Cable & Wireless plc

Common card · No. 393160

Cable & Wireless plc was a British telecommunications company. The firm could trace its origins back to 1869 and the business interests of Sir John Pender, who (via the merger of three separate telegraph companies) became the first chairman of the newly-created Eastern Telegraph Company in 1872. The firm expanded largely through acquisitions of other telegraph companies, operating 22,400 miles by 1887. The company's cable services were heavily used during the First World War, and the cables themselves became targets of warfare in themselves for the first time. The interwar period saw rising competition from radio communications, such as Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company, thus the communications methods of the British Empire were merged into one operating company in 1928 to create the Imperial and International Communications Ltd; six years later, it was renamed as Cable and Wireless Limited. In 1947, Cable and Wireless was nationalised by the British government and its UK-based assets...

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