Edward Sandle on Communications

They’ve got these satellite communications now and the office can just pick up their phone and ring the ship, wherever it is in the world and whatever time of day it is, regardless of whether the Captain is in bed or not.

Some little boy in the office can ring him up and say, “Captain, we want this”, but in our day they would send a telegram to us in the Radio Station and then we would pass it on using the Morse key to the ship, so it was a much slower process then and then the Captain would reply to it in the same way.

He would give a message to the Radio Operator although they preferred to be called Radio Officers, on the ship and he would send back to us and we would then, using our teleprinter, would forward it on to the destination.

It was a much slower process in those days and some of the telegrams we received were very long. It took ages to receive and it took quite a long time to send obviously, whereas nowadays they just ‘oomp’ straight through.