Guernsey’s had its fair share of foreign invaders over the millennia, but most modern-day islanders have never heard of a skirmish that caused uproar at the time and questions in Parliament – the so-called Telephone Wars.
With the 13 May marking 130 years to the day since the conflict started, Express casts its gaze back on this overlooked period of the island’s history.
The two-year dispute pitted the States of Guernsey against England’s National Telephone Company (NTC) for control of the island’s new telephone network.
The NTC had a monopoly on telephone networks on the mainland and believed that extended to Guernsey. The States disagreed.
The island’s government even resorted to pulling down telephone wires installed by the British organisation.
But how did a civil dispute end up escalating into an uncivil conflict?
Modern wonders
Even children carry phones in their pockets these days, so it’s difficult to appreciate just how modernistic and magical telephones must have seemed when they were invented in the mid-1870s.
A year after Alexander Graham Bell filed the first telephone patent, news of the latest developments in the technology were eagerly being reported in Guernsey newspaper ‘The Star’, under the headline “The Wonders of Science”.
And in August that same year Guernsey was witness to a technological first – a cross-Channel telephone call to Dartmouth through a subsea cable.
The newspaper at the time reported that “the result was a complete success, sounds at either end being thoroughly audible at the other end”.
“‘God Save the Queen’, sung at Dartmouth, was distinctly heard.”
The following year, in April 1878, a concert in St Martin’s finished with a rendition of a since-lost song, ‘The Telephone Galop’ – showing just how quickly telephones had captured the public imagination.
‘God Save the Queen’, sung at Dartmouth, was distinctly heard.
The Star NEwspaper, August 30 1877
Guernsey continued to be an early adopter of the new technology, but the prospect of being able to dial anyone connected to the network was years away.
Back in the early days, there was no telephone exchange.
Instead, businesses or organisations would install their own direct lines between offices, speeding up communication by orders of magnitude.
For example, the Saturday 18 November 1893 edition of The Star contained an announcement that a Mr Robilliard’s Piette Timber Yard had been connected to his town office in the Market Place.
Meanwhile, while Guernsey Gas had installed a telephone line from their Smith Street office to the gas works at Les Amballes.
Earlier that year, the island’s arsenals had been linked by telephone with the Government office in Ann’s Place, St Peter Port.
By the 1890s, it was clear telephones were here to stay.
A reader’s letter to The Star in March 1896 argued that telephones were a “necessity of the poor” rather than a “luxury of the rich”.
“A telephonic exchange [is] needed in every town and in every considerable village,” the writer – a Mr F.E. Baines – continued.
The following month the Guernsey Telephone Committee was formed to come up with a “practical scheme” to introduce an island-wide telephone network “in the interests and for the benefit of the whole business and residential community of the Island of Guernsey”.
The new committee invited English electrical engineer Alfred Rosling Bennett to the island to “design and construct” a telephone system.
The new system would have nearly 250 “public call offices” spread around the island, “so that anybody wishing to talk to the offices and shops in St Peter Port or to other parts of the island may find an office almost at his door”.
The plan was published in The Star on 12 May 1893.
The committee was determined to keep the cost of telephone calls down, to keep them accessible, so soon ruled out the idea of working with the National Telephone Company as the costs would have been too high.
However, as the NTC had a monopoly over telephones in the United Kingdom, it believed that extended to Guernsey.
Erected overnight
Determined to assert its rights, the NTC started erecting its own telephone poles and wires in St Peter Port.
Mr Bennett later recalled: “They secretly imported men and material and at daylight one summer’s morning, set to work, and from a pole erected in a commanding position behind the Rectory House and central schools strung overhead wires over the town, using tall ladders to get on the roofs, and fixing insulators to chimneys, walls and ridges, without any sort of leave or permission asked or obtained.
“So when the business life of St Peter Port awoke people were amazed to perceive the Arcade, High Street, Smith Street, Pollet, etc., crossed and recrossed by numbers of bright red wires, attached to creamy-white insulators, all blinking and scintillating in the sun.”
It was, he argued, an “attempt to bluff the States”, hoping once installed the lines would be treated as a “done deal”.
‘Small morning hours’
But, they hadn’t factored in the legendary stubbornness of the Guernsey people – we’re not called ‘donkeys’ for nothing, after all.
The States gave the NTC a written notice to remove its equipment and – when the company ignored it – sent in a local electrician, Mr T Langlois, to remove the wires “in the small morning hours”.
Mr Bennett said: “The intrusive filaments were severed from their supports, neatly rolled into coils, and left on the pavements contiguous to the buildings to which they had been attached.”
A local police constable “took a zealous part in the amputation process”, he added.
The NTC was filled with “great wrath”, but the company didn’t try to re-erect them, choosing instead to sue the States for £250 in the Royal Court.
The company lost the case and appealed, eventually taking matters as far as the Privy Council in London, before losing for the final time.
Humbled, the company eventually sold the telephone pole it had erected to the States for a nominal £1 fee.
The affair rumbled on for a further two years, with questions being asked in Parliament, as Guernsey needed permission from the General Post Office to operate the proposed telephone network, with the latter dragging its feet.
In fact it wasn’t just the NTC and the GPO that objected to the States putting in its own telephone system.
Mr Bennett recalled that “a gentleman coming out of his house one morning, attired in frock-coat and tall silk hat, with an orchid in his button-hole and a neat umbrella in his hand, perceived workmen about to plant a big pole near his gate.
“He requested them to stop, but on being told to ‘go to Putney’ he, instead, went down on his knees and raised the Clameur, [forcing them to stop].”
Newspaper announcements
Despite the setbacks, in July 1898 Guernsey’s own telephone system finally went into operation.
Calls were free for the first month, while people became familiar with the system.
For the next few months and years, the local papers were full of announcements of businesses and wealthy individuals excitedly announcing they had a telephone, along with their two and three digit phone numbers.
They included a 107-year-old Mrs Neve, who was given the number 107 in honour of her age.
By late October nearly 200 numbers had been connected, including the Fire Brigade, with plans to roll out the network to the more-remote parishes well underway.
More than 1,000 calls were being made each week, with the National Telephone Company said to be “green with envy”.