January 2018 Speaker
Our first meeting of the New Year was an excellent one, attended by many of the members – Alan Pamphilon, the well-known leader of local walks and Chelmsford historian, gave us a talk on Chelmsford’s Industrial Heritage. The talk was based loosely on one of his walks. Chelmsford’s rich and varied industrial heritage includes many ground-breaking inventions. We were told about many of them including a rope maker's walk and one of the many local iron foundries. He also talked about Crompton and Marconi amongst others, and told us that as Marconi radio operators were trained in the Hall Street factory, that the radio operators on the Titanic would have been trained in Chelmsford. When the surviving radio operator, Harold Bride, arrived safely in New York on the Carpathian, it was Guglielmo Marconi who helped him off the ship.