2MT WRITTLE
1922-2022
THE CENTENARY OF BRITISH
RADIO BROADCASTING
By Tim Wander
A New, Limited Edition Book signed by the author – was sold out - but 9 copies just returned in un-opened box!
Only 300 copies were published in 2022, the centenary year of the radio station (and the BBC!) in support of the Writtle Heritage centenary events.
Each book signed by the author - 208 Pages Full Colour A4.
With many new, previously published and colourised photographs.
The completestory of Britain’s first regular scheduled radio station that changed theworld.
On 14thFebruary 1922 a weak and static-laden radio signal crackled out from the old army hut on the edge of a partly flooded muddy field in the small Essex Village of Writtle. The new art of radio broadcasting had found a home, and Britain gained her first official voice. The new radio station, call sign 2MT, would faithfully appear on the air every Tuesday evening at eight o'clock for almost a year. But station 2MT was much more than an ‘experimental’ radio station. The whole thingwas conceived and run by the irrepressible Captain Peter Pendleton Eckersley. A brilliant engineer, for the first time in history ‘PPE’and the 2MT team offered its listeners news and records, live performances, impromptu comedy sketches, stories, the first ever broadcast radio play, quizzes,competitions, dedicated children’s sections, impersonations, burlesque entertainments and even parodies of grand opera. Nothing like it had been heard before - it was a new type of entertainment for a new age…. And it gave us theBBC.
NOT available on Amazon or book shops.
Tim is best known as an historic consultant, author andlecturer and is acknowledged to be a world authority on history of the Marconi Company, Guglielmo Marconi’s early work and the birth of radio broadcasting. He has published numerous books including ‘Marconi on the Isle of Wight’,‘Marconi’s New Street Works 1912 –2012’, ‘2MT Writtle – The Birth of British Broadcasting’, ‘The Marconi Hall Street Works 1898-1912’ and a detailed accountof the first five years of Marconi’s work, ‘Guglielmo Marconi – Building the Wireless Age’.