BY JOHN MUSGRAVE
Britain’s first rock and roll radio station, Radio Caroline, started transmissions this weekend 60 years ago. Despite our country’s role as the world’s leading democracy, free speech has had a tough time of it in Britain. Back in the 60s the establishment loathed the idea of free radio. It couldn’t be controlled and playing rock and roll was considered unwholesome.
Nevertheless, Caroline began transmissions from aboard the MV Fredericia, anchored off Felixstowe, Suffolk on Saturday, 28th March. The first record played was by the Rolling Stones, ‘Not Fade Away’. She never has.
Radio broadcasting has suffered a troubled history in Britain. Back in the 1920s when wireless radio first took to the air, the government of the day gave the then British Broadcasting Company a monopoly and renamed it the British Broadcasting Corporation.
By contrast in the United States radio stations proliferated in every city, funded by advertising. When pop music hit the big time after the war, American radio literally rocked around the clock. By contrast Britain’s teenagers had to make do with a couple of hours a week from the BBC and night time programmes Radio Luxembourg gamely transmitted from central Europe. Reception was poor.
The BBC monopoly failed free speech as much as it did rock and roll. Back in the 1930s Churchill made it his mission to warn Britain of German rearmament. We are all familiar with his lone voice and isolation from multiple recordings, films and TV series.
Less widely known is that the BBC took against Churchill.
Taking its cue from ostrich-like politicians, Churchill was dismissed as a war monger. Worse still the Beeb’ stern head, Lord Reith was sympathetic to the Nazis. In his diary he wrote, ‘I am pretty certain … that the Nazis will clean things up and put Germany on the way to being a real power in Europe again. They are being ruthless and most determined.’ He kept Churchill off the airwaves throughout the 1930s. That was the establishment for you – in fact Lord Halifax, widely tipped to succeed Neville Chamberlain in 1940 wanted to sue for peace – cut an armistice deal Marshall Petain did in France.
Caroline’s founder, Ronan O’Rahilly was an Irishman whose grandfather died in the 1916 uprising in Dublin. O’Rahilly understood the youth rebellion of the 60s and became an enthusiastic purveyor of nightclubs and rock bands. The Beeb didn’t want to know. This was nothing new.
Back in the early 40s the BBC was less than helpful to a black propaganda unit set up by maverick journalist, Sefton Delmer. An Australian by birth, Delmer had worked in Berlin and spoke fluent German. His idea was to start fictional radio stations broadcasting news and views in colloquial German. The stations would pretend to be official. The idea was to speed demoralisation of German troops and point out the absurdities of the Third Reich.
The BBC, stuffy to a fault, thought what he was doing was not cricket. Churchill was quick to grasp the value of black propaganda. Legend has it the BBC at the time had a spare transmitter, a huge master-blaster capable of beaming programmes across Europe. The Beeb was reluctant to part with it and Soldaten Radio Calais took to the air using an RCA transmitter from the United States. Delmer’s radio stations were funded by the War Office.
O’Rahilly fitted out the MV Fredericia at Greenore in Ireland. Local people helped cover up what was going on. Rumours abounded of British MI5 agents weaselling down the boreens with dynamite.
Radio Caroline was an immediate hit. Despite official finger wagging and routine harassment, Caroline was soon joined by a flotilla of pirate radio stations. Broadcasting from ships and wartime gun emplacements outside the three mile territorial limit, the pirates claimed to break no British law. Rock and roll was the antidote to grey bomb-cratered Britain and the nation’s young couldn’t get enough of it. Bubble gum pop was once considered an American phenomenon, but by the 1960s, it was British bands like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks and the Animals which grabbed popular imagination. Kids desperately needed to hear their music and the role of the pirates quickly became essential. Rock ‘n’ roll might have originated in the Mississippi Delta, but it really hit its stride out on the North Sea.
Looking back, the excitement generated by the pirates was hard to beat. If rock ‘n’ roll is the language of protest, then its songs carried all the more weight when you realised they were being broadcast from a leaky ship crashing up and down in heavy seas off East Anglia. Surging seas, broken stay lines and toppled masts made broadcasting difficult and downright dangerous. Record decks were mounted on gimbals so they stayed level as the ship plunged.
Despite the enormous odds, a rag-tag alliance of sailors, engineers and teenage disc jockeys struggled to free up broadcasting from the stranglehold of the establishment.
Eventually Harold Wilson’s Labour administration closed down the pirates in August 1967. (Caroline’s two ships struggled on until the following March.)
What a gap the pirates left. A generation was in uproar. Pop stars like Lulu and Dusty Springfield broadcast tearful farewells from the ships. Teenagers rioted in Trafalgar Square. Schoolboys rigged up home-made transmitters on rooftops. Rather unnerved by all this, an incoming Conservative administration legalised pop radio, admittedly with all sorts of controls and caveats. London’s Capital Radio kicked off its first broadcast with the wonderfully appropriate ‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters.’
The lessons for our own time are stark: Unless freedom of speech is held sacrosanct it will be brushed aside by an unthinking establishment. Whether Labour or Tory, the establishment does not understand free speech. The starch-collared BBC has long given way to the woke far-left but the song remains the same: A determination to obfuscate views which really don’t coincide with their own.
Free speech is a flickering flame which needs to be breathed into fire by successive generations. How appropriate Chris Moore’s first single, Not Fade Away appears. Radio Caroline never faded away. Five ships later she has survived.
The madness of the cancel culture, Scots legislation on thought crime, jihadi violence and the unfolding tragedy of child abuse means the need for frank and free talking has never been greater. That we have to think what best to say – as I have just had to do with the above sentence – proves our freedoms are parlous at best. We need free speech. Whether we’re pirates or surfers, mods or rockers our duty is clear. We should twist and shout and never, never fade away.
This weekend Radio Caroline will be broadcasting live online and from the good ship ‘Ross Revenge’ anchored somewhere off the Essex coast.
John Musgrave is a writer based in the west of England. His novel, ‘Radio A-Go-Go,’ set on a fictional pirate radio station in the mid-60s, is available on Amazon. Radio A-Go-Go