Friday 26 February 2016

Scalded by coffee, mashed fingers and a mystery virus

OFFSHORE life with the pop pirates 50 years ago could be a dangerous business. The month of February 1966 presented all sorts of hazards for brave DJs and engineers stuck out at sea.  

With the Radio Caroline South ship ‘Mi Amigo’ having recently drifted onto an Essex beach with near-catastrophic consequences, a new temporary home had been arranged thanks to the loan of Swedish Radio Sud vessel ‘Cheetah II’.

The sister ship housing Caroline North, meanwhile, continued to broadcast despite  atrocious weather off England’s NW coastline. During one particularly nasty storm, a gigantic wave smashed the ship so hard that Dutch crewman J.Burgering threw coffee over himself, badly scalding his neck. He was taken off the ship for treatment at Ramsey Cottage Hospital on the Isle of Man.

In a separate incident, Caroline North had to make use of a lifeboat for the first time since broadcasting had begun at sea nearly two years earlier. The victim was Austrian-born chief engineer Manfred Sommer, an extrovert character who would occasionally give visitors tours of the ship while in a state of recent refreshment. 
 

* Engineer Manfred Sommer, damaged fingers  and all, compiled
 a scrapbook of his time on Caroline (pic: offshoreradio.co.uk)
One version of the story tells how Manfred took a young touring party to the engine room and announced “This is the cooling fan” before sticking his hand through the grill. He then quickly withdrew it to reveal a bloodied, tangled mess in the finger area. Onlookers nearly fainted with shock, but Manfred, perhaps anaesthetised by alcohol, was initially undaunted and when the ship’s captain was summoned, he promptly repeated his actions to demonstrate what had happened.

Before he could do any more damage, a tourniquet was applied to stem the flow of blood. Manfred had clearly gone a bit too far this time and his recovery was severely hampered by the shocking weather which meant a lifeboat didn’t arrive for him for another 48 hours. As the effects of the alcohol wore off and delayed shock set in, ashen-faced Manfred’s condition slowly worsened and his weight decreased alarmingly. The lifeboat whisked him to terra firma and he subsequently spent nine months recovering before declaring himself fit for action again.
 
Manfred wasn’t the only eccentric associated with pirate radio news this month. In deepest Cambridgeshire, 53-year-old Leonard Warren announced that he had become Overlord of the Ancient Kingdom of Reach, village of 270 people on the edge of the Fens, and publicly invited Caroline boss Ronan O’Rahilly to set up a radio transmitter within the ‘safe’ borders of his kingdom. Warren explained that Reach qualified as an independent state because in 1201 King John had granted it a Rogation Day Charter which “secured its boundaries for eternity.” He said he was in possession of authentic documents which backed this up. O’Rahilly was said to be interested in the idea, although admitted he felt a little sceptical about Mr Warren’s claims about the village’s status!

Meanwhile, broadcasting got underway in February 1966 - albeit with interruptions - from the ‘Cheetah II’, thus keeping the many thousands of Caroline South fans happy. But on the same day the station returned to the airwaves on reduced power, an emergency call had to be put in to North Foreland radio, when Aussie disc jockey Graham Webb was found in a state of near collapse. He was taken off the ship to Myland Hospital in Colchester, suffering from what was described as a mystery virus. 

Further north the Dunbar lifeboat was called out to rescue Radio Scotland’s Dick Harvey, reportedly in agony with stomach pains.

There was no let-up in the action around this time, with news emerging that former Dutch fishing vessel ‘Ocean VII’ had arrived in Scarborough to be fitted out as a home for Radio 270. The authorities were struggling to keep pace with the monitoring all of this activity, and when asked what they were going to do about Radio City and Radio 390 – occupying abandoned war-time forts in the Thames estuary - the MoD could only meekly admit that turfing them off was “Not a viable project at the moment.”

 
* The weather outside's appalling, but the show goes on
thanks to DJ 'Daffy' Don Allen on Caroline North.
Episodes like the above in early 1966 made good copy for the newspapers, as did the announcement that showbiz entrepreneur Philip Solomon had joined the board and purchased a 20% stake in Planet Productions, which now controlled the two Caroline stations. Solomon, a 41-year-old from Belfast, had already steered major acts like The Bachelors and Ruby Murray to stardom and when he stuck his finger in the Caroline pie it was seen as a significant day for pirate radio.




Friday 22 January 2016

50 years ago: The miracle of Frinton-on-Sea beach


IT HAPPENED 50 years ago this week on a snow and wind-lashed Frinton beach – a near-disaster of epic proportions!
Amid the horrendous weather on the night of Wednesday 19th January 1966, the young team on board pop pirate ship Radio Caroline were relaxing a few miles off the Essex coast, blissfully unaware they were in extreme peril.
Unbeknown to them, their 470-ton ship, the Mi Amigo, was dragging its anchor and drifting out of control towards land. The vessel inched nearer and nearer to a Frinton and Walton coastline lined with concrete and wooden breakwaters and groynes. It would need a miracle to avoid smashing into them, with potentially fatal consequences.
By some bizarre coincidence, that week’s Top 20 pop chart on Caroline had included songs whose titles seemed to foretell the drama:
* My Ship Is Coming In – Walker Brothers (Philips)
* The Water is Over My Head – Rockin’ Berries (Piccadilly)
* Let’s Hang On – Four Seasons (Philips)
* A Hard Day’s Night – Peter Sellers (Parlophone)
Spot the omens there?  It seems somebody been trying to tell them trouble was ahead!
* Frinton beach on the morning after
The drama started after nightfall when a swivel rope controlling the three anchors holding the vessel in international waters suddenly broke in the Force 8 gale. In mountainous waves the ship began to drift and was tossed around dangerously.
Coastguards soon spotted what was happening, but the crew and DJs sleeping or watching TV inside the ship were used to choppy seas and noticed nothing unusual. The crew member on ‘anchor watch’ was hampered by blinding snow and hadn’t a clue they’d broken loose.
The coastguards phoned Caroline’s agent Percy Scadden in Harwich, who raced to Frinton seafront and began flashing his car headlights at the distant ship in a futile attempt to alert them to the danger. In desperation he then phoned Anglia TV who broadcast a message of warning. Of the thousands who heard it, none were on board Radio Caroline.
Meanwhile fierce easterly winds took the ship relentlessly coastwards and it looked like the game was up when the 133-foot vessel headed straight for a concrete groyne; “That’s it – they’ve had it now,” was the reported comment of Coastguard station officer Edward Shreeve at this point. But somehow the vessel skimmed over the hazard, barely touching it.
At around 11pm most on board were watching the wrestling on TV when a crewman rushed in with the news they were hopelessly adrift. Once up on deck all could see they were dangerously close to the bright lights of Essex, and getting closer.  Attempts to start the engines came far too late to help; the ship was clearly going to be hurled on to land, the only question was exactly where and how bad the wreck would be.
* "The gods parked the ship up very nicely!"
Suddenly came a crunching sound as the huge propellor churned up shingle and the vessel came to a shuddering halt 50 yards from Frinton beach. Parachute flares and a line rocket lit up the area as a rescue squad went into action on the beach, working several hours to rig up a breeches buoy lifeline. Equipment was ferried over a treacherous 15-foot snow-covered sea-wall, while Walton lifeboat and other vessels stood by in deeper water.  
Twenty-foot waves raged, the snow continued and it was a hairy operation. Taken off in various states of shock were nine DJs and crew, including the soon-to-be-famous Tony Blackburn and Dave Lee Travis. Blackburn admitted he’d gone first to make sure the press got his photo, and later had to refute allegations he’d set the whole drama up to get himself publicity!   
At 3a.m. the ship – captain and crew still aboard - was declared high and dry. She had somehow avoided serious shipwreck by not only floating over one concrete breakwater, but had come ashore right between two wooden breakwaters, within a gap where one breakwater had been removed years before. It was the only large gap in over five miles of coastline. Any other stopping point and the Mi Amigo and those on board might have perished.
Caroline founder Ronan O’Rahilly, in a state of high emotion on the beach, said the gods had been on their side and had parked his boat up nicely. The precise location was given as Cheveux de Fries Point, Great Holland, close to Frinton Golf Club.
Walton coastguards and an 11-strong Life-Saving Corps rescued nine men in all with the breeches buoy. These were taken to nearby Portobello Hotel for dry clothes, bed and breakfast and later taxis to Harwich.
* Tony Blackburn
The DJs inevitably got the lion’s share of attention in the next day’s media, but the real heroes of the hour were rescuers Shreeve, Curtis, Ward, Hartley, Street, Sayers, Speight and Hipkin.
The beached ship became a real tourist attraction (my own family was among the visiting hordes!), and hundreds watched a ‘kedging’ operation get the vessel off the beach on high tide two days later.
She was towed to the Netherlands for a refit, gaining a generator, more powerful transmitters and an antenna mast extension.  Tony Blackburn and others were meanwhile holed up in the Gables Hotel in Dovercourt waiting for instructions, having heard Caroline’s boss insist this was all just a temporary problem: “The show must go on!”
 
 
 
 
 
 
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