with Ruskin. Dr Urma Gamble has suggested in her biography of Ruskin that they may have reminded him of the gondola poles on the Grand Canal in Venice. But could there have been a deeper, darker association? In a letter to his old Oxford tutor, the Revd Osborne Gordon, Ruskin wrote: “I’d rather be staring at one of those things all covered with wires than looking at my wife’s snatch.” Mrs Effie Ruskin (nee Gray) was later to have their marriage annulled for non-consummation.
W.M. Stack.