Modernity Through the Telegraph Pole: Visions of Railways in Interwar England

This presentation will discuss how railway companies and amateur photographers travelling by train in interwar England interpreted the presence in the landscape of the telegraph network, which had paralleled the railways since the 1840s. Interwar England was a period when these technologies were well established in the landscape, whilst travelling by train was being advertised in innovative ways to a broadening market. It was also a time when amateur photographers were photographing the railways by drawing on earlier artistic conventions. To interpret the significance of the telegraph – or its absence – in these commercial and leisure images of railway travel, I will engage with Schivelbusch’s discussion of the telegraph as a technology which framed the view from the train (1986) and more recent scholarship that has focused on how media and transport entanglements have shaped visual perception and understandings of the modern world (Leonardi and Natale 2018; Johnston 2021; Revill 2011).

I will explore these different approaches by drawing on two collections at the National Railway Museum (UK). First, the guidebooks produced by the Great Western Railway (GWR) in the 1920s, some of which used the telegraph pole as a device to frame its corporate image and convey particular ideas about the national landscape. Second, the work produced in the 1930 by the members of the Railway Photographic Society (RPS). In contrast to the visual importance Schivelbusch ascribed to the humble telegraph pole, and which broadly aligned with GWR’s perspective, the RPS members were often at pains to avoid including it in their images. By contrasting the RPS’ treatment of railway views with the GWR’s promotional material, I will argue that these different responses to the telegraph pole offer new insights into the experience of modernity and how this was shaped by the relationship between communication and transport technologies.