Thunderstruck

THE PRISONER OF GLACE BAY

BEATRICE AND MARCONI MARRIED ON MARCH 16, 1905. They expected a relatively private ceremony but arrived at St. George’s Church to find Hanover Square filled with what one newspaper called “a vast crowd of onlookers.” That morning Alfred Harmsworth’s latest creation, the Daily Mirror, the first British newspaper to make regular and lavish use of photographs, had filled its front page with half-tone images of Marconi and Beatrice, a display technique the newspaper had pioneered a year earlier when it published a full page of photographs of the king and his children. The police stood guard, not as protection from the crowd but because two days earlier the O’Briens had received a letter that warned that Marconi would be killed as he approached the church. The ceremony came off peacefully. Marconi gave Beatrice a diamond coronet, which she suspected had been her mother’s idea. He also gave her a bicycle. “That,” she said, “was really his own idea.”

They retired for their honeymoon to Beatrice’s ancestral home, Dromoland, in Ireland. When she was growing up, the castle had been full of clamor, generated by her thirteen siblings and their friends, but now it struck her as gloomy and lonely. They were assigned rooms in the “visitors” part of the castle, apparently for privacy, but this only amplified the alien feel of the place.

Alone now with her husband (apart, that is, from a small battalion of servants), Beatrice quickly discovered that Marconi was not always the gentleman of charm and good cheer she had come to know on Brownsea Island. He revealed himself to be moody and volatile. They fought, and afterward he would storm from the castle and walk off his rage in the woods, alone. They ended their honeymoon early, after only a week, ostensibly because Marconi had to get back to London on business.

In London they first checked into a small hotel near Marconi’s office, but Marconi realized it was hardly the place for his new bride. They moved to something far grander, the Carlton Hotel at Haymarket and Pall Mall, which the Baedeker’s Guide called “huge and handsome.” For Beatrice, despite her wealthy upbringing, the experience of the Carlton was novel and wonderful.

She found the hotel’s location irresistible and one day decided to take a walk, alone, to explore the surrounding streets. The National Gallery and Trafalgar Square, with Nelson’s column, were two blocks east, St. James’s Park just south. Piccadilly was an easy walk northwest, but as a destination was not, for the time being, a terribly appealing one. The city had resolved that because of increased traffic the street had to be made far wider. Demolition was under way and soon would bring the destruction of many treasured places, among them Nevil Maskelyne’s Egyptian Hall.

“When she got back,” Degna wrote, “her husband met her at the door of their room, storming that she was henceforth to tell him before she left exactly how long she would be gone, and street by street where she planned to be.”

ONCE AGAIN HE PLUNGED into work. He was compelled to acknowledge that his company now confronted a difficult choice. His ship-to-shore business had grown slowly, but it had indeed grown, until by the end of 1904 his company had equipped 124 ships and 69 land stations in Britain, America, Canada, and elsewhere. The Italian Navy had selected his equipment for its warships, and the Italian government had contracted for a giant station in Coltano, now under construction. Moreover, Parliament at last had enacted a law that eased the strictures of the British Post Office monopoly over telegraphy by allowing customers for the first time to turn in messages at their local telegraph offices for delivery to ships at sea. Marconi had also agreed to take Ambrose Fleming back into the company, not because of some newfound adoration for the man but because he recognized that Fleming’s two new inventions, his cymometer and his thermionic valve, had the potential to greatly improve wireless transmission. One clause of the agreement—and no doubt the most important—gave Marconi the rights to use the inventions while allowing Fleming to retain ownership of the underlying patents.

But this empire had become complex and costly, and it promised to become more so. In Canada, the company opened nine new shore stations along the routes ships took when approaching the St. Lawrence River. Such stations tended to be remote and required that their operators and managers live on the grounds, a reality that imposed its own set of costs. The new station at Whittle Rocks, for example, required six kitchen chairs, for a total of $2.88; one armchair, for $1.75; two kitchen tables, for $5; two dresser stands, $22; one rocking chair, $3; and one reading chair, $4.25. Every station got a clock, for $2.35, and at least one bed. And telegraphers had to eat. In April 1905 the new station at Belle Isle paid $42.08 for salt pork, Fame Point spent $43.78 on bacon, and Cape Ray spent $42.37 on lard. And of course every station needed a rubber stamp. Each got one, for 34 cents.

Costs accumulated quickly. In August 1905 Marconi’s bookkeepers found that the cash expenditures of his Canadian operations for just that one month totaled $46,215, more than triple the amount in the previous August. Onetime expenses accounted for much of this increase, but once the new stations began operating and breaking down and freezing and losing aerials to windstorms; once they began hiring employees and cleaners and stationers and freight haulers; once they started buying acid for batteries and paying for postage, telephone service, and land- line telegrams—once all these expenses became routine, they too began to increase, like yeast in a warm oven. Especially wages and salaries. In 1904 Glace Bay alone paid wages and salaries totaling $8,419. This figure would more than double by the end of 1907. Living and general operating expenses at the station increased at an even faster rate, as they did throughout Marconi’s empire.

To Marconi, all this was just business. It didn’t interest him. As always his true passion lay in transatlantic communication, and here things still were not going well. His Glace Bay station had been disassembled, and the timber and other components had been moved to a new inland location nicknamed Marconi Towers. He had recognized that his Poldhu station also had become obsolete and would have to be replaced by one even larger and more powerful.

For the first time he began to wonder whether he should jettison his transatlantic dream and settle for something more quotidian, perhaps focus his company on ship-to-shore communication. There was little doubt about the direction his directors would choose if left to decide on their own.

To better evaluate his future course, Marconi decided to visit the new station in Nova Scotia. In spring 1905 he booked passage aboard the Campania for himself and Beatrice. Despite the deepening financial crisis facing his company, they traveled first class, reflecting yet again a trait that Degna Marconi considered elemental to his character. As she put it, “All he asked of life was the best of everything.”

On this voyage Beatrice would come to feel herself more prisoner than passenger and would learn that her keeper was quirkier than she had imagined.

THEY SETTLED INTO THEIR STATEROOM, which had more in common with a Mayfair flat than a ship-borne cabin. Beatrice was startled when Marconi began pulling numerous clocks from his trunk and placing them at various points in the cabin. She knew of his fixation on time. He gave her many wristwatches, but she consigned them all to her jewelry box where, according to Degna, “she left them all unwound to be spared their multiple ticking.” Now she found herself surrounded by ticking clocks, which Marconi set to display the time in Singapore, Chicago, Rangoon, Tokyo, Lima, and Johannesburg.

Once the voyage was under way, he disappeared into the ship’s wireless cabin, to conduct further experiments and to manage the receipt of news for the onboard newspaper, the Cunard Bulletin.

Left to herself, Beatrice sought to enjoy the ship, one of the most luxurious in Cunard’s fleet. The dining saloon that served first-class passengers had Corinthian columns and ten-foot ceilings. A central shaft rose thirty feet through the decks above to a dome of stained glass at the top of the ship. The crew of 415 included more than one hundred stewards and stewardesses, who sought to satisfy every legal need. The ship served four meals a day, prepared by forty-five chefs and bakers and their helpers. As Beatrice walked the thrumming decks, she delighted in the celebrity accrued to her by the fact of her marriage to Marconi.