Setting the stage: 1960-1963, part 1d ....

​[This is a revised and extracted text from the previous editorial published on 10/5/2020. Our purpose is to separate and then expand parallel tracks about Aodogán O'Rahilly; Allan James Crawford; Charles Orr Stanley and Ian Cowper Ross. To this list we now add Gordon McLendon and his representative Charles William (Bill) Weaver.

Part 1d begins to focus attention on the parallel stories which have been ignored by everyone else and their contents jumbled up into a convoluted and absurd storyline to make Radio Caroline burst on to the scene as if by 'magic'. But the only 'magic' being performed is sleight-of-hand to get readers to buy into a totally fictitious storyline about a non-existent person called 'Jimmy'.

Of late the same troll who has stalked us, has recently posted what he calls an 'essay' about Ian Cowper Ross and his biological family. That 'essay' is no more than a few lines lifted from two or three sources and cobbled together as one, and then passed-off as his own storyline.

For years we have been aware of this information, but we have also been aware that several people share the same name as the father of Ian Cowper Ross. There is more certainty about the life of his paternal grandfather than there is about the life of his father, except that we know that his father became a glorified salesman for a sports car company that was in financial difficulty, and which eventually went out of business.

Consequently what we post here is based upon fact and not 'guilt by association'. If we employ a working hypothesis - we inform our readers that it is only a working hypothesis and a tool to aid us in our cold case investigation into the actual and authentic and provable origins of Radio Caroline.

Cobbling together an irrelevant part about "a" Charles Edward Ross, does not prove anything in relation to the father of Ian Cowper Ross. We do know that Ian's father sold Jensen cars, and that Ian took one of them and crashed it into a bus resulting in a lengthy hospital stay and the near-loss of his foot. A year later, he hobbled into a court of law to answer charges of reckless driving.

We also know that a person named Charles Edward Ross who does appear to be the father of Ian Cowper Ross, had been hauled into a court of law himself, for drunk driving, and that this person then appears to have died intestate - which is defined as "a person who has died without having made a will." The person we found meeting this description seems to have died without assets to leave to anyone.

We also note that neither Ian Cowper Ross, nor his several children, appear to make any reference to Charles Edward Ross, but much mention is made of one part of the aristocratic family line that Ian Cowper Ross married into. In other words, don't be fooled by a troll, or the many fake writers claiming to tell you the true story of Radio Caroline, because they have no idea about what that story really is.

We do, and you are reading it free of charge!

After these present segments have been expanded, and which are all part 1 called 'Setting the stage: 1960-1963',  we will move on to part 2. These parallel tracks will eventually be joined into one theme within the forthcoming book 'Dial 999 for Caroline'.]

For the precursory timeline that runs from 1960 to 1963 and then leads into the creation of Radio Caroline, we have arbitrarily selected the stating year of 1960.  We could just as easily have pushed back the year to 1900 and even earlier in the Nineteenth Century, due to the interconnectivity of events. But in order to at least bring a sense of topicality to this subject, we have chosen the years from 1960 to 1963, and this is because in 1960, PYE unveiled its "packaged" radio and television stations "to go", or as the British say, "to take away". One example of this "off-the-shelf" approach is shown in the 1964 composite picture below regarding the arrival of a "packaged" Manx Radio:

​What is very clear from all of the collected evidence (and we have a growing library that is already full of documentation), is the fact that Charles Orr Stanley and the PYE Group of companies were the true creators of a rival system of broadcasting to the one created by the British Crown and its GPO, using a lapdog monopoly known as BBC. But Charles Orr Stanley who was born in Ireland, unlike Ronan O'Rahilly's father; also relied upon a lot of help from the USA, and especially from both individuals and businesses in the State of Texas.

Now the riddle that we are trying to solve, is how the established and well documented timeline of the rush to register and promote sponsored commercial radio stations in 1960, get tangled-up with the subject of British offshore radio, and in particular, Radio Caroline? The story of Radio London is an entirely separate issue which we fully understand and can document, but the story of Radio Caroline has always been submerged in lies and deceit.

The offshore story emerges from PYE in a very circular fashion. In 1959 Conservative MP Geoffrey Hirst had registered in England, Radio Yorkshire (Development) Limited which was based in Shipley, Yorkshire. It was one of the several hundred such stations that were formed in the Nineteen Sixties, all of them in anticipation of licensed commercial radio broadcasting, which did not materialize.

Radio Yorkshire quickly became wrapped within the affairs of Ross Radio Productions which was already involved with PYE in making sponsored audience participation shows recorded in England, for broadcast on Radio Luxembourg. Another entity involved individuals who would later became heavily involved with PYE on the Isle of Man. (We will have a lot more to say about Radio Yorkshire; Ross Radio Productions; etc., later on). 

Then there is a British offshore timeline that emerges in November 1960 with a radio station using the call letters CNBC. They were derived from Commercial Neutral Broadcasting Company. But whether that entity was ever registered in England as a company, is uncertain at the moment. However, in November 1960, CNBC began test transmissions from a radio ship anchored off the coast of Holland, but after several attempts to provide a good signal that could be received in England, they gave up after March 22, 1961.

Then, towards the end of 1961, an announcement was made in a Canadian newspaper about a station to be known as 'Voice of Slough'. On November 16 of that year, journalist Doug Marshall reported in a Ottawa newspaper that a 42-years old Canadian journalist who had gained experience on a Toronto radio station, planned to begin a small broadcasting venture from off the coast of England. Its promoter's name is John Thompson, and he had now taken up residence in Slough, England. He had also 'borrowed' a theme name which the Rank organization had already used to register as the prefix to several of its planned radio station companies. This same theme had also been picked up by would-be independent operators and the press had duly reported these registrations during the previous year. So in copycat fashion, John Thompson registered his own British company called Voice of Slough Ltd., and he planned use this eponymous name for his radio station.

John Thompson attracted a lot of publicity, and he also gained the attention of a con man named Arnold Swanson. He had got his hands on his wife's inheritance that she got from her father's legacy which had been built in Vancouver after amassing a fortune from the nautical shipping business. Swanson passed himself off of as being wealthy in his own right, and knowledgeable about ships and radio broadcasting. Metropolitan Police did not believe him. They were watching him because they thought he would do a "runner" once he got enough investors to fall for his own scheme. Swanson soon split from John Thompson and then Swanson announced the birth of a much bigger enterprise to be known as GBOK. Thompson then revived his own project, and again true to his copycat form, he called his reborn project - station GBLN. Neither GBLN or GBOK got anywhere, but there are indications that the GPO eventually raided Swanson's hulk called 'Lady Dixon', which was tied up alongside a PYE factory building at Sheerness. However, by September 1962, GBOK had disappeared from the press pages, although Arnold Swanson did up again in the Canadian press after his wife divorced him, and charged with engaging in underage (illegal) sexual activities.

Now it is within the murky events surrounding GBOK and its entanglement with PYE, that the story slides over into the arrival on the scene of Charles William (Bill) Weaver. He was manager of Gordon McLendon's radio station KILT in Houston, Texas; general manager of all McLendon Broadcasting stations, and on top of all that he was assigned by Gordon McLendon to close down Radio Nord, and then to sell off its radio ship called 'Bon Jour'.

With that quick overview and introduction, from which we will pick-up tomorrow with part 2, we now conclude our revised part 1 of 'Setting the stage: 1960-1963'.