“Bonjour. Ca va ? Comment allez-vous ?” Yes, we’d finally made contact with Canada. That’s the French speaking Quebecois town of Drummondville. And this was last week. “Mais pourquoi?”  you ask. Well, it’s another Bridgwater first! 100 years ago, this year Bridgwater was the first place in England to receive a short-wave transatlantic radio broadcast. And it came from Drummondville in Canada. So, to celebrate, we made town to town contact with our (North) American buddies to consider ideas to commemorate that anniversaire.

Well, that broadcast in October 1926 wasn’t meant for us, so we had to send it on to Bodmin in Cornwall. But the Canada Beam Marconi made wireless station at Bridgwater was the purpose-built receiving station. A message had been sent out from Bodmin to Canada and the reply came back to us

But where was this mighty hub of radiophonic innovation? Well, it was exactly on the M5 junction 24, which was a hill 60 feet above sea level in 1926 in wide open country with no screening to affect transmission and on it were 2 lines of 5 masts. One line pointing to South Africa and the other pointing across the Atlantic.

287 Feet High

The masts were 287 feet high and of course visible for miles. Bridgwater loves people noticing it. For centuries before then you could spot Bridgwater from miles away by the cluster of ships masts in the town centre as they moored up by the town bridge. When celebrated Whig radical Thomas Clarkson was on his way to Bridgwater in 1785 to commemorate another Bridgwater first (the first petition against the slave trade) he observed as he reached Cross coming down from the Mendips that he could see Bridgwater in the distance in this way. “Ah! There it is!”

In 1926 Bridgwater was at the cutting edge of global mass communication technology. Today you can insult anyone anywhere in the world just by going on social media yet in 1926 they could only dream of that wonderful opportunity.

One Square Mile

Yet again, as with cellophane and the number of nuclear power stations in one square mile, Bridgwater was leading the world and opening up a planet  speedily coming closer together.

Although in 1926 they were only just beginning to realise where this would all go. The main aspiration was for the King and President Coolidge to make the first transatlantic call thereby ‘uniting the two great capitals of the Anglo-Saxon race’. Immediately alienating Celts and Native Americans everywhere. But those were attitudes of a different time, and we’ll never see them again….er….

Although the project came about through the pioneering inventiveness of Guiglielmo Marconi and his company, he’d already sent the first radio waves from Brean Down to Steepholm (or Flatholm), it was quickly put under the auspices of the Post Office (because it ran telegraphic communications at the time) . The first Tory speakers in parliament on the subject straightaway proposed privatising it.

75 Years Later

But the magic of the moment!  75 years later I’ll never forget my first email “Oi fatty! Don’t forget the fishcakes!” Although I can’t recall now whether that was from my mum or the Mayor of Highbridge. What were those first words that passed between our ancestors to bring the Atlantic shores closer together? We can all plan for these great pithy first words or memorable famous last words and then suddenly something will go wrong and you’ll have said “I keep thinking it’s Tuesday…”

Until Marconi, people had to send messages through wires. And before that by writing on paper. And before that, well, they probably had to talk to each other. After Marconi they could do it through thin air. And not many people even understood how that worked. So, I’m not going to try to tell you. Let’s just say it’s probably magic. And let’s hear no more of Marconi. He went back to Italy and promptly became a Fascist fortunately dying in 1937 before he could be disappointed by the millions of deaths caused by it. Fascism that is, not short-wave radio.

Larry Bennett

So, the Mayor and I had a chat with some people in Drummondville Canada and this year there’ll be some link up to celebrate the anniversary. Here in Bridgwater, we also have a living expert on the subject (I don’t mean he was around in 1926) and that’s Larry Bennett who used to work at Portishead Radio and who has written a book about all this and which Monsieur Juneau obligingly held up to the screen for us to show it had reached Canada. And now Larry has written another one! This time specifically about the Bridgwater station (which I suspect most of you didn’t know about) (I certainly didn’t) Best place to find it is via his website www.larrybennett.co.uk.

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Another Bridgwater first!