The Marconi exhibition in the original company works in Hall Street, Chelmsford was opened on Friday 11 March by the Chelmsford Town Crier Tony Appleton
Below are pictures to give a flavour of the exhibition. Â On this opening day some exhibits had not yet arrived and BBC Essex had not completed their display. Â Further pictures will be added in the coming weeks.
Pictures taken on the evening of 18 March when Tim Wander spoke on Hall Street and Marconi: Building the wireless age.
Pictures taken on the evening of 25 March when Dave Monk from BBC Essex gave a presentation titled The BBC and Me and my life behind the Mic.
This is a short reminder that the public exhibition at Hall Street, Chelmsford opens this Friday 11 March at 11.00 am.
The event will formally be opened by Chelmsford’s town crier, Tony Appleton and Peter Turrall, chairman of the Marconi Veterans Association will be there to show visitors around until midday and to answer any questions. The exhibition will be open every Saturday & Sunday from 11.00am – 3.00pm with Free Entry, finally closing on Sunday 29th May 2016.
Special events planned during the open period include:
Friday 18 March at 7.00pm Tim Wander, curator, Marconi historian, author – will speak on ‘Hall Street and Marconi: Building the Wireless Age’. Tim’s book ‘Marconi’s Hall Street Works: The World’s First Wireless Factory’ is made possible by a grant from Essex Heritage Trust with proceeds from book sales going towards the exhibition. Entry £5.
Friday 25 March at 7.00pm Dave Monk, BBC Essex well known broadcaster, will speak on The BBC and Me and his life behind the microphone. Entry FREE.
Friday 1 April at 7.00pm Ray Clark, broadcaster and author – All at Sea – the exciting story of offshore radio – ‘Radio Caroline’ the true story of the boat that rocked. Entry FREE.
Thursday, 14 April 2016 at 7.00pm Tim Maitlin, Titanic historian, author and broadcaster, will speak on The Role of the Wireless in the Titanic Tragedy on the 104th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. Entry £5.
Friday, 22 April 2016 at 7.00pm Dr Elizabeth Bruton from the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford will talk on The Battle of Jutland. As we approach the centenary of the battle, she will reconsider and re-evaluate the use and impact of wireless communications upon the battle, in particular decisions made by the British commanders. Entry £5.
By the end of 1898 Guglielmo Marconi’s fledgling new Wireless Telegraph Company was just over two years old. The young Italian engineer was exhausted from endless months of intense testing and developments, trying to prove that his system of wireless communication was a viable commercial proposition. But Marconi had no customers and his company was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. However Marconi was no ordinary man. He believed in his system and he believed that the orders would come and that he would need to fulfil them.
In January 1899, in a brave, perhaps even reckless move, he opened the world’s first wireless factory in Chelmsford, employing 20 people. For a time his new factory had to scramble for sub-contract manufacture, but over the next 13 years the Hall Street Works engineers, technicians and staff were to build the foundations of a new wireless age.
Soon the Hall Street Works would send equipment to the Boer War, the Chinese Boxer Rebellion and supply the huge Poldhu and Clifden transatlantic stations. In December 1901, against all the odds, Marconi managed to receive a wireless message sent across the Atlantic Ocean, over 2,170 miles, and much of the equipment was built in the Hall Street Works. Despite Marconi and his Company becoming world famous it was still a desperate struggle to find paying customers for his new ‘wire-less’ system. On 8th May 1901 the Royal Navy would place the first order for 32 sets, which was increased to 108 sets by 1905.
The Hall Street Works then supplied all the equipment for Marconi’s growing network of coastal wireless stations and started to equip increasing numbers of civilian ships. The factory supplied customers across the globe including the Amazon Basin, Hawaii, Congo, Thailand, South Africa, India, Canada and even to both sides in the Balkan War of 1912. It was Marconi wireless equipment manufactured in Hall Street installed aboard the ill-fated RMS Titanic that saved over 730 people when the great ship was lost in 1912 and over 760 people when the RMS Lusitania was sunk in May 1915. This successful use of wireless for safety at sea effectively generated a new and vast market for Marconi’s equipment.
In the same year the Hall Street Works officially closed its doors as the huge New Street Works took over the workload and the world’s first wireless factory fell silent, apart from its wireless station across the road that continued to eavesdrop on the German fleet feeding vital intelligence to the Navy’s top secret Room 40 code breakers. It was this and all the work done at Hall Street that ensured that Britain and the Marconi Company were ready to face the extreme demands of a world now at war.
Saving the World’s First Operational Radar Station!
Bawdsey Radar wins Heritage Lottery Fund support for its Transmitter Block project
Bawdsey Radar has been awarded a Heritage Lottery Fund grant of £1.4m as part of a £1.8m project to conserve the Transmitter Block building on Bawdsey Manor Estate in Suffolk. The Transmitter Block was built in 1938 and was a key building at RAF Bawdsey, the world’s first operational radar station. The major site construction work will start in September 2016 and an exciting new exhibition will open in September 2017 allowing all visitors to explore and find out about this pioneering radar site.
The building has become a focal point for the local community on the Deben Peninsula. Christine Block, Bawdsey Radar Trustee and a Member at Suffolk Coastal District Council has commented,
“We’re delighted that the Heritage Lottery Fund has given us this funding. The Transmitter Block has always been really well supported by local people. It represents such a key moment in our recent history that the community is really excited to feel that the building is going to survive and tell its’ unique story.â€
As well as plans for conserving the fabric of the building, Bawdsey Radar will be working to develop ways, physical and virtual, in which more people can visit the site and understand the importance of the radar heritage that the Transmitter Block represents. New displays within the Transmitter Block will tell the story of radar and its significance in WW2. Radar helped win the war by playing a vital part in the Battle of Britain in 1940 and it is estimated the technology helped shorten the war by two years. An important part of the project will be providing opportunities for learning about radar’s fascinating social and scientific history, and about how the early work at Bawdsey laid the foundation for our current age of electronics leading to inventions such as GPS, accurate weather forecasting, speed safety cameras and even the microwave oven!
The following information has been received from Alan Hartley-Smith of the Marconi Heritage Group
A Marconi Exhibition will be held from 1st March 2016 at the original Marconi Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company works, Hall Street where Guglielmo Marconi set up his business in Chelmsford in December 1898 (The Company was first registered in July 1897).  As a pre-requisite of the planning permission imposed by Chelmsford City Council the developer, MAC Design and Build Ltd, has to make the building available before alteration and refurbishment work starts.  We have been invited to set up an exhibition on the ground floor of this unique building for 3 months.  It will include rare photos and videos from the archives, and possibly some artefacts, and talks by notable speakers.
This is a volunteer-led initiative by Chelmsford Civic Society and the Marconi Heritage Group in collaboration with BBC Essex.  We are thinking of asking volunteers to do 3-hour slots to man the exhibition and if you are willing to participate on this basis please contact <tpswaby@blueyonder.co.uk> to offer your services. You can also see
At the moment we are thinking of opening Friday, Saturday and Sunday 10.00-16.00 with talks on days in the week when the exhibition will be closed to the public.
We are very conscious that this event, which is being given a very high profile, should prove whether or not Chelmsford wants a Marconi Heritage and Science Centre and will go a long way to convincing CCC/ECC to recognise and support our efforts in a substantial manner.
This is the detailed story of Marconi’s intense, five year struggle from 1896-1901 to develop a reliable and practical wireless communication system. It was a constant search for distance and reliability, often in the face of appalling weather. Step by step Marconi overcame countless technical difficulties, battling seemingly insurmountable problems of physics and engineering as his embryonic system began to take shape.
It was also a battle for public, press, commercial, military and scientific acceptance. It quickly became a war of money and ideas as Marconi fought against international and state sponsored competitors who deployed every form of industrial espionage and legal challenge. Each was determined to claim a piece of the new science and try to take control of what soon became a new industrial revolution.
Twelve years in the writing and with fifteen years of research behind that – the goal of the new book was ‘simply’ to fully document the first five years of the young Guglielmo Marconi’s career. My long held passion was to pull the whole story together, step by step and site by site with as many photographs and sketches as possible. The new book tells the complete story of the difficult birth and desperate battles that took place to make a practical system of wireless communication a reality.
Throughout the story I have challenged the established history and time lines, visited every site, interviewed local historians, combed through local archives and of course recorded what still remains. I have also attempted, as a old-time wireless engineer, to re-interpret each experiment and try to understand what happened there. Hence the book contains an extensive ‘Then and Now’ Appendix along with an extensive glossary and Appendices that keep the technical sections out of the main text.
I have also included a personal chapter on Marconi the man – attempting to paint a portrait of this exceptional man, that no one alive today has met – based in part on contemporary accounts and on his reaction to the struggles he overcame. But this is not just Marconi’s story – credit is given to all the  pioneers of wireless whose names have largely been forgotten, but each of whom played their part in the amazingly rapid development of wireless communication.
In the end it was only Marconi who won through. He had the vision, self belief and force of character to build a working system and prove it under the harshest of climates. In doing so he built a huge company and a whole new industry, straight from the laboratory bench. But it was a close run thing. Many times during the first five years he nearly lost the race to tame Heinrich Hertz’s wireless waves. But what he achieved on bleak windswept cliffs and basement laboratories around Britain’s shores changed the world as we know it.
NOW Available. 750 pages, over 750 photographs – many of them never published before.
Hardback. r.r.p. £24.95 plus p&p (£3.90 signed/tracked/insured)
The first 50 copies will be signed, (dedicated if asked) Â and numbered by the author.
Offer to all Marconi Veterans and members of the Marconi Heritage Association – a signed/numbered copy of the book for £25 including postage and packing. Please email the author direct at timwander@compuserve.com for details or order through the website marconibooks.co.uk (add comment MVA or MHA member). Also available through Amazon.
Venue: Anglia Ruskin University, Marconi Building Room 001
For over 100 years the Marconi Companies’ work in Chelmsford and Essex dominated and defined the modern age of electronics, radio, radar, television and mobile communications. The Company had a massive impact on the working and social lives of tens of thousands of Essex people, as well as on the County’s townscapes, especially that of Chelmsford.
In his talk Tim Wander will focus on the the rise and fall of the Marconi Company and the wireless communication industry in Essex starting with an introduction to Marconi’s early career, focusing on the development of the Hall Street works and then tell something of the story of the New Street works until their demolition in 2012.
This will be illustrated with many slides, some previously unseen and questions will be actively encouraged at the end of the talk!
Tim Wander is currently working with the Northwood House Charitable Trust Ltd in Cowes on the Isle of Wight where he is Building and Major Projects Manager overseeing the current phases of renovation works for the large Grade II* Country House and Park.
Tim is perhaps better known as an historic consultant, author, lecturer and journalist specialising in the Marconi Company, Marconi’s early work, Chelmsford’s Industrial History and the birth of radio broadcasting.
He has published numerous books including ‘Marconi on the Isle of Wight’, ‘Marconi’s New Street Works 1912 –2012’, ‘2MT Writtle – The Birth of British Broadcasting’, ‘Marconi and World War One’ and the ‘Marconi Company and Writtle’ as well as writing numerous papers, brochures and research reports which include submissions for listed status and lottery funding. He has written several radio plays for the BBC and has just completed a detailed account of the first five years of Marconi’s work (‘Guglielmo Marconi – Building the Wireless Age’ – due September 2015).
This talk is organised by Chelmsford Science and Engineering Society http://www.chelmsfordses.org.uk/ as a special event for the Chelmsford Ideas Festival – you do not have to be a scientist or engineer to enjoy this talk and learn more about Chelmsford’s important history!
You will already have read about the efforts to acquire part of the Hall Street works for use as a heritage centre in the previous post of the 2015 AGM.
The Marconi Heritage Group in association with the Moulsham Trust now have officially launched their bid to acquire the original Marconi factory in Hall Street in Chelmsford using a public appeal through a crowd-funding approach – see <https://spacehive.com/marconiscienceworX>.
The  Old Moulsham and Central Community Trust have approached Chelmsford Sea Cadets inviting them to parade outside the Hall Street Works on Monday April 13, 2015, and they have kindly agreed to attend with their padre, who will say a few words before those present observe a minute’s silence at 19.12 hours to mark the 1912 sinking of the Titanic on April 14/15. (1912 refers to the year of the sinking not the time of day)
It is believed it will be the first such ceremony in Marconi’s home town to mark the vital role played saving lives at sea, and especially the vital role of radio equipment made at Hall Street in helping to save of more than 700 lives from the stricken Titanic.
It is hoped that as many Marconi Veterans as possible will attend.
14 April – Below is a transcript of Chris Neale’s address together with some pictures of the event.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Sea Cadets and Marconi Veterans thank you for attending tonight’s unique ceremony, on the eve of the sinking of a ship they said was unsinkable
My name is Chris Neale, I am chair of the Marconi Heritage Group, but tonight  I represent the Old Moulsham and Central Committee Trust that had the original vision for this ceremony.
It’s a special night because it is the first time that citizens of Chelmsford and the people of Essex have commemorated the part played by this, Marconi’s first wireless factory, here in Hall Street.
Marconi took over what was originally a Silk Mill back in 1898 and through his inventive genius it played a vital role in the rescue of 700 survivors of the Titanic disaster when it sank overnight on April 14 and 15th 1912.
Two young Marconi wireless telegraphy officers, Harold Bride and Jack Phillips bravely tapped out the SOS that alerted other shipping to the impending doom and Jack went down with the liner, still sending out the vital alert.
The piece of equipment these heroic young men made good use of was made right here inside this building.
Marconi always knew that his equipment would be vital in saving lives at sea and his company were already in the process of building a bigger factory in New Street, Chelmsford, which was then to see its order books filled by the demands of shipping lines all over the world as direct result of this dramatic event.
The new, purpose built factory was constructed in a matter of 17 weeks and the Hall St. manufacturing was transferred there over a single weekend and subsequently closed down.
The Trust is right now sending out its own SOS message in a bid to ‘save’ part of this iconic building for the nation
A heritage task force Marconi Science WorX is currently negotiating with the local developer who has bought this building with planning permission for six apartments and commercial space.
Our thanks tonight are directed chiefly to the Chelmsford Sea Cadets of HMS Upholder
They have admirably risen to the challenge of honouring the role played by the men and women who worked in this factory – to whom so many seafarers, including those serving particularly in the Royal Navy and Merchant Navy owe their lives.
Click on any image to enlarge
Chelmsford Sea Cadets on paradeChris Neale and members of the Chelmsford Sea CadetsChris Neale and Chelmsford Sea CadetsChris Neale and Chelmsford Sea CadetsA Minute’s SilenceA replica Marconi Marine capA replica Marconi Marine capMarconi Heritage
This talk is organised by Chelmsford Science and Engineering Society 
     
