Plan to establish Marconi Museum in Clara

Just Transition funding is being sought to purchase the Marconi Collection and establish a museum in Clara to honour the Italian inventor of radio, who had strong connections to the county Offaly town.

As part of a collaborative project between Clara Heritage Society and the Clara Town Centre First Team, financial backing is being sought from Fáilte Ireland under the EU Just Transition Scheme to establish a Marconi Museum in the former Bank of Ireland building in the centre of Clara.

Bernie Henry, chairperson of the Clara Town Centre First Team, and also chair of the Heritage Society, confirmed to the Offaly Independent this week that funding has been sought for the ambitious project, which she described as an initiative that would put Clara on “the national and international tourist map” in the future.

Clara Heritage Society has already acquired a small part of the Marconi Collection, but is hoping to be in a position to purchase the entire private collection and put it on permanent display in the town. The collection consists of items and documents associated with the inventor's work.

“Marconi and Clara are completely intertwined and, in fact, the very first telegram sent by Marconi was actually sent in Clara,” explained Bernie Henry, “so we think it would be very fitting to be able to establish a Marconi Museum right there in the town.”

The story of Guglielmo Marconi's connection to Clara goes back to a high society party in London, where he met a member of the Goodbody family who, at the time, were major employers in Clara through the J & LS Goodbody textile factory and mills.

“Robert Goodbody invited him to Clara and he conducted some of his earliest transmission tests in the Goodbody home at Inchmore House,” explains Bernie Henry. “The story goes that it was from there he sent his first telegram to Erry Mill to see how many jute sacks were needed for the flour.”

Marconi would go on to transmit the first commercial transatlantic message from his wireless telegraphy station in Clifden, County Galway to Glace Bay, Nova Scotia in Canada in 1907. He won the Nobel Prize for Physics two years later with Germany's Karl Ferdinand Braun.

Bernie says the custodians of the Marconi Collection have been in contact with the Clara Heritage Society and the Town Centre First Team with the a view to selling the collection to them for display in a a museum setting, given the strong links between the inventor and the Offaly town.

“They have been approached by globalists who are interested in acquiring the collection, but they actually approached us to see if we would be interested in purchasing it, so we are keeping our fingers crossed and hoping that our Just Transition funding application will be successful,” she says.

The Town Centre First team and the Heritage Society are hoping to display the Marconi Collection in conjunction with a wonderful collection of photographs of Clara by a local amateur photographer, the late Tommy Harris, who passed away in 1979 leaving behind a rich historical record of the town in the form of up to 20,000 negatives.

The negatives were donated to Offaly Historical Society who digitised some 17,000 photographs and published a trilogy of books which provide a rare glimpse of what life was like in Clara over a period of 70 years.

“We plan to display the Tommy Harris photography collection in the Marconi Museum, and to rotate the collection on a regular basis as well as including background information on the history of Clara in conjunction with the exhibition,” Bernie Henry states.

In the long term, Clara Heritage Society and the Town Centre First Team would like to see the establishment of a national Industrial Heritage Museum in Clara, as Bernie says Clara was “the seat of industry” in Ireland with the Goodbody factories and mills.

“Industrial heritage tourism is one of the fastest growing tourism sectors at the moment, and we have a very rich history of industry in Clara,” she points out, adding that historians described Clara as “the town that never sleeps” long before that phrase became synonymous with New York.

“We have 21 trains stopping in Clara every day and it is just an hour from Dublin, so we are extremely well placed in terms of tourist accessibility, and we also have a very united and tightly-knit local community, so if we can harness all the energy and goodwill we can do anything,” she says.