Mss Eur F699/1/2/7

This sub-series consists of folders of telegrams and copies of telegrams received from various individuals, which are mostly addressed to the Governor General or the Private Secretary to the Governor General, and a register volume in which the telegrams were recorded. (The successive Private Secretaries during this period were Humphrey de Bohun Devereux, during the first five months of Charles Canning’s tenure as Governor General, Gerald Chetwynd Talbot from 1 August 1856, and Lewin Bentham Bowring from 1 April 1858 until 1862.)

The telegrams were originally contained in bundles of one hundred telegrams, each with a labelled board on the top and a board on the bottom of the bundle. After they were received, the telegrams were each assigned a running number, and this number was written either on the reverse of the telegram or on a piece of paper wrapped around the telegram, along with the sender, who the message was addressed to, the date, and the subject of the message. This information was presumably written by the Private Secretary to the Governor General.

The spellings of names of individuals and places often differ between how they are written on the messages themselves, and how they are written on the reverse sides or wrappers of the telegrams. The cataloguer has tended to use the spellings on the reverse sides or wrappers of the telegrams in the file level descriptions.