Can You Hear Me Mother?

Wandering around the streets of London as I do, I always carry with me, in my head at least, a list of demolished buildings that I wished I could have seen.

The London Coal Exchange is one, which sat alongside what is now Upper Thames Street and was sacrificed at the altar of the motor car when the street was widened. A building so worthy in both history and architectural merit that Sir John Betjeman amongst others fought a long hard and as it turned out fruitless campaign in the late fifties for it’s survival, but that’s a story for another post.

One of the others which I wish I had glimpsed was the General Post Office in St Martin’s Le Grand, which was demolished in 1912.

I’ve written several posts in the past about the building and it appears that the stories keep on coming. The one I want to share today is set in the 1920s and concerns the building that replaced the General post Office, the London Chief Office, in itself a rather impressive building.

The story concerns a gentleman by the name of Dr Hugh Mansfield- Robinson. He was a Doctor of Law, a former Town Clerk for Shoreditch and a fully paid up member of the eccentric persuasion.

The Doctor was one of those people caught up in the surge of psychic investigation following the outbreak of the First World War, when many grieving relative sought some form of contact with someone lost in the conflict. There were many of these psychic’s or mediums in every city, town and village across the country and competition must have been fierce, however the good Doctor had something of an edge over his competition, as he claimed to also be an interplanetary psychic.

He first came to the public’s attention in a newspaper article of 1924, where he claimed that he had transported his celestial body to the planet Mars and had observed the population. He describes men seven to eight feet tall, while the females were over six feet. They are intensely religious’ beings, who treat atheism as a form of insanity. They have large ears sticking out on each side of the head, a huge shock of hair massed high, and a Chinese cast of features. They dine mostly on electric apples.

He alluded to their greater grasp of technology. They have great airships run by electricity. All their power is electrical, run from the harnessing of the canals and waterfalls in the mountains. They are consequently many generations in advance of us in wireless knowledge.

As to the society as a whole he says, labour strikes are unknown, the population is decentralised out of cities, and their numbers include a lower caste of beings lacking in intelligence, and with heads shaped like that of a walrus.

Obviously a bit of a ladies man, the Doctor seems to have been allured by one female in particular (and who wouldn’t!), a lady by the name of Oomaruru and they struck up a firm friendship, allowing the two of them to communicate psychically.

This very long distance relationship was all well and good, but somewhat to his surprise his revelations about the planet were received on the whole with derision. He had to come up with some sort of tangible proof that these beings existed, and guess what? He had a stroke of luck, as he explained to a collection of hacks, gathered to hear another story which they could deride. It just so happened that Oomaruru had a relative who was in charge of Mars’ main radio station and through their psychic contact he was arranging to set up two way communication between the two planets. He went on to explain that this would not take place for another two years, when in 1926 Mars would be much closer to Earth than usual.

The scientific community were eagerly awaiting this event. Many new observatories had been created to witness the planet in such close proximity (forty two million miles) and batches of experiments were planned across the world by most of the leading names in their field. It was deemed that Wednesday 27 October 1926 would be the day where Mars was at it’s closest and Boffins at Greenwich, Cambridge, Kew and the Radcliffe Observatories prepared for the evening to unfold. However Dr Mansfield- Robinson stole a march on them, presenting himself and an entourage of gentlemen of the press at the front door of the London Chief Office in King Edward Street well before opening time. (possibly it was half day closing on a Wednesday).

On admittance he strode purposely over to the Telegraph Department and with a flourish waved a piece of paper in front of the expectant journalists declaring that he had in his hand a message to the Martian race.

Unable to make out what it said, they asked for clarification, to be told that it was written in Martian and read Opesti nipitia secomba, something along the lines of fraternal greetings. He then handed the paper over to a rather bemused telegraphist, but before he relayed the message to a transmitter at Rugby the cost of the message had to be ascertained. The young Clerk had never had to send a message so far and there appeared to be no clarification in the handbook as to what rate was to be used for communicating with Mars, so his superior was summoned to grapple with the problem. In the end common sense prevailed and the Doctor was charged 18 pence per word for the radio transmission, equivalent to the long-distance ship rate. The station at Rugby received the message and explicit instruction on which wavelength to broadcast it at, 18,240 metres, and the radio signal was duly sent into the ether.

Seeking the Post Office’ stance on such goings on, the department head was asked for a comment, to which he gave a short statement, “If people wish to send messages even to the moon and the man there-on, and are prepared to pay for them, there does not seem to be any valid reason why the post office should refuse revenue.”

Extremely pleased with his mornings work the Doctor told the press that monitoring stations should be set up to the frequency that he had been given by Oomaruru to receive the Martian response, 30,000 metres, a wavelength favoured by the Martians for space transmission, adding that there may be a delay of several hours or even days before a response was to be had (presumably it was also early closing on a Wednesday at the Martian State Radio).

It’s easy to imagine hundred or possibly thousands of people hunched over small wireless receivers long into the night, hoping that they might be the first to pick up the Martian response, but sadly for them and also the good Doctor who had blown nearly ten bob on the communication, no response was forthcoming.

By the following day, the Post Office declared that no signal had been received. Robinson refused to accept the silence. He insisted that other stations might yet intercept something, and later hinted, though never once proving it that some listening posts had indeed heard a response.

The Doctor, his profile high for all the wrong reasons tried again the following year, sending the message “Mar la oi da earth. Com ga Mar” (love to Mars from Earth. God is love) from the same Post Office. Again, no signal was received, but his response was a little more fulsome. “I am advised by my telepathic friends on Mars that they did not receive our message owing to the layers of rarefied air”, Robinson explained to the press.

As you can imagine the press had an absolute field day at his expense, but the most scathing comments came from his wife Florence. “I don’t know anything about this Mars affair. I have refused to have the experiments conducted in this house while I remain in it. I don’t know whether anyone encouraged my husband but there will be no more of that foolishness in this house.”