LAST week the Gazette reported on Malvern Wells student Samuel Walter, who is urging people to switch off electricity for an hour in order to reduce carbon emissions.

Electricity is so much a part of our lives nowadays that it comes as a shock to open the Gazette for August 4, 1906, and see the headline: The Electric Undertaking: Is it A White Elephant?

The scene was a district council meeting, where its newest member Mr G A Jones had come up with some disturbing figures about the town's electricity plant.

He said that over the previous year, the works made a loss of £860, and there were only 112 consumers of electricity in the town.

He worked this out to mean that some 3,000 Malvern ratepayers were subsidising those 112 electricity users to the tune of some five shillings five pence in the pound.

Mr Jones went on to argue that it was time the committee increased its charges for electricity, inasmuch as the electric undertaking was working against the only profitable asset which the town possessed in the gas works.

He said every light added to the present system meant increased cost and the transformers were already working at a dangerous load.

Mr F W Hayes followed in similar vein, remarking that future extensions meant more expense and it was no use borrowing money faster than they could pay it off.

Mr Jephson bluntly suggested that both the gas and electricity undertakings should be sold to private companies.

When the electricity works were inaugurated, the opening ceremony was described by some as the dawn of another epoch in local history, while fears were expressed by others that this addition to the public works of the town was likely to prove a white elephant.