How late/often would you say telegraph offices tended to be open?

He read the telegram aloud.

“Have just had most incredible and grotesque experience. May I consult you?
— “Scott Eccles,
“Post Office, Charing Cross.”

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Finally he drove round to the Charing Cross telegraph office, sent off a message, and then, at last, we made for Baker Street once more.

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The first electric telegraph was demonstrated in London in 1837, and by the late 19th century telegraph wires connected thousands of towns and villages across the country – and the telegraph system linked the United Kingdom to the United States and the countries that made up the British Empire and beyond.

This was really revolutionary! Especially when you bear in mind that in the 1840s, it took ten weeks for a message to reach India, and for a reply to be sent back. Thirty years later using the telegraph service, the same message could be sent and the reply received in just 4 minutes. From 1870, when the Post Office took over the new telegraph network, until the service closed in this country over a century later, millions of telegrams were sent using this system.


If you needed to send someone a message, you would go to your local post office or telegraph office and fill in a telegram form. Amberley’s Fred Stanford explains how it was done:


Fred: Once you’d … created your written telegram, the person behind the counter would have counted up how many words you’d used and charged you for those words. It would have then have been sent, either – if it was a larger office – through a pneumatic tube system to the telegraph office, or – if it was a smaller office – it would have either have been telegraphed or telephoned to the nearest telegraph office for transmission to the distant end.


Narrator: In towns and cities, the larger post offices used a pneumatic tube system. The written telegram message was folded up, and fed into a little container. The container was then pushed into a brass tube. When the door to the tube closed, the force from compressed air whizzed the container to the telegraph room in another part of the building, or to a nearby telegraph office.


By the 1920s, the telephone was getting more popular. Few people could afford to have one in their homes, but public payphones were widely available - and, as a result, the popularity of telegrams started to decline. In 1935 the Greetings telegram was successfully introduced to boost the dwindling appeal of the service. During two world wars people came to dread the arrival of a telegram, because it often announced that a loved one was dead or injured.

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Telegraph services have greatly facilitated military operations. in the course of eight years of war there have been many instances of resumption of telegraphic connections with recaptured cities within a few days after the enemy had been driven out. In June, 1945, there were in operation under the Directorate-General of Tele-Communications 25 signal corps, and 25 line-repairing engineering corps at the various war fronts.

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Up to the end of 1944 the main center for international radio traffic had been located in Chengtu. The Ministry of Communications set up a special speed automatic duplex system wire between Chungking and Chengtu. This instalment furnishes Chungking with sufficiently powerful equipment for direct contact with the outside world. A 24-hour service between Chengtu and R.C.A. and Mackay stations at San Francisco and an 18-hour or even longer daily service between Chengtu and London have been maintained by the Chengtu station which is especially equipped for long-distance transmission.

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SwallowFeather said:

In the south of France long before D-Day? (It's March to be precise.) This is an area under long occupation but not an area currently at war, and in fact it never saw active combat, because the Germans never made it that far in the initial 1940 invasion before the armistice deal was cut and they withdrew from the "unoccupied zone" aka Vichy France.

Do you have a specific reason why the telegraph offices would be destroyed? It would take the Germans wanting to do so deliberately even under non-warfare conditions. This seems possible--or they might reserve them for themselves, I suppose. But I've read of the civilian population sending telegrams sometimes.

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The reason has to do with traffic. In the first 11 months of 2017, only 8,000 telegrams were sent, most by ten regular business users and a smattering of residential customers, according to a press release from Proximus. Once upon a time, telegraphs were the best way to communicate news—good and bad—quickly across great distances. Today, the medium's remaining users mostly consist of lawyers or bailiffs who require legal proof of a message's receipt. To give you an idea of how steep the decline has been in the last few decades, Proximus explains that in the early 1980s, it sent about 1.5 million telegrams per year. By 2010, that number had dropped to about 50,000.

The end of Belgian telegrams isn’t the end of the service across the world, but it’s getting close. Britain ditched telegrams in 1982, the United States sent its last in 2006 and India, which long-relied on telegrams for internal government communications, tossed its last message in the bin in 2013.

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