Spectators wishing to view the instruments paid 1s 0d.

The South Eastern Railway worked the telegraph between London and Dover and over all its branches in 1846. It then charged the following public message rate for up to twenty words from its London Bridge terminus: to Tunbridge 5s 0d, Tonbridge Wells 6s 0d, Folkestone 10s 6d, Dover 11s 0d, Canterbury 10s 6d and to Ramsgate 12s 6d. From twenty to forty words were charged double and from forty to sixty words treble the above rate. The public were not allowed in the South-Eastern’s instrument rooms.

The Eastern Counties Railway advertised a public message tariff between all of its stations in 1846; for up to thirty words from London to Colchester the cost was 3s 6d, to Cambridge 3s 6d, to Ipswich 5s 6d, to Norwich 7s 6d and to Yarmouth 9s 6d. Thirty word messages to the suburban stations in London from its Shoreditch terminus were 2s 0d. A flat rate of 1s 0d for every subsequent ten words and 1s 0d a mile for delivery was charged.

The Midland Railway in December 1846 worked the telegraph for public messages between the towns of Leeds, Normanton, Sheffield, Derby, Rugby, Tamworth, Birmingham, Nottingham, Newark and Lincoln.

The charge made by the Midland for under ten words was 1d a mile; above ten words and under twenty, 1½d a mile; above twenty words and under thirty, 3d a mile; and for every additional ten words ½d a mile; messengers to deliver the message from any station on foot would be charged at 1s 0d, or by post-chaise at cost. In the case of any message failing through the defect of the instrument or neglect of the railway company’s servants the money would be refunded. Messages regarding lost luggage on the railway were sent free-of-charge. This tariff ended in 1848.

c.] Telegraph Company Message Pricing - From its inception the Electric company used a message length of twenty words for publicising its pricing. The cost of a twenty-word message became the industry norm for determining prices. As well as “words” all numbers and punctuation had to be spelt out. Additions such as underlining, italic text, parenthesis and inverted commas were charged as two words. At this period the delivery of the message within one-half mile of the receiving office was free, but the words in both the sender’s and recipient’s addresses were charged for. There was also then a minimum charge.

Between 1848, when the major English and Scottish cities were first in circuit, and March 1850 the Electric company charged 1d a word a mile for the first fifty miles (i.e. twenty words, 4s 2d), ½d a word a mile for the second fifty miles (i.e. twenty words, 6s 3d) and ¼d a word a mile for distances beyond. Half-rate was charged for each additional ten words or fraction thereof. Actual examples of the confusing basic tariff for a twenty-word telegraphic message from London, in place from January 1, 1848 until March 1850, were:

Southampton..........5s 6d
Yarmouth...............7s 0d
Birmingham............6s 6d
Manchester.............8s 6d
Liverpool................8s 6d
Berwick...................12s 0d
Bristol.....................13s 0d
Glasgow...................14s 0d
Edinburgh...............16s 0d

The maximum charge for twenty words over any distance was fixed at 10s 0d in March 1850; this was reduced to 8s 6d in March 1851, when a “simplified” charge of 3d a word for over twenty words or half-rate for ten words was also introduced.

For important messages Repetition was recommended; for a further half-rate charge on the message cost it would be transmitted back to the sender by the receiving office to ensure accuracy.

There was an extra charge on top of repetition for Insured Messages. This applied to communications that had monetary value, mercantile buying and selling orders, for example. In 1848 for a premium of 12½ per cent the Company would be responsible for losses due to errors in transmission for sums up to £1,000. The maximum premium was 2s 6d which applied to liabilities of £1,000 and over. The premium had reduced to 10% of the liability by 1860 but this was payable with no upper limit.

 

The Magnetic had a limit for compensation of £5 for errors in repeated messages, but only charged a 1% premium for its Insured Messages. In any case, repetition was rarely, and insurance almost never, used by the message sending public.

All of the Special Acts authorising the companies had clauses indemnifying them from damages caused by errors in transmission of ordinary public messages. Repetition and Insurance as premium services were there to justify this legal indemnity. Although tested in the Courts the companies were never to be found liable for errors. Public messages with any sort of error were said, in 1853, to be one in every 2,400 sent, which was thought acceptable.

For a single charge of 2s 6d travellers could book carriages, post-horses, refreshments, beds or other accommodations at all towns where the Company had a telegraph station. Lost luggage could also be sought for the same flat-rate.

In the Company’s early years, until about 1850 or 1851, before public knowledge and confidence was established, the majority of its messages out of London consisted of bulk news and commercial information carried by contract at a discounted rate, set by negotiation, or for its own subscription news-rooms.

In July 1853 the Electric Telegraph Company introduced a 1s 0d message rate for twenty words between its eighteen branch offices in London; the railway stations at Euston Square, King’s Cross, Shoreditch, Fenchurch Street, London Bridge, Waterloo Bridge, Paddington, Blackwall and Highbury; and 43 Mincing Lane; the General Post Office; 30 Fleet Street; 448 West Strand; 17a Great George Street; 89 St. James's Street; 1 Parkside, Knightsbridge; 6 Edgware Road; and London Docks. It also offered a promotional message rate between its metropolitan offices of 4d for a message of ten words at the same time; but this was not continued.

The message rate to and from the London branches and the provinces was the same as for Founders’ Court.

In November 1853, as competition began to be felt, the overall pricing structure was again slightly simplified – the charge for a twenty word message under 50 miles became 1s 0d, under 100 miles became 2s 6d, beyond 100 miles it cost 5s 0d. The 3d a word charge for more than twenty words and the half-rate for ten words ad-ditional was continued. 

Commencing in June 1854, as a further concession, but only in response to competition, the words in the addresses of sender and recipient were sent free-of-charge. At the same time the Electric offered Special Rates for twenty words where the competition was strongest. The 112 miles between London and Birmingham were charged at 1s 0d; and the 210 miles to Liverpool, the 180 miles to Manchester and the 309 miles to Carlisle at 2s 6d. The average message length then was calculated at twenty-three words, of which seven represented the sender’s and recipient’s addresses.

For the four-and-a-half-years between July 1855 and January 1860 the cost of a twenty word message on the Electric’s circuits, with addresses “free”, was 1s 0d within London, 1s 6d within 50 miles, 2s 0d within 100 miles, 3s 0d within 150 miles, 4s 0d over 150 miles and 5s 0d to Dublin in Ireland. The rate within 200 miles was reduced in 1860 to 2s 6d from 4s 0d.

Delivery of the message by messenger on foot, termed at the time porterage, was free-of-charge under a half-mile from the receiving office; from a half to one mile it was 6d, from one to two miles 1s 0d and from two to three miles 1s 6d. Delivery “express” by horse-cab was also free under a half-mile; from a half to one mile it was 1s 0d, from one to two miles 2s 0d and from two to three miles 3s 0d.

The English & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company introduced a reduced tariff in May 30, 1854 between London, Liverpool, Manchester and Carlisle at 2s 6d for twenty words; and for Birmingham to London, Liverpool or Manchester, and vice versa, at 1s 0d. Direct connections were also promoted to Scotland, and Belfast, Dublin, Galway, Cork and Queenstown in Ireland.

The opening of the “Submarine & European Telegraph”, the united trading title of these companies, was advertised in Liverpool on May 12, 1854 with a cost for twenty words to London of 2s 6d (previously 5s 0d), Manchester 1s 0d and Birmingham 1s 0d (formerly 2s 6d, an additional ten words now 6d originally 1s 3d). There was no charge for name and address, or porterage for the first mile. The Electric company promptly matched these rates.

The “Submarine & European Telegraph” also promoted much simplified city-to-city rates with just two tariffs for twenty words, either 1s 0d or 2s 6d. But it possessed only a very limited number of public offices: in London at 30 Cornhill, City, 43 Regent Circus, West End, and the House of Commons, as well as in Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Gravesend, Chatham, Canterbury, Dover and Deal.

The European, British and Magnetic companies, singly and as merged, understandably offered message rates broadly comparable to the Electric company’s; and just as complex; although it was through their competitive influence that the Electric company gradually reduced its rates throughout the 1850s.

In July 1854 the new British Telegraph Company, the combined British and European firms, charged the following national message rates for twenty words: under 50 miles 1s 0d, under 100 miles 2s 0d, under 200 miles 2s 6d, under 300 miles 3s 0d, over 300 miles 4s 0d, with no charge for address of sender or recipient, with no charge for porterage under one mile, where messengers were kept, otherwise 1s 0d a mile was charged outside a one-mile radius; and 3d a word extra, or one-half the above rates for any number not exceeding ten words.
The British company’s rate in 1855 from London to Belfast was 7s 0d; Birmingham 1s 0d, Glasgow 4s 0d, Greenock 4s 0d, Hull 2s 6d, Leeds 2s 6d, Liverpool 2s 6d, Manchester 2s 6d and Newcastle 3s 0d.

On its inception by merger in 1857 the British & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company adopted the same message charges as the Electric company had fixed in June 1855. The only exceptions to this were for messages to Ireland, where the Electric had only a limited presence; 5s 0d for twenty words to most of its 83 stations there and 6s 0d to the remote Atlantic coast towns.

The United Kingdom company introduced the flat rate of one shilling for a twenty-word message throughout its system; its rates were 1s 0d for the first twenty words and 3d for each additional five words or part of five words irrespective of distance; with the options of repetition and insurance of messages. It commenced working message traffic in 1861 and, from November 1861, the other companies adopted these rates wherever the United Kingdom company opened competing offices. The original shilling rate did not include delivery.

This rate was never remunerative and effective price competition lasted four years, 1861 until 1865.

In the face of flat rate competition in 1862 the Electric and Magnetic adopted a common tariff. The charge for messages to any part of Great Britain, not exceeding twenty words, was: within 25 miles, 1s 0d; within 50 miles, 1s 6d; within 100 miles, 2s 0d; within 200 miles, 2s 6d; within 300 miles, 3s 0d; within 400 miles, 4s 0d. Special exceptions were made in the cases of Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham (i.e. where the United Kingdom company had offices): the charge to these places being 1s 0d per 20 words. For messages of twenty words to distant cities in Ireland: Queenstown, Galway, and Londonderry, 6s 0d; to all other Irish stations, 5s 0d for 20 words (Seven words were allowed in addresses without charge).

In 1860 the Channel Islands Telegraph Company and the Electric Telegraph Company charged 3s 0d for twenty words from the islands to Weymouth, where the English cable landed, 4s 0d to Southampton, 5s 0d to London, and 5s 8d to Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow, and the same costs in reverse, using the country’s longest domestic cable. Messages between the islands of Jersey, Guernsey and Alderney were 1s 0d. If sent to England via Paris and the Submarine company’s circuits, the charge was 11s 6d, reduced in 1862 to 7s 6d. 

 

Table 14
The Electric Telegraph Company’s
Average Message Cost

In Ireland the British & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company offered a promotional rate of 6d for a ten word message on its suburban circuits from Dublin to Kingstown and Cork to Queenstown in 1858. This led to:

The exception to the twenty-word standard was to be that initially adopted by the London District company having a uniform 4d rate for its fifteen word messages within London, including delivery. In 1861 it increased this to 6d. So the basic charge for fifteen words was 6d; for fifteen words each in message and a reply it was 9d; for twenty words, 9d, each delivered, without extra charge, within half-a-mile of a station. Repetition back to the sender for accuracy was an extra half-rate.

Cynical newspapers claimed its lady clerks in London merely re-wrote a received message on a delivery form, paying boys a penny to take it to the recipient.

The District offered tradesmen the opportunity to have customers place orders by telegraph free-of-charge. The tradesman paying twenty shillings for a package of one hundred messages for this service. It also gave substantial rebates at the year end on business accounts to secure frequent users in commerce and trade.

 
It made a similar generous offer to the general public in 1862; one hundred 6d stamps for just one pound, effectively offering a message rate of 2½d for fifteen words within London, approaching the Post Office letter fee of 1d. This was the cheapest rate for a telegraph message ever offered in Britain. It permitted for the first time “social messaging” on a wholly personal level, in that trivial domestic matters might be communicated relatively cheaply.

In 1866, unable to raise the capital needed to repair massive weather damage to its over-house circuits, the London District company temporarily raised its tariff from 6d to 1s 0d for fifteen words. The sixpenny rate was restored for a few months but was finally abandoned in 1867 when it adopted a rate of 1s 0d for twenty words, the minimum charged by the other companies.

The Twenty-Word Message - By the 1860s it was established that the address of the sender consisted, on average, of four words and the address of the receiver occupied eight words. With no less than fourteen words required for the companies’ accompanying service instructions by the operators, and with seventeen, the average number of words sent by the public, the total number of words transmitted for each “twenty-word” message was actually forty-three.

The Last Tariff - Ending all competition in July 1865 the three national telegraph companies, the Electric, the Magnetic and the United Kingdom, consolidated their tariffs at 6d for twenty words within London, 1s 0d within 100 miles, 1s 6d within 200 miles and 2s 0d beyond 200 miles, including delivery. Two years later, once it was realised that a 1s 0d flat rate was advocated by the Government, the London rate of 6d was abandoned. This collective price-fixing by the major companies was driven by the growing lobby for state intervention.

In comparison, the basic message rate in France, Belgium and Switzerland during the 1860s was one franc, say 10d, for fifteen words, which had to include the addresses, over one zone of about 50 miles. Because of the lack of free addresses and the close zone tariff most messages were far more expensive than in Britain.

As has been stated previously mailing a Post Office letter addressed to anywhere in the three kingdoms cost just 1d, the speed of delivery varying by distance. In London there were twelve collections and deliveries of letters per day; in most country towns six a day.