These much ignored pieces of rural and urban furniture finally have a website of their own.
This is not the site to visit for technical information pertaining to telegraph poles. You'll find nothing about 10KVa transformers, digital telephone networking or even so much as a single volt. This is a website celebrating the glorious everyday mundanitude of these simple silent sentinels the world over. We don't care what the wires contain either. They all carry electricity in some way be it the sparky stuff which boils your kettle, or the thinner stuff with your voice in it when you're on the phone.
Pole #898
You might look at this pole and see just a run-of-the-mill 7 metre BT light Pole from 1988. Two dropwires, no crossarms, no insulators., but a placard declaring that it is pole #898. Oh and it’s in black and white. Well, this is a pole with a story. And I’ll relate it pretty much as it came to me.
Mark Scott is an author and researcher who was delving in to the family history and persecution of Charlie Warmington’s (see prev post) family at the hands of the Nazis and discovered that Charlie’s great aunt and uncles were, in fact, resistance fighters in Nazi occupied Vienna – for which they paid a heavy price. Anyway, Whilst Charlie and Mark were on a trip out to Vienna to discover more they found themselves, typically, in a pub at the end of the day.
“During one of these sessions I wanted to show Charlie a photograph of a boat, a dilapidated Dunkirk ‘Little Ship’ moored in bad shape, that I had discovered. I flicked through the photos on my phone with Charlie looking on and suddenly he shouted ‘Stop, stop!’. He stopped me at a photograph I had taken of Telegraph Pole 898 which lives not far from me.
Charlie asked could I send him the photo, which, incidentally was taken using a Leica iiic camera and Ilford FP4 film. I sent him the image then and there. Then he asked if he could forward it, ‘Of course’ I said. He told me he had a friend who would be delighted to see my photograph of Telegraph Pole 898 and he was very excited to know I had taken such an image.
I am very proud of the shot, for reasons I know not.”
I received several pole photos from Charlie – mostly around his home in Newtonabbey – but never this one until now, courtesy of Mark. I think we’re way past Pole of the Month for this one. It will henceforth, forever now be known as the Charlie Warmington Memorial Pole. And below is a mini-placard that I have just ordered and have every intention of attaching to said pole.
Meanwhile, Mark’s book is called “Transport Number 4” and will be available online immediately after the launch event.
Goodbye Charlie Warmington
We knew something was wrong when Charlie never got in touch after we sent him his 2026 Telegraph Pole Appreciation calendar. And despite several emails and online searches I only found out today that Charlie had, in fact, died in hospital.
Charlie Warmington is a long-standing friend of this society. He totally understood what we are about and often used his weekly “Roamer” column in the Belfast Newsletter to extoll our virtuous appreciation of all things tall wooden, sticky-uppy with wires coming out of the top.
He had a writer’s nose for the quirkier side of life, and off-beat human stories were a staple of his missives from the Belfast front. But his own career is long and varied having started out studying architecture he moved into journalism working through the BBC TV & radio and his keen sense of humour saw him write successful satirical shows for theatre, TV and radio.
It was as Roamer that I knew him and we often exchanged phone calls, his mellifluous Fermanagh accent could melt chocolate in my own pantry over here in Wales. He was charming, funny, warm and fascinating. My stories paled in comparison to his own and his back story is worthy of some research. I remain ever grateful to Charlie for the many plugs about our obscure and whimsical selves to the good readers of Ulster. I’m further grateful that, only last year, Charlie published my own article about the Welsh new year tradition of Mari Lwyd to this same audience.
Carry on Roaming Charlie
Pole Graveyard and…
The last of the calendars
What is it about telegraph poles and Scotland? Many of the finest extant poles can be found north of the border. And some of our most ardent telegraph pole appreciators are also from up there. Recent member William Brown sent in the photo below of a pole graveyard at Keith railway station yard. The picture, I must add, was taken by fellow new member, Mike Cooper. Official secrets and all that precludes me from telling you their membership numbers. But they are adjacent.
Apart from Keith being the name of my dad, it is a town that sounds like it should be in Aberdeenshire but is actually in Moray and is the geographical location where the A95 meets the A96. It’s also got a football team, a St. Rufus church and a Tooty’s Takeaway. And this pole graveyard of course. I’ve google street-viewed myself hoarse but haven’t been able to spot them. Seeing these expired five armers in rigor mortis I find deeply disturbing. I shouldn’t be looking at this picture so close to bedtime. And I’ve just had cheese.
Every cloud, as they say. Now that I’ve given the location away I can imagine busloads of insulator collectors turning up at some station somewhere asking to be taken to Keith and the conductor saying “He’s not working today.”
While I’m on, just 20 calendars left now. I’m supposed to be moving house so they have to go. Pic below of June by way of temptation.
Still banging on about the calendar
Sorry to keep doing this. It’s just that we’re down to the last half box and I am now in the process of packing up my house to have moved before Christmas. So posting stuff out after about next week is going to get tricky. Here’s what the front of it looks like. And below that are a pair of delightful photos from Minffordd cemetary alongside the Ffestiniog Railway that didn’t make it to the calendar (a bit too dark). Did I say this already? Anyway, I’d love that everyone who wants one can get one so… Roll up, get ’em while you can right <here>.
Missing E
You’ve probably seen it on the news already, but a typographical error on the February page of the new Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society calendar has caused confusion and panic buying among aficionados. The error, comprising a single missing letter caused the word “there” to appear in print as “thre”. The mistake happened in the descriptive caption of a telegraph pole near Tomduen in Scotland. While the error didn’t cause any real misinterpretation of the words it did trigger collectors of misprints of official products to buy up stock and create a temporary shortage of this now collectable calendar.
TPAS spokesperson Stoddart E. Schmelmhausen told BBC News, “The letter E key on our society laptop has been giving us trouble for a while. You have to press really hard to make the key press register. And when you’ve typed more than 200 e’s in a day already, it’s no surprise when one gets missed. We promise we’re going to make it up in any reprints and in the 2027 calendar by adding extra letter e’s at no added cost. Meanwhile, we urge all telegraph pole fans to order their copies of the 2026 calendar now as stock levels are starting to show signs of distress. In the interests of fairness, we have to set a limit of 100 calendars per customer. And that’s not up for negotiation.”
Pole of many arms
John Goddard wrote to ask “What is the best way to date a pole? There are no plates or etched marks on this one. It ran along side the old north midland railway station at Darfield South Yorkshire. The photo of the old now long gone station below shows two of the post, now fallen asleep per the remaining pics. The station was built in 1840 and the tunnel behind was scalped in to a cutting in 1899 so the post must date somewhere in that range but would really like to know a more exact date if its possible”.
I could have replied with 17th March 1864 and few would have been able to disprove me. Last quarter of the 19th century is about as far as I would dare hazard. Anyway, a vintage pole like this is a serious find. And I wouldn’t mind betting that with some grubbing around in that undergrowth may produce some fine vintage insulators too.
Answers on a postcard as to whether, in the second photo below, you can just see either (a) the tip of John’s finger or (b) the tip of John’s nose.
TPAS 2026 Calendar
Just when the news is full of dreadful things, here’s something to spark your day/month/year – the Telegraph Pole Appreciation Calendar is now with the printers and is expected to be delivered to TPAS Towers around 5th November. And as is bloody typical, just an hour after I’d sent off the artwork I spotted something I had intended to change. I’ll have to live with it now.
Anyway, here is what the April page looks like. A whole quid cheaper than last year too. Just £9.99 + p&p. No, I don’t know how we do it either. Have a look at it on the ordering page to see what else is on the other months. So celebrate the next year with twelve glorious months of views with telegraph poles in them. Wonderful.
Telegraph Pole Appreciation Day 2026
Ships in the Knight
For 25 years Gill Knight, artist, and this sage society have been searching for one another. 25 years of us looking for someone who gets poles like we do. And for Gill it was exactly the same. She’d slump into her sofa every night kicking off her shoes, defeated, another fruitless day’s searching for a society which truly reflected her love of all things “tall, wooden, sticky-uppy and with wires coming out of the top”.
We came close once or twice. There was that time when I was heading north up the M6 to a Dull Men’s Symposium in Preston, and Gill whizzed south from her home in Scotland and we passed with a combined terminal velocity of 140mph around junction 28 – the turn off for Clayton-le-Woods. Then there was that time in Venice. Our gondola had just turned into the Rio dei Tolentini canal when Gill’s gondolier steered her boat sharply into Rio del Malcanton just as we were about to come into view. Life’s like that sometimes. It was to be another 9 years of painstaking and abortive searches before Gill found us properly in an article online somewhere and when her heavily laden email clunked through my metaphorical letter box last week, I knew our search was over. Welcome to our sage and aged society Gill.
Below is a selection of some of Gill’s excellent paintings. Now you can see why we like them. And why Gill likes us. Have a look at her recent solo show on Robertson Fine Arts website. Or have a look at Gill’s website right here: https://www.gillknightart.co.uk/
Eric Ravilious
The 1930s was the great age of the motor car and touring the open road was almost mandatory for the vehicle owning classes. This idealised vision of the countryside was promoted by motoring organisations and any number of guide-books. Despite not being a driver himself, Eric found inspiration in this landscape. His paintings have a soft almost dreamlike quality and it is this undulating countryside with its endless lonely lane and line of poles that I find so endearing. Apparently, Eric only added the van at a later point having seen it in a Post Office magazine.
Captain Eric Ravilious served as a war artist but was killed at the age of 39 whilst aboard a Lockheed Hudson of RAF 269 squadron on a search and rescue mission off Iceland.
This painting, bristling with telegraph poles, lot #129, going, going, went for £242,500 at Christie’s, London in June 2014.
Meanwhile, I looked again at one of the photos in the previous post – a version of which had been used as January of our 2024 TPAS Calendar and I thought of Eric Ravilious. So I wanted to see what I could do myself. So I dug out my best gouache paints, some round and flat brushes and my favourite fine-tipped sable hair brush. I decided a 250gm heavy paper with a bit of texture to hold the paint and avoid warping would probably be best. Then I set up my easel, put on my smock and artist’s bucket hat and then got down to work….”ChatGPT please can you remake this image in the style of a Ravilious painting?”
We’ll start the bidding at £100,000. Who’ll give me £100,000? Thank you, £110,000? Yes sir, do I hear £120,000? …
Click images to enlarge…