The Singing Line

This work charts the author's journey in the footsteps of her great-great grandfather, Charles Heavitree Todd, the man who strung the telegraph across Australia. It brings together a mix of family history and exploration with a young couple's trek, as they follow the same line 150 years later.

Alice lost her virginity
Witness by
The old man gum tree
While the dog sat confused
Patiently licking its wounds
She gave birth
To one stone room
Next a shed then a house

She then stepped one step south
Before the caterpillars knew
Alice grew
With the scenery so strong
The old man gum tree
Witness Alice lose her virginity far before me

--David Mpetyane, Aboriginal artist, 1992

The Proposal

I could have been called Patience, Gwendoline, Kathleen or Maude, all family names. Instead, I was christened Alice after a solemn-looking great-great-grandmother who had black hair framing a round face, pale eyes and delicate hands. In every generation of my family someone had been named after this sepia woman, set in red velvet in our dining room. The original Alice, in her matronly Victorian crinolines, didn't look like an obvious role model. But she had one great redeeming feature; the story of her marriage proposal to a total stranger.

In 1849, when she was only twelve years old, my great-great-grandmother was reputed to have done something few women nowadays would be brave enough to consider. One of eleven children of the Bell family in Cambridge, she was alone in the schoolroom one day and bored. Looking out of the window, she saw a man twice her age with a neat beard and narrow shoulders walk up to her black and white gabled house off the market place in Free School Lane.

Running down to the kitchen, she was told that this skinny, pallid creature was a distant cousin who had come for 'white wine sherry' and Madeira cake with her mother. Intrigued by his forlorn face, Alice slipped into the drawing room and hid behind the chaise longue. There she listened as the awkward visitor explained that he had just been promoted to the job of assistant astronomer at the University Observatory.

The young grocer's son, a Mr Charles Todd, had been given a letter of introduction to his wealthier merchant cousins by his patron, the seventh Astronomer Royal, Sir George Airy. The formidable Mrs Bell politely inquired after the man's family, but with a depressive for a father and an invalid for a mother, Charles was unforthcoming. He and his two brothers and sisters had watched as the family's fortunes, in the form of a tea and groceries emporium in Islington, had dwindled into a four-barrel wine merchants in Greenwich.

Charles would have followed his elder brother into the merchant navy on the first ship out if it hadn't been for Sir George Airy. The famous astronomer had plucked the fourteen-year-old out of the local Roan school in Greenwich. As a governor of the school, Sir George had heard about the young boy's extraordinary talent for mathematics. By seven, Charles used to earn his pocket money in the port's alehouses, adding or subtracting lists of numbers for the amusement of customers.

The Astronomer Royal was reorganising the large Observatory, and needed more human calculators to collate a mass of observations. Charles became a 'supernumerary computer' sitting on a high, backless wooden stool totting up figures with five other, better educated, boys. But he could do it far faster. Desperate to get away from his family home, the diffident youth persevered. After seven years he heard that a colleague had turned down the position of junior assistant at the University Observatory in Cambridge. Eager to study new projects rather than confirm old discoveries, Charles begged his superior to put in a good word. Within weeks he had moved to Cambridge and was spending his nights making the first observations of Eaye's Comet and searching out the newly identified Neptune.

Alice knew none of this story as she heard the twenty-two-year-old politely discussing his new position with her mother. Struggling to think of something to say, Charles explained that he had just seen the shadowy mountains on the moon through the telescope donated by the Duke of Northumberland, but had never before travelled further than London. Mrs Bell, aware that she was probably this gauche astronomer's only contact in Cambridge, asked him whether he had yet found comfortable lodgings. Charles admitted that his rooms were spartan but that he was working too hard to notice.

'You should get married, Mr Todd,' Mrs Bell suggested. 'I fear no one would want to marry such a dull fellow as I,' Charles replied. Suddenly, Alice jumped up from behind the chaise longue and, according to family legend, announced, 'I will marry you, Mr Todd, if no one else will.' There was a long silence. 'You are far too young,' said the applicant astronomer, nervously clicking his lily-white knuckles. 'You can wait for me,' said Alice.

Mrs Bell, blushing at the forwardness of her youngest daughter, sent Alice from the room. But Mr Todd was already smitten by this fleeting vision in pinafore and plaits, with her thick, black hair like a Chinese coolie, freckles and straight eyebrows. The next day, a paper package was delivered to the front door for Miss Alice Gillam Bell. Inside was a copy of the Pilgrim's Progress, inscribed to the young Miss Bell from her friend, Mr Charles Todd.

The book presented Mrs Bell with a dilemma. She couldn't send such an innocent gift back to the poor man. He shared the same nonconformist religious background and was an upright figure. She didn't, however, want her daughter being courted by a pauper. She was well acquainted with the precarious financial circumstances of the Todd family. Through hard work, her own husband, Edward, had risen to become one of the most successful corn merchants in Cambridgeshire. Their home at No. 3. Free School Lane had five floors, and their new warehouse in Pease Lane was the most impressive for miles. Once Mrs Bell had made bonnets to supplement the family's income, now she hoped that one day a son might become mayor of Cambridge. Mrs Bell spent occasional evenings speculating on who would be lucky enough to lead Alice up the aisle, but that would be many years off. Her adored and precocious daughter needed to become less impetuous.

To Mrs Bell's relief, Alice seemed to forget her promise for the next seven years, even though she was sent biblical tracts every birthday, with increasingly daring inscriptions signed by 'your admirer Charles Todd'. Occasionally he would call on the schoolgirl, but she was never allowed to visit his lodgings overlooking Trinity College to drink his favourite blend of Su-Chang and Orange Pekoe tea.

By the time Alice was fifteen, Charles had been sent back to Greenwich to take charge of the 'Galvanic department'. His main job was the maintenance of the time-balls which were placed at Greenwich, and in the Strand in London. Charles had to ensure that these balls, suspended at the top of tall masts, were dropped at precisely one p.m. each day to provide an accurate time check. In London the balls were used by lawyers and businessmen, walking down the Strand, to check their pocket watches on the way to their clubs. But their main use was for ships in port, so that captains could set their maritime chronometers accurately for a voyage. Using the time-balls to check Greenwich Mean Time, the navigators could establish their longitude anywhere in the world by comparing their chronometer's time with an estimation of local time. An hour's difference represented a shift of fifteen degrees in longitude. The chronometer thus had to be set to exactly the right time or every minute lost or gained would mean an error of longitude of nearly twenty miles on the equator, so the time ball couldn't be a fraction of a second out.

This work brought Charles into contact with the newfangled electric telegraph. Since the Napoleonic Wars, Britain had been looking for a way to communicate rapidly with her expanding empire. Throughout the 1830s, men were experimenting with magnetic needles, coils of wire and galvanic electricity. In 1838, Professor Charles Wheatstone and his colleague William Cooke patented the first long-haul telegraph instrument in Britain, where the letters were denoted by a number of motions to the left or right of the needle. In America, Samuel Morse, an artist by profession, had also formulated his ideas for transmitting messages by means of electricity through dots and dashes. In 1844, he inaugurated the first intercity line from Washington to Baltimore with the words: 'What hath God wrought.' In the same year, Queen Victoria used the new telegraph from Windsor to London to announce the birth of her second son, Alfred Ernest.

In Britain the telegraph was originally used as a signalling device by the train companies, but the police soon realised its potential. Pickpockets used to prey on crowds at busy railway termini and then escape by train. The telegraph allowed police to alert stations up the line of a thief's impending arrival. It was also credited with having caught the murderer John Tawell. He tried to escape from Slough by train, having killed his mistress. But the police in London were immediately telegraphed, and they arrested him when he stepped on to the platform at Paddington. Tawell was convicted and hanged, and the telegraph wires became known as: 'The cords that hung John Tawell.'

The Stock Exchange was the next to go on-line. But the public was still nervous of the wire, with some insisting that it was witchcraft. It was only during the Great Exhibition of 1851, when thirteen different telegraph instruments went on display, that people began to be excited by the idea. Morse code soon replaced Wheatstone's more unwieldy system. A wedding was conducted down the line, and there was serious debate as to whether the extension of the wires to Gretna Green would mean the end of runaway marriages because, a disapproving parent could alert the authorities before their child arrived.
In 1852, the Astronomer Royal installed a magnetic clock for the transmission of Greenwich Mean Time around Britain using the new electric telegraph. Stationmasters were issued with the order, 'You are at liberty to allow local clock and watch makers to have Greenwich ...