The All Red Line — The Telegraph Network That Girdled the British Empire (1858-1911)

The first telegraph cable connecting Ireland and Newfoundland carried messages across the Atlantic for several weeks in 1858 before failing. A lasting link was finally laid in 1866 by the SS Great Eastern between Valentia Island and Heart's Content, Newfoundland. These cables proved that ocean-spanning telegraphy was possible and began the race to connect the world's coasts.

Location: Newfoundland, Canada

Cables laid through Suez to Bombay, Madras, Penang, and Singapore, and then extended to Port Darwin in 1871, allowed a direct message from London to Adelaide and Sydney by 1872, though the route ran through Dutch and Portuguese territory. Australia was connected to New Zealand by cable in 1876. Communication between Britain and its Pacific dominions, however, still relied on foreign-owned relays and foreign territorial landings, which politicians and military planners increasingly viewed as a strategic liability.

Location: Adelaide, Australia

The 1887 Colonial Conference first resolved to support an all-British Pacific cable, and the 1894 Ottawa conference approved detailed plans. Sandford Fleming, chief engineer of the Canadian Pacific Railway, was the scheme's chief advocate, arguing that a state-owned cable would break the private monopolies that charged high rates and route imperial traffic through foreign hands. The Pacific Cable Committee formed in 1896, and the proposal became a founding project of colonial cooperation rather than private enterprise.

Location: Ottawa, Canada

The Pacific Cable Board was constituted with eight members, three from Britain, two each from Canada and Australia, and one from New Zealand, with funding shared among the British, Canadian, New Zealand, and Australian colonial governments. Britain had annexed Fanning Island in 1888 specifically to serve as the mid-ocean relay station for the Pacific section. The arrangement was a landmark in publicly owned international infrastructure, deliberately excluding the private cable companies that dominated the existing network.

Location: London, England

The cable ships Colonia and Anglia laid roughly 8,000 tonnes of cable linking Bamfield, British Columbia, through Fanning Island, Fiji, and Norfolk Island, to Southport, Queensland, with branches to New Zealand. The first messages across the Pacific were exchanged on 31 October 1902, inaugurating the All Red Line and cutting message rates to the Antipodes. The total cost was around 2 million pounds, and Sir Sandford Fleming marked the completion by girdling the globe with a message routed entirely over British-owned lines.

Location: Bamfield, British Columbia, Canada

On the day Britain entered the First World War, the cable ship Alert cut Germany's submarine telegraph cables, severing Berlin's direct links to the Americas and forcing German diplomatic traffic onto British- or allied-controlled routes, where it could be intercepted. The Committee on Imperial Defence reported in 1911 that the All Red Line was so redundant that 49 cuts would be needed to isolate Britain. British communications remained uninterrupted throughout the war, and intercepted traffic on these routes later included the Zimmermann Telegram of 1917.

Location: London, England

Between 1923 and 1926 the Pacific Cable Board laid a duplicate trans-Pacific cable between Canada and New Zealand using the ships Dominia and Faraday, doubling the redundancy of the empire's key Pacific link. The network entered its declining decades as radio telegraphy, and later telephone cables, took over imperial traffic, but the routes pioneered by the All Red Line largely determined where modern transoceanic fiber-optic cables run.

Location: Bamfield, British Columbia, Canada