In yesterday's blog, we got to the point in George Saunders' storyline where he had just arrived at Greenore. He came in a car which John Gilman appears to have been driving, since George does not mention any additional occupant.

"When we parked the car", said George, "I saw two ships, one looked like a ship and it was large." The larger vessel was the mv Caroline; ex-Iseult; ex-Fredericia. It had departed under tow from Rotterdam, Holland on February 13, 1964 and was then brought to a disused wharf at Greenore, Eire.

As they walked past the ship, Gilman remarked "Oh that’s not ours” and then they arrived at a smaller ship that George thought looked like a coaster. This was the mv Mi Amigo; ex-Magda Maria; ex-Bon Jour which had arrived at Greenore under its own power on March 13, 1964. The ship remained at Greenore until April 17, 1964, for a total of 35 days. Therefore, even though George Saunders did not provide an exact date for his visit, we know that it was after Friday, March 13, since the ship was already there, and before Tuesday, March 23, 1964 when the mv Caroline departed from Greenore which provides a maximum window of 11 days. But since the mv Caroline was not getting ready to depart, it was during a much narrower window of time more akin to the week beginning on Sunday, March 15, 1964, and ending on Saturday, March 20, 1964. Therefore it is also possible that George Saunders had not as yet burned his bridge to Marconi, and that he undertook this visit on the weekend of Saturday-Sunday March 14-15, 1964.

The reason for reaching that conclusion is because when Gilman and Saunders boarded the mv Mi Amigo and went below top deck, they met another man who caused George to react in obvious deference. This was all due to this man's immediate appearance. George figuratively bowed to the apparent superior authority of this man and then immediately began addressing him as "Sir". According to George, this man seemed to like George's manifestations of outward subservience, but then he began to grill George about his knowledge of broadcasting transmitters and radio engineering. George felt under pressure and that he was being given a verbal examination if he wanted the job. It was under this stress point that his interrogator suddenly turned to Gilman and said: "Right you'll do", meaning George Saunders, and not Gilman.

If George had failed this test, which to this day he still rates as one of the more grueling impromptu technical examinations that he has ever had to take, then it is possible that he could have returned to his boring assignment at Marconi the following Monday to resume work on a marine radar handbook. In fact, this is the more likely scenario since George Saunders did not remain at Greenore to sail with the mv Mi Amigo when the ship departed on Friday, April 17, 1964.

After George passed his aural examination and being told "Right you'll do", George later recounted: "So I said 'Okay', I was duly inducted." George then added: "A couple of days later, I was joined by another chap, the name fails me,  I can see the face, gosh a chap called Grays no the name’s gone but he joined about two days after me and under John Gilman’s guidance, we did various things to getting it all set up." Whether George arrived on Friday March 13, 1964, or whether he stayed on for a few days longer on leave from Marconi, is not clear, but it is clear that he did not stay at Greenore and leave with the Mi Amigo.

However, we also have another clue about the time frame as a result of George's additional comments during the same OEM interview about his time at Greenore when he was told:  ".... we need quite a bit of work doing yet, it’s not ready to go. This ship has been on the air previously but the aerial has to be rigged." So clearly Harry Spencer who rigged the antenna had not as yet completed his work.

​While some may think that this concentration on the specificity of dates is tedious and totally unnecessary, the fact is that by skipping lightly over timelines, the vast majority of writers who have addressed the subject of offshore radio, have created fables out of thin air in order to connect dots that do not exist!

But after passing his "aural exam", George was then invited to look around the Mi Amigo where everything below top deck was being lit by local power. They went down into the hold and looked at the two 10kW Continental Electronics transmitters, after which, they then moved on to inspect the studio and its gear.

George Saunders continued: "Now we come back to the chap I mentioned earlier on, the chap who gave me the rigorous interview - now this chap was A. N. Thomas, and he had been chief engineer transmitters BBC, so that’s why I got such a heavy interview. And he had also been head of planning and insulation department as well."

George Saunders sent us an obituary notice from the BBC staff magazine, and it seems that until it was pointed out to George Saunders, he was unaware that it was general knowledge that Alfred Nicholas Thomas had retired from the BBC and taken up employment with Charles Orr Stanley and his Pye Group of Companies.

In some quarters, it was also common knowledge that Alfred Nicholas Thomas who was employed by the BBC at the time, not only knew of, but that he worked with Arthur Carrington of Marconi on a major project. But the dots connecting Thomas with Carrington, also connected both Thomas and Carrington with Pye, 

In addition to these connections, Thomas also became involved with fellow BBC retiree John Howard Gilman. Their connecting dots go from the BBC to Pye and a Pye assignment at Radio Veronica. Then their scene shifted to Swanson's GBOK alongside the Pye facility at Sheerness.

Sensing the desperate mess that Allan James Crawford had repeatedly got himself into by trying to start an offshore radio station to promote his own music business, John Stanley, son of Charles Orr Stanley and head of the Pye Group of companies, then stepped in to take charge. This how and why Thomas and Gilman entered into the life of Allan James Crawford. However, what the average reader saw on their printed pages of the daily newspapers, was a collection of meaningless stories about Ronan O'Rahilly, and Crawford was under strict instructions to keep his mouth shut while two public relations firms got to work to spread misinformation.

The real story behind this 'Electrical installation dispute' which unravels a lot of behind-the-scenes details that have been distorted or skipped-over by others, will be continued here in part 7, tomorrow. ​

This is a composite picture of George Saunders created from two photographs. They were both taken in January 1966, which is approximately twenty-two months after George Saunders first met John Gilman in a pub at Chelmsford, Essex.

To say that this is a strange tale is an understatement. To even suggest that it sounds unbelievable is not unreasonable, but in the absence of contradictory evidence, this is the tale that we are asked to believe, and subject to additional evidence to the contrary, we accept as being true.

To recap, young George who is about twenty-two months younger than the picture you see to the left, has a job at Marconi where he has been employed for about four years. He has been assigned to write a handbook about marine radar, a subject that he finds boring and admits that he knows little about. But it is a steady job with a major British firm of international repute.

One day in Chelmsford, Essex, after working on the marine radar handbook, bored George departed the factory gates of Marconi and went to his local pub to enjoy a pint, or something  similar to wet his whistle. But as he raises his glass he also struck-up a conversation with another customer who was sitting at a nearby table.

George did not know it at the time, but that fellow customer was not a local and neither did he work for Marconi. He was a man on a mission, which seems to have been meeting George Saunders. His name is John Howard Gilman and he was at the time, a retired BBC veteran technician, but on that particular day, it seems that he was there not by chance, but because he had been observing young George. Today, we might call it scouting for talent, or even stalking a victim, or in this instance a 'patsy'.

Gilman was looking for a young and willing candidate whose credentials had previously been vetted and approved by Marconi who considered the mind of George Saunders to be worth the investment of training to become a part of their own technical team. So Gilman made Saunders an offer which apparently Saunders could not refuse, because a few days later, George Saunders called John Gilman to accept his offer.

That offer required George Saunders to resign from his career at Marconi. We don't know the financial terms of Gilman's offer, but they must have been worthwhile for George Saunders to throw away a career and go to work for a company that he will later admit is couched in so much mystery, that he did not know who he was going to work for. He only learn later the strange mechanism by which he would be paid: His wages would flow from an arrangement with a Liechtenstein operation to a Swiss bank, and then they would become available to George via a London bank.

George took the bait. He resigned from Marconi and then followed Gilman's instructions to the letter. He was to go from Chelmsford to Heathrow Airport where he would board a flight to Dublin in the Republic of Ireland. When he got off the plane he was to catch a train bound for Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK, but, he was to alight at Dundalk in the Republic of Ireland.

Had George previously been told about the swirling mist of myths surrounding a young man named Ronan O'Rahilly when he alighted at the Dundalk, his mind might have jarred in recall years later with his own retelling of a momentary visit made by him in 1964 to its railway station. Two years after George's arrival at Dundalk station, and around the time that the pictures of him were taken that are shown at the top of this page; on Sunday, April 10, 1966, the railway station at Dundalk was renamed in honor of Tom Clarke. This man was one of the executed leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising against the British. Now at that time, the dusting-off of the fables relating to 'The O'Rahilly' were yet to follow. But in 1964, at this  soon-to-be commemorated site of the Irish Republican rebellion against of British rule, George got off the train and there, as promised, was John Gilman waiting for him in a car.

George has recited this story several times to different people, including a member of 'The Trio', and he has been asked what kind of job he thought that he was going to be embarking upon. George says that Gilman only told him that it concerned "engineering" and that it was of course related to Gilman's previous admission in the Chelmsford pub, that this "engineering" work concerned a project to put a commercial radio station on board a ship which would then drop its  anchor off the coastline of England, and commence broadcasts to an audience in the British Isles.

For the next part of the story young George might just as well have been telling the police what he knew about being kidnapped, except that he was not going anywhere against his will. He was willingly going off into a dark story by his own account, and it was to venture into an undertaking where he would work on something that he only had a vague idea about, and that he was doing this on behalf of a very mysterious operation that he knew almost nothing about. But, this is what George signed up to do after quitting his secure job with Marconi, which I suppose only raises the question of whether Marconi were as bored with George, as George seems to have been with the work Marconi assigned to him? Only George now knows the answer to that question.

"I got off at Dundalk", says George, "and there sure enough was the chap I now know as John Gilman." That is what George said in an OEM interview. Does this mean that Gilman gave him a fake name when he met him in that Chelmsford pub? Who did George think that he was calling when he made his first telephone call to the man that "I now know as John Gilman"? Did he talk to Gilman on that phone call, or someone else, and who owned the telephone number that George called? We don't know because George did not tell us.

George does say that the man he came to know as Gilman "took me in his car and he said 'the ship's actually at Greenore, which is some way away." George recalled that they traveled over "a narrow windy road" and he remembers passing a castle, but he could not at the time remember what its name was. So I turned to the Internet to see how many castles there are between Dundalk and Greenore in Eire.

About 10 km or 7 miles northeast of Dundalk sits Castle Roche. It is perched on a rocky outcrop and it looks as if Gilman's car with George in it, would have driven along a winding road that passed beneath its sloping shadow.  The castle dates back to 1236 when John de Verdun built its strong walls; deep moat and a secret passageway that led to the once fabled healing powers of waters sought by pilgrims drawn from St. Ronan's  Well; which of course had nothing to do with the blarney that was liberally spashed around by that now departed eponymous member of the O'Rahilly family during his lifetime.

George continues with his recital: ".... eventually we got to Greenore and it was quite surprising, it had been an old railway terminal and a very large hotel was there, I remember it was quite a big building, probably about three storeys high."

Since this account by George Saunders has everything to do with events that led to the creation of Radio Caroline, we will continue our meticulous journey back in time with his account, tomorrow.

According to the joint press release issued by Eric White Associates and Leslie Perrin Associates on July 2, 1964, a "new operation" would be operating from 6 Chesterfield Gardens in London's Mayfair district.

But neither White nor Perrin identified the name of the "new operation", although they did identify the names of both of the old operations, and their two managing directors. White and Perrin claimed that Allan Crawford and Ronan O'Rahilly had become "joint managing directors" of the "new operation".

It seems that a lot of people were mystified as to what this "new operation" was, because according to the July 2, 1964 joint press release, two sales agencies, one in the UK and one in the Republic of Ireland had decided to form a joint enterprise.

It also appears from the joint press release, that the "new operation" was going to be based in the UK because it had a London address at 6 Chesterfield Gardens, which neither of the previous entities had ever used. Those premises were tagged as "Caroline House", and according to the joint press release, both the broadcasts from the new Radio Caroline, which was the old Radio Atlanta, and the original Radio Caroline that had been moved to a position off the Isle of Man, were to be managed from this new address.

There was no mention in the joint press release about ownership of either the ships, or the radio transmission equipment; nor details concerning employers of the announcers or the technical staff, or for that matter, the crew maintaining the ships. In fact, the joint press release created more mystery than anything else, and it led to a lot of people jumping to a lot of (false) conclusions, and they rushed ahead with a stream of misleading articles, broadcasts and books about Radio Caroline; what it was, and who had created it, or why it was created.

Now a story did begin to bubble to the surface about Ronan O'Rahilly, but that was to disguise the true story. But almost everything written and said about this man was false. This propaganda was intended to deceive and to stop people from asking about the name of the "new operation".

But true to the word of the joint press release, "departments" did begin to flood the premises of 6 Chesterfield Gardens. On the ground floor ("first floor" to people in the USA), was a combined sales department with no legal name of its own. This would later become a legal cause for concern after the Board of Trade began to investigate the "new operation" at 6 Chesterfield Gardens.

However, there was also a technical and engineering department with its own departmental head named John Howard Gilman and his secretary Dorothy 'Kitty' Black. They were located at 'Caroline House on its first floor ("second floor" in the USA), they oversaw the work of the radio engineers on board both of the radio ships. One of the radio engineers hired by John Gilman and approved by his consulting overseer named Alfred Nicholas Thomas, was George Saunders.

We can't say that Saunders worked for Radio Caroline, because that is not who he worked for, and there was no company named Radio Caroline that could have employed him. In 1960, George left school and went to work for Marconi as a junior engineer. It was his first job. He was more or less an apprentice moving around the firm and learning their procedures.

His last job before being hired by Gilman in early 1964, was to write a Marconi marine radar handbook. This project did not appeal to him because, he admitted in an OEM interview during 2014, he didn't know much about radar frequencies, and consequently he had to rely upon other people for information. This resulted in George becoming disenchanted with his job at Marconi.

For a long time after Gilman hired him, George puzzled about the way in which he was paid, but later still, after leaving behind anything to do with Radio Caroline, he asked for a letter of reference to give to his new employer. This letter puzzled George even more, because it merely confirmed that he had no idea about who he had been working for, and so it prompted him to recall the cloak and dagger way in which Gilman had hired him.

George has fondly recited the same story to several people, and so we have reasonable confidence in what we think we know, is close enough to what actually happened. He says that one day after leaving work at Marconi in Chelmsford,  he went to a local pub that Marconi employees tended to favor. He got his drink and looked around and saw a well dressed man in a suit who was sitting by himself at a table. George took his drink, walked over, sat down at the same table and began a conversation.

On July 2, 1964 a joint press release was issued in the name of two public relations firms: Eric White and Leslie Perrin.

White and Perrin (who David Block worked for), claimed to be representing two different companies, one of which was British (Atlanta), and the other was based in Eire (Planet). Both companies were formed to sell time on two different radio stations.

This joint press release for two different companies registered in two different countries, are each represented by a Managing Director: Crawford for Atlanta; O'Rahilly for Planet. This statement of fact is then followed by a statement of obfuscation. Both Crawford and O'Rahilly are to be joint managing directors of "the new operation".

Question: What is the name of "the new operation"?

We are not told, but we are told that it will have "departments" and that "the new operation" will be located at: "6 Chesterfield Gardens, W.1.

Since the press release is dealing with two different sales organizations based in two different countries it must have a name because it has an address, and it must be involved with more than sales since it has "departments". This is no idle matter. It is something that has been totally overlooked by the myriad of writers whose words attempted to tell their readers what the story of Radio Caroline was all about. Yet, no one seems to have addressed this very basic issue, even though it goes to the heart of the problem that suddenly confronted  Ove Sjöström and George Saunders in September 1964, but which began at some point in time before that date. 

That being the case, then this Press Release that is dated July 2, 1964, reveals an omission that became a critical flaw in the operation of Radio Caroline North which first came on the air with entirely new equipment on March 27, 1964, and that flaw is answered by this question:

Who installed the broadcasting equipment on board the mv Caroline?

Under the sub-heading of 'generators', Block wrote that there were ".... two generating sets, made by Mercedes-Benz, each capable of delivering 80 kilowatts at 220 volts (3 phase). A control panel regulates the voltage with a complicated switch gear." It is this seemingly innocuous paragraph that
later became the center of a dispute involving Ove Sjöström and George Saunders.

An air of mystery was also created regarding the identity or even authenticity of Arthur Carrington as a real person. No pictures were ever issued regarding this important individual who, according to David Block, turned a ferry boat into a radio ship, all by himself.

Because this incident goes to the heart and core of who was really behind the creation of Radio Caroline, we will deal with the CV of Arthur Carrington as a later and separate Blog entry. Here we will deal with the issue of the installation of the equipment itself.

Having read Block's version involving Carrington's participation, tomorrow we will address the claims of Ove Sjöström.

I had to modify yesterday's blog entry when some of the information I was working with began to conflict with other documents that I was about to draw upon.

This is a cold case investigation which enables a researcher to have an overview on all of the evidence collected to date.

A topical story allows the writer to only review the information previously collected within the space of a horizontal time frame, and the writer then has to meet a related deadline for publication.

But this story is decades old, and therefore this analytical overview can inspect information placed within folders and files during a vertical time frame, with only a self-imposed deadline.

When I was writing yesterday about David Block's account of Arthur Carrington, it was within a horizontal time frame, but the information I began to refer to came from a later period within a vertical time frame. That is when a controversy arose in my mind concerning the account of Arthur Carrington as written by David Block.

Part of that controversy was stimulated by the account published out of time sequence by Ove Sjöström, which was in itself challenged by the account created out of time sequence by George Saunders regarding Ove Sjöström. Those two accounts also conflicted with the David Block account of Arthur Carrington.

This creates an additional problem for me.

No longer is it sufficient for me to just trace the career of Arthur Carrington, but it is also necessary to trace the career of David Block and discover where those two lives collide with each other. It is not only necessary to know who Arthur Carrington is and who he worked for, but I also have to know who David Block is and who he worked for, because it is Block who introduced Carrington.

But, when the comments of both Ove Sjöström and George Saunders are added to the mix, there is at least a four-way ball of confusion. "At least four-way", because there is also contemporary documentation that supports, in part, some of Saunders account. But the account by Sjöström weaves a tangled web around both Allan James Crawford, and the Texas owners of 'Radio Nord' where Sjöström once worked.

Given all of that, I need to find the other folders within vertical files and place them for analysis side-by-side and within the context of horizontal events. In that way I can then perform a closer examination and hope to discover just where the truth resides.

​That is what I hope to present in this Blog tomorrow.

The person shown in the picture at the bottom of the page is not Arthur Carrington. It is the photograph of Swedish 'Panel Operator' Ove Sjöström. According to former Marconi engineer George Saunders, a few months after the mv Caroline moved to a new location off the Isle of Man, he was sent to the ship in order to sack this same individual.

Saunders claims that Sjöström had rendered one of the new CE transmitters useless, and that Sjöström was on his way to destroying the second one. That of course would have put the original Radio Caroline, now designated as the 'North' station, off the air! However, because it is this same textual controversy which envelopes both Sjöström and Saunders, I will spend more time examining it in depth within tomorrow's Blog. 

According to David Block, Arthur Carrington not only "installed the equipment", but this man whose picture is not shown, was also "responsible for Britain's first aerial and first undersea television transmissions. He also worked on the installation of equipment into the Manchester studios of ABC Television and has worked for the BBC, The Marconi Company [sic] and for the British Government on radar."

But David Block does not want there to be any ambiguity as to what he meant when he wrote that Arthur Carrington had "installed the equipment", because he then continued to list the "equipment" that he was referring to with these words which appear on the following page.

Generators. Block says that Carrington installed: ".... two generating sets, made by Mercedes-Benz, each capable of delivering 80 kilowatts at 220 volts (3 phase). A control panel regulates the voltage with a complicated switch gear."

Now this raises a question about the truthfulness of David Block, and the controversy involving Sjöström and Saunders which I will address tomorrow.

​Let look at the next item of "equipment" that Carrington is alleged to have installed: Transmitters and Combining Unit. It refers to ".... two transmitters and a combining unit all manufactured by American Continental Electrics [sic]. ..... The combining unit was put into operation at the end of May [1964] ...." The transmitters were manufactured in Dallas, Texas by a company called Continental Electronics, not 'American Continental Electrics'.

This technical slip seems to point to David Block not being on the ship, nor having actual documents to work from, being given second-hand notes by someone, which raises questions about the person who wrote his notes, and who he was working for when he wrote his own text?

However, irrespective of the manufacturer's name, those transmitters were installed at Rotterdam, and not at Greenore. They were already on board the mv Caroline when it first arrived in Ireland.

The next item attributed to Carrington is the aerial. Now Block contradicts himself, because he says that it was "designed and manufactured in Southampton and rigged in Cowes in the Isle of Wight." Now we know for a fact that Arthur Carrington did not design and nor did he manufacture or rig the aerial (antenna), because we know who designed it and who manufactured it, and neither party was named Arthur Carrington. Now as for "rigging" the antenna, well it could not be "rigged" before a mast was erected on the mv Caroline for the antenna to be rigged to, and the mast was erected at Greenore.

Finally this "equipment" section refers to 'Sound Control Room and Studio', and according to Sjöström, who was the Panel Operator from Sweden, some of this work was carried out by him, and his Swedish colleague.

So who is Arthur Carrington?

He is the person that David Block so conveniently identified as being the person responsible for turning the entire mv Caroline into a radio broadcasting ship.

More on this tomorrow.

Readers are told that this item was attached in "Southern Ireland", meaning the Republic of Ireland, to stop a needle from sliding across records during a storm. Prior to this information he has slipped in these key words: ".... where she was fitted out for broadcasting". It is as if David Block senses that information about the stability of the vessel is more important to listeners than details about the broadcasting station on board the vessel.

Who installed it? Who paid for it to be installed, and who owns the ship that it was installed upon? David Block does not tell us. Instead, David Block delights in telling readers on page 9 all about "28 year old Don Murrison" who works for "Anglia Marine Agencies of Harwich" who supply the ship after getting permission from a lot of UK governmental entities.

There is even a big picture of the ship's cook!

But what did that statement ".... where she was fitted out for broadcasting" mean on page 8; the one wrapped around details of the ship's anchor? When the ship arrived at Greenore from Rotterdam in Holland, there were two 10kW Continental Electronics transmitters which had been manufactured in Dallas, Texas already on board the ship. How did they get from Dallas to Rotterdam, and who paid for their manufacture and transportation?

However, whoever was behind Radio Caroline did not tell Christopher Moore. It was a secret.

Chris Moore filed suit against the people that he thought were running Radio Caroline, and this newspaper cutting was the result. In May 1966, it must have finally dawned on Chris Moore that what he thought he knew about Radio Caroline, was nothing at all. This press cutting tells his tale. 

However, as time went on Chris Moore was placated and he must have withdrawn his law because he later appeared on an Arena BBC-TV program where he laughed about those days. So was he paid-off, and if he was paid-off, who paid him off, and why? 

Clearly no one was in a hurry to tell the press who had really set-up Radio Caroline, and later, when Ronan O'Rahilly tried to revive Radio Caroline with the help of John Bloom, he did not know where to start.

Carl Conway is yet another person whose life and times have become obfuscated. Then on page 7, we are introduced to Doug Kerr, and about the only pattern that is beginning to emerge is a prior connection to ITA program contractors.

Next comes Tom Lodge who came in via Chris Moore, who obviously knew nothing about the real story behind Radio Caroline. Tom Lodge is followed by Gerry Duncan who is the "Programme Producer", and he also came in with a background working for ITA program contractors. He was also brought in via Chris Moore, and it was Chris Moor's lawsuit that claimed that he was the the "Programme Director and Planner" for Radio Caroline.

In other words pages 6 and 7 contain pictures accompanied by text that us nothing at all about the original on-air staff who were hired to present Radio Caroline programs, and neither does it explain who was behind Radio Caroline.