About Tim Wander

Author, Journalist, Historic Consultant, Guest Speaker

Tim is always pleased to provide help and support about any aspect of the history of wireless, broadcasting and the Marconi Company. Over 35 years and 11 books, he has amassed a huge photographic and book/document archive and answers his many emails as soon as possible.

His books are now considered to an important historic record and he has appeared at four of the last five prestigious Isle of Wight Literary Festivals. A record!!

He regularly provides reviews and advice for academic papers and students, contributes as author or reviewer to numerous journals and has considerable radio, broadcast and TV experience.

Tim has appeared on ITV’s About Our Coast, Celebrity Antiques Road Show, a major documentary for Italian TV (on Marconi) and even Songs of Praise – as the historic consultant! He has also written and presented a series of eight programs for the subscription Titanic Channel and has been the script consultant on a large number of TV shows including Channel 5’s recent documentary on the Savoy Hotel, Andrew Marr’s, Making of Britain and Michael Portillo’s Great Railway Journeys.

He continues to work with a number of museums and collections and has designed and compiled a wide range of historic displays, information boards and guidebooks.

Raised and educated in Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire, an Honours Degree in Computer Science from Aston University in Birmingham brought him by chance to work at GEC-Marconi Communication Systems’ Writtle site, near Chelmsford in Essex. He spent the first 17 years of his career with various arms of the GEC-Marconi Company worldwide, designing, developing and managing radio, telecommunication and control system projects. Tim left Marconi's in 1999 and spent three more years in senior management within the electronics industry in the City of London. Tim then decided on a career change, finding time to race and restore a number of classic Jaguar E type cars while working aa Senior Project Manager for a series of major building projects around the world.

Tim has written and edited many other books, including "Marconi on the Isle of Wight", produced for the centenary of the closure of the Alum Bay, Royal Needles Hotel station in 2000. A long held interest in early radio sets inherited from his father and a passion for the early days of radio broadcasting led him to write "2MT Writtle - The Birth of British Broadcasting", first published in 1988. After 22 years the second, completely rewritten and much larger edition was published in October 2010. In 2012 he published the story of the world’s first purpose built wireless factory – "Marconi’s New Street Works 1912-2012. Birthplace of the Wireless Age." In 2013 he also published the completely rewritten story of "Marconi on the Isle of Wight", telling the full story of Marconi’s earliest stations and experiments. In 2014 "The Marconi Company and Writtle" was published together with Heritage Writtle. Also in 2014, after 12 years of research and having visited nearly every site he has published "Guglielmo Marconi Building the Wireless Age" - the full and detailed story of the first five years of Marconi's career from 1896 to 1901.

In 2015 as the historian and curator for the Hall Street Museum project in Chelmsford, Tim produced a series of display boards, and a dedicated new book with all proceeds donated to the project - Marconi's Hall Street Works 1898 -1912 - The World's First Wireless Factory. He also gave a series of very well received and full to capacity lectures as part of this program.

In 2016 he was asked to become the Consultant and Curator Sandford Mill Museum for Chelmsford City Museum Service, looking after the extensive technology collection and of course the original Writtle 2MT Hut. He is also the historic firearms consultant for the Essex Regiment Museum there. He is now actively preparing a major exhibition and lecture series to celebrate the centenary of Dame Nellie Melba’s historic radio concert in June 2020.

In 2018, after 4 years of research Tim published his very well received Culver Cliff and the Isle of Wight at War. For nearly thirty years Tim has been fascinated with Culver Cliff and the military and social history of the Isle of Wight. This book has brought together many of his diverse interests in history and technology and paints a new picture of just how close the Isle of Wight came to invasion in 1940.

His new book, Where PLUTO Crossed the Path, co-written with noted Island Historian John Farthing was released in October 2019. It turns the established history of the Second World War on its head, with a major reassessment and reappraisal the famous PLUTO project and to understand exactly what happened with this hugely ambitious, but ultimately doomed project. They quickly realised that there were many problems with the written history, many questions and many statements that didn’t make sense. Order via this website.

I have a associated website where the IoW Film Club has put up a lot of my video work and archive footage and recent TV programs.

Tim has also written a series of papers and pamphlets about early wireless including Marconi in Northern Island, The Hall Street Works, The Marconi Company in WW1 and some specialist papers for Bembridge Fort and Sandown Battery Barracks on the Isle of Wight.

He has also written several radio plays based on the New Street and Writtle broadcasts, with a new one just completed. TV and film scripts are in production.

More books are planned and you can keep track of Tim’s new and past titles and contact the author via .

With what little time he has left, Tim’s hobbies still include a passion for early Jaguar cars, including a period of historic motor racing and all types of shooting, especially with vintage and historic long arms.

Tim is now a Freelance Author, Lecturer, Consultant and Project Manager based on the Isle of Wight. Once upon a time he managed to spend a lot of time in the beautiful mountains of Southern Spain with his old dog and even older Jeep but for the last five years he has now been working on the equally beautiful Isle of Wight, documenting and recording the lost sites and technologies of the Islands' industrial and wartime heritage.