Alice Thomson - The Singing Line

A BOUT THE B OOK

The story of the man who strung the telegraph across Australia, and the woman who gave her name to Alice Springs.

In 1855 an impoverished young scientist from Greenwich told his guardian that he was off to chance his luck in Australia as Government Astronomer and Superintendent of Telegraphs for the small colony of South Australia. With him went his young wife Alice after whom Alice Springs would be named. For Charles Todd was following a dream the near impossible task of stringing a telegraph wire across one of the last uncrossed colonial wilderness, and finally connecting Australia with Britain.

In 1997, their great-great-granddaughter Alice followed in their footsteps. Her plan was to track the telegraph and her ancestors, from Adelaide over the thousands of miles of desert, outback, swamp and mountain that Charles Todd had crossed in the 1860s with his 400 men.

A BOUT THE A UTHOR

Alice Thomson is Associate Editor, columnist and interviewer for the Daily Telegraph. Born in 1967, she was educated at Bristol and worked previously for The Times. She is also restaurant critic for the Spectator. She was called after her great-great grandmother Alice Todd, for whom Alice Springs was named in 1871.

THIS BOOK IS FOR ED

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Version 1.0

Epub ISBN 9781448155033

www.randomhouse.co.uk

Published by Vintage 2000

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Copyright Alice Thomson 1999

The right of Alice Thomson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published in Great Britain in 1999 by Chatto & Windus

Vintage
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 099 27282 2

C ONTENTS

L IST OF I LLUSTRATIONS

Maps

Australia, showing the route of the Overland Telegraph

The Southern Section

The Central Section

The Northern Section

Illustrations

Silhouette of the Bell Family

Charles and Alice Todd in the 1860s (South Australia Archives)

Adelaide (Mary Evans Picture Library)

The first pole, 15 September 1870 (Telecom/Telstra Archives)

Erecting the poles (Illustrated Sydney News)

The Peake repeater station (Mary Evans Picture Library)

Early days

Off the bitumen

Ed at the Peake repeater station

Ed relaxing

Simpsons Gap

McMinns sketch of Alice Springs

The Alice Springs repeater station (Telecom/Telstra Archives)

The attack at Barrow Creek (Illustrated Sydney News)

The entrance to Coober Pedy

The angle pole

Camping on the River Todd

The road to Alice Springs

Alice outside the Alice Springs repeater station

The Telegraph fleet off Port Darwin (Illustrated London News)

The camp at the Roper River (Illustrated London News)

At the Roper River (Telecom/Telstra Archives)

Bringing the Telegraph ashore in Darwin (Telecom/Telstra Archives)

Ed with a feral pole

Making an outback lunch

Watching Ed change the tyre

The Roper River

The last remnants of the Young Australian

Weve made it to Darwin

The celebration banquet (South Australia Archives)

Todd on completion of the line (South Australia Archives)

Alice in street dress (South Australia Archives)

Todd at the Observatory (South Australia Archives)

Elizabeth, Charlie and Hedley Todd in the 1860s (South Australia Archives)

Lorna Todd as a child (South Australia Archives)

The Todd family in 1897 (South Australia Archives)

Alice in later life

Sir Charles Todd in his study (South Australia Archives)

The plaque commemorating Todds men

Australia, showing the route of the Overland Telegraph

Alice lost her virginity

Witness by

The old man gum tree

While the dog sat confused

Patiently licking its wounds

She gave birth

To one stone room

Next a shed then a house

She then stepped one step south

Before the caterpillars knew

Alice grew

With the scenery so strong

The old man gum tree

Witness Alice lose her virginity

Long before me

Fertility

David Mpetyane, Aboriginal artist, 1992

T HE P ROPOSAL

I COULD HAVE been called Patience, Gwendoline, Kathleen or Maude, all family names. Instead, I was christened Alice after a solemn-looking great-great-grandmother who had black hair framing a round face, pale eyes and delicate hands. In every generation of my family someone had been named after this sepia woman, set in red velvet in our dining room. The original Alice, in her matronly Victorian crinoline, didnt look like an obvious role model. But she had one great redeeming feature; the story of her marriage proposal to a total stranger.

In 1849, when she was only twelve years old, my great-great-grandmother was reputed to have done something few women nowadays would be brave enough to consider. One of eleven children of the Bell family in Cambridge, she was alone in the schoolroom one day and bored. Looking out of the window, she saw a man twice her age with a neat beard and narrow shoulders walk up to her black and white gabled house off the marketplace in Free School Lane.

Running down to the kitchen, she was told that this skinny, pallid creature was a distant cousin who had come for white wine sherry and Madeira cake with her mother. Intrigued by his forlorn face, Alice slipped into the drawing room and hid behind the chaise longue. There she listened as the awkward visitor explained that he had just been promoted to the job of assistant astronomer at the University Observatory.

The young grocers son, a Mr Charles Todd, had been given a letter of introduction to his wealthier merchant cousins by his patron, the seventh Astronomer Royal, Sir George Airy. The formidable Mrs Bell politely inquired after the mans family, but with a depressive for a father and an invalid for a mother, Charles was unforthcoming. He and his two brothers and sisters had watched as the familys fortunes, in the form of a tea and groceries emporium in Islington, had dwindled into a four-barrel wine merchants in Greenwich.