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.