If you don’t like what’s on the radio, then start your own radio station. That’s what some pirate broadcasters around the British Isles did and the government was not at all happy about it. Journalist and MI5 agent Paul Harris tells the story in his self-published book When Pirates Ruled the Waves.
It all starts in the early 1960s. The BBC has a monopoly on the airwaves and licenses are never granted to independent broadcasters. Large portions of the U.K. receive no radio signals at all and what is received by a moderate portion of the population does not come in clearly. And to be honest, as Paul Harris puts it, the programming on BBC radio just plain sucks. There is very little music and lots of educational and information broadcasts. Interest levels are low and few people ever listen to it. Even worse, the BBC is payed for with taxes and yet they insist on broadcasting things that tax-paying listeners have no interest in hearing.
Then the Isle of Man, where they are geographically incapable of receiving the BBC, gets permission to open their own radio station. So a few businessmen see a gap in the market and begin operating pirate stations located either on boats or abandoned military forts from World War II that are located in international waters, outside the boundaries of British territory. The radio operators have a plan to eventually go legitimate, thinking that when the government sees how popular they are they will be granted licenses and become legal. The pirate stations’ transmissions catch on like wildfire, not only with teenagers who listened to rock and pop, but also with adults like men driving to and from work and housewives who like having music to play while doing chores. The stations cater to their tastes by playing pop and easy listening music while also broadcasting news, information of local interest, weather reports, and advertising. The advertisers are legitimate businesses, some being big corporations. For a time, everyone is happy except the BBC and the government. Then a fight breaks out between competing pirate stations and one station owner gets killed.
A good half of the book tells the story of the stations themselves. That is the most interesting part. The other half of lesser interest is about the politics surrounding the pirate stations. The Labour party are strictly against legalization and tolerance of the pirate stations while the Tories are silently sympathetic on the other hand. While Labour is at first gunshy about addressing the issue, they eventually take a strong stance and fight with all they can to maintain the BBC monopoly. Eventually British laws are changed and claims to territorial waters are altered to run the pirates out of business. The passages about the government are not entirely uninteresting, but they do get tedious and if you have no especial interest in the bickering of British politicians it might seem like a bit too much.
Thankfully the stories of the two sides in this conflict are effectively intertwined so the dull parts are balanced by the more exciting parts. The exciting passages give details about some of the rowdies and eccentrics who start the pirate radio stations like horror rock singer Screaming Lord Sutch and Roy Bates who eventually turned his radio station on Roughs Tower into the micronation called The Principality of Sealand, although this book does not give any details about that development. The sections on British parliamentary procedures border on absurd humor since, by the author’s account, the Labour MP’s take themselves a little too seriously.
The last chapter could have ruined the book if Paul Harris had taken it too far. He accuses Labour of being part of a communist conspiracy to brainwash British people with BBC broadcasting. What he fails to account for is that such brainwashing would be impossible considering so few people were listening to the BBC at the time. Besides, Labour doesn’t appear to be the Stalinist dictators he claims they are; in this context they are more like a bunch of senile fuddyduddies who are too out of touch with popular opinion to see how wrong they are. The American Republican party did not invent paranoid conspiracy theorists and political cranks; judging by the ranting of Paul Harris, right wing loonies were alive and kicking in Britain during the 1960s too. Fortunately his tirade doesn’t last more than a couple pages and if it had, this book would be less credible than it is.
When Pirates Ruled the Waves is an informative story about an overlooked and forgotten issue from the U.K.’s past. Coming from a journalist, the writing is simple and clear. It offers a glimpse into a lost era in the history of radio that we probably can’t relate to so much today now that we have access to whatever we want to hear on the internet. It is that different perspective and the challenge of understanding it that makes this kind of obscure book valuable. I’m not sure what radio is like in the British Isles these days, but here in America it sucks. That is because all our stations are owned by giant corporations who want to dictate what we listen to. It is a whole different problem now. So much has changed and yet so little is different.
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