In late 2019 Paul Rusling became the latest in a long line of "I know-nothing-but-pretend-that-I-know-what-you-don't-know" people, who have slapped their own names on vanity publications and hoped to make money - by conning gullible readers who genuinely wanted answers. As everyone should know by now: he had none to offer.

However, hacks such as Rusling are but variations on a theme of Arnold Swanson, but not Ronan O'Rahilly; because O'Rahilly hitched his wagon to the real storyline. Unfortunately, when that storyline ended on August 14, 1967, O'Rahilly thought that he could keep it going. But all he kept alive was the meaningless name of 'Caroline'.

Radio Caroline was dead and remained dead.

Today, not only is Radio Caroline an irrelevant name in communications, but the medium it used back in 1964 is also on its way to extinction as it was once perceived. To know why O'Rahilly went off into cloud-cuckoo-land is to understand why Rusling knew nothing and knows nothing of the real story, that is, apart from the bits he stole from us, and yet, he still does not understand the subject at all.

It all has to do with dates on the calendar.

August 14, 1967 marks the real end of the story, but it whimpered on until March 6, 1968, and then it was extinguished - forever.

The other date of importance is the one we have already raised on this Blog, and it concerns the date upon which Allan James Crawford got involved with offshore radio. Crawford says that he first met Ronan O'Rahilly at the beginning of 1963, but Crawford had already become involved with offshore radio in 1962, the year prior to meeting O'Rahilly.

The date of Crawford's arrival at 47 Dean Street also coincides with the beginning of his involvement in offshore radio. Another author who should know better than to put two and two together and make six, is academic Adrian Johns. He asserted that Crawford moved into the vacated premises once occupied by the VRON/CNBC project. But they had been located diagonally across Dean Street and further up from the address Crawford moved into. Johns tried to connect dots that don't exist in order to tell his story and sell books. It is as fake as Ruslings!

All of the evidence points to Crawford beginning his involvement in 1962, and no earlier. If you have proof that he did begin his offshore interests earlier than 1962, we would like to see the proof, and if you have it, we will immediately admit our mistake!

The mistake made by anoraks is in confusing the date of incorporation of CBC (Plays) Limited in 1960, and assuming, incorrectly, that this is when Crawford got involved. But Crawford left all kinds of tell-tale evidence behind for investigators like us, to uncover years later.

Arnold Swanson was a crook, and Metropolitan Police warned the British government that he was a crook. Later, after more scams elsewhere, his wealthy wife divorced him; denounced him, and led police to arrest him for having underage sexual relations with two young teenage girls.

However, Swanson had managed to not only con John Thompson and his fledgling company Voice of Slough Ltd into cooperating with him, but he also attracted two ex-BBC engineers and the son of Charles Orr Stanley who headed the Pye Group of companies.

Stanley did have a legitimate agenda that stretched back via pioneers of British commercial radio, and that trail began before World War II. But Stanley did not have all of his irons in the same fire.

He had a goal and that was to defeat the BBC monopoly in television and radio in order to sell television and radio equipment. He was never in the business of trying to operate stations on his own, although he did create demonstration units to prove that his business plan worked.

Others then ripped-off the Pye Plan and pretended that it was their own work.

Stanley's interests spread out in several directions simultaneously, and offshore broadcasting was only one part of his plan. Yet the people he brought into his plans were only told what they needed to know about the aspects of his plans that they were involved with. These people formed a line of experts whose interests in British commercial radio also stretched back before WWII.

However, while Charles Orr Stanley was certainly a major player, he was not the only major person in this story with an agenda. The others were not involved with broadcasting in a direct sense, because their interests spun-off in several other directions. Some were involved in music; some in law, and some in a gigantic operation worth billions of US Dollars and British tax Pounds.

But these interests all converged in the same time and space to achieve different goals. So the time-dated interests of Allan James Crawford are very important to this story, in as much that by pinning down dates, it is possible to see where he fits into the bigger picture, and why he brought in Ronan O'Rahilly.

It is also possible to see why Allan James Crawford who in all probability did not know the 'bigger picture', then found himself used and abused by other people as the Radio Caroline aspect of it lumbered on to its final conclusion and destruction.

Reg Calvert had no idea of what he was getting into. He thought that he did, and he became a fatality along the way.

Don Pierson who created Radio London; Radio England and Britain Radio, was another person who groped his way through a veil of deceit and lies which eventually led to his demise. Don Pierson thought that it was all a straight-forward and obvious enterprise, but it wasn't, but he did not know that.

What Ted Allbuery learned along the way remains a mystery. His pre-offshore radio days hint at his possible wider perception of something more, and he even had a dalliance with Herbert W. Armstrong in Pasadena, California. It was Armstrong who brushed against the darker world of political propaganda by broadcasting, and it was Armstrong who financed offshore radio by buying time on the stations.

But search as you may, you won't find major articles citing UK government sources as to why Armstrong funded the offshore broadcasting stations. That is a can of worms that the clandestine world of geopolitical propaganda did not want to be opened, by anyone. However, if Allbuery ever came to know what was really going on, he never wrote about it when he became a successful author of spy stories.

But that was not the big story behind North Sea activities.

It is the big story that we have now uncovered and pieced together.

To date it has not been published anywhere, by anyone.

It is not a story about now aging old men with their tin pot replica radio stations attached to a rusting hulk. This is a story affecting millions of people in the year 2020 during the course of their normal daily activities.

​However, it is a story that has to be pieced together from many, many different sources and thoroughly documented. Once published it will trigger all manner of additional publications and broadcasts, and it will become the focus of many who gaze once again at a picture of the past in wonderment that it was not brought to everyone's attention before now. The answer is that it has been partly revealed by others, but not in the way and in the manner that those interested in offshore radio broadcasting will have noticed.

Because it is necessary to correct the currently perceived timeline of events, it is time to have a closer look at the life of Allan James Crawford. It is necessary to understand exactly where he fits into the true timeline, which is totally different from the fictitious nonsense spun by Paul Rusling and his tribe of self-serving vanity hacks, and the dubious documents written on the subject by people claiming to be scholars.

Our intention is to unravel the mysteries surrounding this story, and there are many mysteries that remain as yet unsolved. But we now know enough to begin publication.

However, unlike the fraudsters, and there have been many, we are not out to con anyone out of anything, and to date, we have not asked for, and neither do we now ask for any money from anyone who is presently reading this Blog.

There will be more on this Blog about all of this in due course, along with details of the first book in a new series of books. They will be part of a commercial undertaking that will finally begin to explain to everyone, what was really going on during the so-called 'Swinging Sixties'.

Metropolitan Police were asked for their opinion about Arnold Johann Swanson and they told the Crown authorities that Swanson was a con artist. His plan was to float a scheme and not a radio station so that he could con money from business into his own pockets.

Swanson was a Canadian who had no money.

He was a Canadian version of Ronan O'Rahilly.

Swanson divorced his first wife and married a Canadian shipping heiress in Reno, Nevada, and she had money to spare. So he spent her money on a number of promotional schemes which allowed him to syphon money off into his own pockets.

GBOK was one of those ventures.

GBOK had been spun off the Voice of Slough Limited project started by John Thompson - who also had little money. Thompson had lived in Canada and returned to England at the time when commercial radio was being promoted by hundreds of registered companies.

All of this began late in 1959.

Thompson began making a noise for himself in 1960.

Thompson noted that a lot of the potential radio station companies being registered in the UK were copying the name 'Voice of America'. So Thompson registered 'Voice of Slough'.

Then along came Swanson who told Thompson all kinds of nonsense about his expertise, of which he really had none. So Thompson folded his project under the Swanson banner of GBOK and let Swanson take over.

Swanson conned Pye; BBC engineers, and many other people out expertise in order to get money from investors. It looked like he had money because he had control of his wife's finances and he splurged on buying an impressive house that fooled a lot of people.

Money begets money, and so does the illusion of money.

But things became too hot for Swanson and so he dumped everything back in Thompson's hands. Thompson then tried to revive his original idea, but without success and Thompson then tacked himself on to the ill-fated Radio Invicta project, and he had the nerve to complain in writing to the UK government, that Ted Allbuery had stolen that project from him with the birth of Radio 390!

I guess Thompson was trying imitate Swanson who by then had gone to California where his wife had bought another expensive property.

Then he went to Hawaii and bought a disused ocean liner which he explained was to become part of a new shipping line. Of course he didn't actually buy it, he just arranged terms so that it looked as if he bought it.

But his wife was getting worried and distanced herself from him.

Meantime he was back in Canada having sex with two underage teenage girls. His wife, accompanied by cops, caught him in the act and Swanson was arrested. She then divorced him and had to take him to court to try to regain control of her own money!

You will love his excuse that he told the judge in answer to the reason why he was in court: He said that he was so happy to be in the protection of the police who put him in jail, because his wife had become violently crazy, and he was afraid of what she might do!

Con men keep on conning and people keep on falling for their speil.

Think Ronan O'Rahilly.

​Think Radio Caroline.

There is a true story behind the birth of Radio Caroline, it's just that it has yet to be told and so you have not read it. Hopefully we will begin to remedy that before this year is out.

We began researching and writing articles about British media in 1966, which resulted on June 27 of that year with publication of a half-page feature in a daily newspaper. It had been prompted by the onslaught of fake reporting in newspapers such as 'The Daily Telegraph', which was triggered by the shooting and killing of Reg Calvert, the man who began the offshore station called Radio City.

We tracked down 'The Daily Telegraph' reporter who wrote a main feature about Calvert's death, and asked him about his source material. He told us that he was assigned to the story by his Editor, so he wandered down to a Fleet Street watering hole and asked his mate who worked for Granada TV to fill him in with details. This hear-say nonsense then appeared in print, and in turn it sparked us into beginning this project.

At first we began with the O'Rahilly mythology about the start of Radio Caroline, because that is what Don Pierson who began Radio London also believed. That mythology was Pierson's motivation. Then, when Don Pierson gave us his legal and financial records about Radio London; Radio England and Britain Radio, we came to see that the cassette that Steve England was selling with the help of fiction spawned by Johnnie Walker, was absolute rubbish.

Our print publishing also gave birth to radio and later television programs. One of those radio programs rebutted the Steve England product with commentary by Don Pierson. So instead of withdrawing the fake cassette from sale, Steve England merely tacked on a brief acknowledgement with excerpts of Don Pierson's commentary. But Steve England dissed the differences, including the made up nonsense spawned by Johnnie Walker, as the result of time and different recollections!

But this is where made-up fakery clashes with documented proof. The former would be pitched from any courtroom as perjury, but it is soaked-up and repeated by mindless anoraks who worship anything named 'Radio Caroline'.

We have attempted to cooperate with others by sharing our research, and consequently we have been ripped-off by plagiarizing lazy writers who didn't understand the subject, but wanted to make a vain showing with their names in print and on air. These literary thieves merely took our material and then cobbled it into the mythology already in circulation. So they didn't make our job easier, they made it worse. In so doing they hammered into the dull mindsets of the soaking sponges who imbibed their nonsense, more variations on a continuing theme of mythology.

Radio Caroline does not continue, mythology continues.

It is not just Steve England; Robert Chapman; Brian Lister and Paul Rusling who stand in the way of knowledge; nor is it the work of paid hacks such as John Venmore Rowland, but prominent people such as John Whitney. It was the work of Whitney that eventually led to a new and trivial media entity being given a license to broadcast as Radio Caroline. 

John Whitney also did his best to bury the trail of investigation.

John Whitney?

Yes, the same John Whitney described on Wikipedia this way:

"John Norton Braithwaite Whitney, CBE (born 20 December 1930) is a British writer and producer who has been involved in the introduction and development of commercial radio and television in the UK during the 1970s and 1980s. He has held various posts such as Managing Director of Capital Radio, Director General of the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), and Chairman of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). In addition he is involved with numerous charities such as Artsline, Stage One, and the Shakespeare Globe Trust, and in 2008 he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to broadcasting and charity."

We have now managed to finally create a new storyline by unmasking the vain glory and self-promotion by people like John Whitney. Funnily enough, the one clown among the dross who could have told anoraks the real story, if he had looked, was Paul Rusling from Yorkshire.

Paul Rusling told us that he does not read books (and he said this as he stood in one of our book depositories), nor does he like to perform research, he said. He merely takes and twists and self-promotes, and in so doing he confuses the story even more. By so doing Rusling helps to further conceal the real story about the development of British offshore broadcasting, just like John Whitney.

But for all of his huffing and puffing and self-promotion as an 'expert', he is stripped bare as an expert of naught, which includes the history of his claimed home base of Yorkshire! What a fraud.

We were writing daily blog updates, but this did not result in additional help, but in more abuse from trolls. In many instances they were too young in years to remember the actual events, and too immature to want to know how we can authoritatively tell our readers that Ronan O'Rahilly was a con-man. Instead, they clutch on to the nonsense that Radio Caroline of 1964 continues to broadcast, but that legacy is fiction:  it is totally and utterly untrue.

Because of the fact that people like Rusling have merely propped-up the Establishment tale of doyens such as John Whitney, and because we have now broken through Whitney's wall of obfuscation and nonsense, we created today's landmark blog entry to note the date in which this was finally achieved. We can now report that we are very close to putting together a skeleton storyline of true events.

No, we don't claim to know all of the previously hidden answers, but we do now know enough to publish what we know, and do so in the hope that there are enough honest and intellectually interested readers who can fill-in some of the blanks that remain. To that end we are still working on an initial publication later this year.

[This text was revised with additions on October 31, 2020.]

Back in 2017 we produced a timeline that was circulated as part of the informal 'Caroline Investigative Newsletter' in which this question was addressed:
"When did Allan James Crawford begin his first venture into offshore radio?"

The purpose of the suggested timeline was to put the accepted history of the ship Bon Jour / Magda Maria / Mi Amigo into perspective. But our own timeline contained a basic error in year and it also raised a new question about the starting date regarding the original date of involvement by Allan James Crawford.

So Francois Lhote of Offshore Echos digest, kindly pointed out our error by directing attention to an article in OEM 173. Now, by removing our typo and adding new timeline details, an anomaly surfaced which has remained unaddressed but which is defined by the question: "When did Allan James Crawford begin his first venture into offshore radio?"

Anorak trolls snorted "cheek", when we first posed this question a few days ago, in as much that anorak trolls who claim to know everything, but in reality know nothing, think that someone else should always pay for their knowledge in both time and money. This is what at least two vanity authors believed when they ripped-off our research and created more pages of plagiarized text hammered into nonsensical pulp supporting Ronan O'Rahilly rubbish.

The focus of Francois' interest, was a translated press report from the 'Nieuwe Leidsch Courant' newspaper that is dated January 19, 1963, because it begins: "No interest for former radio ship." It is about the ship then known as Magda Maria, which had been called Bon Jour, but it was not as yet renamed Mi Amigo.

At the time of that press report, the ship was tied-up to a quay at Ostend in Belgium. It was here where the main mast supporting the radio ship's broadcasting antenna was removed after it collapsed on or just after January 11, 1963, following a storm. But now let's turn the clock back to the previous year:

It was not until July 23, 1962 when Radio Nord ceased broadcasting from the ship then known as Bon Jour. Then is sailed for El Ferrol, Spain to undergo a refit where it also acquired its new name of Magda Maria.

While all this was going on, what was Allan James Crawford doing? That is the question whose answer creates another question. On March 2, 1962, information to hand shows that Crawford obtained a ship's mortgage on the retired Trinity House Vessel named Satellite which was docked on the Isle of Wight. (So that we don't get into another semantic round of nonsense from hack plagiarists, we use that word to mean that it was tied-up to a quay.)

We do know that Crawford expressed an interest in acquiring the ex-Radio Nord vessel, but as his ship's mortgage on the 'Satellite' clearly demonstrates, he did not have the cash to buy the Bon Jour / Magda Maria, and the owner's representative Bill Weaver from Houston, had instructions to sell it, and not to lease it. So Crawford had gone ahead with a plan to use the former Trinity House vessel, instead. But Crawford still had to lean on a financial backer to pay that mortgage and outfit that ship.

Crawford's backer was John Delaney whose organization controlled a bevy of related theatrical service companies. But when on August 15, 1962, Danish Police raided the ship Lucky Star from which old tapes had been used to restart Radio Mercur broadcasts, John Delaney pulled the plug on Crawford's radio ship plans. The issue at stake was the status of the British 'Hovering Acts', so called. If the Danes were going beyond their territorial waters to board a ship, what was to stop the British from ignoring the status of the 'Hovering Acts' and doing the same thing to silence transmissions from the Magda Maria? If the British did board the ship, would they then seize and take it away from its Texas owners without financial compensation?

Bill Weaver could not risk that!
 
The 'Hovering Acts' was the colloquial name for a series of laws designed to stop smugglers from using 'mother ships' at anchor just outside British territorial waters. Those laws had been scrapped when 'Free Trade' was adopted by the UK during the second half of the Nineteenth Century. But with tariff walls being introduced again in an ad hoc manner, it was again possible that these laws could be reinvigorated by reactivation.

So Bill Weaver told Allan James Crawford that the answer was "No!", he would not lease the Magda Maria to him. But now, after Crawford had adopted a 'Plan B' to use the THV 'Satellite', John Delaney had just pulled the plug on that plan as well.

This is where that question: "When did Allan James Crawford begin his first venture into offshore radio?" - comes in, because it has been oft-repeated that Allan James Crawford had registered CBC (Plays) Limited back in 1960, with Dorothy (Kitty) Black, and both of them had the intention of starting an offshore radio station using CBC (Plays) Limited!

Clearly this is not true! 

In fact, we used the services of an investigator to search the records of UK Companies House; the London Gazette and similar entities to discover who registered CBC (Plays) Limited, and why they registered it. The investigator came back with a vague date of incorporation as being somewhere between 1959 and 1960, while later government employees in 1962 cited the date of April 2, 1960 and began attributing its incorporation to Crawford and Black.

What we discovered is that the company registration number for CBC (Plays) Limited is "missing" in sequence from all present-day preserved records of UK company registrations. We also found that its date of incorporation is very close to the sequence of incorporation numbers and the date of Herbert W. Armstrong's Ambassador College (UK) Limited. However, that entity changed its name years later, and so  Ambassador College (UK) Limited is not to be found under that name, but under another name relating to a church - which is still registered in the UK. It is because that sequence of numbers is still "live" that it is possible to backtrack and find the information about the original incorporation for Ambassador College (UK) Limited. But you have to know the latter name to find its original name!

But CBC (Plays) Limited is a now a defunct company having been forced out of business (by pressure applied in mid-1967, before the MOA), in a British court by a Panamanian subsidiary of Wijsmuller. Clearly there is also a direct relationship between that action and the towing away of the two Caroline ships in March 1969. (This Wijsmuller subsidiary is the same company that employed the Caroline radio engineers prior to the MOA!)

Complicating matters even more, is that fact that Armstrong later incorporated Ambassador College in the UK once again - but as another company, separate from the one which is still active under the church name. But then this second entity was also wound-up. However, that happened within the timeframe when digital records began to be recorded, but the original version took place in the "dark ages" of the Sixties. 

Meanwhile, the folks at Companies House began dumping defunct company records, and this is before the age of digital recording began! So CBC (Plays) Limited fell into the black hole of oblivion.

This is an important issue because it means that later governmental investigators who used contemporary  events of 1962 and 1963 to document the inter-governmental activity of CBC (Plays) Limited, did not join the dots back to 1960, but they did reference its commencement in 1960. However, the name they referred to was CBC (Plays) Limited, and this presents another problem for investigators.

Where this is important to our storyline, is the fact that CBC (Plays) Limited held the licensing contract with the Liechtenstein entity represented by Bill Weaver, and CBC (Plays) Limited was the backbone of Project Atlanta Limited which was incorporated at the beginning of August 1963. Crawford did drop out, but both Project Atlanta Limited and its parent company CBC (Plays) Limited continued on into the 1970s.

But the question is this: If Ambassador College (UK) Limited which was incorporated within the same batch or time sequence of numbers as CBC (Plays) Limited in 1960, but then changed its name and purpose from a college to a church; what was the original name and purpose of CBC (Plays) Limited?

It should also be noted that Planet Productions Limited was registered in Ireland during February 1964, and despite all of the claims to the contrary, no company under any name - including Caroline Sales - ever existed in the UK as a registered entity owning the operations called Radio Caroline. The only link in the chain is with CBC (Plays) Limited which became the backbone of Project Atlanta Limited.

The example of Ambassador College (UK) Limited which had a numerical registration sequence in 1960 that was very close to CBC (Plays) Limited, raises this all important and unanswered question: Since Ambassador College (UK) Limited incorporation remained active - but not under that name - what was the original registration name and purpose of CBC (Plays) Limited, because this is where two more problems arise.

It is more than coincidence that CNBC gained a similar working name to CBC (Plays) Limited, and that PYE had used the CBC initials before CNBC, and just after the original name registration (under whatever name it was), was obtained by the registration number for CBC (Plays) Limited.

More than this, in 1960, Alan Bednall was the designer of a CBC logo for PYE!

Bednall is also the person who claimed that John Stanley secretly masterminded Radio Caroline, after supplying equipment to both Radio Luxembourg and the Isle of Man station projects. There were two IOM versions, and one of them tied directly to Allan James Crawford and the plans of John Stanley! It is also clear that Allan James Crawford was aware of the PYE involvement on the Isle of Man with its threat to begin 'Radio Vannin' to pressure the British GPO into supplying Manx Radio with a decent wavelength and suitable power.

PYE was also behind the move to anchor the Fredericia off Ramsay Bay as a part of this highly secretive plan. It was first anchored off Essex to test British reaction: Would the British reactivate the 'Hovering Acts' in whole or in part to silence Radio Caroline? Simon Dee was the guinea pig and he discovered that the way was clear - the British would not forcibly board the Fredericia.

Weaver then gave the green light for Crawford to lease the Mi Amigo!

All of this brings us back to our first question: "When did Allan James Crawford begin his first venture into offshore radio?"

The answer appears to be at some point in 1962 and Crawford is also on record as saying that he first met Ronan O'Rahilly in early 1963.

So what was Kitty Black doing? She was working for Associated Rediffusion and Granada Television producing plays while the agents for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) were in London trying to export British plays to Canada for broadcast by CBC.

However, there are several other links in this chain which we know about that we won't go into here, but they will be in the book 'Dial 999 for Caroline'.

If you are going to cite this paid for research, please do not steal it and claim it as your own work. We will be naming those who engage in intellectual theft within our new book.

[This text was revised with additions on October 31, 2020.]

Yesterday we asked this question ....
"When did Allan James Crawford begin his first venture into offshore radio?"

Well the anorak trolls responded by promoting the question and drew attention to our original post, but so far, the question itself has remained unanswered.

Why is this important to us, and what does it have to do with this project?

Everything!

Years ago (2014) we were about to write the history of offshore radio by incorporating the given story about Radio Caroline. But we had already discovered holes in the version spun by Ronan O'Rahilly who was a fraudster - a con man.

Then we were confronted by a challenge which blew Ronan O'Rahilly into the realms of obscure blathering or blethering as some would have it. That challenge arose due to the misquoted claims of Alan Bednall. So we embarked on a very lengthy search of discovery to find the original version of what Bednall had actually claimed.

Then we found it, but Bednall had not named the entities which would have allowed us to connect the dots.

Recently we found that entity.

But unfortunately the official records relating to it seem to be missing. A curator went in search of it"  via three main governmental sources and drew blanks.

Then we found some indicators by buying information from a score of credible sources, and all of that led to the question now posed to anorak trolls of the "Church of Caroline".

We arrived at this question:
"When did Allan James Crawford begin his first venture into offshore radio?"

We have a working answer, but, since some of the anorak trolls like to play "gotcha!" games, we are giving them a chance to speak or forever keep quiet and crawl back into their own world of nonsense.

No, we are not stating in public what the evidence seems to point to in answer to that question, so this means that anyone offering their own answer will have to do so providing their own sources of proof to support their claims.

Why is this so important?

Because we have now decided upon a two-part approach to publishing our findings and it is one we have used in the past.

We will be providing a storyline for general release to the public, but not a storyline that is weighed-down by footnotes and endnotes of the kind found in academic works.

However, we will then begin publishing a series of academic works that will take apart one element of the storyline at a time, and thoroughly document it, one book at a time.

Whether the storyline is one or two books remains to be seen, but the academic companions will be a series of books. As stated earlier, we have used this approach before, although the anorak trolls seem to be unaware of this fact.

Oh, yes, you have not heard the last of Caroline Brooks by the way: I will be the narrator of the storyline!

But anorak trolls out there .... don't let the name of Caroline Brooks distract you from your quest to provide your own answer to this question:
"When did Allan James Crawford begin his first venture into offshore radio?"

Do you even know the answer?

So far your posted rants seem to indicate total ignorance!

While we work on the first of our own new series of books, we want to pose a question for all of the would-be offshore radio "experts" out there, who think that they can educate everyone about the beginnings of Radio Caroline.

Now in this instance we are going to be very specific.

Ronan O'Rahilly never said that he did not know Allan James Crawford, and Crawford is on film saying that he first met O'Rahilly at the beginning of 1963.

Jocelyn Stevens is on film, with Ronan O'Rahilly in the same room, where Stevens said that the beginnings of the Radio Caroline project took place around September-October of 1963.

But when did Allan James Crawford begin his first venture into offshore radio?

If you think that you know, be sure to back up your claim with documented proof with the name of your source and the date of original publication.

Then, wander over to Conversation Central and post your findings. (Use the 'Comments' link at the top of this page.)

Be sure to repost this challenge on the Garry Stevens' Forum and its related password-protected offspring.

Although we stated that we were not going to be posting additional research on this Blog at the present time in order not to encroach on our forthcoming book 'Dial 999 for Caroline', we also stated that we will be updating other pages on this site such as Timeline and BioFrag. However, our research is continuing, and now we have come across this email from 2004 which will give you an idea of how long Paul Rusling and Malcolm Smith have been trying to undermine our research, just as others in the offshore radio world have been assisting us.

So we are posting this redacted email as a time-marker to preserve just how much and for how long these little-minded censors have been burying the real story by hindering our research which began back around 1985 when Don Pierson gave us his financial and legal documents relating to Radio London; Radio England; Britain Radio, and his other offshore station projects.

From our email vault here is an enquiry from 2004 and our timely response. The "JE" and "John England" referred to in the text is Mervyn Hagger. The site referred to is one of our earlier web sites when we shared a lot of research with a lot of people, and as a result, some of them stole it for their own vanity publications:

(INCOMING INQUIRY)
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 23:03:02 +0100
Subject: History

Hi there.

You claim many things about the ownership of the Ross but do not include all the details on this site.

Would you please expand on the subject.

Thanks.

John

(OUTGOING RESPONSE)
Date: Sat 6/19/2004 11:02 AM
Subject: History

Dear John,
​
Thanks for the email. At the moment we are a little too busy to do this, but it is on our "to do" list. However, if you might also ask Christopher Rollins = Chris England or even John Burch who I know were in receipt of copies of the original research.

While Chris England likes to pretend that he knows nothing at all about all of this on his Anorak Nation site, he in fact was the instigator of the research as a part of his plan to take over the Ross Revenge at the time that he registered Radio Caroline Ltd. In those days John Burch was his on again off again companion in his scheme for which he had backing of the DTI Radio Investigation Service chief Barry Maxwell.

From our files by cut and paste:

(1990 - January 9 = Research continues into the ownership of the "M.V. Ross Revenge" for John Burch and Chris ("England") Rollins. Some of this information is being passed on to Barry Maxwell (head of the DTI/RIS, London), who asked John England on the telephone to request additional information from Panamanian Government officers in New York and Panama City.)

It is also interesting that on the Anorak Nation site Paul Rusling also seems to want to distance himself from the facts, and no wonder since he is now trying to raise a lot of money for his IoM station.

However, the thread that links all of the offshore history together is James Ryan.

Rusling worked with Ryan many times. Ryan was behind the original Radio Caroline "MV Imagine" venture. The sales link of that group eventually became the sales arm for Laser. Ryan was also involved with many of the other attempts to launch offshore radio in the 1980s after Caroline and Laser.

Today no one wants to talk about Ryan because Ryan was sent to prison in the USA over the Radio Caroline fraud. From our files:

(1989: April 5 = James Ryan sentenced to five years imprisonment, five years probation, $10,000 fine, and $332,000.501 restitution, by the U.S. District Court of Pennsylvania (case number 84-314). This case arose from Ryan's activities to refloat "Radio Caroline", by raising $1.4 million from investors who he then defrauded.)

The Ross Revenge itself also links to one individual in Europe who others assisted in setting up a series of interlocking companies. By the time that Malcolm Smith (Peter Moore) got hold of it the real owner had more or less abandoned it, but that did not mean that Smith had legal ownership, only defacto possession. Unless the real owner has since made a gift of the ship to Smith (the Ross is more of a financial liability than an asset as a ship), then Smith and his associates still do not have legal ownership.

When the ship was boarded it did not have Panamanian or any other registration. It was stateless. James Murphy who was behind the scenes working to silence the station worked for the little known office of the Official Solicitor as an Investigator on behalf of the Secretary of State for the DTI.

The Official Solicitor is an office that goes back to the time when the law in England was split between the spiritual (CofE) and temporal. Those two offices still exist today but the last gasp of the Murphy office was during the Heath government in 1971 and the Pentonville 5.

Now that office deals mainly with the interests of children and it has been pulled under government control. Back then it was an ancient freewheeling office with amazing powers that everyone had forgotten about until the Heath debacle, but it was not until Blair - long after the Ross boarding - that the Official Solictor was stripped of his super powers.

As you can tell it will take some time to put this entire information on line in detail to answer all questions, so I hope that this overview will help you in the meantime. You might want to share this information with others while asking Chris England and perhaps Paul Rusling for some answers.

One question we want answered was prompted originally by John Burch. Here are notes from that time - by the way, everything that is in brackets with dates has been cut and pasted from other files in order for you to read the information within this email -

(1993: January 14 = John Burch informed John England by telephone that Ray Anderson was in Florida with Paul Alexander Rusling to sue James Ryan in a U.S. court over money owed on the rebirth of the "Laser Hot Hits" radio station.

• John Burch also informed JE by telephone that "High Adventure Ministries" (who are licensee of KVOH international shortwave station in California), and LeSea Ministries (who are licensees of WHRI international shortwave station in Ohio), are the co-owners of the "M.V. Nepal Empress" which was outfitted in Portuguese Macau (Macao) off China. This radio ship is anchored off Indonesia and is playing top forty on 264 metres with 20 kW on AM, and on 89.5 kHz FM using 1 kW. On 11960 kc SW is U.S. "gospel" religious programming. The radio ship is approximately 70 metres in length.
  
  
• John Burch also informed JE by telephone that another radio ship, which had been docked at Lake Worth, Florida for several years (since Laser was first outfitted in the mid-1980s), has now left the area and approximately two weeks ago anchored in the area of Boston Harbor. (That would be around December 31, of last year - having taken a week or so to move up the coast from Florida.) This radio ship (name unknown at the moment), was once owned by the Bacardi Bros., of rum fame, and once had ties to the Radio-TV Marti project. After being outfitted the ship is supposed to sail for a position that is 18 miles off the coast of Normandy, France. The radio ship is thought to have a start-up date for Easter of 1993. No other details known at this time.)

The reason why the last item is interesting is because it first cropped up again on Martin's massive Offshore Radio web site in the Broadcasting Fleet section and it was written by Paul Rusling who claimed that the same ship was supposed to have become Sir James Goldsmith's "Referendum Radio" to sway the 1997 General Election. That did not happen and Goldsmith flooded the UK with video tapes instead. However, what is interesting is that when we asked Martin to ask Rusling for more information - Rusling shut up and today he refuses to talk about it.

John Burch also seems to remain silent on this topic.

Then Rusling, Rollins (Chris England), Burch, and Malcolm Smith (Moore) began their slag off attacks against John England on the Anorak Nation site - which John England was not even writing to. In fact he knew nothing about all of that until someone like yourself began sending this information to him some time later. These people are very afraid of the truth.

That is why we debunked "Sealand" (a sunken ship not an island fort which is the reason that Bates can never succeed with his plans and why his Internet venture flopped when the Americans left for the USA and denounced Bates for fraud!) It is also the reason why we have exposed Anderson - no matter what he tries to accomplish in the name of Radio London.

The reason why these people are afraid of John England and (his) associates is because Rusling, Rollins, Anderson, et al are mainly interested in money for themselves and not in basic freedom for all individuals. That is why they surround themselves with crooks and con-men. Alan Weiner was and is the same way. Weiner's projects were also built upon fraud ... with advice from James Ryan!

Rusling is scared to death that the name of James Ryan will be raised once more and in so doing cause his potential investors to take a double look at what he is really trying to do.

Now you know.

[AS WHERE INDICATED, ALL EMAIL TEXT HAS BEEN REPRODUCED FROM A FILE DATED 2004.]

This Blog began on 3/3/2020 in response to a book that had been recently published called 'The Radio Caroline Bible' whose author had plagiarized (stolen) a lot of our research material and then mangled it by attempting to make it conform to the nonsense (false) scenario that was set out in another book called 'Rocking the boat', which we have also referred to before.

If this Blog now continues with information text past our edition of 10/9/2020, we will be encroaching upon information which we prefer to debut in our new book 'Dial 999 for Caroline', which will be our first in a series of new books aimed at a larger and more general audience than our previous academic marketplace publications.

So this is where we stop this Blog - for now.

Once 'Dial 999 for Caroline' has been published, we may resume this Blog, but until then we will concentrate upon other aspects of this site including the Timeline and BioFrag sections. That is where you will begin to notice the addition of new information.

We guarantee that the information that we have researched and uncovered, once read in context in 'Dial 999 for Caroline', will come as a surprise to many, and as a total shock to everyone who was brought upon the lies, distortions and mythology spun about events that led up to offshore broadcasting to the British Isles, primarily between the years 1964 to 1967. 

Yesterday, we referred you back to our Blog of 4/7/20 titled 'Meet Alan Bednall'. Today, we are going to ask you to again refer back to that Blog, because the information printed there, is the information that also belongs here in context, and we see no point in posting it again. So if you are interested in trying to comprehend what really took place between the years 1960 to 1963, please go to that earlier edition.

The story of PYE "packaged radio stations" that first saw major exposure in 1960 at two consecutive exhibitions, was timed to coincide with the hundreds of local radio station companies (and their subsidiaries), that were formed parallel to the anti-commercial radio and television drive by the GPO-BBC Pilkington Committee. That story about PYE "packaged radio stations" has been one of the most heavily censored media news stories of all time. 

We are not claiming that news stories did not exist, because we are reproducing some of them on this Blog. What we are claiming is that those news stories have been ignored by authors who have written about the history of British broadcasting. This is especially true as it relates to that period of time leading  up to the ultra-secret creation of Radio Caroline.

As we previously reported in parts 1c and 1d of this present series, there were eventually hundreds of radio stations seeking licenses at that time, and all were denied, except for Manx Radio. But the story of Manx Radio has been heavily censored, and its license only squeaked under the radar due to the special circumstances surrounding the laws governing the Isle of Man.

That station began as a project to create a full-blown super-power operation known as 'Radio Manx', but it was toned down to the whimper known as 'Manx Radio'. Even so, that station was first hauled on to the landscape as self-contained "packaged radio station" from PYE. But contemporary press accounts merely shrugged it off as being in a "caravan". Journalists missed the real story by a mile! It was a "packaged radio station". Calling it a "caravan" gives the impression that this was merely a one-off mobile home that was put to another use, and not as just the packaging used for that particular station.

Nicholas Stanley, who is the grandson of Charles Orr Stanley, and son of John Stanley, commissioned a book that supposedly recreated the history of the PYE Group of companies, which, according to him, had been destroyed when various parts of the PYE Group were absorbed by Phillips. Unfortunately, he assigned the job of writing his book to a journalist who did not understand the subject matter he was writing about. To assist him, a technical writer was also brought in.

However, the author Mark Frankland was working on a manuscript which covered far more than the subject of broadcasting. PYE was a group of companies making a vast number of consumer; military; industrial, and nautical products. Frankland drew upon existing published works about these subjects, as well as a scattered collection of PYE documents, to create his work.

One of these documents had been created by Nicholas Stanley; son of John Stanley and grandson of Charles Orr Stanley. On page 276 of the book 'Radio Man' which was funded by Nicholas Stanley to the tune of approximately £100,000, is a single paragraph which, when read 'as is', makes no sense whatsoever. It cost us both time and money to uncover what this book was concealing, and how it had been concealed. But why it was concealed, primarily by Nicholas Stanley himself by misdirection, we still don't know.

It all centered upon one man named Alan Bednall and three pages of an interview that Nicholas Stanley had personally undertaken in the home of Alan Bednall. We have previously published that document on 4/7/2020 with the Blog edition heading of 'Meet Alan Bednall'.

We have extracted the relevant and verbatim information as it relates to Radio Caroline, and placed it within the composite picture shown below:

Based upon what has been published to date by many authors, and what has been broadcast in many documentaries, the statement by Alan Bednall is at odds with them all. Either he lied, or he told the truth.

But Bednall's account is also at odds with the paragraph that was published on page 276 of the book 'Radio Man'. However, once other previously hidden information is also factored in, the contradictions disappear.

What is now important is to discover missing pieces of information that support what Alan Bednall really told Nicholas Stanley!

But that raises another major question:

How can you find something when you don't know exactly what it is that you are looking for?

The answer to that riddle is actually quite funny, because one of the most important 'keys' is hidden in plain sight, and we have now republished it several times on this Blog! However, we have have deliberately avoided drawing attention to it, thus far!

The reason why we have not connected those dots so far (but we will), has to do with the microscopic way in which we have been examining the cold case evidence. We are not going to engage in 'guilt by association' or wild conspiracy theories, because we are going to use academic and police standards of documentation that first require the laying down of precedent to which other documented evidence can be joined.

Having been previously ripped-off by so many plagiarists, we have been very clear about the fact that what we are doing is unique. It has not been done before and this evidence has not been assembled in this way before.

There is a distinct "them" and "us" approach to this work. It will eventually be assembled in the first book in a new series that will be published later this year with the working title of 'Dial 999 for Caroline'.

More on this theme in part 3, tomorrow.