The devil has all the best songs:
reflections on the life and times of Simon Dee
Simon Matthews
The death of sixties broadcaster Simon Dee in August
produced a crop of obituaries that commented on his brief
period of fame and the claims he subsequently made about his
career’s demise. Most of the accounts suggested that he was
eccentric, slightly paranoid, of little talent and had an
exaggerated sense of his own significance. The reader’s
attention was drawn to his comments that he had been
classified as a national security risk by the Special Branch and
that the CIA effectively controlled broadcasting in the UK.1
Dee served in the RAF from 1953 to 1958, spending
much of this time in the Middle East, culminating in his being
attached to RAF Intelligence in Baghdad in 1957-1958. This
was a critical period that saw the UK humiliated by the USA
during the Suez crisis in late 1956. At its simplest this event,
more than any other, highlighted a split in the British
establishment. One section took an essentially Gaullist view:
Britain should be able to act alone and should retain a
domestic economy and services commensurate with this.
Another increasingly influential and powerful section saw Suez
as proof that Britain could no longer operate either as a
separate force in the world or have a particular role of its own
that it was at liberty to pursue and should work closely with
the US and engage in a number of other activities, such as
‘modernising’ its economy on more liberal lines than the post-
1945 political consensus had hitherto indicated.
With his military service complete Dee had various
occupations in the more fashionable areas of London,
including running a coffee bar in Soho and working for a
society photographer. In the early 1960s he met Ronan
O’Rahilly, a young Irish hanger-on in the London music scene.
O’Rahilly told him that he would be starting an independent
commercial radio station – the first venture of this type in or
near the UK – and offered Dee a job as a presenter. Dee
accepted and started broadcasting on Radio Caroline in March
1964.
Radio Nord
Prior to its dropping anchor off the coast of East Anglia, the
ship used to accommodate Radio Caroline had an interesting
history. Originally known as the MV Olga, it was a small coastal
cargo vessel of the type commonly found in northern Europe.
In 1960 it was purchased by two wealthy US businessmen,
Gordon McLendon and Clint Murchison Junior. The Olga was
registered in Nicaragua and equipped to operate as a floating
commercial radio station, broadcasting music and news
bulletins to southern Sweden (Stockholm essentially) while
anchored just outside Swedish territorial waters. It
commenced transmission in March 1961.2 Its radio
broadcasting equipment had been shipped across the Atlantic
from Texas (where McLendon and Murchison were based) and
assembled by US specialists. It was sufficiently powerful to be
heard far beyond the southern part of Sweden. In good
weather conditions the signal was accessible as far east as
Leningrad, Karelia, Finland, the Baltic States, northern Poland
and East Germany. Broadcasting in Swedish would not have
represented an impenetrable difficulty to many listeners in
these areas, the language being widely understood and
spoken then and now in Finland, Karelia and Estonia.
Given that both McLendon and Murchison had significant
business experience – McLendon’s in commercial broadcasting
– we might wonder why (or if) they pursued this venture
purely on economic grounds. A floating radio station is far
more expensive to operate than a land-based operation. In a
typical land-based station, for example, the studio, offices and
broadcasting equipment would all be contained in 2 or 3 floors
of an office block or within a medium sized building. A ship,
however, requires a crew, regular maintenance in a dockyard
and a supply vessel while on station, as well as the usual
technical staff, presenters and a land-based office. Would the
income from radio commercials targeted at the relatively small
population of southern Sweden really be enough to cover all
this and produce a profit? And why have a US-manufactured
transmitter shipped across the Atlantic and installed by US
specialists? Was there really no comparable equipment
available in Europe? If the rationale of McLendon and
Murchison had been solely to open up the then restricted
European radio market to a profitable US-style commercial
radio station they could surely have selected another location
– such as off the coasts of France or Italy or Germany for
example – where their ship would reach much greater
audiences and would broadcast in a far more widely spoken
language. Given the location actually chosen by them, which
was certainly convenient for reaching an audience behind the
Iron Curtain, Radio Nord looks just as likely to have been an
arms-length, privately funded operation broadcasting
propaganda to Eastern Europe. Radio Nord broadcast until
June 1962 when the difficulties caused by the Swedish
government restricting supply of the vessel resulted in her
sailing to Spain, to await orders from its owners.3
The UK interest
In September 1962 Radio Nord sailed north from Spain and
anchored off the south east coast of England while McLendon
and Murchison tried to conclude the sale of the ship to a group
of UK investors led by Alan Crawford, an Australian music
publisher. Crawford, who owned a number of record shops in
London, said subsequently that he was interested in setting
up a commercial radio station that would broadcast pop music
to UK audiences because it would boost sales in his record
shops at a time when pop music received very little exposure
on the BBC Light Programme. Crawford may have had other
reasons for involvement in this venture. He was also, for
instance, a business partner of Major Oliver Smedley. Smedley
was a founder member of the Institute of Economic Affairs and
a prominent figure in UK free trade and libertarian political
circles. Both Crawford and Smedley knew of the broadcasts of
Radio Nord and both had been directors of a company called
CBC (Plays) Limited, which aimed to promote commercial radio,
since 1960 – the year that McLendon and Murchison
purchased the MV Olga.4
Interviewed in 1984 Crawford could not remember how
he found out who the owners of Radio Nord were or how he
contacted them. Whatever the circumstances, McLendon and
Murchison were happy to do a deal and gave Crawford specific
advice on the arrangements and legal structures he needed to
put in place to successfully operate a privately owned offshore
station in an environment where it would be unlawful:
establish a core group of investors with whom the
company would be publicly associated whilst having all the
companies and bodies associated with the venture registered
offshore – preferably in a secretive domain.
The immediate problem facing Crawford in 1962 was that
possible UK investors knew from an elementary perusal of the
Radio Nord finances that the amount of money needed to run
a floating commercial radio station was enormous compared
with a land-based option; that the UK authorities could still
hamper the operation of any proposed station; and that
profits might be considerably less than expected. As a result of
this negotiations with Crawford took until August 1963 to
finalise.5 The eventual deal was that Radio Nord would be
leased by McLendon and Murchison to a consortium led by
Jocelyn Stevens, the owner of the UK high society gossip
magazine Queen. The funding came via a network of
companies registered in Liechtenstein and day-to-day
management of the business was carried out by Major
Smedley. Noting the difficulties in supplying an offshore vessel
and the sanctions that any irate government could use
against it, Crawford, Stevens and Smedley reached an
agreement with Egan O’Rahilly, the owner of a private harbour
at Greenore in Eire, that the vessel would be serviced and
supplied there. O’Rahilly’s son, Ronan, an appropriately
youthful figure who knew Crawford through Crawford’s record
shops in London, was the public front for the operation.6 The
MV Olga/Radio Nord ship was renamed Radio Atlanta, and
sailed to Greenore to be fitted out in late 1963.7
The assorted investors bought a second ship, a
redundant Danish ferry, the MV Fredericia, in December 1963
for use as a radio station and it was registered by its new
owner (ostensibly Ronan O’Rahilly) in Panama. By early 1964
both Radio Atlanta and the MV Fredericia were under refit at
Greenore. On 28 March 1964 the Fredericia, now renamed
Radio Caroline, took up station off Harwich and began
broadcasting. Simon Dee presented its first programme. It was
joined on 12 May 1964 by Radio Atlanta which dropped anchor
in approximately the same location. The presence of two
offshore stations so near to London, and their (for the time)
refreshingly new broadcasting style and popularity with a
young audience, quickly led to official enquiries. The Director
General of the BBC duly received a confidential briefing on
their activity on 21 May 1964 which stated:
Approximately 50% of the funding for both ships came
from UK backers, specifically Jocelyn Stevens and the British
Printing Corporation via its key directors Sir Geoffrey Crowther
and Max Rayne.8
The remainder of the funding was held in bank accounts
in Liechtenstein under the control of Dr Peter Marxer.
The transmitting equipment on both vessels was
powerful and of US manufacture.
Both ships had been fitted out in a privately owned port
in Eire owned by a Mr O’Rahilly.9
The memo concluded with its author drily requesting ‘a
word on the telephone about the confidential nature of this
information….’
This comment presumably indicates that there were
certain things that the author of the memo did not wish to put
in writing.
The UK backers
Jocelyn Stevens, the most prominent of the UK figures
associated with the venture, had a conventional upbringing for
a member of the privileged elite in the 1940s and ‘50s – Eton,
the Rifle Brigade and Cambridge. Socially well connected (his
wife was a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret) in 1957 he
became proprietor of Queen magazine, announcing in the
publication that ‘he wanted to destroy British Establishment
society as it was as a result of the 1956 Suez debacle.’
The most significant figure he employed at Queen was
Robin Douglas-Home, nephew of Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Robin
Douglas-Home, who counted himself a friend of both Frank
Sinatra and John F. Kennedy, appears to have had access to
quite a considerable variety of interesting information. On 31
July 1962 Queen published the first piece of gossip linking John
Profumo to Christine Keeler and Eugene Ivanov. It is not
known who supplied Queen and/or Robin Douglas-Home with
this information, but its appearance was a significant part of
the events that led to the collapse of the MacMillan
government.10
The career and political inclinations of Major Oliver
Smedley have already been noted. During the negotiations to
purchase the MV Olga by UK investors, Smedley was also
active as a founder member of the Keep Britain Out campaign.
This campaigned against the attempts then being made by
Harold MacMillan to take the UK into the Common Market.
Smedley, who was Vice President of the Liberal Party at this
point, actually announced when Radio Atlanta started
broadcasting in May 1964, that it was intended to be ‘the last
bastion of freedom if the country went Communist.’ This could
only have been an allusion to the possibility that the general
election that was due in late 1964 would result in a Labour
government that Major Smedley and his colleagues regarded
as seriously – even dangerously – left-wing.
Sir Geoffrey Crowther went from Cambridge where he
had been President of the Union in 1928, to Yale via a
Commonwealth Fund Fellowship. He had an American wife and
was editor of The Economist from 1938 until 1956.11 He was a
member of the Council of the Royal Institute of International
Affairs and in the 1940s had edited Transatlantic, a magazine
published at that time by Penguin Books.
Max Rayne was a property developer and conducted
various business ventures with SAS founder David Stirling in
the 1950s and ‘60s. He later married Lady Jane Vane-
Tempest-Stewart, sister of Lady Annabel Birley, subsequently
the wife of Sir James Goldsmith.
At the simplest the common denominators that the
above figures shared were:
a disinterest in the post-1945 political settlement of high
spending on social welfare and various state and
governmental activities;
a belief instead in the efficacy of the free market;
a recognition that Harold MacMillan, the candidate
favoured by the US for the Conservative succession in 1957,
was by the early 1960s struggling badly and was seen by
many as a failed leader who would produce electoral defeat
and the return to power of Labour.12
The wider context
The association of public figures such as Stevens, Smedley,
Crowther and Payne with what was then an unlawful venture
in the UK also needs to be put into a broader social and
cultural context. There were many people in Britain in the
1950s and 60s who believed that US society offered a valid
model for the UK to emulate. There is not sufficient space here
to record every step in the Americanisation of Britain but
significant episodes in this long march were surely the
legislation in 1954 that established commercial television, the
‘Traffic in Towns’ study of 1960 (which led to US style
developments and road networks in city centres)13 and the
scrapping of retail price maintenance in 1963, which produced
the great supermarket expansion of the 1960s and 70s.
But not all efforts to change the fabric of cultural and
social life in the UK necessarily went the way of those who
were pro-American. The Pilkington Committee which between
1960 and 1962 looked at the future of broadcasting in the UK
is an interesting case in point. Its conclusions severely
criticised ITV for relying too much on recycled US product. It
recommended that the BBC should start a second, high brow,
television channel. It was opposed to the licensing of
commercial radio stations and it recommended instead that
the BBC should set up a network of state-run local stations
specifically to thwart this objective. Lobbying for commercial
radio and funding an offshore ‘pirate’ station was thus quite a
logical activity for some of those disappointed by the outcome
of the Pilkington Report and was of a piece with the other
initiatives listed above.14
In July 1964 both ships were under the same
management and were broadcasting across the whole of the
UK from two different locations. Radio Atlanta (ex-Radio Nord)
moved to a position off the Isle of Man and was renamed
Radio Caroline North, while the other vessel, the original Radio
Caroline, stayed off the coast of East Anglia and was known
as Radio Caroline South. Test transmissions showed that their
signals had sufficient power to reach the USA from these
positions in favourable weather conditions. The existence of
privately owned commercial radio stations owned by figures in
the UK who were sympathetic to the Americanisation of their
own country does not prove that the US either planned or
engineered such a course of events at an official level.
However if the Radio Nord template was in any way typical, it
was clear that political, cultural and social influence favourable
to the US could be exerted by wealthy freelance individuals (or
companies) operating at arms-length from government. The
circumstances around the establishment of Radio Caroline fit
with this theory.15
Fighting Mr Wilson
Despite the curious memo prepared for the Director-General of
the BBC, the Conservative government lead by Prime Minister
Douglas-Home government took no action against Radio
Caroline. This was noted at the time by Anthony Wedgewood
Benn MP, who commented in his diaries for the period that he
assumed that this was because they were actually quite
happy with the station broadcasting. Although they trailed
Labour by 10% in the opinion polls in May 1964 the
Conservatives narrowed the gap considerably and only just
lost the October 1964 General Election.
The new administration formed by Harold Wilson took a
very different line about unlicensed privately owned radio
stations, but with a parliamentary majority of only four could
not immediately make the issue a major priority. This state of
affairs lasted until the March 1966 General Election when
Labour were re-elected with a majority of 96 – sufficient to
contemplate a wide programme of parliamentary legislation.
It is still curious that while the record of the 1966-1970
Wilson government indicated a general inability to deal with a
range of issues – devaluation, Rhodesia and trade union
reform for example – no such inhibitions existed when it came
to their taking action against unlicensed popular
entertainment. One possible reason for this may have been
the multiplication of offshore radio stations between 1964 and
1966.
By 1966 the two Radio Carolines had been joined by
others, the best known of which was Radio London. This, too,
had an interesting background. The station was owned by
Don Pierson, a successful businessman from Dallas, Texas,
who had discussed setting up the venture with Gordon
McLendon, founder of Radio Nord. Pierson originally wanted to
name the station Radio KLIF London, after KLIF, the radio
station that McLendon ran in Dallas. McLendon was not happy
with this and it broadcast instead as Radio London from a
vessel anchored off Essex. Radio London earned substantial
revenue from relaying programmes and advertising from the
Texas based Radio Church of God, a Christian evangelical
organisation led by Herbert W. Armstrong, that produced a
current affairs programme ‘The World Tomorrow’.16
In addition to Radio London others that could be heard
included Radio 270, anchored off Scarborough and funded by a
former Conservative MP, Wilf Proudfoot, (who owned an early
chain of UK supermarkets) and Radio City, based in a disused
WW2 fort off Margate and run by Reg Calvert, a successful
manager and promoter of a number of 1960s pop groups,17
as part of an arrangement he had with Major Smedley. Calvert
also dabbled in politics. Under his guidance Screaming Lord
Sutch stood as a National Teenage Party candidate in the
1963 bye-election caused by Profumo’s resignation and also
ran against Harold Wilson in Huyton in 1966 – when the
government forcing ‘pirate’ radio stations to close was
something of a political issue with younger elements of the
electorate.
Despite their popularity, neither of the two Radio
Carolines were profitable – no doubt the extremely high
operating costs noted above accounted for this – and as a
result Smedley, Stevens and the other backers soon wanted
the ships sold and the broadcasting equipment moved into a
disused coastal fortification off Margate. Calvert established
Radio City as the first stage in this process with a generator
supplied by Smedley. It transpired that, despite being outside
territorial waters, the disused coastal fortress was still owned
by the Ministry of Defence. In May 1966 Smedley arrived at
Radio City in a motor launch with a group of dockers and
seamen.18 They removed the generator, thus forcing Radio
City off the air. Hearing of this Calvert went to Smedley’s home
and in the ensuing fracas Smedley shot Calvert dead. At the
ensuing trial Smedley was acquitted on the grounds that he
had acted in self-defence. Calvert’s tinkering in politics and the
sensational nature of his death thus provided a second
reason for the Wilson government to use valuable
parliamentary time on legislation against ‘pirate’ radio
stations, time that could have been used to better effect on
other issues. A bill making Radio Caroline and its imitators
illegal was introduced to Parliament in late 1966 and became
law as the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act in August 1967.
The passage of the legislation through Parliament
provoked a campaign of opposition which did much to tarnish
Wilson’s and Labour’s reputation with the younger section of
the electorate at this point.19 The campaign against the Act
reached its crescendo in May, June and July 1967 during the
final stages of the legislation. In reply to a question put to him
in Parliament Edward Short, the Postmaster-General, solemnly
informed his colleagues that Radio Caroline had influenced the
outcome of the May 1967 Greater London Council (GLC)
elections, in which Labour had lost control of London for the
first time since 1934. This was nonsense. The GLC had been
established by the previous Conservative government in 1963
as the replacement body for the London County Council (LCC),
precisely because enlarging the LCC area to include the
surrounding suburban parts of London made it easier for the
Conservatives to win the elections for the new authority.
Short made his comments, though, against a backdrop of
Labour having lost control of a range of major local authorities
in May 1967.20 The notion thus being propagated by Short, to
assembled Labour MPs, many of whom represented marginal
seats affected by these disastrous results, was that Radio
Caroline and possibly other stations represented a sort of
anti-left, fifth column that ought to be curtailed in the interests
of democracy. The truth appears to have been that by May
1967 Wilson and Labour were unpopular for a range of
reasons and that pirate radio stations played only a minor role
in this change.
The campaign in favour of the ‘pirate’ stations
particularly involved The Move, a group who had just
established themselves at that point, and their manager Tony
Secunda. In May and June 1967 The Move began destroying
effigies of Harold Wilson on stage with an axe as part of their
‘auto-destructive’ pop art stage act. Secunda followed this in
August 1967 by distributing promotional postcards for their
latest record, ‘Flowers in the Rain’, showing a naked man in
the bath on which the Prime Minister’s face was
superimposed, with a caption that implied that Wilson was
having an affair with his secretary, Marcia Falkender. The
postcard found its way into the hands of George Wigg MP,
who passed it to Wilson. Wilson sued Secunda and The Move
and won.21
During the period between the appearance of the
postcard and the subsequent legal denouement, Secunda and
The Move found themselves under surveillance by the state
(presumably Special Branch) who followed them on tour
around the UK as they promoted ‘Flowers in the Rain’.
Wilson’s lack of humour arose from the allegations that he
was having an extramarital relationship with Falkender.
Attempts to smear him with this stretched back as far as 1960
but were not that well known or in the public domain in 1967.
Who told Secunda that Wilson was having an affair with
Marcia Falkender? The use of the security services against a
pop group suggests that Wilson may have taken the activities
of Radio Caroline and the other pirate stations somewhat
more seriously than has previously been thought. Did he think
that they were part of the attempts to destabilise and
discredit him? If he did the presence of free market,
libertarian, UK figures and US oil magnates amongst their
backers would have been significant to him.
When the Maritime Broadcasting Offences Act became
law in August 1967, the majority of the ‘pirate’ stations closed
and virtually all of the better known DJs and presenters
transferred to the new BBC pop station, Radio One. Radio
Caroline stayed on the air. By this point Stevens, Smedley and
the other publicly known backers had dropped out due to the
furore between the Calvert shooting in 1966 and the passing
of the Maritime Broadcasting Offences Act. The Radio Caroline
operation was now reduced to Ronan O’Rahilly with finance
coming from Phil Solomons, an Irish record company owner.22
Despite this, in March 1968 both Caroline ships went off the
air. They were towed back to harbour in Amsterdam following
failure by O’Rahilly and/or Solomons to pay for their crew,
servicing and maintenance costs while on the air.
Radio Caroline never produced the profits expected by
its backers in its early years. Its final financial crisis in 1967-
1968 seems to have been exacerbated by O’Rahilly
diversifying into film production. He spent a great deal of time
in 1968 as Executive Producer for the film ‘Girl on a Motor
Cycle’ which starred Marianne Faithful and Alain Delon.23 Very
much a European prototype for ‘Easy Rider’ and its slew of
imitators, it gave an indication of the direction that O’Rahilly
would now follow.
Dee time
Simon Dee left Radio Caroline in 196524 and joined the BBC
Light Programme where he worked successfully as a record
presenter. He later became one of several figures hosting Top
of the Pops before being given his own BBC TV chat show,
‘Dee Time’, in April 1967. Down to the present day, the many
other programmes of this type still follow the original ‘Dee
Time’ formula: a mixture of live music and interviews with
contemporary celebrities, politicians and cultural figures. It
was hugely popular. On one occasion an audience figure as
high as 18 million was recorded. While Radio Caroline passed
into temporary obscurity, Dee enjoyed enormous success,
covering the 1967 Miss World competition and being seen in
the company of Princess Margaret. In 1969, though, he
angered the BBC by demanding a pay rise. They dropped ‘Dee
Time’ and he switched to London Weekend TV where he
started a new series, ‘The Simon Dee Show’, in January 1970.
On 28 February 1970 Dee hosted an episode in which he
interviewed George Lazenby and Diana Rigg, the stars of the
then current James Bond film ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’.
Lazenby, who was managed by Ronan O’Rahilly, used his
appearance on the show to speak at some length about the
assassination of JFK.25 He named a number of living US public
figures as having played a role in the killing. This was an
extraordinary direction for a piece of TV to take in 1970 but
‘The Simon Dee Show’ was broadcast live and not prerecorded
and/or edited as would be the case today. London
Weekend TV told Dee immediately after the programme that
his show would not be continued and that his contract was
being terminated.26 The curtailment of ‘The Simon Dee Show’
ended Dee’s television career.
Challenging Harold again
Whatever the circumstances behind the demise of Simon
Dee’s TV career, both Dee and O’Rahilly – and Radio Caroline –
reappeared in public life in the run up to the 1970 general
election. The background to this episode was intriguing.
When Radio London ceased broadcasting in August 1967
its owners, the Radio Church of God, offered the vessel to two
Swiss businessmen, Edwin Bollier and Erwin Meister, with
extensive interests in the electronics industry. Ultimately they
decided against purchasing Radio London and fitted out their
own ship instead, the SS Mebo II, with transmitting equipment
twice the power of anything previously carried by either Radio
London or Radio Caroline. Named Radio North Sea
International, it took up station off the coast of Essex in
January 1970 and began broadcasting. Despite Post Office
jamming from April 1970 it remained on the air. Ronan O’Rahilly
contacted the owners in early May 1970 and persuaded them
to rename the station Radio Caroline International during the
immediate run up the 18 June 1970 UK general election and to
explicitly endorse the Conservative Party.
There was a straightforward reason for this. The
Conservative opposition, under Edward Heath, had included in
its manifesto proposals to introduce legislation to licence a
number of privately owned commercial radio stations across
the UK.27 As well as using Radio Caroline International to
relay the vote-Conservative-not-Labour message, O’Rahilly
and Dee also took a road show around selected UK
parliamentary constituencies in a double decker bus covered
with pictures of Chairman Mao Tse-Tung on which the face of
Harold Wilson had been superimposed. O’Rahilly said of this
later:
‘I have had some very heavy battles, politically, very
heavy battles. The biggest one was with Labour in
1970. I produced 5 million posters. I fought in a 100
marginal constituencies in the UK. We had double decker
buses all over, we had hundreds of thousands of young
people handing out leaflets.’ 28
As Labour had been consistently ahead in the polls by as
much as 49% to 42%, most political observers were taken by
surprise when Heath won the 1970 general election. Various
explanations were advanced then and subsequently for this
unexpected outcome. The key factor in all of them is a
recognition that the UK electorate of the time were actually
more conservative and traditional than either the Wilson
government of 1964-1970 or the political intelligentsia
realised; and that the extremely rapid social, economic and
cultural change during this period alienated a section of the
population without affecting the outcome of contemporary
opinion polls (which were in any event less sophisticated than
those of today).29 In this context the role of Radio Caroline
International and the O’Rahilly/Dee road show in May and
June 1970 may have been more significant than was generally
realised at the time. Harold Wilson evidently thought so – he
is reputed to have vowed to ‘finish off’ O’Rahilly during the
election campaign. But dealing with O’Rahilly – a citizen of Eire,
who resided overseas – was not straightforward. Simon Dee
was an easier target. Wilson and the Labour Party made a
formal complaint to the police that Dee had broken electoral
law by campaigning in a partisan fashion during and election
without submitting expenses. As late as December 1970 Dee
was still being questioned by the Special Branch on this
subject, though charges were never brought.
Loving Awareness
While Dee assisted the police with their enquiries O’Rahilly
pursued his career as a film producer. He steered George
Lazenby away from starring in any more films in the James
Bond series, persuading Lazenby that plots in which a solitary
British agent continually demonstrated amazing prowess in
beating the enemies of the West were of declining relevance
and would not sustain their box office appeal. Instead of this
O’Rahilly assembled the funding for ‘Universal Soldier’,
intended originally as a starring vehicle for George Lazenby
and Jimi Hendrix. Unfazed by the death of Hendrix, the film
continued in production with Lazenby playing an amoral
mercenary whose services are sought by various post-colonial
states in Africa. The female lead opposite Lazenby was played
by Germaine Greer. In the film Greer gets Lazenby to see the
error of his ways and persuades him to follow an alternative
life style.30 ‘Universal Soldier’ was an expensive film to make
and had only limited box office success when released in early
1971. This, together with the clear inaccuracy of O’Rahilly’s
advice on the longevity and appeal of the Bond franchise, led
to Lazenby dismissing him as his manager.
With his career as a mainstream film producer over,
O’Rahilly finally paid off most of the debts that had
encumbered the original Radio Nord/MV Olga vessel and the
ship sailed from Amsterdam and started broadcasting off the
coast of Essex, as Radio Caroline, once more. Initially and
anachronistically the station played in 1972 the same records
(and radio commercials) that it had broadcast in 1967-1968.
In March 1974 O’Rahilly completely revamped the format
and launched his latest business venture – the Loving
Awareness concept. This involved switching the Radio Caroline
play lists to the type of AOR (adult orientated rock) that was
popular in the US but hardly heard at all in Europe at that time
and specifically promoting with it the benefits of a meditative,
West Coast-style hippy culture. As part of this project O’Rahilly
put together and funded a rock group that he hoped would
promote this concept with their music. This was the Loving
Awareness Band who were eventually unveiled to the media
in simultaneous press conferences at the Hilton Hotel in
Amsterdam (this event being hosted by Simon Dee) and the
World Trade Centre in New York in May 1976.31 These events
were largely ignored by the UK media but were covered very
extensively in Europe and also by 3 major US TV stations. The
publicity that O’Rahilly had devised for the launch went to
great lengths to proclaim that the Loving Awareness Band
were as good as the Beatles and would be acclaimed – like
the Beatles had been in the 1960s – as the dominant musical
force in western culture in the years to come.32 The Loving
Awareness Band duly went to Palm Springs, California, where
they recorded an LP that was released on the Dutch
Phonogram label in September 1976. Despite being broadcast
continually on Radio Caroline it did not sell in significant
quantities. A limited number of live appearances by the group
across Europe did not promote sales either.
What was striking about Loving Awareness even at the
time was how out of kilter it was with everyday existence in
the UK in the mid 1970s and how musically conservative the
material performed by the Loving Awareness Band sounded
when compared to what was available from other artists at
that time.33 The changing fashions of the mid 1970s and the
lack of any relevance that Loving Awareness had to its
audience meant that it fizzled out. In August 1977 the Loving
Awareness Band left O’Rahilly and became the Blockheads,
backing band to Ian Dury, and a very different, more
accessible and more successful musical entity altogether.
Fade out
Gordon McLendon and Clint Murchison Junior remained
prominent figures in Texas business and politics throughout
the 1960s and 70s. McLendon became of interest to the
continuing investigation of who had killed President Kennedy
in Dallas in November 1963. It was noted that McLendon was
known to Jack Ruby, who made a point of asking to speak to
him directly after his arrest for killing Lee Harvey Oswald.34
McLendon was also alleged to have provided funding to help
establish the Intercontinental Penetration Force (a.k.a.
Interpen) – a private sector sponsored mercenary group that
attempted to overthrow Fidel Castro in 1961-1962.35
McLendon was also a friend of David Atlee Philips, arguably
one of the CIA’s most influential figures in the post-war period.
He helped Philips establish the Association of Former
Intelligence Officers in 1975, during the aftermath of the
Watergate affair, when the reputations of many in the CIA and
their supporters on the political right in the US were at a low
ebb. Clint Murchison Junior is less well known and after he
inherited his father’s considerable fortune in 1969 he devoted
himself to his extensive business interests.36
The loans affair
Allan Crawford returned to his chain of record shops in
London and his music publishing business after ending his
involvement with Radio Caroline in 1966. His career
prospered: in the late 1960s he was responsible for the ‘Top
of the Pops’ series of LPs issued on the Pickwick label. These
were sold at a budget price and contained cover versions of
contemporary hit records. In the mid 1970s he reappeared in
Australia as the business partner of and official spokesman for
Tirath Khemlani. In 1974 Khemlani offered a substantial loan –
ostensibly from sources in Saudi Arabia – to the Gough
Whitlam government at a time when, like every other country
in the western world, Australia was battling with inflation and
a shortage of funds for key investment projects. The loan was
designed to reduce the dependence of Australia on raising
funds from US banks, to access sources of funds outside the
jurisdiction of the various US dominated financial institutions
(such as the World Bank and the IMF) and also to circumvent
the bureaucratic attitudes and restrictions of the Australian
Treasury. The Whitlam government did not instigate the
negotiations with Khemlani, never received the money, and
never paid commission to either Khemlani or Crawford. After
awaiting the appearance of the Saudi funds in 1974-1975
(which failed to materialise), Whitlam switched instead to the
conventional approach of requesting a loan from a US bank,
which insisted as part of its requirements that any other loan
negotiations were ceased. By late 1975 details of the
Khemlani loan had been leaked to the Australian press,
causing considerable embarrassment to the Whitlam
government and playing a factor in its eventual removal by the
governor-general of Australia.37 An involvement in these
events, even if marginal, was quite a career step for Crawford
given his prior role in producing Pickwick Top of the Pops Vol. 8
(or similar), complete with a sleeve showing a girl in a bikini,
and destined for sale to unsuspecting shoppers in
Woolworth’s.
Jocelyn Stevens relinquished any involvement in Radio
Caroline in 1965 and in 1968 sold Queen magazine to the
Hearst Corporation, the owners of Harpers, the longest
established high society magazine in the US. Stevens moved
to Beaverbrook Newspapers where he became Managing
Director of The Evening Standard (1969) and later The Daily
Express (1972).He remained an influential and extremely well
connected figure in the UK media into the 1990s.
Other individuals prominent in the launch of Radio
Caroline continued to feature in public life for many years
afterwards. For Major Smedley shooting a business rival dead
in 1966 did not prove any impediment to continuing his
political ambitions. In the 1970 general election he stood as
the Liberal Party candidate in Bethnal Green – an area noted
for the robust, individualist opinions of its electorate. He
remained active in various anti-EEC campaigns throughout the
1970s. His colleague at the Institute of Economic Affairs, Sir
Anthony Fisher, became one of the most influential exponents
of the renewed right-wing economic liberalism of the late
1970s and early 80s.
Ronan O’Rahilly remains a problematic figure and one
whose influence is difficult to determine. Partly this is due to
his tendency to provide accounts of events that are difficult to
verify and often at odds with the recollections of others. Prior
to the launch of Radio Caroline he claimed that he ran the
Scene Club (he didn’t); that he managed the Beatles for a
week (did Brian Epstein know this?); and that he was he was
so annoyed by his failure to secure Georgie Fame a record
deal in 1962 or 1963 (details of when are hazy) that he
eventually produced a record by Fame on an independent
label (there is no proof of this). After Radio Caroline began
broadcasting he maintained that the station was named after
the daughter of the late John F. Kennedy (it wasn’t). This
tendency continued down to the press conferences that
launched the Loving Awareness Band in 1976 when various
claims were made – equally difficult to either prove or disprove
– that the new group had the support of the Beatles. In a
nutshell the account that O’Rahilly gives of how Radio Caroline
started is designed, in the opinion of some commentators, to
draw attention away from who its backers actually were and
what their intentions might have been.
Radio Caroline continued broadcasting until early 1980
when a storm beached the vessel on the coast of Essex. The
ship was then 60 years old and had not been properly
seaworthy for some time. It was towed away and scrapped.
O’Rahilly has continued to own and promote Radio Caroline
either as a ship-based station or an on-line broadcasting
franchise; but in an era with a bewildering array of radio
stations it has never matched the popularity and impact that it
had between 1964 and 1967.
Gaddafi
The most curious – and dramatic – aftermath of all concerns
Radio North Sea International, the station that had broadcast
briefly as Radio Caroline International in 1970. In August 1974
Radio North Sea International went off the air when the
Netherlands banned unlicensed offshore radio stations. The
ship was then laid up in a Dutch harbour by its owners, Erwin
Meister and Edwin Bollier, and eventually sold in February
1977 to the Libyan government. Renamed Radio Jamharia, it
anchored off Tobruk and broadcast ‘Libya International in
English’, supporting and endorsing the Gaddafi regime, much
of it aimed at neighbouring Egypt. This continued until 1984
when the ship was decommissioned, stripped of its fittings
and sunk as a target for bombing practice by the Libyan air
force.
The extent of the business relationship between Meister,
Bollier, their company Mebo Electronics and the government of
Libya became clear – and publicly known – at the Lockerbie
bombing trial in 2000. Bollier was called as a key witness in
the trial, it having been determined that a timer manufactured
by Mebo Electronics had detonated the explosives that had
brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie on 21
December 1988. Careful procedural arguments made by the
prosecution underscored that while Bollier was not being
charged at that point as either an accomplice or an accessory,
such charges could be made against him at a later date if
thought to be justified. Questioned extensively in June 2000,
Bollier admitted that he had travelled to Berlin to meet Markus
Wolf, the head of the foreign intelligence service of the STASI,
in 1970.38 Mebo Electronics had subsequently supplied
detonators, encryption systems, electrical timers, lie detectors
and suitcase bombs to East Germany. The view the STASI had
of Bollier was interesting: recently released documents from
their archives indicate that they were not sure of his loyalty
and thought it possible that he was working for the CIA.
In 1977 Mebo Electronics broadened its interests to
Libya and supplied significant amounts of the same equipment
to the Gaddaffi regime. As well as a straightforward trading
relationship the company was also used by Libya as a means
of passing loans to organisations and individuals that Libya
wished to fund. Bollier admitted that Mebo Electronics rented
office space to Abdelbaset Al Megrahi, the man eventually
convicted of the bombing, in the building it used as its HQ. The
trend of the questioning that was put to Bollier evidently
unnerved him. In the later stages of his testimony he made
clear, through his lawyer, that if charges were brought or
considered against him he would call an extensive array of
witnesses on his behalf. This list included Colonel Oliver North,
President George Bush Snr., General von Tenda (the former
head of BOSS the South African intelligence service), Gerrit
Pretorious (formerly secretary to President Pik Botha of South
Africa) and a range of other individuals including serving CIA
officers. It is not clear that these witnesses would have
attended if requested to do so, what connection if any they
had with Bollier. It is possible that if the Lockerbie bombing is
subject to a full enquiry – as some hope – Edwin Bollier may
yet be questioned further about his trading activities in the
1970s and 80s. The events listed above certainly make a
deeper evaluation of the activities of Radio North Sea
International between 1970 and 1974 of interest.39
Postscript
In December 2003 Channel 4 TV broadcast ‘DeeConstruction’,
a discussion programme involving Simon Dee that analysed
the changes that had occurred to the media since his period of
fame and commented on the contemporary prevalence of the
celebrity cult. It was followed by a 30 minute, one-off episode
of ‘Dee Time’ that used the same format as the 1960s series:
live unedited interviews with well known figures and some
incidental music. Despite poor reviews it seemed on the night
no worse than Jonathan Ross (which has, of course, much
more money thrown at it) and Dee himself (contrary to what
would later appear about him in his obituaries) appeared
modest, not particularly bitter, and intelligent.
The programme did not mention his claims about MI5,
the CIA et al in detail but did remind viewers that the specific
reason for his demise was being deemed responsible for the
broadcasting of George Lazenby’s theories about who killed
President Kennedy. What should we make of his claims now?
He said he was monitored by the security services. It turns out
that this was indeed accurate – and would clearly have been
the case anyway due to his closeness to Princess Margaret at
one point. (Anyone near the Royals will be looked at by the
security services). He was also on record as having made
comments on TV about the Prime Minister Harold Wilson that
were highly disparaging, and, for the time, regarded as
unprofessional. We also know that his electoral antics in 1970
with Ronan O’Rahilly led to a Special Branch investigation. If,
as some suppose, Radio North Sea International was an
eastern bloc intelligence operation, then Dee touring the UK
promoting Radio Caroline International would also have been
of interest to them.
Dee also said that the CIA controlled the UK media ‘then
and now’. For this the most that can be said is that there is no
evidence for such sweeping claims. But given what we know
about the peculiar history of how pirate radio came about
between 1961 and 1964, what it was intended to promote,
the various propaganda programmes that the CIA did run, a
statement of this type cannot quite be regarded as the silly
conspiracy theory that many would have us believe.
1 See The Daily Telegraph 30 August 2009 and others the same day.
2 McLendon and Murchison were keen not to be publicly identified with
Radio Nord. The station was thus managed by Jack Kotschack, a
Swedish/Finnish businessman, who had produced a couple of minor
Swedish films in the 1950s. It is not clear how Kotschack came to be in
contact with McLendon and Murchison.
3 Radio Nord remained on the air through the winter. During this time
the Baltic freezes over, there is little daylight and temperatures are
below zero for many months on end – hardly pleasant conditions for
the crew of a small cramped ship.
4 See <www.offshoreechoes.com>
5 Because the negotiations with Crawford took so long to conclude,
the MV Olga/Radio Nord was ordered back to Galveston, Texas and
decommissioned by McLendon and Murchison.
6 In O’Rahilly’s account of this period he gives himself a central role
in bringing Jocelyn Stevens into the venture. It is not clear that this
was the case.
7 The name Radio Atlanta was selected to commemorate the town of
Atlanta, Texas, where McLendon had established his first radio station.
8 Granada TV interviewed Stephens and O’Rahilly on May 12th 1964
in the offices of Queen. These served initially as the administrative HQ
for Radio Caroline.
9 Egan O’Rahilly, father of Ronan, was a close colleague of Eamonn
de Valera and Sean MacBride. MacBride, who was Chairman of
Amnesty International at this time, wrote the legal opinion that Radio
Caroline would have relied on if subjected to serious legal challenge.
Through his wife, an Irish-American, Egan O’Rahilly also had
connections to influential figures in US politics.
10 Robin Douglas-Home was divorced by his wife, model Sandra Paul,
in 1965 as a result of his affair with Princess Margaret. He was found
dead in 1968, the death being ruled as suicide due to clinical
depression. Sandra Paul later married David Wynne-Morgan, who ran
Annabel’s night club, and is today married to Michael Howard MP,
Conservative Party leader 2003-2005.
11 During his stewardship The Economist invented the humorous
character ‘Mr Butskell’, a British politician who combined the attributes
of both R. A. Butler and Hugh Gaitskell and whose commitment to a
high spending state enabled him to be at home in either of the two
main political parties.
12 Note should also be taken of the satire boom – which began in the
UK in 1961-1962 – attacked and mocked the MacMillan government
which it portrayed as ineffectual and complacent. It thus shared some
common ground with the line taken by Queen magazine and the
promoters of Radio Caroline.
13 ‘Traffic in Towns’ studied the growth of car ownership in the UK and
recommended major road construction schemes including some within
town centres. It appeared at the same time as Reshaping British
Railways – aka ‘The Beeching Report’ – which proposed closing 50% of
the UK rail network. ‘Traffic in Towns’ studied mainly US models rather
than European options and was prepared by a Committee led by Sir
Geoffrey Crowther. Other members were T Dan Smith, Leader of
Newcastle City Council (a local authority that, more than any other,
opted for US style redevelopment during this period) and Oleg
Kerensky, a noted bridge engineer. Oleg Kerensky was the son of
Alexander Kerensky, briefly Prime Minister of Russia in 1917, until
ousted in a Bolshevik coup. T. Dan Smith actually began his political
career in the Revolutionary Communist Party – a significant UK
Trotskyist group – with Gerry Healy, Ted Grant et al, where he learnt
the importance of a tightly organised and disciplined political machine.
One wonders if Smith and Kerensky Jnr. discussed politics while
serving on ‘Traffic in Towns’.
14 For an interesting discussion of these issues see ‘How American
Mass Media Manipulated British Commercial Radio Broadcasting’, an
academic paper published by the Romanian Journal of English Studies.
Its authors, Eric Gilder and Mervyn Hagger, are involved with the John
Lilburne Research Institute, a free market think tank based in Texas.
Its website <www.johnlilburne.com> contains some fascinating
information.
15 We should note that from the early 1950s the CIA sponsored a
Gray Broadcasting programme in which either fully or partially privately
funded and run radio stations produced pro-US material in various
parts of the world. <www.faqs.org> has a number of badly scanned
documents on this topic.
16 Herbert W Armstrong was a major US evangelist from the 1930s
onwards who moved into radio broadcasting. A core part of his creed
was that the white citizens of the US, UK and British Commonwealth
were the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel and therefore
entitled, according to Biblical prophesy, to inherit the Earth. Armstrong
and the Radio Church of God also took the view that the coming
Armageddon of World War Three would be caused by a United States
of Europe, led by Satan – in this instance German Christian Democrat
politician Franz Josef Strauss, a key advocate of European unity.
Because of this much of their broadcasts from Radio London were
stridently anti-Common Market. In this they had something in
common with the views of Major Oliver Smedley.
17 His roster of artists included Screaming Lord Sutch, the Rockin’
Berries, the Fortunes and Pinkerton’s Assorted Colours. In 1964 The
Fortunes released ‘Caroline’, a single on Decca, that was used as the
daily theme music for Radio Caroline.
18 The dockers and seamen used in this expedition were temporarily
unemployed at this time due to the National Union of Seamen’s strike,
an issue that also preoccupied Wilson.
19 In 1969 the Wilson government agreed to lower the voting age
from 21 to 18 with effect from 1970. Thus those voting for the first
time in June 1970 would have been aged 15,16 or 17 when the ‘pirate’
stations were taken off the air and some may have felt hostility to
Labour in 1970 as a result.
20 In the May 1967 local elections Labour lost control of Bradford,
Bristol, Cardiff, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle,
Nottingham, Southampton and Wolverhampton.
21 The litigation was dealt with on Wilson’s behalf by Lord Goodman.
Goodman instructed Quintin Hogg QC MP to pursue the case against
Secunda. This was ironic (or intentional) given that Hogg had raised
the issue of a Wilson-Falkender relationship – without naming names
– as early as 1963. The BBC’s response to the ‘pirates’, Radio One,
went on the air in September 1967 with Tony Blackburn playing
‘Flowers in the Rain’, possibly an act of mild rebellion by Blackburn,
who had been a Radio Caroline DJ.
In settlement Wilson was allocated the entire royalties of
‘Flowers in the Rain’ in perpetuity.
22 Solomons owned and ran Major Minor records which had an early
success with the Irish protest singer David McWilliams and his single
‘Days of Pearly Spencer’. This was played continually on Radio Caroline
and as a result charted everywhere in Europe. It was not played on
Radio One due to the involvement of Major Minor with Radio Caroline
and was not, therefore, a hit in the UK. Major Minor achieved a no. 1
hit in the UK in November 1969 (at a time when Radio Caroline was no
longer broadcasting) with ‘Je T’Aime Mois Non Plus’ by Serge
Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin – the first instance of a record that was
banned everywhere and impossible to hear on the radio reaching the
top of the charts.
23 ‘Girl on a Motorcycle’, known as ‘Naked Under Leather’ in the US,
was based on an obscure French novel in which a young woman rejects
bourgeois conformism and rides across Europe on a motorbike visiting
various lovers whilst wearing a one piece leather jump-suit. The film
was moderately successful despite, or because of, being described as
‘sub-porn claptrap’.
24 Dee said at the time that he was leaving Radio Caroline ‘while the
going was good’ possibly an indication of the parlous state of the
station’s finances and of the looming legislation to ban it.
25 Various accounts say that Lazenby was either drunk, stoned or
tripping while making these statements. Dee himself was known to be
a regular cannabis user at this time, something that may have
accounted for the freewheeling and slightly disorganised nature of
some of his shows. This was not the first time Dee had been
associated with the murder of JFK. In 1969 he had tried to get a copy
of the Zapruder film for broadcasting on Dee Time.
26 A discussion of the little that is known about this episode is at
<
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/lofive...php/t14731.
htm>.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that LWT was not unhappy to have
a reason to fire Dee. His audience was falling. Further, one of LWT’s
shareholders, David Frost, also had a chat show (in a similar format)
on the station and was trying to break into the American market. He
may have surmised that this would be less likely to occur if he could
not demonstrate that action had been taken about the antics of Dee
and Lazenby.
The media in 1970 had not yet left behind the era of Reithian
deference and was quite capable casting into oblivion individuals who
committed minor infractions or told inappropriate jokes. Kenny Everett
was sacked by the BBC in 1970 for speculating about whether or not
the wife of the Minister of Transport (John Peyton MP) had bribed a
driving instructor £5 so that she could pass her driving test.
27 The first independent local radio stations – as they were called by
the Heath government – were set up in October 1973 in London (LBC
and Capital Radio) and December 1973 in Glasgow (Radio Clyde).
28 Interview at <www.offshoreechos.com/oem_interviews-01.htm>
29 Re rapid change in the 1960s: between 1963 and 1971 the
following occurred: the end of National Service, the abolition of the
death penalty, decolonisation, legalisation of homosexuality and
abortion, the closure of 50% of the national rail network, the
reconstruction and demolition of numerous town centres, the
development of tower blocks, the appearance of large, visible ethnic
minority communities in the UK, decimalisation and the announcement
that metrication would follow.
30 Greer came to prominence in 1968 as co-presenter, with Kenny
Everett, of the TV series ‘Nice Time’. She was also a contributor to
Suck, a sex magazine published in Amsterdam and banned in the UK,
and OZ, which was run by a fellow Australian Richard Neville. OZ at one
point published a photograph of her vagina. In ‘Universal Soldier’
Greer appears in hot pants, smokes cannabis and has a lot of sex with
Lazenby. During this time she was also a lecturer at Warwick
University. A profile of her in Rolling Stone while they were making
Universal Soldier is at <www.ibiblio.org/mal/MO/philm/germaine/>
31 By 1976 Dee’s career was in low gear. He had spent a period in
prison for debt and had not been regularly employed for some time.
32 The members of the Loving Awareness Band were not the Beatles
but were certainly seasoned session musicians. The core of the group
came from the North East of England and had formerly been in Skip
Bifferty, a moderately successful psychedelic band in the period 1967-
1969. One track by the Loving Awareness Band can be heard on
<www.youtube.com>.
33 Loving Awareness was launched at a time when groups like Dr
Feelgood, Kraftwerk and Can had just achieved commercial success. By
November-December 1976 the first records by Blondie, the Damned
and the Sex Pistols had been issued in the UK.
34 Ruby was a frequent visitor to McLendon’s radio station KLIF. This
has led some commentators to speculate that McLendon and Ruby
were connected to the group of people who organised and carried out
the Kennedy assassination.
35 See <www.cuban-exile.com>
36 Clint Murchison Snr. was a major business figure in the US from
the 1930s onward. He was a friend of J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon B.
Johnson. There are numerous postings on the Web detailing a
gathering that he supposedly organised in Dallas on 21 November
1963.
37 The Khemlani Loan is covered extensively at
<www.theage.com.au> and elsewhere. Khemlani was later detained in
the US in 1981 attempting to sell stolen securities.
For the Australian left’s view of the ‘loans affair’ as a CIA operation
to discredit the Whitlam government see <
http://www.serendipity.li/cia/
cia_oz/cia_oz2.htm>.
38 Radio North Sea International was anchored very near the Orford
Ness Atomic Weapons Research Establishment. Orford Ness had a very
extensive array of Over the Horizon radar antennae that were used to
track Soviet communications and monitor Soviet missile tests. The
pirate station could, therefore, have been either interfering with this
work or listening in to it on behalf of the eastern bloc.
39 Details of the exchanges involving Bollier at the Lockerbie Trial are
at <www.web.archive.org/web/2002110541308/>
http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/l...ster58.pdf
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Karl Marx
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.
