Looking back at Radio London and Radio England

For one of the recent Radio London RSL's, a restricted transmission licence for twenty-eight days, some people of the original American staff of the station traveled to the UK to join the celebrations. Among them was Tom Danaher, the man who stood at the station's crib and rigged up the impressive transmitter facilities on board of the ship that in 1964 would become Radio London's home base, the MV "Galaxy". François Lhote met him on board of the "Yeoman Rose", anchored seven miles out from Frinton-on-Sea, and asked him to tell us some more about the beginnings of Radio London in 1964, and the ill-fated Swinging Radio England / Britain Radio project of 1966.

Our agreement was simple. He would take care of everything that could tear — the money and the contracts. Everything that could bend — the technical and mechanical part of the operation — would be my responsibility. He persuaded his group of friends to invest in the project and I got a group of my friends to do the same. After we talked about it, Don decided to go over to Britain, which he did. He hired a plane and flew around Caroline's ship a few times, taking pictures. He investigated about the organization and, sure enough, it was doing really well. While he was away, I decided to find out where we could buy a ship for our own.

I was doing the design work for the transmitter house, the studio room and the antenna and also getting all of the machinery — the ship's engine, the generators — in working order again. I also went out to buy another generator to run the transmitter and I set the bids out for buying the transmitter itself. Now a friend of mine at home, Bill Horne, was an engineer at the local radio station, a 20 kW AM station. I talked to him about what kind of transmitter I had to buy and where I could find a good second-hand one. He advised me to buy an RCA, because those are the best ones. He also told me who to call at Camden, New Jersey. So I called those guys and asked them how long it would take them to deliver a transmitter and how much it would cost us. Meanwhile I was staying in Miami, working on the ship full-time and assembling everything needed. Next I designed the mast that went on the ship's deck. It was made by Union Metals in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. That's how I practically got involved with the radio ship business.

Tom Danaher: I cannot remember the exact date, but Bill Horne put me in touch with Bill Carr from Fort Worth. Carr was the radio engineer who would match up the transmitter with the mast. The captain was Kou Walters and he had given me a lot of help. He worked every day on the ship with me and it was he who eventually hired the outside contractors who helped us with the engines and the compressors. Now this boat used a lot of compressed air. The engine did not have any transmission in it. So when you were going into reverse, you had to stop the engine, pull a series of levers and then the compressed air would run the engine backwards. Only then the ship itself would reverse.

Tom Danaher: I cannot answer that question. All they did was call me up on three different occasions. They told me to get different crystals, cut for different frequencies. I called the company that produces these crystals for RCA and they said they could not make them just like that. It takes some time, you know, because it is a growth process and you cannot just call up and tell them to send over a 266 or whatever.

Tom Danaher: Well, two things made it successful. The first one certainly was Ben Toney who brought us the KLIF sound. Toney knew he had to go to PAMS to get the jingles, because he had worked at these Top 40 stations and at KLIF itself. He knew where to get his stuff. Then he trained the diskjockeys and taught them how to present the programs. The second thing was that our transmitter was better than the competition. I mean, we obliterated all the other offshore stations with the power of our large transmitter. At least as soon as it operated properly, which at first it did not. Bill Carr worked on it for a long time, trying to get the output up and every time it would trip out. I was present at the first few times, when they tried to go up to 50 kW. The thing would get up to 20, 25 kW and then there would be a big bolt of lighting dropping on the deck. Next the transmitter would trip out — I don't know what caused it. Bill would keep changing the position that was loaded. The whole mast was loaded and it had to be tapped at a certain point. It took some time before it worked properly. However, I do not think that even Bill stayed long enough to get the thing clear up to 50 kW and probably it never did. Still, Radio London's transmitter was so much stronger than those of Radio Caroline or the others, that they just might have used that as a sales pitch.

Tom Danaher: That option was subject of some discussion, but we figured that it was not really worth it. Of course, by that time for me, personally, it really did not make any difference. I had my own business back home and I was quite busy with that. I suppose that for Phil Birch this advertising agency, Radlon Sales, was his whole life. It was his full-time job and it was really his decision whether to go on or not. However, I did not think he wanted to. So it would have been a matter of getting someone else to keep it all going, and we did not know whether they would pull the same thing when we tied up at Sheerness. Moreover, no Englishman could work on or service the ship anyway, so you were fighting an uphill battle. I did not want to mess with it. Also, by this time I was totally detached from servicing the ship or trying to keep the thing afloat. Other than just being on a ship, Radio London was just another regular Top 40 station.

About four months later, a friend of mine down at the City National Bank called me and asked if he could bring two men to my office to talk to me. About fifteen minutes later these three guys came by. I knew one of them already, because he was the Chevrolet dealer in Archer City, Texas, which is about twenty miles south of Wichita Falls. The others were Red Livingstone, a big, rich oil driller and his business partner. Both men asked me if I was making any money on that radio ship off England. I told them that I was and that the operation really was going well. They explained that they had been contacted by a guy from Eastland, Texas, who had built a radio ship, the "Olga Patricia", in Miami.

Don had also promoted his venture with some of the friends that I had brought into Radio London — which I did not like either. He never told me about it and asked them not to say anything about it to me, because of the falling out between himself, Bud and me. The whole Radio England thing was a bad, unethical experience for me. After they got it over here and they could not get it to work, my friends who had invested at least five times as much as they had invested in Radio London, were losing money. After seeing the success of Radio London, they just wrote big checks. So these friends then called on me. They said that they we losing a terrible amount of the money that they had invested in Radio England. Would I help them out? This was because when the going really got rough at Radio England, Don just left. He ran up a huge bill at the Hilton Hotel, and a host of other places in London, and then he just evaporated into thin air.