Could someone put a map up of where this company was on a google street view if possible please.

R S Newall & co Corporation Road
Telegraph Works


Transatlantic telegraph cable
It was made jointly by two English firms—Glass, Elliot & Co., of Greenwich, and R. S. Newall & Co., of Birkenhead.
1857 Supplied wire for the first trans-Atlantic cable R. S. Newall and Co at Birkenhead.
The success of the 1851 cross-Channel cable brought many orders for cable to Newall's, who continued to purchase their core from the Gutta Percha Co. Newall's factory at Birkenhead, near Liverpool, was responsible for armouring half of the 1857 Atlantic cable, the rest being made by Glass, Elliot and Co of Greenwich.

Not sure if I can manage Streetview, as there's nothing left much to view, so a map (with a little help from Photoshop and the 1875 OS map) will have to suffice. According to contemporary newspapers R S Newall & Co set up their "Submarine Cable Works" in Unit A6 of the Dock Company Warehouses, which would be the one I've outlined below.

Thanks marty99fred
I'd have thought the warehouse sheds would have been for storing such cables for shipping out though.
Another query would be how long has the wall been in Corporation Road and if it has been rebuilt several times.
Is it like my 50 year old brush only had 10 heads put on and 5 handles?

Like many people I'd always assumed that R S Newall's 'works' in Birkenhead was some sort of purpose-built factory, but there's no obvious building on Corporation Road on the surviving 1858 maps that it could possibly be; in fact, on the maps there's virtually nothing on Corpy Road between the Dock Warehouses and the Canada Works in the North End. It was only when I found the following two newspaper items that light finally dawned; the first comes from an account of the celebratory dinner following the completion of their half of the Transatlantic cable, the second from a Liverpool Dock Committee meeting in August 1857.

In the book 'Liverpool Firsts' by Jack Cooper (one of the Blue Badge Guides) he provides this paragragraph :-

'Atlantic Cable
The first sucessful Atlantic telegraph Cable was made and financed by Liverpool, and laid down bt the "Great Eastern" in 1866. The engineer in charge was Cyrus Field.'

So, does this mean that the 1858 cable was a failure? In short, the answer is no, not really. It did pass messages from August that year, but the speed was very low. The first official message from the UK to the USA was from Queen Victoria, and it took several hours to send.
Over a period of about four weeks, the cable detorioated to the state of being un-useable. Various factors played a part in this, but it was mainly due to the quality of the gutta-percha insulation and the way the cable was kept between manufacture and laying.
Cyrus Field was the driving force behind the first scheme. Because the first cable had sent some messages, and the cause of the failure was known, Field was able to raise the funds for a second cable to be maid and laid in 1866. Assistance for this came from Thomas Brassey and John Pender. They also repaired the original cable and put it back into service.
The Glass, Elliot, and Gutta-Percha Companies were united to form the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company (Telcon, later part of BICC), which undertook to manufacture and lay the new cable.
This last bit of information then raises the question of where this new cable was made.


As to where the 'Telegraph Works' were located, I don't know, but I had a thought in the back of my mind that they were near to Duke Street, near the Oddesey works. On the face of the newspaper cuttings, it looks like they hired the dock shed in order to make this very large cable. But what else did they do in the Telegraph Works?

Also note that the pub 'The Grand Trunk' is in Duke Street. I don't know the origins of its name, but in terms of telephony and telegraphy, a 'trunk' is a circuit on a long distance cable.


The dock wall in Corporation Road. I think a section of it either collapsed or was demolished by a vehicle accident about 30 years ago. It was repaired and the rest of the wall was repointed. The gates at Vittoria Street were also renewed and the opening enlarged somewhere around the same time, if my memory serves correct.

Not quite sure what you're getting at by this bit, Norton; You seem to be suggesting that the dock warehouse occupied by Newall's wasn't the 'Telegraph Works'. According to the Post Office Directory for 1857 Newall's Submarine Telegraph Works was in Corporation Road, but neither of the 1858 maps has any buildings on Corporation Road beween Livingstone Street and St James's Church; there's certainly nothing in the vicinity of Duke Street.

As for the question "What else did they do in the Telegraph Works?", that's a bit like asking "What else do they make in a biscuit factory?" - they continued to make telegraph cable for further contracts, including the 1859 cable between Suez and Karachi and another the same year for the Dutch Government between Batavia (Java) and Singapore. The former was partially laid by the steamers Imperador and Imperatriz, whilst the latter was laid by the Bahiana. All three of these vessels had been built at Laird's in 1854 for the South American & General Steam Navigation Co, and all three were converted at Laird's for cable-laying duties during 1859, each being fitted with three large cylindrical tanks to take the coiled cables. Unfortunately the Suez-Karachi cable turned out to be a complete failure, and it seems that at this point Newell's gave up manufacturing submarine cable (at least temporarily) and left Birkenhead.

As for the Grand Trunk pub in Duke Street, as any fule kno this almost certainly gets its name from the Grand Trunk Railway between Quebec and Toronto in Canada; the contractors for the railway were Messrs Peto, Brassey and Betts, and many of the main components and locomotives for it were manufactured at their 'Canada Works' off Beaufort Road and shipped from Birkenhead Docks.

Thanks for that, and the extra information.

As I said, just a thought - no foundation to back it up. I just had this image of a building with 'Telegraph Works' on it, in addition to whatever they occupied on the docks. To me, the name implies the manufacture of all sorts of telegraph related items, and I just wondered if anybody else had any knowledge of this. It's also interesting to see that the PO called it the 'Submarine Telegraph Works'
I was aware that there wasn't much in the way of buildings along Corporation Road at the time, according to the OS maps. I would have thought that premises on the dock estate would have had a dock estate address and not a Corporation Road one.
All I'm getting at is that I would expect to find a works that designed, tested and made cable and other telegraph apparatus in a factory building. But when a large order comes in, perhaps ten times bigger than normal, it needs to be stored somewhere before it is loaded onto the cable laying ship, which must take all of it on one go. Warehouse A6 just does not seem big enough for all operations and storage as well, but that's why they wanted the adjacent one as well, I suppose.

I might not be any fule, but I didn't know that about the Grand Trunk Railway, so it would make a worthwhile addition to the entry for the Grand Trunk in the pubs section.

And there was me thinking it referred to the semaphore system in the Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett.

BTW, love the Molesworth reference.

There may be a possibility that the 'Canada Works' was involved in the manufacture of some components of this cable and that the dock sheds were where all the components ended up to be made the finished product.Newall had the patent and may have subcontracted parts of the manufacture of it.

off internet
As well as railway engineering, Brassey was active in the development of steamships, mines, locomotive factories, marine telegraphy, and water supply and sewage systems. He built part of the London sewerage system, still in operation today, and was a major shareholder in Brunel's The Great Eastern, the only ship large enough at the time to lay the first transatlantic telegraph cable across the North Atlantic, in 1864.

Brassey gave financial help to Brunel to build his ship The Leviathan, which was later called The Great Eastern and which in 1854 was six times larger than any other vessel in the world. Brassey was a major shareholder in the ship and after Brunel's death, he, together with Gooch and Barber, bought the ship for the purpose of laying the first Transatlantic telegraph cable across the North Atlantic in 1864


Anyone know where Thomas Brassey lived in Whetstone Lane?

Actually it was a Deep Purple reference...

Not sure about Whetstone Lane, can't find anything yet.
He did live in Palm Grove in a house called "Montana"
I think he was the contractor who built it.

Anyone following this might be interested in another topic on here regarding the Great Eastern and its involvement in cable laying, with great links and pictures about where and how the cable was made.
See - https://www.wikiwirral.co.uk/forums/ubbthreads.php/topics/690283.html#Post690283