This is the BBC Home service...............

In the week where the BBC marks it's 90th anniversary in total disarray over how it has dealt with child abuse allegations, both on air and off, the resignation of director-general George Entwistle, with a controversial 12 month salary pay-off of £450k, and the subsequent resignations of the director of news Helen Broaden and her deputy I thought it a good time to look back at another notorious period of the BBC's chequered history from the late 1950's and the early 1960's', as documented by Peter Moore, owner of the current Radio Caroline station.

In the late fifties the cult of the 'teenager' began to emerge with the appearance of American style 'teddy boys' copying role models seen on American imported movies. With this came American music; rock and roll, blues and rhythm & blues were copied and then modified by young British artists. Opportunity for hearing such music on BBC radio was limited to a Sunday afternoon review of the current charts and a Saturday morning programme, 'The Saturday Skiffle Club,' (later the Saturday Club after the skiffle craze ended.) These 'shows' were hosted by established BBC presenters in the style of a headmaster presiding over a schoolboys picnic.

The only other way to hear modern popular music was to tune to Radio Luxembourg, the only cross border broadcaster to the UK that had been able to restart operations after the war. The Luxembourg signal could only reach the UK after dark when the propagation conditions changed. Even then it faded in and out for long periods. This notwithstanding, Luxembourg was hugely popular.

Station air time was block booked in fifteen minute or half hour slots and taken up entirely by the major record labels of the day; Decca, Capitol, E.M.I., Parlophone etc... Only their own signed and recorded artists could expect any air play.

In the early sixties then, all was fairly comfortable for the BBC with their state monopoly and Luxembourg with their commercial monopoly and yet more and more talented British groups and artists were modifying and Anglicising imported music and then developing their own song writing skills. How could this music be put before the public.

Around this time there arrived in London one Ronan O'Rahilly, the tearaway son of a well known and wealthy Irish family. O'Rahilly possessed a number of pertinent qualities; a back ground of generally getting what he wanted, a quick and lateral thinking brain, a maturity and presence which belied his tender years and an Irish naivety which gave him no knowledge or regard for the accepted way of going about things. He settled into Soho and London's club land. Ray Charles was his hero. Soon Ronan was operating his own Rhythm & Blues Club. He bought the Rolling Stones their first set of stage equipment and briefly managed them together with his friend, Georgiou Gomalski, before entrepreneur Andrew Oldham snapped them up. But he still had the blues singer Alexis Korner and northerner Georgie Fame as his protégés. He was influential in the early days of Eric Burdon and the Animals even suggesting the name for the band. Live gigs at small venues were a slow way to achieve popularity, but nobody would record his artists. O'Rahilly created his own record label and paid for his own acetates. When presenting these to the BBC he learned that the Corporation only played music by established artists which begged the obvious question 'how to get established.'

At Radio Luxembourg he fared worse, station bosses laughed heartily showing him the programme schedules block booked by the major labels. Independents had no chance of air play at all. The answer? Give up his artists and hope they could be signed by a major label. 'Well,' O'Rahilly told the Luxembourg directors, 'If after managing my own artists I have to create my own record label because nobody will record them and if I then find that no radio station will play their music, it seems that the only thing now is to have my own radio station.' Radio Luxembourg thought this hugely funny and showed him the door.

Soon after, at a party, a girl told Ronan about the station Voice of America which was operating at sea from the official USA vessel the MV Courier. He gleaned information about this operation from the US Embassy and also travelled to visit Jack Kotschack, the owner of the marine station, Radio Nord and the owners of Radio Veronica an efficiently run Dutch offshore radio station. Radio law in the Netherlands was as restrictive as in the UK. In Holland as in Britain the law of the land only extended as far as territorial waters, three miles out from the coast. Beyond that lay international waters where there was no law other than that defined by the flag states of ships. A ship registered to Panama for example, whilst in international waters recognised Panamanian law. If the law of the flag state had no objection to international marine broadcasting then the ship could make broadcasts which were not illegal and could not be stopped. Even Veronica was using precedent created by earlier marine broadcasts made off the Danish and Swedish coasts. The UK however with the young population created by the post war baby boom and with burgeoning youth culture and a new pop industry had untapped potential.

This was the breakthrough O'Rahilly needed and he had certain advantages to build from.

He was now mixing in the clubs and coffee bars of Soho and Chelsea with the young sons of very wealthy people. With his upbringing, large sums of money did not faze him. His family wholly owned the Irish port of Greenore, an ideal place to quietly convert a ship into a floating radio station.

On a fund raising trip to the USA he was captivated by a photograph in Life magazine showing president John F. Kennedy's daughter Caroline playing in the Oval Office of the White House and disrupting the serious business of government. This was exactly the image he wanted for his station. The name had to be Radio Caroline.

With finance in place, the ex ferry Fredericia was purchased and taken to his family owned port Greenore for conversion. Radio studios were built on the upper decks behind the ships bridge. In the hold were A.C. generators connected to two 10KW medium wave (AM ) broadcast transmitters. The combined power from these was fed to a tall aerial tower near the bow of the ship.

Renamed the MV Caroline the ship headed for the British coast off Essex, from where it would cover London and the South East.

On Easter Sunday 1964, with their words having been pre-recorded since they were too nervous to broadcast live, Chris Moore and the then unknown actor Simon Dee announced 'This is Radio Caroline on 199, your all day music station.'

Then this record was played and dedicated to Ronan O'Rahilly.

Caroline was on the air!

A couple of months later Caroline was joined off the Essex coat by Radio Atlanta broadcasting from the MV Mia Amigo. Within weeks the stations merged and the original ship the MV Caroline sailed to Ramsey Bay becoming Radio Caroline North and the Mi Amigo stayed off Frinton-on-Sea becoming Radio Caroline South.

Now O'Rahilly had almost all of the UK plus Southern Ireland and substantial parts of the continent in range of his transmitters.

With Caroline as the catalyst and its audience of tens of millions, new music and youth fashion accelerated at astonishing speed and hundreds of new bands achieved massive and sometimes lasting success, a fact still not  forgotten to this day by the now ageing stars that it helped get started:

"...... Radio Caroline was an exciting part of all our lives and summed up the spirit of the times, culturally and musically." Sir Paul McCartney

"For The Who, Radio Caroline was an angelic force ........without Caroline we would not have sold a single record." Pete Townshend

"Radio Caroline was more adventurous than most of the stations around, it championed bands like The Kinks, who owe much of their early success to Radio Caroline." Ray Davies

"Radio Caroline gave us our start, my eternal thanks." Spencer Davis

"Did you ever wonder why so much fantastic music came out of Britain starting in the 60s? Pirates did it. The story of how they did it seems unbelievable, but it really happened. It completely altered the course of rock n roll." Steve Van Zandt, Bruce Springsteen's band

"Radio Caroline was a great breakthrough in pop music radio - the one place you could hear the charts and new releases you couldn't hear anywhere else." Noddy Holder

"We wrote the song 'Rock n Roll' which included the lyric ' waiting all the time to find radio plays on Caroline'. This ballad was a big part of remembering how important Radio Caroline was to us. The fact that private radio stations played our songs and that they included some of the best DJs prompted the government to give the country top 40 stations." Francis Rossi, Status Quo.

"I had already started my recording career when Caroline launched. I loved lazing in bed in the morning listening to all my favourite records. It was amazing!" Sandie Shaw

"Tuning in to Radio Caroline in the 60s was an integral part of keeping abreast with the chart action of the day. For us recording artists, it not only kept us on our toes, but - upon hearing some sparkling new release - made us even more determined to match or surpass the musical standards being set!" Mike d'Abo, Manfred Mann.

" Everyone needs competition to maintain quality and provide alternatives and Radio Caroline was just what we needed in the 60's, being one of the first to do this in radio .." Joe Brown

"If there had been no Radio Caroline, there would have been no Wild Thing and no Troggs, plus many other groups we still know today from the 60s. God bless all who sailed in her." Reg Presley, The Troggs

By the end of 1964 Caroline had more listeners than the three BBC networks combined.

The monopolies of the BBC and Luxembourg were shattered and UK radio was changed forever.

As always, the BBC was totally out of touch with what their audience wanted.

Nothing's changed there then!