| Goodbye to Goonhilly |
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Goonhilly: tranmission over and the end of an era? As icons of modern history go, Goonhilly takes some beating. It paved the way for live television and the internet and has been a landmark on the Cornish skyline for four decades. As their future is threatened, Jane Reynolds looks at the world-famous dishes, their surroundings, and their impact.  Since Paleolithic times there’s been human activity on Goonhilly. The area of heathland covering 140 acres of the Lizard in south Cornwall is home to bronze age barrows, standing stones, ancient field patterns, and some much more modern structures: the monumental satellite dishes of the Goonhilly Earth Station. Originally built to receive the first live transatlantic pictures from America via the Telstar satellite, the site has grown steadily ever since. Yet for how much longer? BT, which owns and manages the site, plans to stop its satellite activities at Goonhilly by 2008 and transfer them to Madley in Herefordshire. Under the plan the only dish to remain would be the original Antenna 1, known affectionately as Arthur and now a Grade II listed structure. That this relatively recent concrete and steel structure is protected is testament to its historic and social importance. Today, visitors fuel the economy of the Lizard. However, in 1961 tourism income was much smaller, and farming and fishing were more important. The arrival of an army of GPO engineers and construction workers was a welcome boost to local livelihoods reliant on seasonal incomes. There was no Portacabin camp for these workers: they were billeted in guesthouses in the Coverack area. Management were housed in the Headland Hotel. Neil White, from Helston, was part of that original team. He would go on to become station manager of the site, but as a brand new graduate in 1961 he wanted to return home to work and says he couldn’t quite believe it when he heard what the GPO was planning at Goonhilly. “It was so exciting. It was like science fiction, and there it was, happening in Cornwall.” This was the era of the space race and Sputnik and just prior to Wilson’s boast of a ‘white hot technological revolution’. The project drew in hundreds of workers – many from far afield. Arthur was built and designed by HC Husband and Co. They had just finished work on the new Tamar road bridge, and moved west to construct the antenna at Goonhilly. Many of the men were shipyard workers by profession, expert steelworkers whose homes were in the great port cities of the north and Scotland. Along with the GPO engineers they formed a team that lived and breathed the task in hand. Neil White recalls working long hours through the day, then planning into the small hours from the comfort of the bar in the Headland Hotel. “We were given the keys to the bar and kept paying in, drinking, and working until we felt we’d done all we could for the day.” A sense of camaraderie was crucial to the project. There was only a year to design and construct the earth station before the launch of Telstar, and workers seemed to sense its importance. When the Post Office Engineering Union called a national strike over wage scales a senior GPO manager, Donald Wray, called the workforce together and explained that if they withdrew their collaboration the completion date would be very publicly jeopardised. In his memoir he wrote: They seemed puzzled. “Strike?” said one, “Strike? That’s for England, not Cornwall!” I was never sure if this was a display of genuine Cornish nationalism or whether they, like everyone else on the project, were so excited that to do other than work flat out was unthinkable. So the giant aerial was completed in time for it to receive test signals before Telstar’s launch. These involved transmissions that were sent from a test station at Leswidden near Land’s End and proved that the aerial could pick up signals, albeit from a stationary source. On the night of 10 July, 1962, Neil White was quietly confident that things would go according to plan. He was in the control room, responsible for picking up Telstar’s first tracking signals as it came over the horizon. “We were all too busy and focussed on the job in hand to get excited. My colleague next to me stopped the scanner and said the signal was locked on. It was a hundred times weaker than we’d been expecting. We all waited for the picture to appear. Then on the consul we saw a weak and fluctuating test card. But it wasn’t a good picture,” he said. An inspection in daylight revealed that the polariser, a vital piece of receiving equipment in the centre of the dish, had been installed the wrong way round on the advice of its American manufacturer. It was re-fitted, and the next night the live transmission from America was picture-perfect. During subsequent passes of Telstar the French, Americans and British grew more confident and tried transmitting pictures other than test cards. Goonhilly notched up another first by conducting a live tour of the earth station using BBC cameras. This was the first live transmission of moving pictures. These successes for Telstar and Goonhilly were the climax of a story that began in 1960 when the GPO got together with AT&T and NASA, in the USA, and the French post office PTT. The idea was that satellite communications would be used for defence purposes. No one ever dreamed that the real benefit of the technology would be for relaying television pictures into people’s living rooms. Each of the three countries had to build giant aerials to communicate with the planned satellite. The European and American equipment had to be as close to each other as possible. The chosen sites were Andover in Maine on the American East coast, Pleumeur Bodou in Brittany, and Goonhilly in Cornwall. Goonhilly was selected because of its extreme southerly position and because it sits on a high plateau, with a line of sight down to a low horizon. This was important because Telstar’s orbit was very low. There would therefore only be a short period of visibility from both the UK and USA as it crossed from one horizon to the other. Other Lizard locations were considered – Croft Pascoe and Predannack. But Goonhilly was to have the edge. Its geology of serpentine rock gave it a firm foundation for the massive weight it would bear as the first dish was erected. Arthur’s design was very different from those of the French and American antennas. AT&T and PTT opted for a trumpet-shaped horn design, housed in a protective dome-like structure. The design chosen for Goonhilly’s aerial was based on one already being used at Jodrell Bank for astronomy work. The Americans and French were sceptical of the British parabolic, or circular, dish. But the British engineers knew what they were doing. The delicate horn design wouldn’t have survived long on the windswept Lizard Peninsula. Indeed, the French and American engineers soon found themselves up against noise interference when it rained. They even had to battle against pigeons that found the covered shelter was a cosy nesting spot. Yet in the run- up to Telstar’s launch Arthur received little attention. All the excitement seemed focussed on the horn antennae, which is ironic since the dish design eventually won the day and is now synonymous with modern telecommunications. Goonhilly was also cheaper to build than its foreign counterparts. It cost around £800,000 – about a quarter of the cost of the French and American stations. There’s no record of opposition to those plans to site an enormous steel and concrete dish in such a prominent position. It was obvious from the start that Goonhilly would provide jobs. Chris Oates farms within sight of the antennae on land owned by his family for generations at Traboe. Although only a boy in 1961 he said: “I can’t remember Arthur not being there. Through the 1960s and 1970s we watched with excitement as the dishes grew in number. They seem to draw people to the area. They’re like a piece of modern art.” In spite of his obvious fondness for the dishes, Chris is pragmatic about their future. “If they’ve served their purpose then I suppose they must go. Of course we’ll miss them. But times change, don’t they?” The current station manager at Goonhilly is Alan Bradley. He started work at the site in 1964 and says no one ever complained about the antennae. “In fact people have always been very obliging,” he says. “Fishermen and sailors around the Lizard use them as navigational landmarks. I’m not sure though whether it would be possible to build such a structure in such a place today. People are far more sensitive about that sort of thing.” Neil White agrees. “There was a real impetus in the early 1960s from people at the top in the GPO. They also had the financial freedom to have a go at this project. These days it would be up to private firms, and I doubt whether they’d see the financial benefit of such an investment.” It’s not yet clear what BT will do with the decommissioned dishes. Arthur’s future may be secure, but what of his brothers and sisters who rejoice in similarly mythical names like Guinevere, Lancelot and Merlin? Neil White believes it’ll be too expensive to dismantle them. Besides, he draws comparisons between them and other historic Cornish landmarks. “Our landscape is littered with the remains of mine stacks and buildings. They’ve been made secure and remain with us. The same should happen to the antennae.” It’s an idea that also chimes with archaeologists. The Cornwall Archaeological Unit has carried out extensive surveys of the Goonhilly area because of the large number of prehistoric remains found there. James Gossip is an archaeologist with the service, and says: “In a way the dishes are as important as the prehistoric landscape. Recent history often gets overlooked, yet it has wide-ranging social implications.” So much of what we today take for granted originated from the work of engineers at Goonhilly and the people who built it. After that first success in July 1962, innovation continued over the following four decades. Goonhilly was the first to receive live TV from Australia in 1966. In 1967 it did the same from Canada. It was the first to receive live coverage via satellite of the Olympics, from Mexico in 1968. It was the first to transmit colour television via satellite. From the late 1960s onwards Goonhilly was involved in the early development of the internet when electronic ‘packets’ of information were sent around the world via satellite. The clients in this enterprise were the Ministry of Defence. Without that work the internet as we all know it would not have developed. Goonhilly really did change our lives: following that hot summer’s night in 1962 our world became a much smaller place. With thanks to: BT Archives Cornwall Historic Environment Service |