In the 1960s, the BBC had a vise grip on British radio, and rarely played the pop and rock music that was all the rage. So a group of rebellious radio DJs decided to give the people what they wanted, and started broadcasting popular music from boats stationed in international waters. Soon enough, these young DJs became national superstars… until the British government decided it was time to sink these pirates once and for all. This story comes from the History This Week podcast.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Original Music by Wesley Slover
Don’t Let Me Drown by Tigerblood Jewel
No One Knows But Me by Torii Wolf
No Apology by Mike Smmmtringer
Too Hot by Kommodity
The Wild Horseman (Version 2) by Traditional
To Completion by Epocha
West Side Story by Roy Edwin Williams

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View Transcript ▶︎

[sfx: AM tuning through a few channels]

You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

[sfx: switch to FM, music in]

When I was a kid, the main way that I listened to music was on the radio. This was back in the 90s, way before anything like Spotify, iTunes, or even Napster. Heck, even the internet barely existed. Sure, there were CDs and cassette tapes, but they were expensive, and there was no way a poor kid like me could afford much of a music collection.

Back then, it felt like the radio had so much power. There was no skip button, and only a handful of stations. By today’s standards, it might sound really constrictive, but there was actually something kinda nice about it. Once I tuned in, I was just along for the ride.

I remember sitting in my bedroom, listening to the radio on a little boombox [sfx: boombox music: Tigerblood Jewel - Don’t Let Me Drown]. And once I was old enough to drive, I would turn on the radio on my 45 minute commute to and from school.

[sfx: car startup + driving + new music: Torii Wolf - No One Knows But Me]

On these long drives, the radio felt like my connection to the outside world. It was how I got into the grunge scene that was exploding in Seattle.

[sfx: grunge music Mike Smmmtringer - No Apology]

On the hip hop station, I’d hear local Memphis rappers who were just starting to get big.

[sfx: hop hop Kommodity - Too Hot]

And in the mornings, I’d hear Shock Jock DJs who would say stuff that you could never get away with on television.

[sfx: Shock Jock Peanuts-Style Talking]

[sfx: car stops, music in: Traditional - The Wild Horseman (v2)]

But years before I even existed, in the late 60s, the radio was a totally different place. And that was especially true over in England. If you turned on a radio in England back then, chances are, you wouldn't hear any rock ‘n’ roll, and you definitely wouldn’t hear any DJs saying shocking things. The radio was a very clean and sanitized place, and it was tightly controlled by the BBC. At least, it was, until the great pirate radio rebellion.

[music out into ocean sfx]

This story comes from History This Week. Here’s Host Sally Helm. Sally: August 14, 1967.

Sally: Gale force winds off the coast of England. Choppy waves. Foam blowing in streaks across the water. And a small group of pirate ships that have been fighting to stay afloat… and are about to lose.

[sfx clip: Archival: Radio London presents their final hour.]

Sally: These are pirates of a particular kind. Less sword fighting and treasure hunting, more spinning records and dancing late into the night. For the past few years, a handful of boats have made it their mission to broadcast popular music from international waters. Because the BBC won’t play much pop, and this is the sixties. The people want to hear it.

Sally: This was always just barely legal. And now, the government has put its foot down. Tonight, at the stroke of midnight, these pirate radio DJs will become criminals.

Sally: Several boats have already given up. And today, the last possible day, the first to stop broadcasting is Radio London.

[sfx clip: Archival: Big L time is three o'clock and Radio London is now closing down.]

Sally: The next to drop is Radio 270, so-named for the frequency that it airs on. In their final hours, they have a rough go of it—the bad weather prevents most of the DJs from making it out to the boat, so they have to record their farewell messages from the shore. A helicopter pilot agrees to drop a package of tapes on board the ship so the DJs who are on board can play them, but he misses, and the tapes plunge into the water. Plus, 270 has some technical difficulties after jellyfish get sucked in with the water that's supposed to cool the generators. But their final broadcast is poignant nonetheless.

[sfx clip: Archival: Well, we have exactly, exactly 60 seconds left. So I haven't said my goodbyes yet. Well, you already know my sentiment. I'm going to miss you one hell of a lot.]

Sally: Right before midnight:

[sfx clip: Archival: Radio 270 is now closing down.]

Sally: Radio Scotland shuts down at the last minute, too:

[sfx clip: Archival: In the dying minutes of Radio Scotland to again thank you from the bottom of my heart and to say goodbye, and God bless you all. Bye-bye.]

Sally: All these DJs have closed up shop in the nick of time. A few seconds later, and their broadcasts could have gotten them thrown in prison.

Sally: But… some pirates are willing to risk it.

[sfx clip: Archival: We are now alone.] Sally: The DJs of Radio Caroline are defiant. August 14th turns into August 15. And their two ships, Caroline North and Caroline South, keep on playing. A news report put it this way: "It All Started Three Years Ago With Radio Caroline, and Caroline Is Going to Have the Last Word, Too."

Nick Bailey: I call pirate radio the soundtrack to the swinging sixties.

Patrick Hammerton: People just flocked in the millions to pirate radio.

Gordon Cruse: We were just rock ‘n’ roll. Just going nuts. It was fun.

Sally: The year is 1964. The Rolling Stones are releasing their first record album. The Beatles have had their American TV debut on Ed Sullivan, kicking off the British Invasion in the US. Their music had hit number one on the charts in the US even before a record 73 million caught them on TV—these days, if you turn on a radio in the States, you'll hear Beatles, Beatles, and more Beatles.

Sally: But back in the UK...

Nick Bailey: The BBC didn't really play much pop music at all.

Sally: That's Nick Bailey, one of the many former pirate DJs you'll hear from today. He told us, in the early 1960s, the British Broadcasting Corporation totally ruled the British airwaves. There was no such thing as commercial radio in the UK. And to listen to the radio, you had to pay for a TV and radio license. It was kind of like a tax. And even if you had a license, you were unlikely to catch the Beatles playing on the BBC at any given time. The BBC had struck a deal with the record companies and the musicians union: they'd play just a few hours of recorded music on air per week.

Nick Bailey: So if the BBC wanted to have pop music at other times of the day, they had to use the BBC orchestra.

Sally: Like, imagine you want to hear the Beatles’ "Yesterday":

[sfx clip: Archival: BBC Northern Dance Orchestra playing Yesterday]

Sally: And you get this rendition instead.

Nick Bailey: So it was pretty awful.

Sally: All these great records weren’t being played in the place they were being made.

Sally: Enter an eccentric 23 year-old, the grandson of a revolutionary who died fighting for Irish independence. His name was Ronan O'Rahilly. He died in 2020.

Ian Ross: He was a very charismatic figure, small, leprechaun-ish-looking. He had a weird smile, a bit like Jack Nicholson, a kind of diabolic smile. He looked in your eyes and you saw this kind of blazing sort of vaguely manic, but uh, tremendous force behind everything Ronan said and did.

Sally: The person you just heard is Ian Ross. O'Rahilly convinced Ross to get his father, and his father's investor friends, to put their money behind a vision: buy a ship, deck it out with radio transmitters, and anchor it over three miles off the coast of England. That way, they could play the pop music everyone wanted to hear. Their signal could reach millions of people—but they'd be technically outside British territorial limits. The law couldn't touch them.

Ian Ross: The whole pitch is that it's entirely legal. We were technically broadcasting from Panama.

Sally: O’Rahilly had made a deal with the Panamanian government so that the ship could fly the Panama flag.

Ian Ross: And if anything went wrong with Panama, we had another flag of convenience lined up.

Sally: There had been a few other pirate radio stations in Europe already—and another guy was trying to launch a ship to target the British audience around the same time as O'Rahilly's. It was to be called Radio Atlanta. In what was perhaps his first piratical move, O'Rahilly managed to stall the rival ship at port and beat them to launch.

Sally: On Easter weekend, 1964, Radio Caroline hits the airwaves.

[sfx clip: Archival: Hello, and happy Easter to all of you. This is Christopher Moore with the first record program on Radio Caroline.]

Sally: Their ship is a former Baltic ferry. They've outfitted it with a mast over 150 ft tall that doubles as a transmitting tower. It's anchored, but there's a captain and crew on board. Every day or so, a little tender boat comes bringing food, mail, and shipments of new records to play. Plus a rotating team of disc jockeys and newsreaders, from all over the world, who would generally spend two weeks on the ship, and then one week off. Today, you'll be hearing from ten of them. You've already met Nick Bailey…

Nick Bailey: I was a newsreader. My father was an actor and I sort of inherited his voice.

Sally: There was Patrick Hammerton, who went by "Mark Sloan" on the radio.

Patrick Hammerton: They told me Patrick Hammerton wasn't a radio name. They gave me half an hour to find one.

Sally: Steve Young:

Steve Young: My audio nom de plume became the curly headed kid in the third row.

Sally: Gordon Cruse...

Gordon Cruse: I called myself the Big Cruiser.

Sally: Keith Hampshire…

Keith Hampshire: I did the afternoon show and I called it Keefers’ Commotion.  Sally: Dermot Hoy:

Dermot Hoy: I was Brian Vaughan when pirate radio started.

Sally: Colin Nichol, who changed his name just slightly:

Colin Nichol: N I C H O L to N I C O L.

Sally: William Butcher, who’s since had his name legally changed to his DJ name,

Paul Noble: Paul Noble. I always rather liked chivalry, knighthood, et cetera.

Sally: There was Chris Sandford, who used his real name on air…

Chris Sandford: Because I was in an English soap opera.

Sally: And Roger Gale…

Roger Gale: Well, who I am now is the rightful honorable Sir Roger Gale, MP, which is a bit of a mouthful.

Sally: Back in the Radio Caroline days, he went by plain old Roger Gale.

Sally: Onshore in London, O’Rahilly set up a headquarters known as "Caroline House," where he and the other management were based. The DJs were split between two ships: the original one O’Rahilly had launched, called Caroline North. And his rival ship, Radio Atlanta, which he convinced to join forces. It would now be called Caroline South. Between the two ships, Caroline's signal could reach the whole country.

[sfx clip: Archival - This is the sound of free radio, Caroline South, broadcasting 24 hours a day on 259 meters in the medium wave…]

Paul Noble: I got up at quarter to six and was on the air eating cornflakes at six o'clock.

Sally: Paul Noble broadcast from Caroline South each morning. He'd talk to his listeners. Sympathize with their early commutes.

Paul Noble: We related to our audience. For example, on my breakfast show, I knew when nurses went to work. I knew what time the milkman came.

Sally: Sometimes he'd call his mom up on the air.

Paul Noble: I mean, no one on the BBC ever called their mother up.

Steve Young: The BBC at that time was a very formal, British, you know, stiff upper lip. BBC: Let's spin the title song.

Sally: Radio Caroline?

Keith Hampshire: I used to say, ‘good afternoon, it's time for Keefers’ Commotion.’

[sfx clip: Archival - I'll have another three solid hours of finger snapping toe tapping knee knocking thigh slapping knuckle cracking... ]

Keith Hampshire: Rock n roll music.

[sfx clip: Archival - Brought to you by me, Keefers. Spelled with an F.]

Steve Young: I always equated it with being like having a nice little chat over the backyard fence and playing some great music for your neighbor, at a barbecue or something like that. That's kind of how it felt.

Sally: When Steve Young took his first trip out to Caroline South, he didn't know what to expect. What he found?

Steve Young: It was a rusty old tub. And I looked at it and thought to myself, what have I done?

Sally Helm: These were hardly ideal broadcasting conditions.

[sfx clip: Archival - We had a really rough night indeed up and down all night. I think gale force winds at times, and this morning and his situation hasn't improved all that much.]

Nick Bailey: I could be reading the news and one moment I see the sky and the next moment I see the sea.

Colin Nichol: I was thrown out of my seat and across the cabin in the middle of the news bulletin. I threw myself back in the seat and kept reading.

[sfx clip: Archival - I do believe you can hear the wind over the microphone there can you? Yes that’s it, that strange noise is the wind, we're really running about a bit and it’s very very rough outside.]

Dermot Hoy: I remember being sick out the porthole and then running back to the microphone and kept talking. We were dedicated weren't we?

Sally: Even just playing the records on a turntable could be a challenge.

Gordon Cruse: When the seas were rough, the needle would slide right across the record. So you had to have a cassette and you could play that.

Sally: It wasn’t just the weather that made things difficult. It was also each other. Pranks were a constant. Sometimes, a newsreader would be reading, and then…

Patrick Hammerton: Suddenly you get smoke in the studio and suddenly you realize half your news has been destroyed.

Sally: Because… someone thought it would be funny to set your notes on fire. The guys would lock each other in their cabins just before a broadcast:

Steve Young: Let me out of here, I'm on the air in two minutes!

Sally: It could be chaos. Not just the pranks. They also kept live chickens on deck for eggs. One guy had a pet bird who they sometimes talked to on the air.

[sfx clip: Archival - [bird tweet] Yes well, let me put in a word, edgewise, man, or like you go right into the little black hole there in the back. [bird tweet]…]

Sally: One day, a bunch of them are on board when…the signal goes out. Anyone trying to tune into Radio Caroline North finds… silence. Sally: Everyone onboard is running around, trying desperately to find the problem. Finally, Nick Bailey told us, they realize…

Nick Bailey: We'd overdone the toaster and it had tripped everything. It would be be suicide these days if you were off air for a couple of hours, but it kind of increased the interest. There was pent up demand. So when we came back on air, we said, ‘Terribly sorry, it was the toaster.’ And that, and people loved that sort of thing. All the sort of quirky stuff.

Paul Noble: We were real people and it was the first time that people in Britain were actually listening to that.

[sfx clip: Archival - This is Party Time.] Roger Gale: This is Party Time on Radio Caroline.

Sally: Roger Gale's first “Party Time” broadcast was on his 22nd birthday. He asked listeners to come down to the coast and flash their lights in celebration. And when he looked up, he saw… people were listening. Lights were flashing everywhere.

Roger Gale: The Coast Guard went berserk the following day. They said, ‘you do realize that half the traffic in the channel was bemused by the lights. And we practically had deep sea oil tankers moored in Harwich high street.’

[sfx clip: Archival - That's the way baby, move it.]

Roger Gale: I mean, we were mad.

Sally: And the audience ate it up. Within Caroline's first three weeks on the air, a Gallup Poll found that nearly thirty percent of the adult audience in the South station's broadcast zone had listened. That's almost 7 million people.

Ian Ross: We just took off the valve and it just went, boom.

Dermot Hoy: We were playing the stuff that people wanted to hear.

Sally: Each day, the tender would bring the latest shipment of records.

Roger Gale: Enormous amounts, you know enough vinyl to probably poison the whole of the north Atlantic if you throw it over the side.

Sally: The music was often sent by the artists or the record companies themselves. Media historians and people involved in the music scene told us, this was a kind of open secret—the record companies weren’t really supposed to be fraternizing with pirates. And sometimes, the DJs got money or favors in exchange for airtime, a practice known as “payola.” It was banned in the UK, but not unique to the pirates—the BBC itself had an internal investigation into payola a few years later, in 1971.

Sally: Back on the boat, the DJs would gather, listen to the records, and decide what to play.

Nick Bailey: I tell you the most exciting time for me, this was on the North ship, was when Sgt. Pepper by the Beatles came out.

Sally: The DJs crowded around a turntable and listened.

Nick Bailey: That was a particularly calm day. The sun was coming in, the sea was like a mill pond and it was just great to be alive and to be listening to this music, which was out of this world.

Sally: The Caroline DJs had advance access to records by the Monkeys, Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones. When the BBC refused to play Tom Jones' single, "It's Not Unusual," Caroline DJs did—and it shot to number one. They got an early copy of the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations."

Patrick Hammerton: And we played it repetitively the whole of that day. I think actually we were all on the roof, above the studio so they could hear us bouncing up and down on the roof.

Sally: "They" means Caroline's large and growing audience. The DJs had real sway with listeners.

Colin Nichol: We did break records. We did actually launch records.

Sally: Playing a relatively unknown artist could make a big difference in that person's career.

Dermot Hoy: The fact that we played them meant that they eventually became hits themselves.

Sally: They’re becoming real players in the music world. The BBC saw it coming—they told us, they definitely noticed Radio Caroline, which was having a lot of success with the youth. In the fall 1964, the BBC even conducted secret market research to "gather as much information as possible about the Caroline listening phenomenon."

Sally: The following year, a newspaper reported that between the two ships, Caroline boasted the second-largest English-speaking audience in the world. And it was bringing in 15,000 pounds a week in profit. By the ship’s first birthday, they had some high profile fans.

[sfx clip: Archival - Hi, this is Stevie Wonder. We're The Supremes. Wishing everyone at Radio Caroline a very happy birthday. And many more to come. Uh, this is Tom Jones, wishing Radio Caroline a happy birthday. I think it's a wonderful program. I would like to thank them very much for plugging my record.]

Sally: Normal people wrote in, too. A lot of them.

Keith Hampshire: We got between 500 and 1,000 fan letters every week.

Gordon Cruse: Mostly girls, who listened to the pirate ships.

Sally: The North ship, where Nick Bailey was transferred, got so much mail that the local post office had specific staff assigned to manage it.

Nick Bailey: Getting the, uh, the fan mail was well, it was very flattering.

Sally: He still has some of those letters.

Nick Bailey: Caroline is great. And there was only one thing I can say about the DJs. They are absolutely mad.

Sally: There was quite a bit of curiosity about the men behind the mics--and they were all men.

Nick Bailey: Here this one says “Dear gorgeous and sexy Nick, we are two great fans of Radio Caroline, and are dying to see what you look like. So will you please, please send us a photo because you sound really lovely. Lots of love, Linda.”

Sally: This was a theme.

Nick Bailey: PS, please don't forget the photo.

Sally: It wasn’t just girls writing to the guys. Keith Hampshire told us, he had a crush on his local bank teller. And one day, on air…

Keith Hampshire: I said, ‘if anybody's driving through Epsom today, do me a favor, stop into Barclays bank. You'll see a beautiful blonde teller behind the counter. Just go up to her and say, ‘Keefers says hi.’’ Well, apparently all day long, people were going into the bank and going up to her and saying, ‘Keefers says hi.’

Sally: Radio Caroline fans were everywhere. But they weren’t allowed on the boat. Some ferry boat captains saw a business opportunity, and brought boatloads of people right up to the edge of the ships.

Colin Nichol: And the people would all wave and shout and throw notes to us tied around a piece of rock or something of the sort.

Patrick Hammerton: They could do things like put a request and wrap it round a potato with an elastic band and throw it and it’d come whizzing past in their boats and throw it on board the Caroline.

[sfx clip: Archival - And the speed boat that's been running alongside us for a little while called the Sarah Paul has asked us for a request. Well, no sooner said than done, here's her latest.]

Gordon Cruse: And then when you came off the ship after your two week stint, there'd always be a crowd to greet the DJs.

Sally: During their week off the ship, on what they called "shore leave," Caroline DJs would interview musicians at "Caroline House." They'd open at concerts, or appear in nightclubs.

[sfx clip: Archival - The Caroline Saturday night sensation…]

Sally: The pirate radio lifestyle had perks. Like getting into exclusive events, or being given free clothes.

Steve Young: We went to all the nightclubs and spent money like water.

Sally: The DJs were making less than 1500 pounds a year, the equivalent of about $35,000 US dollars today. But they didn't pay income taxes. And while they were on board, they had no living expenses. They got free food, and a ration of cigarettes and beer. Even their dry cleaning was paid for.

Nick Bailey: I've never felt as rich since.

Sally: Bit by bit, the pirates were realizing just what a phenomenon they had become.

Colin Nichol: It's sort of an eye of the storm situation. When you're in the eye of the storm, you're not quite clear on what's going on around you.

[music in: Epocha - To Completion]

But it wasn’t just the fans who were paying close attention to what Caroline was doing, it was also the British government. As the station got bigger and bigger, the government started seeing these young DJs as less of a minor nuisance, and more of a serious threat. Soon enough, they decided it was time to take these pirates down once and for all. That’s coming up, after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[sfx clip: Caroline Ad - Caroline, the sound of a nation… ]

In just two short years, Radio Caroline had exploded in popularity. The DJs had become national celebrities, and the owners were supposedly making almost three million dollars a year in ad sales. Caroline was such a success that soon enough, competitors started popping up.

Sally: Some, like Caroline, were on ships or forts at sea. Like Radio London, which at times, claimed an audience even larger than Caroline’s. Others were just teenagers broadcasting from their attics.

Nick Bailey: And the more pirate stations started up, the more the government got worried.

Sally: The post office was in charge of radio communications at this point. And they started sending out enforcers.

Colin Nichol: Vans going around, trying to track down where these people were in their attics with their little homemade radio sets.

Sally: The post office says, they’re getting reports that the influx of pirate frequencies is interfering with radio communications. The government starts arguing, those frequencies could block emergency transmissions between other ships and those on shore. They could threaten the whole shipping industry.

Sally: Ronan O’Rahilly, Caroline’s founder, said these claims were overblown. But: on July 27, 1966, The Marine Broadcasting Offences Bill gets introduced in the House of Commons.

Sally: It means that any British subject working on the pirate radio ships, supplying the ships, advertising on the ships…

Keith Hampshire: Any British subject who basically had anything at all to do with the, uh, pirate radio stations—

Sally: Any of them could face a four hundred pound fine, or up to two years in prison.

Sally: The law wouldn’t go into effect until the following year. And the Caroline rebels were not about to take it lying down.

Roger Gale: We're going to fight for our freedom to broadcast.

[sfx clip: Archival - Tell the world you stand behind us. The slogan: make Wilson walk the plank.]

Steve Young: We ran a series of what you might call public service announcements.

[sfx clip: Archival - Free radio's army of rebellion is on the march.]

[sfx clip: Archival - A basic freedom is at stake.]

Nick Bailey: They were just trying to ram it home to the government that we weren't doing any harm, everyone is enjoying it, why do this?

Sally: The Caroline DJs seemed to have the public on their side. Even a Tory politician made headlines by calling the bill a "kill-joy." The DJs asked listeners to speak up in their defense. And they did.

Keith Hampshire: There were all kinds of campaigns—

Steve Young: Stickers and flags and demonstrations—

Keith Hampshire: There were petitions, millions and millions of signatures sent to MPs saying, ‘we want our Caroline, we want our pirates.’ And, um, it didn't seem to matter.

Sally: The act would go into effect at the stroke of midnight on August 14, 1967. As soon as Monday became Tuesday, August 15th. And as that date drew closer, other pirate radio stations started shutting down. But O'Rahilly, who has been running things from the headquarters on land.

Keith Hampshire: he said, ‘I don't care. The government can do whatever they want. People deserve free radio.’

Sally: He comes up with a workaround. Instead of restocking the ships from England, where that would now be illegal, he'd use Ireland in the North and Holland in the South. But that meant it would be a lot harder to get supplies, and people, to and from the ships.

Nick Bailey: It would've meant every time I went off the ship, going on the tender for 11 hours, and I didn't really fancy that.

Sally: Nick Bailey's last broadcast was on August 8, 1967. Just a week before the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act would have made him a criminal.

[sfx clip: Archival - This has been Nick Bailey.]

Sally: Other DJs threw in the towel because they didn't want to get arrested. Like Keith Hampshire.

Keith Hampshire: I still had my British passport. So I knew that I was liable.

[sfx clip: Archival - Sunday afternoon, August the 13th, the last edition of Keefers’ Commotion on Radio Caroline. Thank you very very much for being with me this afternoon. And thank you for being with me any afternoon that you have joined me previous to this one.]

Sally: The next day, Radio London, Radio 270, and Radio Scotland shut down one by one, until:  [sfx clip: Archival - This is Radio Caroline. It is now 12 midnight.]  Sally: Caroline North and Caroline South are the last pirates standing. For several weeks, it seems like they might just keep on playing music. Here’s a headline from the Evening Standard: "Ten weeks after it became an outlaw Radio Caroline is doing fine; audience and fan mail is steady—and the money still flows in."   Sally: Patrick Hammerton stayed aboard after the law passed. And when he went ashore for leave, he was approached by a journalist.

Patrick Hammerton: And he said he knew who I was. He knew that my show was still on the radio. If I was going back, he felt it would be an interesting story.

Sally: A story that would expose Hammerton as Caroline DJ Mark Sloane to the public. And to the police. Who were none to happy about the whole Caroline situation. The journalist tells Hammerton…

Patrick Hammerton: The feeling was that the Marine Offences Bill wasn't working properly because both Caroline North and South were having a wonderful time. So, there was a suggestion that one or two of us be made an example of and, uh, in the end, I thought it's not worth it. So I, uh, I resigned. That was that.

Sally: Soon, the big advertisers were pulling out. They didn’t want to be associated with these law-breaking pirates. Caroline was bleeding money.

Nick Bailey: That was the biggest problem because without the advertising, we were sunk really.

Sally: And then, the BBC announces it is launching a new channel. Radio One, to play pop music. And it offers jobs to many of the pirate DJs. Legal jobs, on British soil. A lot of them took the offers—some are still broadcasting on the BBC today.

Sally: In a way, this was a victory for the pirates. As a London newspaper put it, they had "nudged BBC radio into the second half of the twentieth century." But once that happened, there wasn't really as much need for them anymore.

Keith Hampshire: We felt that, okay, hey, we’d proven that this is what people want. But, on the other hand, you think, boy, you guys aren't doing it right. Within the confines of the BBC, it just didn't have the spark. It didn't have the camaraderie, whatever you want to call it. It was magical radio. It really was.

Sally: The following year, both ships were towed away by creditors. They were drowning in debt. The station's been revived on and off over the years. You can listen to a digital version online today. It’s the only station from the 1960s pirate radio era that’s still around. Now, it typically broadcasts from land, but it still owns a ship that it uses from time to time—though the current owner and station manager told us, at this point, that ship is just a figurehead.

Sally: Years after Caroline first went quiet, former DJ Gordon Cruse had a chat with Ronan O'Rahilly. He asked, hey: why'd you call the ship Caroline? O'Rahilly said, he got the idea when he saw a magazine photo of Caroline Kennedy, playing by her dad's desk in the oval office.

Gordon Cruse: And under the picture is, I'm getting emotional, “the world waits while Caroline plays.”

Sally: The world waits while Caroline plays. In another interview, with former Caroline DJ Keith Skues, O’Rahilly described the photo this way: “climbing under his desk, disrupting the whole work of government, was his daughter Caroline... and she was smiling.”

Sally: Disrupting the work of government. And having a good time doing it. That was Radio Caroline.

[music in]

That story came from History This Week, a fascinating and highly-produced podcast about momentous events in history. Every week, they turn back the clock to meet the people, visit the places, and witness the moments that led us to where we are today. Subscribe to History This Week right here in your podcast player.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound. To keep up with the latest and greatest, follow Defacto Sound on Instagram.

Sally: A very special thanks today to Jon Myer, whose website "The Pirate Radio Hall of Fame," has tons of great resources about Radio Caroline—including many of the recordings you heard in this episode. Thanks also to Sylvan Mason, Paul Rusling, Margaret Mytton and Chris Stevenson, for sharing their recordings. Thanks also to Colin Nichol, who shared tons of newspaper clippings and other archival materials from his Caroline days. And thank you to the many media historians and former record company employees who talked to us for this story.

Sally: This episode was reported and produced by Julia Press. HISTORY This Week is also produced by Julie Magruder, Ben Dickstein, and me, Sally Helm. Our editor and sound designer is Bill Moss. Our researcher is Emma Fredericks. McCamey Lynn is our senior producer. Our executive producers are Jessie Katz and Ted Butler.

To hear Radio Caroline today, visit radiocaroline dot C-O dot UK. You can even adjust the timezone, so that you can hear the breakfast show while you eat breakfast.

Thanks for listening.

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