The 11th Hour,

of the 11th Day,

of the 11th Month.

In Northern France the war dragged on in the mud and blood to its final inevitable and bitter end.

The final Allied push towards the German border began on 17th October 1918. As the British, French and American armies advanced, the alliance between the Central Powers began to collapse. Turkey signed an armistice at the end of October, Austria-Hungary followed on 3rd November.

Germany began to crumble from within. Faced with the prospect of returning to sea, the sailors of the High Seas Fleet stationed at Kiel mutinied on 29th October. Within a few days, the entire city was in their control and the revolution spread throughout the country.

On 9th November the Kaiser abdicated; slipping across the border into the Netherlands and exile. A German Republic was declared and peace feelers extended to the Allies. At 5am on the morning of November 11th an armistice was signed in a railroad car parked in a French forest near the front lines.

The terms of the agreement called for the cessation of fighting along the entire Western Front to begin at precisely 11am that morning. The Armistice for the ‘War to End All Wars’, the First World War, was signed on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918. It brought peace to a shattered Europe.

After over four years of bloody conflict, the Great War was at an end.

'...at the front there was no celebration.'

It was a wireless message that had been the first, opening act of war. Now it was also to be the last. At 5.40am on 11th November 1918, W.H. Chick, a Marconi Company special duty wireless operator at Marconi House in the Strand, intercepted the long-awaited message sent out from the Eiffel Tower station by Marshal Foch. The message read:

Among the hundreds of wireless operators who were tuned to Eiffel Tower’s familiar grunting tones was Guglielmo Marconi in his apartment in Rome. One can imagine the emotions of the man who had in his youth foreseen wireless as a means of saving life and who, until his death, never ceased to look upon it as a potential means of promoting peace and understanding between the nations.

On the 21st June 1922 Mr. Godfrey Isaacs unveiled a memorial plaque in Marconi House in the Strand to the 348 men of the Marconi Companies who had lost their lives in the war, the bulk of whom were sea-going wireless operators of the Marconi International Marine Communication Company.

The plaque, which many years later was moved to the entrance hall of the new Marconi House building at the Chelmsford New Street works and more recently to Chelmsford Cathedral, bears the words:

‘THEY DYING SO, LIVE.’

The world had paid a terrible price.

The First World War was truly ‘the Great War’. Its origins were complex. Its scale was vast. Its conduct was intense. Its impact on military operations was revolutionary. Its human and material costs were enormous. And its results were profound.

The war was a global conflict. Thirty-two nations were eventually involved. Twenty-eight of these constituted the Allied and Associated Powers, whose principal belligerents were the British Empire, France, Italy, Russia, Serbia, and the United States of America. They were opposed by the Central Powers: Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire.

Despite huge advancement and technical breakthroughs the still young technology of radio failed to provide a man-portable wireless. In reality communication for most of the war was still dependent on telephone or telegraph wires which were always broken by shell-fire and difficult to protect. Artillery and infantry commanders were rarely in voice communication and both usually lacked 'real time' or accurate intelligence of battlefield events.

Wireless equipment in four short years of war had developed almost beyond all recognition and by 1918 all three services came to increasingly depend on its operation. But it had come almost too late as for most of the First World War infantry commanders could not easily call down artillery fire when confronted by an enemy obstruction. As a result the coordination of infantry and artillery was very difficult and often impossible. Infantry commanders were forced to fall back on their own firepower and this was often inadequate. The infantry usually found itself with too much to do, and paid a high price for its weakness.

This was often not the fault of the engineers as by 1917 the equipment was available. It was more a failing in the British high command who were slow to adopt new ideas and new technologies and were always fearful that wireless would give away more than it delivered.

During the war the British and French were particularly successful in mobilising their economies. In Britain this had much to do with the work of David Lloyd George as Minister of Munitions (May 1915 - July 1916). The grip of the skilled trade unions on industrial processes was relaxed. Ancient lines of demarcation were blurred. Women replaced men in the factories.

On the technical front research and development were given a proper place in industrial strategy. It also ensured that in any future war, scientists, engineers, and mechanics would be as important as soldiers.

Casualties in World War One, both military and civilian, are estimated at some 37 million men, woman and children. Over 16 million people were dead and another 21 million had been wounded out of some 65 million men mobilised. As the war subsided, a virulent new strain of the influenza virus, misleadingly known as the 'Spanish flu' became a worldwide pandemic that killed over 50 million more people. It had been a mechanised and brutal slaughter on a scale previously considered unimaginable. The men who survived it, wounded or not would always carry the scars and memories.

But through it all the science of radio had come of age. The 'War to End All Wars' brought a tremendous cost in suffering, death and waste, but as usual, war always spurs the advance of technology. This rapid technical development in hardware was met by an equal number of young men both fascinated by, and now well trained in, the new art of wireless communication. By the armistice of 1918, radio had been transformed from an inventor’s plaything, into a faithful workhorse.

As the armistice came into effect, it was clear that the political, cultural, and social order of the whole world had been drastically changed forever. In the aftermath of war, new countries were formed and old ones were abolished. It was a time of great changes, and new hopes for the future.

As the troops came marching home, the giant Marconi Company returned to its peace time activities. It was now staffed by men who had survived the war, and whose baptism of fire had included working with radio equipment capable of transmitting speech. The Marconi Company now began development of a new range of high power wireless telephony transmitters. These were known as ‘panel sets’, each capable of transmitting at different output powers, 0.25 kW, 1.5 kW, 3 kW and 6 kW.

The Company also started design work on a range of high power thermionic valves to match the requirements of these new transmitter designs. In March 1919, just four months after the end of the First World War, one of the new 3 kW wireless telephony transmitters was installed at the Ballybunion station in Ireland under the direction of Captain Henry Joseph Round who had returned to the company.

The social structure of the world had also been torn apart by the World War and the new world was ready to listen, hungry for instant news. The same war that had driven the technology, science and engineering to develop the equipment would now make it possible for the general public to ‘listen in’ as massive quantities of war surplus equipment were freely available. Also tens of thousands of young men came home to this new world having either been trained in, or having seen wireless communication and radio systems being used at sea, or in the trenches and skies of Northern France.

In the commercial world, at first the powerful Marconi Company was still convinced that Morse code was the most reliable and efficient form of communication between ships and between ship and shore. There was a widely held belief that speech transmission, known then as telephony, had no real place in the evermore crowded ether. This attitude did not last for long, but it took two years of struggle by the radio amateur community to change it.

Having entered the war as little more than a curiosity, wireless communication had in four short years become essential for the conduct of any military force, be it on land, sea or in the air.

Wireless, both telegraphy and telephony and direction finding equipment were in the words of the First Lord of the Admiralty, Admiral Sir Henry Jackson:

'a major strategic advantage which brought about the meeting of the British and German fleets at the battle of Jutland on 31^st May 1916'.

He placed the credit for this with Captain Henry Joseph Round. Jackson was himself an early wireless inventor and pioneer and he had worked alongside the young Marconi as early as 1896, championing the young Italian inventors efforts and cause when many others doubted that wireless had any practical use.

As the new decade dawned, the time was simply right for a new age of radio broadcasting to occur. Built on the back of the huge technical progress made during the war, in a Britain struggling to return to normality after the horrors of the First World War, the first British radio broadcasts made their lonely voices heard.

Most of the RFC engineers joined the Marconi Company after the war and the skills and equipment they had developed were crucial in the rapid development of civilian air traffic wireless, air traffic control systems and civilian air traffic direction finding systems.

Then a group of young Marconi engineers, born into the Victorian age, fresh from Military service during the war and now working for the huge Company that Marconi had built, took their stride into history. They now built the foundations of what became British radio broadcasting.

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