Radio Caroline (eBook)

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Project Atlanta

Australian Allan Crawford was a music publisher living in London. He’d been employed by Southern Music, one of the biggest publishing houses in the world, at a time when sheet music sales were all important. But times were changing, and the music business had become more dependent on sales of the new 45rpm records. In 1959, Crawford decided to ‘go it alone’, setting up his own Merit Music Publishing Company and, later, a variety of record labels, including Rocket, Cannon and Crossbow, which featured cover versions of top pop hits of the day performed by session musicians and singers and available by mail order. He also released original recordings on his Sabre and Carnival labels:

Allan Crawford’s Rocket Records label.

I was managing director of Southern Music both in Australia and in London; I resigned from the London Company after fourteen years to become independent. Then it hit me that having 300 publishers in London striving to get into any half-hour recorded programme on the BBC or Luxembourg was idiocy; there was no way to win as an independent. The publishers that were getting success were the well-established, wealthy publishers, who could wine and dine people and influence them.

I read an announcement that Radio Luxembourg had made an arrangement with one of the big publishers to form a publishing company between them. Well, I was angry at that, because I could see that favouritism was going on. The main advertisers on Luxembourg for the principal hours in the evening were EMI and Decca, so naturally it was their numbers that were being played, and, of course, the disc jockeys employed by Radio Luxembourg, by great coincidence, turned out to be the same ones the BBC were using – and were they going to cut off their own bread and butter by not playing the records that EMI and Decca wanted? Of course they weren’t, they’d have been crazy if they had. It was a very restrictive set-up.

I was annoyed so I wrote a sarcastic letter to the BBC and said, ‘Following the announcement in the paper,’ and I didn’t name the article or what it said, ‘I now make the following suggestion: that the BBC and my company, Merit Music, form a sub-publishing company, so that by careful programming, we can do away with such worthy institutions as the Performing Rights Society, the Publishers Association and Phonographic Performance Limited, so that all the numbers being broadcast would belong to Merit Music and the BBC.’

I meant it to be sarcastic, such a thing could never happen. But, you know, they had a fellow ring up, ‘Mr Crawford, we have your letter – what does it mean?’ I’ve forgotten the name of the man but I was invited to lunch with the BBC, in the boardroom, there was a butler serving on silver platters a beautiful luncheon and we were sitting at a boardroom table a mile long and there were only three of us.

One of the men, I think he was in charge of BBC programmes, was reluctant and a little bit huffy at having been made to come, until he listened to what I was saying and he warmed up as I was explaining how Luxembourg worked.

He wrote out the address of a committee1 that was meeting to take evidence about the future of radio and he described how they were going to have housewives on this committee and I thought ‘my God, we’re going to get some sense out of this, aren’t we?’ [sarcastically]. He said, ‘would you please repeat what you said to them,’ and I said, ‘I’ll think about it’.

As I left, I stood outside in Portland Place looking up at the BBC building, I said to myself, ‘I’ll be dammed if I’ll do this. I’m not going to play your game to make [the name of] Radio Luxembourg black so that there’ll never be commercial radio in England. I will do it myself.’

And that was that day that pirate radio was born.

Allan Crawford2

Before his meeting at the BBC, Crawford was already aware of radio broadcasts from ships off the coast, in particular the Dutch Radio Veronica and the English CNBC service:

Both Doug Stanley and I came to know Allan Crawford while we were with CNBC. We met on several occasions and he could see the value of pirate radio to break the BBC monopoly. He became aware of the debacle concerning the Verweijs problem, the absconding of thousands of guilders by the rogue engineer they had contracted to buy a powerful AM transmitter from RCA in the US. Allan’s thoughts towards Radio Atlanta occurred shortly after CNBC closed down in 1961.

Paul Hollingdale, DJ3

Another of Crawford’s acquaintances was a theatre literary agent called Dorothy ‘Kitty’ Black. She sold plays, he sold music, their business interests were similar and they obviously moved in the same circles.

Kitty Black had been aware of Radio Mercur when she’d been on holiday in Sweden in the late 1950s, so she already knew about offshore radio. She was to play a major role in Crawford’s future plans for commercial radio in the UK:

I was introduced to an Australian called Allan Crawford. I asked him to come and see this musical and because we were both ‘beastly colonials’ – I come from South Africa, he from Australia – we clicked and became great friends and seemed to have the same sort of ideas about most things. One day, Allan told me that he had been approached by the stocking manufacturers who owned the pirate ship called Radio Veronica and they were prepared to sell a half share for something like £60,000. Allan had been over to see the ship and came to the conclusion that for £100,000 it would be possible to buy a ship, install the radio equipment and start our own operation in this country.

Kitty Black4

There was certainly contact between Crawford and Veronica, though any proposed deal was probably more complex than Kitty Black remembered, or was aware of:

I had gone to meet the people in the Dutch ship, the Verweij brothers, and I took a great liking to them. They needed money very heavily in 1961 because they’d struck opposition from the authorities, people were afraid to advertise. I found a small English bank willing to listen and I took them [the bank] over there. The day was such a nice day and the English were so bloody light-hearted, they started to get flippant. The Dutchmen didn’t like it, I mean they were in trouble, they wanted money and they weren’t interested in anyone getting flippant on a nice summer’s day. We came back to England with them not having reached a decision, and it’s always bad not to clinch a thing on the spot. But within days, one of the biggest advertisers had some kind of adverse thing against one of their products and they needed a quick way to offset this unfavourable publicity. They chose to advertise on Veronica and, overnight, they were making 2,000 a week instead of a loss. Now they didn’t need us.

Allan Crawford5

With Allan Crawford aware of Veronica’s situation and the costs involved, he searched for investors prepared to put money into his own radio station. His plan was ‘Project Atlanta’, a radio station to broadcast off the English coast. It was, potentially, a very risky business, but also one that could become extremely profitable:

There was no way that I would embark on something unless we had sufficient capital to operate for a minimum of three months. So the sums were gone into over and over again; the cost of the ship, the cost of the equipment, the weekly running costs, the transport between shore and ship, the cost of recording the tapes, the cost of an onshore office – everything that you can think of had been calculated. The problem was always to persuade the backers to put up the money that we needed. Somebody would put up ten thousand, somebody else would then say they would put up another five thousand and then we go to somebody else who said they would put up another ten thousand, so we had twenty five thousand. But by this time, the person who had said that he was going to put up the initial ten thousand had changed his mind, so we were back to fifteen thousand. This was the appalling situation that we were in, neither of us had the kind of financial connections that were needed for this sort of operation, but at this point Allan met up with a very interesting man called Oliver Smedley. He’d stood for Parliament as a Liberal candidate and had great financial ideas as to how things should be operated, he was very go-ahead, very open to new ideas and he became fired with enthusiasm for the pirate radio ship operation.

Kitty Black6

When Project Atlanta Ltd was registered on 30 July 1963, the company attracted more than 150 investors, some owning just twenty shares, but others owning considerably more. The largest shareholder was CBC (Plays) Ltd, a company registered in April 1960 to act as agents and managers, Crawford and Black were both directors of this company.

Allan Crawford studied the legalities very carefully, guided by the experiences and research of previous ventures and further legal advice. It’s likely that he had access to papers from the CNBC venture operated from Royalty House, just a few yards away from his own Merit Music office in London’s Dean Street:

The ship would be owned by a Panamanian company. It would be run by a company in Lichtenstein which would enter into agreements with us to sell advertising time in England, which legally we could do. In other words, we had a company that didn’t own the ship but did have a contract with the owner to sell advertising time. The crew would be paid from Lichtenstein, the company that employed the disc jockeys would get so much every month from...