The majestic former Telegraph Office in Benoy-Badal-Dinesh Bagh (formerly, and popularly, Dalhousie Square) in Calcutta (Kolkata), India. Lucas felt that the industrial revolution happened at just the right time for Britain and for her Empire. Any sooner, and the telegraph and steamships would have made it too easy for London to tighten her grip on the colonies with meddlesome regulations and British-born bureaucrats. Any later, and Britain would by then have forgotten about distant countries she no longer ran; we would have shrunk to become a little European country, instead of remaining a truly global nation.
Part 1 of 2
QUEEN Victoria’s reign was marked in a pre-eminent degree by the triumphal progress of science. When she came to the throne, modern scientific invention was in its infancy; when she died, it was dominating the world. When Lord Durham went on his mission to Canada in 1838,* the year after the Queen’s accession, there was but one small railway in Canada, and none in any other of the Queen’s dominions beyond the seas.* The same year saw the beginning of regular steam communication between Great Britain and America.*
It was only in 1837 that Cooke and Wheatstone took out their patent for an electric telegraph.* The first submarine cable between Great Britain and America was not laid till 1858, and some years passed before the communication was successfully established. No steamer ran from England to Australia till 1852.* There was no direct telegraph line to Australia until 1872, and none to South Africa prior to 1879, the news of the disaster at Isandhlwana in January of that year* being brought by ship to the nearest telegraph station, which was in the Cape Verde Islands.*
John George Lambton (1792-1840), 1st Earl of Durham, went to Canada to report on moves towards the unification of its various provinces, and self-government. His recommendations formed the basis of the British North America Act of 1867 that granted self-government to the Dominion of Canada. See Defective Democracy.
The Champlain and Saint Lawrence Railroad, near Montreal, was opened in 1836. India’s First Railway, from Bombay to Thane, opened in 1853. The first passenger-carrying inter-city line in England was The Liverpool and Manchester Railway, which opened in 1830.
Steam-powered ships had made the journey before, but the first purpose-built steam-powered transatlantic passenger liner was the SS Great Western, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and built in Bristol. She arrived in New York on April 23rd, 1838.
Together with Sir William Fothergill Cooke (1806-1879), Sir Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875) subsequently founded the Electric Telegraph Company, the world’s first public telegraph company, in 1846. Wheatstone had also invented the English concertina back in 1829.
The SS Great Britain left Liverpool for Melbourne and Sydney on August 21, 1852, and arrived in Australia on November 12th. SS Great Western’s historic Atlantic crossing had carried only a handful of passengers after a news of a fire in the engine room caused dozens of cancellations; happily, no such ill luck struck the SS Great Britain, which carried 143 crew and 630 passengers to the other side of the world.
The Battle of Isandlwana on January 22nd, 1879, was one of the early engagements of the short Anglo-Zulu War. The fighting saw some 22,000 Zulu warriors inflict an unprecedented defeat on about 1,350 British and Native troops; a small contingent at nearby Rorke’s Drift held out against the odds in a heroic defence that drew eleven Victoria Crosses. The British regrouped and overwhelmed the Zulus at Kambula on 29th March, taking the capital Ulundi from King Cetewayo on July 4th despite his offer of peace.
An archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean some 440 miles off the coast of Senegal, northwest Africa.
Part Two
A painting by Joseph Walter (1783-1856) of the paddle-steamer SS Great Western arriving at New York on St George’s Day, April 23rd, 1838. She was beaten to the punch by ‘Sirius’, a much smaller vessel built in Leith, Scotland, which reached New York a day earlier. However, ‘Sirius’ had enjoyed a four-day head start and had to supplement her exhausted fuel with resin; ‘Great Western’ not only almost caught up with her, but finished her journey with 200 tons of coal to spare, thus proving that Atlantic liners were commercially viable. She made forty-five Atlantic round trips in her lifetime.
STATESMEN, writers, and thinkers on Imperial questions, with the one exception of Lord Durham, do not seem to have foreseen in any measure how great a revolution would be worked by the forces of science, whereas the British Empire, as it stands before us to-day, is largely the outcome of the work of inventors and engineers.
It is possible that the facilities for interference supplied by scientific invention, if they had been supplied at an earlier date, might have militated against the grant of responsible government to the present self-governing dominions by removing in a sense the element of distance, which was the main reason for giving responsible government;* but by the time that steam and telegraphy had become fully effective, the dominions had reached the stage when self-government was imperative, and could no longer be denied.
It may fairly be said that the effect of scientific invention has been distinctly beneficial, as making for a better understanding between the Colonial Office and the dominions, at a stage in history when interference from home had already been discarded.
‘Responsible government’ means government that is responsible (i.e. answerable) to the public, and not to a monarch, his ministers or indeed a parliament of elected representatives alone. On the problems and deceptions involved in defining such terms, see the cautions of John Buchan, one of Canada’s outstanding Governors General, in Popular Misconceptions.
