History of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications
from the first submarine cable of 1850 to the worldwide fiber optic network

CS Lady Denison Pender
by Bill Glover

CS LADY DENISON PENDER

Built in1920 by Fairfield Ship Building and Engineering Co., Glasgow

Length 269.2 ft Breadth 38.1 ft Depth 23.8 ft Gross tonnage 1984

Built for the Eastern Telegraph Company as a repair ship and fitted out by the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company. Transferred to Imperial & International Communications Ltd in 1929 and then to Cable & Wireless Ltd in 1934. Based at Aden, undertaking repairs in the Indian Ocean and down the east coast of Africa as far as Zanzibar up until 1938. From 1938 until the outbreak of war carried out repairs in the West Indies.

For the duration of the war the crew consisted of men from the island of St Helena. In 1940 returned to Aden surviving a number of raids by Italian bombers. Moved again following these raids, this time working in the Atlantic. In January 1943 diverted the Malaga - Azores cable, belonging to Italcable, into Gibraltar and Las Palmas. Two months later, while acting as Convoy Commodore on a run from Gibraltar to Freetown, Sierra Leone, she had a narrow escape when a torpedo passed under her stern. All the other merchant vessels in the convoy were sunk.

During 1944-5 undertook repair work in the North Atlantic, South America, Pacific and Caribbean, most of this work being carried out without any escorts. Moved back to Aden in 1946 and worked there and off the Brazilian coast until 1958, returning to the West Indies for a further five years. Withdrawn from service in 1963 and scrapped in Belgium.

Research Material Needed

The Atlantic Cable website is non-commercial, and its mission is to make available on line as much information as possible.

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.

If you have any cable-related items that you could photograph, copy, scan, loan, or sell, please email me: billb@ftldesign.com