The Groningen Radio Story Untold by Hans Knot

​While Houston, Texas in the USA holds the key to understanding the beginnings of this story, it is Groningen that leads to the birth of 'Radio Caroline'.

Groningen is located in a northeastern province of the Netherlands, and it adjoins the North Sea. It is where the North Sea gas and oil exploration story began onshore, and it is where the Deterding family name comes into the offshore radio picture.

Why Deterding?

It was Henri Deterding who was General Manager of Royal Dutch Petroleum Company that linked up with Shell Transport and Trading Company, a company founded by a Lord Mayor of London. Under their cartel banner of Royal Dutch Shell, Deterding's involvement with Adolph Hitler's Third Reich led to a legacy tagline of death and destruction. So, we have to jump over his son to his grandson James Deterding if we want to learn about a quiet but important member of the board of directors on Allan Crawford's Project Atlanta Limited.

James Deterding was not on the PAL Ltd board of directors when it was originally incorporated on August 1, 1963, by a solicitor representing Allan Crawford. The limelight back then went to Oliver Smedley and Kitty Black. Those two, Smedley and Black, were soon pushed to one side and Smedley formed another and rival radio company which entangled itself with the Kray Twins and the murder of Reg Calvert, boss of 'Radio City'.

But PAL Ltd., was not a part of that fiasco and resulting tragedy.

By September-October 1963, PAL Ltd. had become an interesting company with a gold-plated board of directors representing the printing, publishing and offshore gas and oil industry with roots in Groningen. But don't wait for Hans Knot to tell you this, because so far, even though he has written piles of trivia about the offshore radio stations, he does not seem to have written a single word about the real story. Maybe he has, but if he has, it is buried in the trivia about the lives of disc jockeys.

If you want to know about the "second coming" of PAL Ltd. which leads into the founding of 'Radio Caroline', then you have to know about the visit by Ronan O'Rahilly in June 1963 to see Bill Weaver in Houston, Texas. That was a visit engineered on behalf of Allan Crawford who O'Rahilly had met for the first time at the beginning of 1963. But where is any of this in all of those so-called 'true' stories about the origins of 'Radio Caroline'?

Nowhere!

The scam artists churning out rubbish to support the conmanship of the current 'Ross Revenge' fundraising charity dare not tell the people the real story. But you will find the real story, the true story of 'Radio Caroline' on this and its companion Blog pages.