Signor Marconi's Magic Box (34 page)

As the
Montrose
approached Father Point in the estuary of the
St Lawrence, Captain Kendall kept the Canadian Chief Constable up to date: ‘Crippen is having breakfast. Suspects nothing. Your instructions carried out to the letter. Le Neve not up yet.’ The
Daily Mail
’s special correspondent sent a report, datelined Sunday, 31 July, which began:

Only one of these men was a true river pilot. The others were police officers, including Inspector Dew of Scotland Yard, who was disguised in a captain’s uniform. When they had hauled themselves aboard, Dew shook Captain Kendall’s hand, and after a glance at ‘Mr Robinson’, muttered: ‘That’s my man!’ Crippen did not hear this, but continued to pace the deck until he was confronted by Dew. He lost his composure as the Canadian Chief Constable put him under arrest. A gathering throng of excited passengers then heard a woman’s scream: Dew had found Ethel Le Neve in her cabin, and she had become hysterical and then collapsed. She too was arrested, and both were taken back to London to stand trial at the Old Bailey.

For many years after the trial, the Dr Crippen case fascinated the public on both sides of the Atlantic. Alfred Hitchcock would weave elements of the story into several of his spine-chilling films. The motive for the murder was never established beyond doubt. One theory was that Crippen had no intention of killing his wife, and wanted merely to put a stop to her infidelity: the poison he gave her was recommended as a potion for quelling the libido of sexually excitable women. But the prosecution claimed that he had
murdered her in order to get his hands on her jewellery, some of which he had pawned to pay for his flight with his lover Ethel Le Neve. Crippen always maintained that he was innocent, and impressed his prison warders with his kindly manner and personality.

In time the role played by Marconi wireless in Dr Crippen’s arrest was forgotten, but in 1910 it was a sensation, yet another triumph for the new technology with which the public were becoming daily more familiar. The
Daily Mail
, ever attentive to the curiosity of its readers, commissioned a piece by W.W. Bradfield, now deputy managing director of the Marconi Company, to explain this marvel. It was headlined ‘Pursuit by Wireless: Danger of Shipboard for Fugitives: Long Arm of the Law’. Under the subheading ‘The Magic Cabin’, Bradfield wrote:

The French newspaper
Liberté
commented:

T
he romance of the Marconi wireless telegraph was sadly not reflected in its inventor’s domestic life. While Dr Crippen was being pursued across the Atlantic, Guglielmo, Beatrice and their new son spent much of the summer at the Villa Griffone. With support from Marconi’s mother, who usually took Beatrice’s side in their disputes, they were persuaded not to end the marriage. But the situation was becoming impossible. Whenever Marconi and Beatrice spent any time together there were conflicts; then Marconi would be away for long periods without anything being resolved. Their reconciliations were always short-lived.

In September 1910 Marconi was at sea again, pursuing an ambitious scheme to set up a worldwide system of wireless communication for the Italian government. He sailed for South America with one of his more brilliant engineers, H.J. Round, and together they raised aerials from the liner with kites, picking up signals from the Irish station at Clifden from four thousand miles during the day, and seven thousand miles at night. Maximum distance, above all else, was still Marconi’s ambition.

Beatrice had two younger sisters who were ready to ‘come out’ in the London Season of 1911, when debutantes attended a round of balls before being presented to King George V and Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace. She returned to London and rented a house in the grounds of Richmond Park to the south-west of London,
joining in the fashionable round of shows and parties - the very life that Marconi was happy to enjoy himself, but attempted to deny Beatrice when he was not with her. At the very time the jury at the Old Bailey was finding Dr Crippen guilty of the murder of his wife, the marriage of the wireless wizard whose invention had caught the timid American was close to collapse. Crippen was sentenced to death, and hanged on 23 November 1910, consoled by the knowledge that his lover Ethel Le Neve had been acquitted. Under the assumed name Ethel Nelson she would live in Canada before returning to England, where she married an accountant who did not know her true identity. She was a grandmother when she died in 1967.

Beatrice made the most of her brief time in London in 1911. She told her daughter Degna:

In August Marconi took Bea away from London society and back to the wilds of Cape Breton, where she had a miserable time, plagued by summer insects, seasickness and toothache. Then, as the battle between the two of them seemed certain to lead to a grim formal separation, Marconi was called away to Italy for his first taste of war. In a now-forgotten conflict, Italy declared war on Turkey on 29 September on the thin pretext of a dispute about territory in what is now Libya. A loyal Italian patriot, Marconi was eager to serve his country, and shipped aboard the
Pisa
, which
policed the North African coastline, supporting ground troops and attacking Turkish positions. These included wireless stations built by the Marconi Company’s great German rivals Telefunken - Marconi was on board when the
Pisa
destroyed a large installation at Derna. All the while Marconi continued to experiment with the Italian wireless equipment, and from the tone of his letters home obviously enjoyed himself. He wrote to Bea, who had travelled with him as far as Taranto in southern Italy: ‘I am in the best of health and spirits. There is only one woman in the whole place, she is an old Arab. We have a splendid hospital ship here, beautifully equipped but with no nurses on board. They had to send them away for as they had no wounded to attend and nursing to do they flirted too much with the officers.’

Marconi’s mother wrote to him on 12 December 1911:

Free for a time from the pressures of company work, Marconi was in his element, enjoying once again the life of the dedicated inventor. He went ashore and tested mobile wireless equipment carried on camels, while aboard ship he had the admiring attentions of the officers, even if, as he explained to Bea, there were no romantic temptations like those offered by Atlantic liners. His company was at last prospering, paying a dividend to shareholders for the first time in 1910, and rapidly absorbing competitors in both
Britain and the United States. After a brief period in which Marconi ran the company himself, a new managing director, Godfrey Isaacs, a man of drive and vision recommended by Beatrice’s family, had been appointed in 1910. Marconi’s connections with the upper crust of English society and the business world remained crucial to his success as Isaacs embarked on a programme of establishing the Marconi companies as the foremost manufacturers and distributors of wireless telegraphy equipment in the world.

While Marconi was examining with an expert eye the Telefunken stations destroyed by Italian naval guns in North Africa, Isaacs was negotiating to put an end to the long-running rivalry with the German company. All Germany’s efforts to force Marconi to communicate with ships carrying Telefunken equipment had failed. At the same time Marconi’s companies around the world came up against what they called ‘the Telefunken Wall’ whenever they sought new customers. The licensee for Marconi patents in Germany, Austria and some other European countries was La Compagnie de Télégraphie Sans Fils, based in Brussels, and it faced collapse when the German company banned Marconi wireless from their own ships, and fought fiercely for European orders. Godfrey Isaacs managed to negotiate an end to the stalemate. A new company, the Deutsche Betriebsgesellschaft für Drahtlöse Telegraphie (DEBEG), was created in January 1911. The British and Belgian Marconi Companies had a 45 per cent stake, and Telefunken 55 per cent. All resources on ships and in shore stations were pooled, and Austrian wireless stations were soon absorbed.

At the same time Isaacs began to sue rival companies for patent infringements, and where this was not possible, to buy out the competition. Oliver Lodge, who in 1896 claimed to have sent wireless messages before Marconi, and who had developed the ‘coherer’ that Marconi copied and adapted, was a tough opponent. He had a patent on ‘syntony’ or tuning which rivalled Marconi’s, and with his friend Alexander Muirhead he had formed his own wireless company which had won contracts from the British Army. After a court action in London the Marconi Company agreed to pay
Lodge £1000 a year for the seven years his patent had to run, bought out the Lodge-Muirhead Company to close it down, and hired Lodge as a consultant at £500 a year. In America, Isaacs took action against the huge but financially unsound United Wireless for patent infringement, at a time when its directors were being prosecuted for fraud. Very rapidly the American Marconi Company attacked and defeated its rivals, absorbing NESCO, the company which had backed Reginald Fessenden, as well as United Wireless. Finally Lee de Forest, who was again facing charges of fraud and was licking his wounds in California after a second disastrous marriage and the failure of his wireless telephony system, was put out of the picture. De Forest’s backers had let him down, and though after 1918 he was to become a celebrated pioneer of radio and sound movies in Hollywood, in 1912 he was no rival for Marconi.

John Bottomley, managing director of the American Marconi Company, was able to report in 1912 that from meagre beginnings there was now $5 million available for investment. Marconi’s commercial ambitions were at last being fulfilled. By now he had acquired a Rolls-Royce and a chauffeur, and for the first time there was the prospect of a settled home life after years of travel. Beatrice took a lease on a country house in the parish of Fawley in Hampshire called Eaglehurst. It was a return to the south coast of England where Marconi had first demonstrated that wireless worked, and was only a short distance from the Haven Hotel in Poole, where there was still a research station manned by Marconi engineers. Romantic and slightly run-down, Eaglehurst had manicured lawns which led down to the seashore, peacocks which drove Beatrice mad with their screeching, and grounds in which the children could play. Degna remembered:

Marconi could have settled here, financially secure, resting on his laurels. Instead he was seldom at Eaglehurst, coming and going in his Rolls-Royce, often bringing one of his engineers to stay. Degna and her brother Giulio had a nursery at the top of a flight of stairs in one wing of the house, and their pet Pekinese, Manchu, kept guard on the landing outside, snapping and snarling fiercely at any unfamiliar visitor. It was Marconi’s habit on his rare and unannounced visits to go straight to the nursery. Manchu saw him so infrequently that he did not regard him as one of the family, but would attack him, snapping at his trousers. After a time ‘the little monster’, as Marconi called him, was taken away, much to the children’s sorrow.