History of the Atlantic Cable & Submarine Telegraphy

	History of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications from the first submarine cable of 1850 to the worldwide fiber optic network
CS Recorder (3) by Bill Glover & Barry Waterhouse

CS RECORDER (3)

Built in 1954 by Swan, Hunter and Wigham Richardson Ltd.

Length 340 ft 5 in. Breadth 45 ft 2in Depth t8 ft 6 in Gross tonnage 3430

CS Recorder, 22 July 1954
Image courtesy of David Griffiths

Built for Cable & Wireless Ltd., for cable repair work, eventually replacing Stanley Angwin at Singapore. There the ship was responsible for repair work, covering an area from Colombo, Sri Lanka, to Vancouver, Canada. Fitted with three cable tanks capable of holding 21,000 cubic feet of cable. Combined picking up/paying out machinery supplied by Johnson & Phillips. Three 3ft 6in bow sheaves fitted but no stem sheave. Scrapped at the end of 1985 when replaced by CS Retriever (5).

Ship's shield: CS Restorer

"We speak through the sea"

Ship's shield: Mercury

"The ocean shall not divide us"

These shields belonged to Captain Charles Goodsir, late Royal Signals Corps. Mercury was the emblem of Cable & Wireless, owner and operator of the Recorder.
Thanks to Mabel Goodsir for kindly donating the shields to the Atlantic Cable website, and to retired Royal Signal Corps Major Derek Wood for making the connection.

CABLE WORK

1964	SEACOM 2 Carried out a route survey from Hong Kong to Australia with CS Mercury in areas covering some of the deepest parts of the ocean
1964	Laid SEACOM 2 shore ends at Sabah
1964	Recovered a large amount of cable from the USA - Hawaii - Guam - Philippines route belonging to the Commercial Pacific Cable Company which had ceased trading. The cable was used for repairs.
1971	BRACAN Carried out a route survey with Retriever (5)

Barry Waterhouse, who served on Recorder (3) on her first cable voyage, shares the following memories:

My first ship at sea was the Recorder (a new building) and I joined her as a junior engineer of 21 on the 16th August 1954 under Tyne Bridge at Newcastle after her acceptance trials. About 10 days later we sailed for the Thames and the Telcon works to load cable before sailing for Singapore to relieve the Stanley Angwin.

The Captain was Capt. Muccleston from Louth, Chief Engineer "Thunder" McKinley, Second Engineer Denis Dawson, and the bo’sun was Harold Yon, who hailed from the island of St. Helena. The crew was Spanish.

However, during fog in the Thames estuary (it must have been the 27 th August 1954), we were in collision with a Danish ship, the Uruguay, sustaining severe damage to the starboard side in line with the break of the poop deck. The collision destroyed the hospital on the boatdeck, one of the lifeboats (stained and varnished at that time – not white as in the photograph below), and several crew cabins.

The damage was temporarily repaired by, if I recall correctly, Siley, Cox & Weir on the Thames, and we then returned to the Tyne for permanent repairs, which involved renewal of about 22 plates, accommodation repairs, and a new lifeboat etc. We were there about 5 - 6 weeks.

After repairs we sailed down to Greenwich, but then, instead of going to Singapore, we were based on the Gibraltar station, spending a lot of time operating out of Falmouth and were actually in Falmouth for Christmas 1954.

The Recorder did eventually take up the Singapore station but when I’m not sure.

I left the Recorder in April 1955 after about 8 months, while she was in drydock in Grimsby, and was transferred to the Edward Wilshaw.

Recorder moored on the Thames at Greenwich in September 1954. The damage caused in the collision can be seen towards the stern.

See also the Stamps page on CS Recorder (3)

Last revised: 19 January, 2011

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You can help - if you have cable material, old or new, please contact me. Cable samples, instruments, documents, brochures, souvenir books, photographs, family stories, all are valuable to researchers and historians.

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—Bill Burns, publisher and webmaster: Atlantic-Cable.com