Cable Hut At Porthcurno Telegraph Station

Cable Hut at Porthcurno Telegraph Station

A cable hut built in 1929 for Imperial and International Communications Ltd on the edge of Porthcurno beach. The structure is a small, single-roomed, simple box-shaped building constructed of rubble and concrete with a flat roof. It has a wooden casement window in the east wall and a central north-facing door.

Internally, a metal frame attached to the wall on three sides supports a series of 14 cable terminal boxes, each labelled with its destination and a commutation frame. The cables enter the building through holes in the floor adjacent to the wall and are joined to land lines within the cable terminal boxes. The land lines leave the boxes at the top and are carried underground to the telegraph station at Eastern House.

The cable hut was built as part of a major development at Porthcurno, which had become the most important telegraph station in the British Empire by 1929. The hut was erected when a number of cables were refurbished and a new cable link was laid from the hut to Eastern House. At this time, 14 operational submarine cables terminated at Porthcurno, arriving from destinations across the British Empire.

The telegraph station itself had been established at Porthcurno in 1870 when a cable from Carcavellos in Portugal arrived on the beach, forming the final link in a chain of cables leading from Bombay in India. The location was chosen for its sheltered, sandy beach, which was considered more reliable than the original intended landing point at Falmouth. By 1904 the station had relocated across the valley to purpose-built, fireproofed accommodation at Eastern House, which was subsequently extended northward following the arrival of a cable to Fayal in the Azores in 1906.

In 1928 a conference in London recommended amalgamation of cable and wireless interests within the Empire, resulting in the formation of Imperial and International Communications Ltd. The following year, 1929, Porthcurno was formally recognised as the most important telegraph station in the British Empire, and the cable hut was constructed to accommodate the multiple submarine cable terminations.

During the Second World War, the strategic importance and vulnerability of the station were recognised. In early May 1941, the entire telegraph operation moved underground into tunnels blasted into the adjacent hillside. The area was further protected by barbed-wire entanglements, flood-lighting, and flame throwers. The station was refurbished and extended between the end of the war and 1950, and reopened as a training school. The telegraph station itself closed in 1970, exactly 100 years after the arrival of the first cable, though the training school continued until 1993. The cable hut survives as the unique intact example of telegraph cable termination infrastructure from this period, containing the largest collection of historic telegraph cables and termination boxes in a single location.