Place Name
Commemorates the telegraph signal station which was set up here by the Admiralty in 1796 to convey messages between London and the ports of Portsmouth, Deal, Yarmouth and Plymouth at around the time of the Napoleonic Wars. But since it needed clear weather this system which relied on a chain of relay stations connected by line of sight proved on limited use. The system worked by using six circular shutter discs controlled by ropes from within the hut, where men were continuously on watch using spy-glasses (telescopes). By pivoting individual shutters a large variety of different combinations could be obtained, depending on which shutters exposed their face. The operators would not need to know the message but merely to relay the signal which was then decoded at the receiving end. The first official message sent via the new telegraph from Yarmouth in 1808 was “Calypso ready for sea”. But there was a problem, the Portsmouth to London stations ran over 72 miles and in poor weather proved not only impossible to use but eye-wateringly expensive, it was estimated to cost between £3,000 and £3,500 a year to work. Richard Phillips in his book A Morning’s Walk from London to Kew published in 1820 noted: “After about twenty years’ experience, they calculate on about two hundred days on which signals can be transmitted throughout the day; about sixty others on which they can pass only part of the day, or at particular stations; and about one hundred days in which few of the stations can see the others… The station in question is generally rendered useless during easterly winds by the smoke of London, which fills the valley of the Thames between this spot and Chelsea Hospital…” The Admiralty semaphore was abandoned at the end of 1847. The Telegraph pub now stands in place of the signal station.
