A celebrity is born on Parkeston Quay

Simon Dee publicity picture from 1964

FIFTY years ago this week, weary Radio Caroline DJ Simon Dee came ashore for the first time since the pirate station’s launch at Easter 1964. If he’d hoped for some rest and relaxation he was to be sorely disappointed.

Fellow DJs aboard the Fredericia mischievously announced on-air that Dee was heading for the port of Harwich – and hundreds of fans quickly gathered at the quayside to give him a hysterical ‘Beatle-mania’ reception.

Dee, real name Cyril Henty-Dodd, a 28-year-old former public schoolboy and RAF man, was astonished by the crowds that greeted him. He knew his stint on the pioneering pirate ship had elevated him to some sort of celebrity status, but screaming girls on this scale was a real shock. He spent at least an hour signing autographs before being whisked away.

The Caroline organisation was keen to exploit the situation and booked Dee for a number of public appearances while he was on the mainland. One of his first engagements on shore was to judge the Felixstowe Carnival Queen competition. Carnival organisers had earlier expressed concern that if their guest came directly from the ship and slipped into Felixstowe Ferry, he could be arrested on the beach, while on the other hand a legitimate landing might see him encounter problems with customs officers.

They needn’t have worried, for Dee’s minders got him back into the country without incident and he turned up at the carnival all smiles, accompanied by fellow celebrity judge Rolf Van Brandtzaeg, a senior executive at Caroline’s London office. After they ‘inspected’ the contestants for carnival queen, they awarded the crown to 18-year-old Felixstowe shop assistant Andrea Cooper.  A day or two later Dee made a surprise visit backstage at the Felixstowe Spa Pavilion to meet the cast and dancing girls from the summer show Starlight Rendezvous.

Dee also rolled up at a record shop in Ipswich's Buttermarket, and again a huge number of fans turned out to get close up and personal with the new pirate hero. The shop was reported by at least one source as being called 'Record Maintenance'. That name sounded unlikely to me, so I am grateful to Ipswich photographer Dave Kindred for pointing out it was actually called Murdoch's - and he should know because he was there to witness Simon Dee's visit!

Adam Faith performed on board Caroline in June 1964

Radio Caroline’s popularity was clear to see from such scenes, and such was the station’s pulling power that pop celebrities were willing to go out into the North Sea to visit the ship in return for having their latest records played and publicised by the station. Teen idol Adam Faith was one such visitor, performing and publicising his new single ‘I Love Being in Love With You’ which he hoped would gain him the rare accolade of 20 consecutive singles reaching the charts (or ‘hit parade’ as then known). Dressed in jeans and black sweater, he was taken to the ship on the tug Agana and returned to Parkeston Quay in the late afternoon, to be met by a crowd described as “girl office workers” clutching autograph books.

Around this time Parkeston Quay also welcomed back two Dovercourt carpenters – Ron Mitchell and Colin Sturch - who had been out to work on the ship, but had become marooned there by bad weather. They’d been hired to make alterations to cabins, but rough weather saw them stranded for days. DJs broadcast messages between records to their wives to assure them all was well and their spouses would be back soon! At one point listeners heard an appeal for a tug to be sent out immediately the weather improved, and when this was done the pair got home after at least four days on board. At the quayside they told reporters it had been very rough out there, but they’d enjoyed themselves.

Also sailing into Harwich looking a bit green around the gills were the crew of the yacht Carmen, teenage electrical engineering students from Leeds, who had been foiled in a bid to anchor in international waters near Caroline. They wanted to set up a temporary pirate station to publicise their university rag week, but instead suffered a night being seasick and scared witless as they were tossed around in Force 5 gales, the choppy sea crashing over the deck and forcing them back to land.

On the morning of June 12, thousands of Caroline listeners began to fret when they found the station had gone off the air. Calls flooded into the offices of Planet Productions in London, where a spokesman attempted to reassure everyone it was a mere temporary blip, but as there was no direct contact with the ship they couldn’t be sure what was going on. It was likely to be maintenance work on transmitters, they said. Suddenly, at around noon, the airwaves burst into life and all was well again.

Meanwhile talks continued about a merger of the two stations out in the North Sea – Caroline and Atlanta – with the idea that one of them would become ‘Radio Caroline North’ and broadcast from the Irish Sea remaining a strong possibility.

The authorities were still in a tizzy about it all. Barrister Jeremy Thorpe, Liberal MP for North Devon, introduced a Parliamentary Bill to force radio stations using advertising to formally register with the Government. He said without this the ships could be vulnerable to any warship in the world that might want to hijack airwaves for propaganda purposes. He said Caroline “currently sings like an offshore siren” but if taken over could quite easily start broadcasting inflammatory, seditious, obscene or undesirable material to an unprotected British public . . . .    


Website: www.robhadgraft.com
Twitter: @RobHadgraft

Eccentrics jump on the pirate bandwagon!

Screaming Lord Sutch launched his pirate  radio
 station on a fishing boat 50 years ago this week.
 

IMITATION is the sincerest form of flattery they say, and 50 years ago this week all manner of weird and wonderful ‘Heath Robinson’ radio stations were attempting to emulate the astonishing success of the new Radio Caroline.

Perhaps the noisiest and most surreal of all of them was Radio Sutch, brainchild of Screaming Lord Sutch, a 23-year-old rock’n’roller and part-time politician. Sutch didn’t have the backing or the resources of Caroline and his early efforts involved using rather crude equipment plonked on board a smelly fishing boat off Southend. Things improved greatly for Sutch’s little team when they happened upon the unoccupied Shivering Sands army defence fort, built on stilts nine miles out in the Thames Estuary, and decided to use that instead!

Caroline had by now attracted 6.8 million listeners in less than 10 weeks on the air. The continuous pop music, something not provided by the BBC at the time, was proving very popular and businesses were said to be queuing up to buy advertising slots. Caroline’s publicity manager announced that £60,000 worth of advertising had been booked by the end of May and another half-a-million’s worth was in negotiation. These were, of course, huge sums in 1964 terms.

With figures like this being bandied about it was no wonder other chancers wanted a slice of the action. Radio Atlanta had joined Caroline in the North Sea off the coast of NE Essex and began broadcasting in mid-May. There were strong rumours Atlanta might agree to a merger with Caroline and then head off to the Irish Sea to begin broadcasting as ‘Caroline North’. In early June there was still no sign of this happening, however, which prompted a member of the House of Keys on the Isle of Man to announce that if Caroline North didn’t launch soon, he would do the job himself and call his station Radio Vannin.

The next pop pirate project to pop up was called Radio Invicta, which set up home on the Red Sands defence fort off the Kent coast, under the leadership of fisherman Tom Pepper (real name Harry Featherbee), publican Charlie Evans and journalist John Thompson. Test transmissions were made in the first week of June as the station finalised plans to broadcast pop music to the people of the London area. (NOTE: Six months later tragedy would strike Invicta, Pepper and two others drowning after leaving Red Sands in misty conditions on a boat with engine trouble).



Shivering Sands war-time fort, home of Radio Sutch

(Pic: Hywel Williams)

The pirate stations, even those positioned in international waters, had become a real headache for the British government in June 1964, and one MP, Sir Ian Orr-Ewing, said there was one obvious way to sort out the situation and break the BBC monopoly in one fell swoop - create a proper local radio network for the UK, with small regional transmitters and small teams of local people, all funded by the private sector. It worked for local newspapers, why not radio?

Meanwhile, Screaming Lord Sutch was having a whale of a time on Shivering Sands, his playlist inevitably heavily featuring his own wacky records, released with limited success over the past three years. Late at night he broadcast ‘Saucy Bedtime Tales’ and horror stories, featuring excerpts from novels like Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Fanny Hill. According to his biographer Graham Sharpe (Aurum Books, 2005), Sutch reckoned Shivering Sands was like a hotel or a holiday camp in the middle of the sea, complete with proper toilets and bathrooms, and a big step up from the station’s earlier home, a 60-foot trawler called Cornucopia anchored off Shoeburyness. The boat had been  uncomfortable and smelt strongly of fish because they rented it out in the afternoons after the fishermen had finished with it for the day. Broadcasting times continued to vary on Radio Sutch, DJs often oversleeping and equipment breaking down. Bizarrely, their expenses were covered mostly by American evangelist groups who brought air-time to broadcast bible classes during the early hours.

Dressed in his trademark leopard-skin gear, Sutch liked to wave a Jolly Roger flag from the catwalk of the 70 feet towers to welcome any visiting boats of reporters or supporters. Having claimed squatters’ rights to the fort, they no longer suffered seasickness like many of those aboard Caroline and Atlanta, but did encounter some health problems - on one occasion DJ Colin Dale was airlifted to Margate hospital suffering badly with food poisoning. There were other hairy incidents, including a fire, DJ Brian Paull almost drowning while swimming in the sea, and various members finding themselves falling or hanging from broken ladders and walkways which were in a poor state of repair.

To begin with, it appeared the authorities would leave Sutch and his merry men alone. A war department land agent accompanied by a Gravesend police officer arrived by boat at the fort, apparently intent on serving notice on Radio Sutch they were trespassing on government property. But on arrival, having seen there was no damage to the lighting and other external aspects of the fort, they decided a formal notice was pointless and retreated.

A patrol boat from Sheerness made repeated appearances near the fort, but Sutch claimed he simply told them they were not welcome, and they too retreated. He said: “I told them the Army had left the forts and did not want them, so I had offered to buy them. No one comes aboard here unless I say so! We close all the hatches and lock all the doors if anyone we don’t like comes near us.”

Aficianados of pirate radio soon learned that Radio Sutch was little more than a publicity stunt, whereas the Caroline organisation was clearly in it for the long haul.

 

Cool jazz direct from the chilly North Sea!

Supplies arrive for the Mi Amigo (Pic: Ken Adams) 

FIFTY years ago the choppy grey waters of the North Sea could be a surreal and cool place to be. For example, sea-farers passing a certain spot just off the Essex coast on one particular day would have heard the jazzy Hammond organ sounds of American star Jimmy Smith, who was playing live from the poop deck of the motor vessel Mi Amigo!

Smith was in Britain to record music for the forthcoming MGM film Where the Spies Are, starring David Niven. He’d met Radio Caroline chief Ronan O’Rahilly at the 21 Club in London and agreed to come out to the Caroline ship and give the first-ever live performance on the new radio station.

He was duly ferried out, along with his hefty Hammond organ, drums and guitar, plus cohorts Tony Crombie and Tony Thorpe. When they found the organ wouldn’t fit inside the ship’s tiny studio they set up on the poop deck instead. Despite the noise of the wind and shrieking gulls, the sound was deemed perfect! Smith played a special composition called Hip Ship Blues, plus his hits Moonlight in Vermont and Satin Doll. Caroline's millions of listeners loved it, while those on board witnessing the cool jazz at close quarters broke into rapturous applause when the mini-show ended.

Exactly 50 years ago this week, Caroline was broadcasting from the MV Fredericia, a mile or two off the coast from Felixstowe, and had been recently joined by the Radio Atlanta team, aboard the MV Mi Amigo, which anchored a short distance away, just off Frinton-on-Sea. Both were positioned in international waters, but close enough for smaller boats containing fans, journalists and rag week students to set out to visit them from time to time. It was pretty hectic and the Customs and Coastguard people were having their work cut out to keep pace with it all.

Atlanta, set up by Australian entrepreneur Allan Crawford, began test broadcasts before their first proper programming commenced with a show by DJ Colin Nicol. Audience figures for Caroline were by now huge, and the debate over the two stations’ legality (or otherwise) continued to drag on, with strong rumours emanating from Westminster that because they were fulfilling a clear need, legislation to force them off the air might not be introduced after all. The ships were deliberately positioned just outside GB territorial waters so controlling them was no easy task.

It was widely tipped that Caroline and Atlanta would soon merge, their respective bosses claiming they were no longer deadly rivals fighting for the same audience, as was initially the case. They were also both well aware of the huge profit-making potential of broadcasting adverts between the pop records. ITV even devoted an episode of its prime-time weekly show World in Action to the story.

The very first advert heard over the Caroline airwaves was on behalf of Woburn Abbey, the country seat of the Duke of Bedford. It was so successful that the following day Woburn welcomed 4,500 visitors despite bad weather, a big increase on normal figures. This satisfied customer would be quickly followed by ads from Peter Evans Restaurants, the News of the World and Phoenix Rubber, as well as smaller businesses from Suffolk and Essex on the nearby coast.

Songwriters and music publishers’ were not quite so happy with the pirates, however, and talks were held to thrash out a formal agreement  for the stations to start paying the Performing Rights Society for the music it was broadcasting 12 hours each day. This showed the pirates were willing to go ‘legit’ in order to keep the authorities happy. Not only this, they were even willing to sponsor projects on the British mainland, Caroline helping fund a Formula 3 Brabham racing car. It did well under its new colours, featuring in the prize money on six occasions over the spring and summer of 1964.

Having been delayed and closely questioned by Customs officials at the port of Brightlingsea, a group of journalists headed out one morning to the ships looking for stories about the new pop pirate phenomenon. They were delighted to find that on board the Mi Amigo, skipper Gerard Meyer was accompanied by his wife Irene. The pair had married ten months earlier, and revealed that this stint on the North Sea was the first time they'd been able to live together!

The ships welcomed the attention of the journos, but were not quite so relaxed when their supply vessel was reportedly ‘taken over’ by eight students who were apparently attempting to out-pirate the pirates! The students arrived on board Caroline (after a delay due to engine trouble) but met with little resistance from the crew and DJs after explaining they were from SE Essex College of Technology in Dagenham and only wanted to publicise a rag week appeal in aid of starving third world children. The teenagers were allowed to broadcast their message and were named as Lorraine Maughan, Janice Sibthorpe, Dee Hunter-Williams, Lesley Sinclair, Chris Williams, Graham Dove, Tony Cole and Ron Newbury. I wonder what became of them? 

This rag week idea caught on, and before long students from Leeds University came down to Essex with a yacht, complete with radio transmitter, to join the fun in the North Sea. Their plans went awry however, when a group of colleagues arrived to relieve the team already on board, but made the mistake of driving their Land Rover into shallow waters on the foreshore at Harwich. It quickly began to sink and suffered considerable damage before it could be towed out hours later. The students' plan to become radio pirates suddenly lost its appeal and they decided to leave it to the experts on Caroline and Atlanta.

Meanwhile, three miles out in the North Sea, the music played on . . . 

* FOOTNOTE: The live performance on board Caroline by Jimmy Smith and his band has been the subject of conjecture among pirate radio enthusiasts over the years. Some sources say it happened in May 1964, others say it was a year later in 1965. Jon Myer who compiled the Pirate Radio Hall of Fame and knows a thing or two about this subject, tells me it was almost certainly May 1965, and, what is more, this has been confirmed by Jimmy’s guitarist that day, Tony Thorpe. Tony, incidentally, went on to achieve success in the pop charts with The Rubettes and The Firm. Those of you old enough to remember the No.1 hit Sugar Baby Love on Top of the The Pops, might remember the band member with the huge glasses . . .  that’s him! 



* Tony Thorpe . . . from the
North Sea to Top of the Pops!