Those self-important and ignorant old DJs ....

Every time a tune is played on the radio it creates associations in the mind of the listener, and broadcasters who were called disc jockeys because they played discs, are now dying off with their memories. Many of them have written books about their past activities in broadcasting, and because they were on the low end of the management tree, they were not aware of the activities of the people who made their employment possible. All they had to do was speak into a microphone and play the records; commercials; station breaks and add blather about nothing much in particular.

So this presented a lot of these would-be DJ-authors with a problem. If they merely rattled on about how clever they were, the book buying audience would ignore them. But if they mixed-in with their blather a lot of "inside information", like gossip about their peers and superiors, well, then they had a chance to sell their typographical wares to the hoi polloi.

Unfortunately for them they were on the lower level of the employment tree and so they had no idea of what the people at the top were up to. They were at the top, and they were on the bottom end of the money trail.

In this way many books and articles got written about the offshore stations of the Sixties, and most of them are filled with nonsense. That which the authors did not know, they got from other books or from people who relayed second-hand tales. This is how Robert Chapman got into the picture.

So when April 1990 rolled around, and Cambridge University Press published an article comparing 'Radio London' with 'Radio Caroline', it seemed as if its author knew what he was writing about, which of course he did not. Robert Chapman threw into his article just about every line of gossip about the management of the two stations that he had heard, and naturally, most of these line items of apocryphal, inside information, were derived from made-up rubbish.

Robert Chapman was trying to get a university degree, and this subject was part of his means of achieving it with a dissertation. So he wrote an article and then he wrote a book which was published the year after the BBC-TV documentary had turned Ian Cowper Ross' novel into claimed fact. Which of course it was wasn't, but it was claimed that it was. 

But when Robert Chapman wrote this article for publication in April 1990, he did not have the mythology of Ian Cowper Ross to draw upon. So he knew nothing about the myth involving 'Jimmy Ross', and consequently he could only recite the old nonsense about 'Radio Caroline' being named after Caroline Kennedy, and tales like that. Tales such as the one about the wife of LBJ investing in 'Radio London'. It was what Robert Chapman had been told, not what he knew.

The real story about the offshore stations of the Sixties has nothing to do with broadcasting, and that is the real reason why no one has revealed that story to date. It has more in common with the mythology of 'Climate Change' than it does with kids being deprived of pop music.

After all, when 'Radio Caroline' first hit the airwaves, the Beatles were already big, and one attachment to the aristocratic in-law connections of Ian Cowper Ross was already cashing-in on their success, while it would be years before others cashed-in on Herbert W. Armstrong's themed warnings about our polluted Planet, and the Brexit crisis. Yet that was the message that kept the offshore pirate stations of the Sixties on the air.

But the DJs like Kenny Everett could only get annoyed when the voice of Art Gilmore interrupted his 'Big L' show with 'The World Tomorrow', even though that program was helping to pay his wages. Everett did not understand that program, and neither did other Djs who turned to writing their memoirs, yet that program had more in common with the offshore stations coming on the air, than the kids who wanted to hear Beatles' records on the radio!

Check out this site for more information about Ian Cowper Ross.