Marconi in East Kent

Whilst future co-operations between Marconi and government officials
continued the relationship had been damaged although with Preece
approaching retirement age he was happy to encourage the comradely spirit in
which the early technical successes had been achieved.
However with Preece’s retirement in 1899 the relationship between the
Government and the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company was all but
irretrievable.
One lasting legacy of that working relationship however saw George Kemp,
who had served as an electrician and instructor with the Royal Navy before
working for William Preece at the Post Office where he was one of the first to
be assigned to Marconi, in July 1896, ultimately moving to the fledgling
Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company where he worked as «first assistant» to
Signor Marconi for the next thirty six years.
Relationships between the company and Whitehall further worsened in 1900
when plans were put in place to explore means by which Marconi’s patents
might be declared void; alternatively the Government would explore ways of
circumventing them with the use of similar, but legally different, equipment.
To this end the Post Office secretly commissioned Professors Lodge and
Thompson with each of them going on to produce over thirty pages of analysis
and recommendation, Lodge in particular concerning himself with the validity
of the existing patents, referring to his own experiments in the field and his
presentation to the Royal Institution of June 1st 1894 and to the British
Association in Oxford in August of that same year. Lodge however had to
accept that he did not pursue the matter at the time as he was unaware that
there would be any demand for this kind of telegraphy.
Lodge even accused Marconi of “a tendency ... to attempt a claim at
everything, whether he had invented it or not” suggesting that the Italian had
claimed “things which he probably obtained from my writings”.
Ironically an order on behalf of the Royal Navy had already been placed with
the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company in July 1900 before Lodge's and
Thompson's reports had reached the Admiralty with a total of Thirty-two
wireless sets having been ordered.
No legal action was taken by the Government, although one of the directors of
Marconi's Company later discovered that the Admiralty had sent one of the
Marconi sets to be copied, The Admiralty subsequently accepted that they