Pioneer of amateur radio

Born 140 years ago today, Eugen Gerald Marcuse was one of the early experimenters with amateur radio. Long before the BBC launched its Empire Service, Marcuse was experimenting with short-wave broadcasts, transmitting speech and music to listeners across the British Empire and beyond. Although Marcuse is remembered today as a radio pioneer rather than a diarist, a single youthful journal of his from 1903 has survived and is catalogued at the British Library.

Marcuse was born in Sutton, Surrey, on 4 June 1886, one of three children. After attending local schools he entered the Crystal Palace School of Engineering in 1903 before serving an apprenticeship with Ruston and Proctor of Lincoln, manufacturers of steam engines, road rollers and tractors. His work took him abroad and, while still a young man, he developed an interest in the emerging technology of wireless communication. By 1913 he had obtained an experimental wireless licence and was conducting his own transmissions using equipment assembled from commercially available parts.

Following the First World War, Marcuse resumed his radio activities and soon became a leading figure in British amateur radio. Operating under the call sign 2NM and later G2NM, he participated in the pioneering transatlantic tests of the early 1920s and became one of the first British amateurs to establish two-way communication across the Atlantic. In 1925 he played a role in the formation of the International Amateur Radio Union and was elected one of its vice-presidents. He also relayed messages from the Hamilton Rice expedition in the Brazilian interior, earning recognition from the Royal Geographical Society.

The achievement for which he is best remembered came in 1927 when he began transmitting programmes of speech and music across the Empire using short-wave radio. These experimental broadcasts reached listeners throughout the world and anticipated by several years the BBC’s own Empire Service. Marcuse continued his radio work from Sonning-on-Thames and later Bosham, Sussex. During the Second World War he assisted the Radio Security Service, helping organise amateur volunteers who monitored radio transmissions on behalf of the authorities. He remained active in amateur radio throughout his life and died on 6 October 1961. Further information is most readily available from a pdf document available at the RADARC website.

Although Marcuse could not have claimed to be a diarist, there is a single surviving youthful journal from 1903 written during his studies at the Mechanical Engineering School, Einbeck, Germany. The 56-page volume - The Diary of Gerald Marcuse - was translated and edited by David Fry (a radio operator) according to the British Library, and published in the UK in 2022. However, there appears to be no trace online of its contents. Similarly, there’s an absence of information about a second David Fry book on Marcuse: in 2023, he seems to have published a fuller biography: Gerald Eugen Marcuse, G2NM: Pioneer of Radio.

The absence of accessible diary entries means that Marcuse’s own voice survives more readily through a taped interview recorded in the RADARC document, a year before his death. Looking back on his pioneering broadcasts, he recalled: ‘Everybody clamoured for Big Ben and nobody would give me a recording. I had to wait until 12.00 - it was the only time in those days they did it.’ Elsewhere he cheerfully admitted to ignoring official restrictions: ‘Your licence permitted you to rebroadcast? It didn’t, but I did not care in those days.’ 

Perhaps the most charming anecdote concerned the origins of his Empire broadcasts. Marcuse remembered receiving a letter from a listener in Bermuda who wrote: ‘I am enchanted with your voice which I hear every Sunday morning and I have three lovely daughters and a flourishing business. If you would like to come over you can have the pick of the daughters and the business.’