Signor Marconi's Magic Box (38 page)

At dawn on 10 October the tanker appeared, and was positioned windward of the
Volturno
, from where it discharged two streams of lubricating oil. This quietened the sea enough for small boats to go out from the waiting ships to the
Volturno.
In the swell it was still difficult to manoeuvre beneath the burning liner, but by nine o’clock in the morning each of the rescue ships had taken on a share of the survivors. The German
Grosser Kurfürst
saved more than any other: sixty-seven passengers and nineteen crew members, who were taken on to New York. Another ninety survivors reached New York on board the Red Star Line’s
Kroonland
. The
Carmania
took only eleven people, as it was too large to manoeuvre close to the
Volturno.
Seven other boats, including the tanker
Narragansett
, took those they rescued to England, France and in one case a return trip to Rotterdam. Parents and children had become separated in the confusion, and it was a long while before the fate of many passengers was known.

The rescue of the
Titanic
passengers had been a sensational success for Marconi’s wireless. Because it was the largest liner in the world and had so many famous people aboard, the event received massive publicity. But the saving of those on board the
Volturno
demonstrated to shipping lines and the world’s navies the huge potential of wireless for manoeuvring ships at sea. The whole operation, from the first messages to the
Carmania
to Captain Barr’s call for an oil tanker to still the waters, had been entirely dependent on an agreed system of Morse code and distress signals, and free communication between ships of different nationalities. The wireless operators on the
Volturno
had been able to go on sending and receiving with emergency equipment after the liner’s power failed.

On 15 October the London
Daily Telegraph
, comparing the triumph of the
Volturno
rescue with the tawdry matter of the Marconi shares affair, told its readers: ‘the country on which he has showered such untold benefits has been content to single him out as an
unwilling participant in an unsavoury scandal. Surely the time and occasion have arrived when the State may well revive, if that be necessary, its standard of honour, and grant to the wizard who enabled such a triumph to be achieved in the name of humanity some fitting token of England’s gratitude for the great permanent addition he has made to what may be described as our armoury of mercy.’ Even the satirical magazine
Punch
put aside its accustomed cynicism and published an illustration of a smart-looking Marconi at a ship’s wireless station with the caption ‘S.O.S’, and Mr Punch himself, hat in hand, saying to the inventor of wireless: ‘Many hearts bless you to-day, Sir. The World’s Debt to you grows fast.’ To add to his Nobel Prize and a host of other honours, Marconi received from King George V an honorary GCVO - the Victorian Order - as a personal gift. It was presented to him at Buckingham Palace in July 1914. A month later he was a suspect foreigner on British soil.

O
n 5 August 1914, the day after Britain declared war on Germany, a British cable-laying ship, the
Telconia
, slipped quietly into the North Sea on a long-planned expedition. From the seabed it hooked up one by one five encrusted telegraph cables, then cut through them, making sure that if need be they could be reconnected to each other. These cables were the veins of Germany’s Imperial communications network, running from the German port of Emden to Vigo in Spain, Tenerife in the Canary Islands, Brest on France’s north-west coast, and on to America and the Azores. With these five cables out of action, Germany would have to rely heavily on wireless telegraphy throughout the four years of the First World War. At Nauen, just outside Berlin, the Germans had built the most powerful wireless station in the world, which could communicate with stations as far away as America and Togo in Africa. On 3 August an urgent message had been sent from there telling all German ships at sea to make for neutral ports. From the outset, wireless telegraphy changed the tactics of warfare, and the demands of war had a profound effect on the way in which the technology was exploited.

As has been noted, Germany, with few of its submarine cables remaining intact, became reliant upon wireless, while the British authorities were not at all sure what to do with it. Under the Defence of the Realm Act, hastily passed in August 1914, Britain’s
first move was to root out and close down anything that might be of use to foreign spies, and the newly appointed Secretary of State for War, Earl Kitchener of Khartoum, had no doubt where the greatest danger lay.

Shortly after war was declared, British police stations were issued with a set of photographs to enable them to distinguish instantly between potentially treacherous inhabitants and those who could be regarded as harmless. There were the ‘carrier’, the ‘dragoon’, the ‘show homer’ and the ‘racer’. Armed with these mugshots, police constables set out to do their duty. Their investigations took them into the terraced streets of small towns in the Midlands and Lancashire, up back stairs, into secret lofts where the suspects were known to be lurking. Often when they arrived their quarry had flown, and they had to wait until the rattle of a trapdoor in the loft announced their return. The warning of Lord Kitchener was taken seriously: he did not want to see any homing pigeons flying around, for he feared there was a great danger of them being used to carry messages across the Channel. Suspected spies were tracked down: a German ‘posing as a Dane’ had his pigeon loft in Doughty Street, London, raided.

The talents of the tame blue rock dove, or homing pigeon, had been known for thousands of years. With careful training these birds could be released hundreds of miles from the loft where they were raised and fly non-stop at speeds of between thirty and sixty miles an hour back to the little trapdoor of their home. How they achieved this was no better understood than long-distance wireless telegraphy, though both were thought to be influenced in some way by the earth’s magnetic field. In time of war, theory was of little value; but both wireless and winged messengers were to be of vital importance. Kitchener and the military authorities were persuaded that, if properly supervised, the homing pigeon fraternity could play a useful role, and that it would be better to license them than to ban them. A Voluntary Pigeon War Committee was formed, with the Marconi Company’s managing director Godfrey Isaacs as the wireless telegraphy representative. Over half a million
licences for the possession, carrying or releasing of pigeons were issued during the war years, including one to King George V, who had a royal pigeon loft on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk.

At the outset of the war the British Army imagined it could rely for its communications on the field telephone, telegraph cables and a few of the new-fangled wireless sets. But the highly efficient use of mobile pigeon lofts by the Germans and the French revealed the value of winged messengers when all else failed - as it often did when telegraph lines were blown to pieces by artillery bombardment. The British made great use of carrier pigeons during the Battle of the Somme, with four hundred messages flown back from the front on one September day, and five thousand sorties in all. The man who organised the operation, Lieutenant Colonel A.H. Osman, wrote in his account of the service
Pigeons in the Great War
, published in 1929: ‘The advent and improvement of wireless has been the means of doing away with the use of pigeons for many services, but for espionage, secret service and many important duties, pigeons will never be replaced . . . A pigeon silently flies through the air, there is no wave that indicates its use, nothing that indicates its point of departure or destination.’

Wireless amateurs were included along with pigeons in the Defence of the Realm Act: ‘No person without the permission in writing of the Postmaster General shall buy, sell or have in his possession any apparatus for sending or receiving messages by wireless telegraphy, nor any apparatus intended to be used as a component part of such apparatus.’

Although the British Navy had been using wireless telegraphy in its manoeuvres and exercises for more than a decade, and a beginning had been made on constructing the chain of Imperial stations by the Marconi Company, few in positions of power yet understood the potential of this relatively new technology. Their first impulse was to blow up as many of the German wireless stations which had been established around the world as soon as possible.

Under the Defence of the Realm Act the Marconi Company
was taken over by the government in August 1914. The police also tracked down and closed 2500 licensed amateur wireless installations, and 750 that had been operating illegally. However, one or two stations avoided discovery, and continued to tune in after the declaration of war. Their defiance of the law proved to be of immense value, for they found they were picking up coded signals transmitted on predictable wavelengths by the German High Seas fleet, which was equipped with the very latest wireless technology.

Two of these amateurs - a barrister, Russell Clarke, and a retired colonel, Richard Hippisley - were very well connected. They were able to pass on messages they had received illegally to Sir Alfred Ewing, who had the title Director of Naval Education. Although eavesdropping on encrypted German wireless messages had been done before the war, the fact that potentially vital information could be picked up by stations in the West End of London suggested that some of the amateurs who had had their aerials taken down, and in certain cases their equipment confiscated or sealed in cupboards, might be every bit as useful as the patriotic pigeon-fanciers.

On 14 November the
Daily Telegraph
weighed up the pros and cons of wireless ‘spying’ in wartime:

Germany had created an ingenious range of diplomatic and military codes, and was confident that any messages picked up in
Britain or America would be unintelligible to their enemies. The German High Seas fleet made free use of wireless when it was on the move, sending Morse messages in code to Zeppelins and U-boats. Great advances had been made in transmitter technology, and since around 1905 the old intermittent spark transmitters had been replaced by rotary spark generators which sent a continuous signal that was musical in tone (it was said to ‘sing’) and gave wonderfully clear dots and dashes. If the British could eavesdrop on these messages and crack the codes, Germany’s war plans would be an open book. A large number of the Marconi Company’s skilled operators who were able to accurately record high-speed Morse code volunteered for active service, and while more young men were being trained by the Naval Education Department, the only available pool of expertise was in the Wireless Societies that had been formed by amateurs.

The two amateurs Russell Clarke and Richard Hippisley, who had alerted the Admiralty to the possibility of tapping German wireless messages, were sent to Hunstanton on the north Norfolk coast to set up a listening station, and the government surreptitiously began to bring into the war effort the wireless enthusiasts whose equipment it had previously wanted to silence. They were not to transmit anything: their job was to listen in. Over a period of time these vigilantes were sworn in as special constables, and took a pledge in which they ‘solemnly and sincerely’ declared that they would not reveal to any ‘improper’ authority the contents of any messages received. Although nobody thought of them in that way at the time, this amateur wireless fraternity was the first ‘audience’ for broadcasts in Britain. They thrilled not to the sound of music, or reports of great sporting events, but to messages sent as series of numerals which when deciphered could play a crucial part in the outcome of the war.

The first network of listening stations was established along the eastern coast of Britain to monitor the movements of the German High Seas fleet, which would make sorties into the North Sea with the intention of picking off patrolling British Navy vessels. The
hope of the British Admiralty was that the navy could catch the main part of the German fleet in open sea, and inflict a devastating defeat upon it with its superior firepower. This cat-and-mouse strategy was played out numerous times throughout the first year of the war.

Wireless messages picked up by the vigilantes were sent to a team of code-breakers who worked in great secrecy in Room 40 of Admiralty House in Whitehall. When they cracked a code and were confident that they knew what the German fleet was up to, the information was passed on to the navy. In theory it was like a game of chess in which one side knows what the other’s next move is going to be. In practice, however, a great deal of valuable information was misused or wasted because of a distrust among naval command of the accuracy and value of what they were being told.

Among the many Marconi Company technicians who volunteered for active service was the engineer H.J. Round, a favourite of Marconi himself, who before the war had been developing the ‘valve’ receiver that Sir Ambrose Fleming had devised in a moment of inspiration in 1903. The valve receiver, which had been used experimentally for some time, had tremendous advantages over the crystal set or the crude but reliable ‘Maggie’: it was more sensitive, could operate at higher Morse speeds and could also carry speech. At first Round was sent to the Western Front, where he discovered that diode valve receivers could be used for pinpointing where a wireless signal had come from. He returned to Britain and set up direction-finding stations on the east coast which could plot the path of Zeppelins as they acted as lookouts for the German fleet or set out on bombing raids over England. In this way the nature of warfare was transformed by wireless, which proved of great value to Britain not so much as a technological advance on pigeons or the traditional semaphore of naval communications, but for sophisticated espionage. It was the beginning of the secret tapping of enemy signals which would play such a vital part in British intelligence during the Second World War.