Cadw accused of failing to protect globally-important Welsh Marconi site

Martin Shipton

An historian has accused the Welsh Government’s heritage arm Cadw of failing to protect a globally-important industrial heritage site near Caernarfon.

John Rowlands, who lives in Anglesey, wrote what is considered to be the definitive account of the early 20th century Marconi wireless transmitting station.

But he says that despite formal recommendations that the site should be legally protected since at least 2016, Cadw has yet to act.

Under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979, anyone – including members of the public – can recommend sites to Cadw for so-called “scheduling” or legal protection. The Gwynedd Archaeological Trust conducted a survey and recommended in 2016 that the Marconi “Carnarvon” station – as it was always known by the company – should be granted protected status. Members of the public had highlighted the site two years earlier than that.

Full assessment

Yet despite this, argues Mr Rowlands, Cadw has consistently failed to progress with a full assessment and recommend that Welsh Ministers should protect the site.

Mr. Rowlands said: “The Marconi transmitter site, which by 1925, hosted three vast antenna arrays and saw the proving of new transmitter technologies, is widely recognised in the wireless heritage community as being of global significance in commercial wireless development. In September 1918, the first ever direct transmission between the UK and Australia was made from Welsh soil at ‘Carnarvon’..

“While Cadw has been almost immediate in responding to recommendations relating to UNESCO and the slate industry, it has completely failed to protect the Marconi site for at least a decade.

“Rather than help Wales be proud of its Marconi heritage, Cadw seems intent on doing nothing. It says it has such a lack of money that it can’t send someone to look at the site in any detail. Cadw keeps saying the site is ‘complex’, even though my work has given Cadw an in-depth understanding of the site at no cost to the taxpayer. I think this inaction by Cadw is a tragedy for the nation and the Welsh Government should address the failures there as a matter of urgency.”

Grateful

A Cadw spokesperson responded: “We are grateful to Mr Rowlands for his detailed analysis, which will assist with our assessment of the Marconi site. Though it is not presently designated as a nationally important scheduled monument, national planning policy in Wales provides a safeguard against harmful development at Marconi as it presumes in favour of the physical protection of nationally important archaeological remains (whether scheduled or not) and their settings.”

Gugliemo Marconi is also well-known for successfully transmitting the first ever wireless messages to go over the sea in 1897, from Flat Holm to Lavernock Point in the Vale of Glamorgan.

Recently, however, while his scientific achievements remain unquestioned, other less palatable parts of his life have come under scrutiny.

He was a member of Mussolini’s Fascist Party and had a prominent role in blocking Jews from membership of the Academy of Italy.

Ethiopia

Marconi was also an enthusiastic supporter of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, which resulted in the deaths of many thousands of people.

He joined the Fascist Party in 1923, a year after Mussolini came to power, later becoming a member of the Fascist Grand Council.

Marconi was an apologist for fascist ideology. In a lecture he stated: “I reclaim the honour of being the first fascist in the field of radiotelegraphy, the first who acknowledged the utility of joining the electric rays in a bundle, as Mussolini was the first in the political field who acknowledged the necessity of merging all the healthy energies of the country into a bundle, for the greater greatness of Italy.”

Documents unearthed in Rome two decades ago exposed Mr Marconi as a clandestine but willing enforcer of Mussolini’s campaign against Jews years before the persecution came into the open.

As head of the Academy of Italy, the Nobel prize winner blocked all Jewish candidates at the behest of the dictator at a time when the regime still denied having any religious prejudice.

Ebreo

Marconi, revered in Italy for helping to usher in the technological age, wrote the letter “E” beside the names of Jewish scientists his colleagues had short-listed to become members of the academy. The Italian word for Jew is “Ebreo”.

Despite their prominence in archaeology, mathematics and physics, not one Jew was allowed to join during Marconi’s tenure, which started in 1930, three years before Adolf Hitler took power in Germany and eight years before Mussolini’s race laws brought his regime’s anti-Semitism into the open.

The documents were discovered in archives in Rome by researcher Annalisa Capristo, and revealed in the Israel Monthly Review.

In 1935, before the invasion of Ethiopia – then known as Abyssinia – Marconi was appointed director of Mussolini’s telegraph, telephone and wireless communications for the campaign in east Africa.

Since his death in 1937, Marconi has been remembered as a prodigy: he took out a patent on wireless telegraphy in 1896, aged 22, and won the Nobel prize for physics in 1909.

In summer 2024 a sculpture commemorating the work of Marconi was unveiled on Cardiff Bay Barrage. No mention is made of Marconi, however, because of his fascist past.

John Rowlands is the author of Marconi’s Carnarvon Station 1912-1939: Archaeological Reconstruction and History of a Trans-Oceanic Wireless Site.