Swinging Radio England

Swinging Radio England ("SRE") was a top 40 offshore commercial station which operated briefly from 3 May to 13 November of 1966 from a ship anchored in the North Sea, three and a half miles off Frinton-on-Sea, Essex, England. While the station was dubbed as a pirate radio station, its actual operation took place within the laws of the day and its offices were located in the heart of the West End of London. Its representation was by a company formed earlier in the year to represent in Europe the ABC radio and television stations in the United States.

Both the studio and the transmitter of Swinging Radio England were located in two separate prefabricated rooms lowered into the two holds of the MV Olga Patricia (later renamed MV Laissez Faire), a World War II vessel built in the USA as a supply ship. The station shared the studio and transmitter holds with a sister station named Britain Radio which was billed as the Hallmark of Quality and broadcasting a format of easy listening music.

Origin of the station

Swinging Radio England was the brainchild of Don Pierson who lived in Eastland, Texas, USA. According to an interview conducted by Dr. Eric Gilder with Don Pierson which was published by Sibiu University Press in Romania during 2001, Don Pierson got the idea to start Swinging Radio England following the success of his earlier venture called Wonderful Radio London.

The unique format of SRE was built around a hybrid collection of sounds and formats. Like those of Radio London, its jingles were made by PAMS in Dallas, Texas as part of "The Jet Set" series 27 that was originally made for WABC, New York. Its rapid fire bannerline news format, at 15 minutes past the hour was borrowed from WFUN in Miami, Florida. The on air staff were known as boss jocks, although the offshore version bore no resemblance to the style of broadcasting performed by KHJ in California which had originated the name.

Station transmitters

Don Pierson delegated all transmitter and antenna work to the LTV Continental Electronics company in Dallas, Texas as a turn-key operation. Consulting radio engineer Bill Carr of Fort Worth, Texas had performed work on the antenna construction of Wonderful Radio London, and Don Pierson originally sought Carr's advice for the new station, but when Pierson began to run out of time in getting the twin stations on the air due to difficulty in getting financial underwriters for the project, he decided to compartment the project into three segments: the ship; the stations and advertising. As a result of this development it was not until the beginning of 1966 that a total contract for the stations was signed. LTV/CE proceded to design a dipole antenna system fed at the top by a heavy cable which resulted in the end product crashing to the deck after the ship had left Miami, Florida where it had been outfitted. Two 50kW transmitters were installed in a prefabricated building and lowered into a cargo hold of the ship.

Studios

The studios for both Swinging Radio England and its sister station Britain Radio were located in adjoining rooms, and like the transmitters which were housed in a prefabricated building lowered into one of the holds of the ship, the two rooms were located in a similar building which had been lowered into the second hold of the ship.

When Don Pierson first planned the station in 1965, his engineer Bill Carr had suggested 665kc and 795kc or 815kc as frequencies for the twin stations. But by the end of November of that year, Don Pierson had still been unable to finance either the purchase of a ship or the finance of two offshore radio stations. By the time that financial arrangements were finally completed, the New Year of 1966 had arrived and so he decided that in order to make up for lost time it was necessary to spped up the operaton. This was divided into a ship purchase and a package purchase for both stations and the antenna to be manufactured and installed by Continental Electronics.

Both radio studios were originally going to be fully automated using the same ideas that Don Pierson had originally planned for Wonderful Radio London. At that time stations in the USA were using this method to program both easy listening and top forty formats and they required few staff which resulted in keeping expenses to a minimum. However, at the last moment Don Pierson was persuaded by one of the disc jockeys that he hired from nearby WFUN in South Miami, to make a further purchase for the top forty station and install a Collins Radio control board and to staff the station with live announcers who would live on the ship.

As a result of this change of plan, most of the automation for both stations was moved to the Britain Radio studio in order to create more space for the new board and equipment.

Technical Problems

Among other suggestions made by radio engineer Bill Carr had been the erection of a 200 foot mast to which the transmitter signals would be shunt-fed to the top using a similar (but higher placed) method to the Wonderful Radio London ship station. When the work was reassigned to Continental Electronics the company designed a mast supporting an outstretched triangular boom to which a heavy insulator supporter a huge and heavy swinging cable stretched down to the deck. With the signal shunt-fed to the top of the mast antennas were then attached to radiate both signals.

After leaving port with carpenters hurridly constructing new sleeping arrangements for the additional staff made necessary by the installation of the Collins board which was also being wired while the ship was underway for England, the huge shunt-fed cable broke loose and came crashing down on the deck after about two hours at sea. A series of delays caused by the unavailablility of Continental Electronics staff caused the Olga Patricia to arrive in Europe where a hasty and improvised new two cage antennas were rigged. Unfortunately the electonics company had not researched the frequencies suggested by Bill Carr and this resulted in the discovery that one frequency was in use by a BBC network in Britain. When Swinging Radio England finally got on the air as a signal station due to problems with the new antenna system, it was also discovered that it was clashing with a state-owned radio station in Italy. When Britain Radio finally made it on the air, its improvised and very unsuitable frequency was then swapped with Swinging Radio England to avoid clashing with the Italian radio station, while Britain Radio did not operate at full power.

Ownership and Management

Ownership of the venture resided with investors in North and West Texas. These investors formed loyalties to various factions and this caused tremendous infighting within the organization when the venture quickly turned into a chaotic financial failure.

Advertising sales were assigned William E. Vick by the venture under exclusive employment contract. Vick formed a British company called Peir Vick, Ltd., with offices at 32 Curzon Street in the Mayfair district of London, England, directly opposite those of Wonderful Radio London at 17 Curzon Street.

Vick, who was also a Texas investor in the venture, then entered into two exclusive contracts with British companies. The first contract went to Peter Rendall and Asssociates who handled all of the public relations and extensive and expensive party to launch the stations, and in turn introduced the Radiovision Broadcasts International, Limited (RBI), which had been formed in January 1966 as a subsidiary of Pearl & Dean whose reputation had been established by selling space on British cinema screens. The creation of RBI had been triggered by the intention of the ABC radio and television networks in the USA to expand the sale of their programs in Britain and Europe. All of this coincided with rumors that the British Government were about to license two 50kw commercial radio stations to be located in two different cities. In fact Pierson had been advised in December 1965 not to go ahead with the offshore stations but to seek these two licenses instead. A compromise was seen in the prefabrication of the transmitters and studios which could be immediately unloaded on land should such licenses be granted.

Unfortunately for all concerned the engineering work never succeeded in making the offshore stations fully operational and RBI failed to sell enough advertising to make the venture profitable, which the public relations firm spent large sums of money promoting the stations.

Noteworthy events

Two major parties were thrown by Peter Rendall and Associate to introduce RBI to advertisers, with the second of these parties being held at the London Hilton hotel and promoted in the press as "The Party of the Year". This star-studded affair was followed by a nationwide live music tour called "Swinging 66" for which the headline act was the Small Faces.

Swinging Radio England made its arrival on to the British airwaves with Mitch Miller recording of "Yellow Rose of Texas" which was followed by use of the new station jingles that were promptly copied, edited and used by rival Radio Caroline South on another ship anchored close by the Olga Patricia.

The last minute decision by Don Pierson to allow Ron O'Quinn, the disc jockey that he had hired from WFUN to change the automated system of broadcasting to a live format was the most controversial of all. O'Quinn hurridly borrowed every kind of format gimmic that he was familiar with in the broadcasting area of Georgia and Florida to create a hybrid sound heard only in England via "SRE". The key to this hodge-podge was the renaming of the djs as "boss jocks", a term borrowed from a station on the West Coast of the USA who used it in a very laid back on air delivery. In contrast SRE was anything but laid back. It was a like a top 40 station on steriods where everything had echo, was shouted, had either a genuine southern US accent or English accents feining what came to be called a "transatlantic accent". Even the news format which had been used on stations such as WFUN and KBOX in Dallas, was full of buzzers, beeps, echo and full-throttle delivery (the exact opposite of conversational speech.) An example was in the top of the hour station identification announcement (which was also accompanied by a drum roll): "This is “SRE-Swinging Radio England. Broadcasting 4 1/2 miles off the Frinton Essex Coast on 227 metres, 24 hours a day, in excess of 50,000 watts of power, SRE, first and foremost is BOSS!" While many British and Contintental European teenagers where exited by the these sounds, they did nothing for the advertisers and coupled with the technical problems they gave SRE a very short life. By November of 1996 it was all over.

Of the American staff of SRE who left a brief but memorable mark on the minds of British listeners were Rick Randall, Boom-Boom Branigan and Larry Dean, who became a master of the hybrid sound created by Ron O'Quinn. In recent times Rick Randall has mused that perhaps Don Pierson had been right after all and that more polish, control and saving of expenses would have been achieved had Swinging Radio England been an automated station.

Footnote

When SRE left the airwaves it was followed by a series of three Dutch language stations occupying the same wavelength during the short time that the transmitters remained on the air between 1966 and July 1967.

During the short time that Swinging Radio England was on the air it launched the British radio broadcasting careers of Roger Day and Johnnie Walker.

An example of a functioning automated top 40 station using the same PAMS jingles series 27 as SRE, but minus the "boss jocks", was WGNE-AM located at the Signal Hill Country Club in Panama City, Florida up until the middle of the 1970s. WGNE-AM was primarily run by three adults and a teenager, with one adult managing the station and two adults recording program and selling commercials. The automation was similar to that used aboard the Olga Patricia.

References

• Mass Media Moments in the United Kingdom, the USSR and the USA, by Gilder, Eric. - "Lucian Blaga" University of Sibiu Press, Romania. 2003 ISBN 973-651-596-6

See also

• Boss Radio

External links

• The Olga Patricia story and the offshore stations that were transmitted from this ship which was later renamed Laissez Faire.
• The story of Swinging Radio England
• 40th Anniversary of Swinging Radio England and Britain Radio held in London during June, 2006.