In her biography of her father Guglielmo, Degna Marconi recalled visiting her grandmother in London. Annie Jameson was nearing the end of her life but could vividly remember the night in 1894, some 30 years previously, when her youngest son woke her and told her to follow him upstairs to the attic of the family home where he was conducting his experiments.
“As she watched,” wrote Degna, “he bowed his blond head over a telegraph key set on a workbench under a window and tapped it delicately with one finger. From the far end of the long double room came a gentle, insistent sound. A bell was ringing, little louder than the crickets but with concise, wakeful clarity. Between the transmitter under his hand and the tiny tinkling lay nothing but air.”
The 20-year-old Guglielmo Marconi had invented a simple radio transmitter and receiver and the first person to see it was his immensely proud mother. Thanks to his contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy, Marconi was to become one of the 20th century’s most famous Italians. But it was his Irish mother, Annie, who was the more encouraging parent. While allowing Guglielmo indulge his scientific speculations, his father, Giuseppe, was sceptical about the practical applications of his son’s tinkerings.
However, Annie was a determined woman and unwavering in her support of her son.
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Indeed, she had already proven her courage by going against the wishes of her own family to marry the man she loved.
Born into the Jameson distilling family, she grew up in Daphne Castle outside Enniscorthy, Co Wexford. Annie was a talented singer who was studying bel canto in Bologna when she met Giuseppe Marconi, a widowed landowner with a young child.
Her family was opposed to the relationship but Annie continued to stay in touch with Giuseppe and, when she was of age, the lovers agreed to meet in Boulougne-sur-Mer on the north coast of France where they were married. They then returned to the Villa Grifone in Pontecchio, on the outskirts of Bologna, to begin their own family.
Annie was determined to raise her two sons as she saw fit. She brought them up in her own Anglican faith, despite the fact they were baptised Catholics, and taught them English. Thus, when her youngest son found that the ministry of posts and telegraphs in Italy was not interested in his invention, Annie took matters into her own hands and got in touch with members of her family living in Ireland and Britain to see if they could help.
In February 1896, Annie and Guglielmo climbed aboard the train at Bologna to begin their journey to London. At Dover, a customs officer opened the box containing Marconi’s apparatus, all wires, batteries and mysterious dials. Suspecting it was a bomb, the customs officer manhandled the equipment, damaging it beyond repair.
Things improved when they reached Victoria Station where they were met by Annie’s nephew, Henry Jameson-Davis. He helped his young cousin build a new apparatus and patent the technology. After Marconi gave a series of demonstrations to William Preece, the chief engineer of the Post Office, the British were convinced.
Within a few years, Marconi’s wireless telegraphy was being employed across the world – Ireland, of course, becoming an important base for Atlantic transmitting stations – and the Italian was a global celebrity. It was during this first flush of fame that another Irishwoman entered his life.
Marconi met 19-year-old Beatrice O’Brien in England in 1904. Brought up in Dromoland Castle, Co Clare, Beatrice was one of the daughters of Lord and Lady Inchiquin.
She was staying on Brownsea Island off the coast of Dorset when she met the famous Italian. Her mother opposed the match, and neither was Beatrice initially sure, but eventually, in 1905, the couple were married. According to Degna Marconi, Guglielmo and Beatrice’s second-born daughter, Lady Inchiquin immediately refused to get her tongue around her new son-in-law’s first name and referred to him instead as “Marky”.
The marriage did not last. In her biography of her father, Degna recalled a cruise around the coast of Italy in 1921.
Her father tinkered in the wireless cabin of the yacht while her mother chatted with her sisters who helped to “recreate her feeling of belonging”.
The Marconis divorced in 1924; both remarried. Marconi died in 1937. Neither Degna, living in England, nor her brother, in the United States, could get to Rome for the funeral in time. But Beatrice, drawn by “love and loyalty”, saw him lying in state.
“I went alone,” she wrote to Degna, “and mingled with the crowd and it helped me and gave me a sense of peace and that all the pettiness and misunderstandings of this material life had slipped away and that he understood so many things better now.”