It all began in 1964, when a maverick Irish businessman by the name of Ronan O'Rahilly decided to break the BBC monopoly and set-up a station on a ship in international waters off the English coast.
“Back in the ’60s, kids in America had a wealth of radio stations to listen to,” British broadcaster and author Ray Clark told ABC News. “Here in the U.K., we had one, the BBC, and they hadn't discovered The Beatles. We needed Radio Caroline, from a ship three miles off the coast, to hear that pop music that we craved for.”
Just three years after the station was created, an infuriated British government passed the Marine Offences Act to stop pirates from broadcasting. True to its spirit, and cheered on by an ever growing audience of music fans, Radio Caroline didn’t submit to the new law. It just carried on broadcasting and, today, 60 years later, it's stiIl filling the airwaves.
However, over the decades, there have been a host of changes and challenges to the renegade radio station. The ship was impounded by creditors, it sank in North Sea in 1980 but returned once more on a new ship, the sturdy former super trawler, the MV Ross Revenge, a bigger and more modern ship for the station to operate on.
But in 1991, disaster struck again. The ship lost its anchor chain and managed to drift onto the notorious Goodwin Sands in the English Channel where the crew was rescued but the ship was badly battered.
The station now broadcasts from a legal land-based studio but, for one weekend a month, crews go out to the vessel - now anchored in the English territorial waters of the Blackwater Estuary off Essex - and do their programs from there. The station remains as popular as ever as it broadcasts pure nostalgic fun harkening back to the swinging '60s. Listeners love it not only in the U.K., but now people around the world can listen to it via internet streams. Why not tune in?
Today's Articles
Fabulous Creations: Street artist brightens his city with charming chalk drawings - guaranteed to make you smile.