Did you hear that in India they closed down the telegram service last weekend? I don’t know about you, but I had a neat succession of reactions when I heard the news. First, a familiar stab of regret that yet another venerable form of communication has died a death. Second, a golden memory of receiving a special birthday telegram from my big sister when I was 18 years old. And third, a vague unease; a sense of embarrassment. “Can you still send a telegram in the UK?” I asked myself. “Did it all wind up about 10 years ago? Or even 20 years ago?” And the answer by return was, “I have absolutely no idea.”
From a quick look online, I think the answer is that you can still send a telegram, but you have to do it from a computer. The recipient still gets a special delivery; but they’ve cut out the bit where you go into a post office and announce, “I wish to send a telegram!” What telegrams signified in the past was a mixture of things. On the plus side, you had urgency, importance, expense, and lovely block capitals. On the negative side, telegrams were sent on the day, which might imply that the sender just hadn’t remembered to put something in the post. And if the wording was in any way economical – HAVE GOOD BIRTHDAY – the recipient couldn’t help but be aware that a slightly stingy calculation had been made regarding outlay.
I never had a sad telegram, but of course the delivery of bad news is what telegrams were traditionally used for. In Alan Bennett’s “Waiting for the Telegram” – his outstanding second monologue for Thora Hird – he has a woman approaching her 100th birthday waiting for the customary congratulations from the Palace, but not quite able to remember the word for telegram. “A few years more,” she says, “and I’ll be getting the… now then… lad comes on a bike… folks stood at the door, weeping… telegram.” Telegrams are rightly to be dreaded – folks stood at the door, weeping – but at least they are perfectly suited to the short, sharp (and official) delivery of terrible news, and would be hard to replace. A friend of mine came out of a cinema one day, switched on her phone, and found a text telling her that a close acquaintance had just jumped off Beachy Head.
Not living in India, I feel a bit bogus bidding farewell to the telegram there. But as a general principle, I feel anxious every time a means of communication is rendered obsolete by the internet. I have this nightmare that one day the internet just stops working (rats gnaw through the power cable; a small earthquake buggers the hard drive; someone spills coffee on it) and then the whole of the world’s population runs about like their hair’s on fire saying, “I need to tell someone something quite urgently! There used to be so many ways of doing that! But now no one has a fax machine anymore, and people can’t remember how to do smoke signals, or semaphore, or Morse code! Did you know you can’t send a telegram anymore, not even in India?”
I once made a radio programme about the fax machine, for a series called The Indispensables. It was a tragic tale. It turned out that the technology for the fax machine was invented in the mid 19th century – a chap from the Science Museum showed me some machines in their archive collection. It took about 150 years to work out how to send facsimile documents down a phone line, and then within about 10 years of the fax becoming “indispensable”, the internet came along and smote it dead. Of course, a big drawback of faxing was that you always had to call up and say, “Did you get my fax?” Also, faxes went yellow and crisp, and the printing faded on exposure to daylight, and the machine always ran out of paper in the middle of a document, and no one ever told you a fax had arrived for you because it wasn’t their bloody job to do that. But otherwise the fax was great, and it was heartless and stupid of us to abandon it so hastily. Trust me, on the day the cat vomits on to the internet and the whole world grinds to a halt, we’ll be very, very sorry for what we’ve done.