Rebel Radio Ships | Al Jazeera World

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so this is radio caroline on 199 england's first commercial radio station [Music] as far as 1925 radio broadcasting was becoming very influential and the government of the day realized that this was a dangerous thing to have in the hands of private companies and individuals they prohibited anyone else being able to send radio signals so the only people that could send radio signals were the british broadcasting corporation which effectively was a an arm of the government of the day [Music] and as i had a monopoly there was no need to ask the population what they'd like to hear so the people running the corporation who were chosen for their you know gravitas said well we'll we'll give the people what we want them to hear and all the things that they felt the population wanted to have because the population weren't consulted only we didn't accept that the music was very important to us but there was no music for us but in the early 60s our founder ronan realized that you can circumvent the regulations by just going a little bit outside of british territory and putting a radio station on a ship hence ships like this and that was the foundation of radio caroline this is radio caroline on 199 england's first commercial radio station my name's simon d with you for the next two hours first one off the top of the pile the hollies rock and robin from somewhere in the mediterranean peace love and good music the voice of peace is your voice first time that i heard the station the voice of peace was in the suez canal when i was sailing with my husband i used to you know at that time you had the radio so i used to go to the channel where they used to i used to listen to the voice of peace and that's how i came to know that there was a radio station called the voice of peace and it's only after i met abe did i connect that this was the gentleman and this was his ship and i think to date there's nobody who broadcasts better music than maybe you know it was it was really good music the idea of a boat broadcasting from the sea was a result of a need because he couldn't get license here in israel or maybe he didn't even try to get a license but in any case once you broadcast from the sea you are a free bird you can do whatever you want and and then open a radio station at those times you needed all kind of regulations and from the sea you don't need all those regulations and therefore he chose to do it from the sea and he was not the first one not the last one by the way the settlers um tried to to imitate imitate him and do the same years after him there'll always be people who criticize but we are not here as israelis we're here as people and the goods that we have come from arabs and jews at the same time and i think we should stop this whole business you know i think they know who i am already and what the ship stands for and who the crew is [Music] peace is the word and the voice of peace is the station 24 hours a day when caroline started in britain we just had the bbc there was no radio competition and and if you were a music producer you couldn't get your new music played and that was why ronan o'reilly started the radio station to get new music played on the radio i mean ronan was not adverse to making money running very much like making money and using other people's money but because of his upbringing his real motivation was to settle the score that he was blocked in doing what he wanted to do because you have to remember that his father was an irish republican and his grandfather was killed in the 1916 uprising where the irish rose up against the british occupying ireland so there was a rebel streak there and which is why of course he started caroline at easter in 1964 because it was eastern 1916 that briefly the the rebels took over dublin and took over the post office and set up gun emplacements and fought the british so this was his way of saying i'm evening the score with the british government in in a peaceful way [Music] all his life i think abe was obsessed with what he had done in 48. he had bombed according to what he said he had bombed palestinian villages as a volunteer in the israeli new air force and their guilt feelings accompanied him for many years and where the motivation to change his way and to start a new start in his life a new approach he realized that what he had done was wrong and this was really the fuel which had fueled his motivation to compensate to to to ask for forgiveness for what he had done in 48 i wish more israelis would have felt the same guilt feelings [Music] but it's very interesting that despite the fact that he was such a zionist to begin with he suddenly not suddenly probably in the process changes and becomes more and more critical uh first of all he does not believe in the israeli mantra that there is no one there to talk to in the arab world he tries individually to as a pilot to fly to egypt three times he flew to egypt but the egyptian did not take him seriously they thought he was a clown [Music] and they sent him back immediately after he landed in ismailia and twice he landed in ismailia and once he came with the flight with egypt from i think larnaca the israelis were very cross and angry with these initiatives this was part of his attempt to bring egypt and israel closer and i think this was uh the first step in his transformation from a very pious zionist into someone who was more critical about the jewish state he sat in his hotel and watched and watched the sea and listened to the radius people were speaking about the conflict and about the war that is about to come and he felt that there should be a way to speak to people to warn them about the consequences of of war and he thought it's not possible to broadcast not from the arab territories but not from israel but maybe from the sea from a ship in the sea a radio station and he said and we call it the voice of peace to speak with people and to calm them he bought a ship with the donation he got from the dutch people from with their generosity and took it to new york to transfer this ship to a radio station it took him almost five years to fulfill his dream and to transfer this small ship into a radio station more than radio session for this period of time and in may 1973 he came to the mediterranean sea and started to broadcasting we are the voice of peace [Music] well there's an american saying which goes you can't beat city hall and what that means is however hard you try the authorities will eventually win and our attitude is well actually they won't and if people see that we're surviving maybe it'll inspire them to survive because roman o'reilly i mean we all live our lives complying with rules that other people have made and it's automatic mostly now we assume the rules are made for our benefit but then you start to think well maybe the rules are made for the benefit of the people making the rules no roland had no rules the only rules he had were his own rules and when you come up against somebody like that who is determined it's a very difficult person to stop because he doesn't operate in the conventional way that most of the rest of the population operate yeah i was a teenager well i was i was very young i was about seven years old when i first started listening to radio caroline but um a few years later when i started working at the age of 16 17 radio caroline were doing what we call road shows discos around the united kingdom of the southeast of the united kingdom i actually started going to those and then got you know to meet some of the people involved in radio caroline and they knew that i could do engineering and of course they were looking for engineers and they were having a problem with the generator and just asked me if i would go out to the ship for a couple of weeks to have a look at it well that was 40 odd years ago and i'm still doing it radio caroline north with great music from the 60s through to the 90s caroline started when i was nine years old and i grew up with caroline and i was smitten by what i'd heard the fabulous music the thought that these guys and they were all guys at the time there were no women involved at the time these guys were sitting on a rusty ship and and against overwhelming odds just to bring me the latest beatles song and it lit a spark i thought i'd want to do that and that stayed through with me all the way through my teenage years through my growing years and then i had the chance to come out i'd been a fan of the station and came out on visitor trips and was invited out from somewhere in the mediterranean we are the voice of peace on 1540 kilohertz and right now you can listen to the voice of peace on fm stereo that's right 100 on your fm dial [Music] a b felt that if it's going to speak all the time about politics no one will listen to the voice of peace he understood that it should be a combination of music of a popular music different styles with the in english very nice and fluent english of british djs most of them were british so that the public will will enjoy listening to their but between the the songs there were messages jingles like no more war normal bloodshed peace is the world and the voice of peace is this station no more war no more bloodshed [Music] peace is the word and the voice of peace is the station people who listened as i did for many years to this station were less exposed to the indoctrination that was part of the official israeli broadcasting stations so even if you were not exposed to direct political messages you were also less exposed to the zionist narrative so to speak and you were thinking in a more universal way so i think in the long run it had a good impact on people's ability to to think out of the box to look uh to look at things not only through the glasses of zionism or jewish national ideology the second impact was especially towards the the last years of the broadcasting uh the ship was totally identified with abi natan so so uh even if the messages were not coming from the ship people saw the project of the ship and his own more political activity as the same project and i think that helped to make even a bigger influence in the direction of a more courageous political view vis-a-vis israeli policies and ideologies well what happens in the throughout the mediterranean all the radio stations and the television stations are controlled by governments with the results the arab don't listen to the israeli radio simply because they feel it must be propaganda since the government controls it the same effect is on the israeli side the difference will be with our station that will be a permanent dialogue there are no speeches here there's no propaganda there'll always be views from both sides so that people can listen to the other point of view and by listening to the other point of view maybe they will understand it radio caroline music into the 80s it was a bit like a secret society you had to ask around because everybody had false names because no one wanted to go to prison i concocted a name because i didn't want to go to prison for two years um but you just had to meet someone who knew someone and gradually you were accepted and trusted and radio caroline loved people who would help out everybody that came out to caroline for legal reasons had a different name it wasn't wise to have your own name just in case you were arrested for playing a bruce springsteen record on a rusty ship um so we all had different names and a friend of mine was mick williams and before i came out to caroline he said what are you going to call yourself and i jokingly said mick williams and the time came in this very studio when i went on air at one o'clock and the previous presenter had said coming up next is mick williams i'm mick williams and that name was the name that i used when i first came out to caroline in the 80s for years i've been ray clark and i intend continuing as ray clarke [Music] originally when i went out to radio caroline in the 1970s i did actually change my name to stephen bishop but when i came back on this ship the ross revenge um i actually came on the air i was going to use stephen bishop but the guy who was on before me knew me from when i worked on irish radio in the irish republic and i was called johnny lewiston and he introduced me as johnny lewis i thought my mars will stick with it now everybody knows anyway [Music] see the british love a fighter who's fighting with disadvantage and radio caroline was such an organization so we got and still have a vast amount of goodwill because we were the we were the crazy guys who would never give in even when we were living and working in awful conditions and maybe risking death well in order to play the rolling stones so the rolling stones had to be very important for people to do that i was here in 1985 when we had what we call euro siege where the government tried to close it down there was our sales in the station called laser 558 we were together a mile and a half apart say two and a half kilometers apart um and the government boat that was trying to close us down moored between the two of us and a couple of times they came you know came close to us uh to try and be menacing and threatening but yeah it didn't upset us at all and in fact at the time it was like we were on every news channel throughout the world um certainly all the european news outlets were covering the story that the government trying to close us down every newspaper in europe so it was like us spending 20 million pounds of um advertising revenue so it actually backfired on the government because suddenly we were getting letters from people saying we thought you'd gone off the air years ago we didn't even realize you were still there so actually acted in our favor on five five eight kilohertz this is radio caroline this is mutiny mr christian [Music] christian maybe the early years of caroline were not very professional but it actually didn't matter because no one had heard that sort of radio before so even if they weren't very good the population absolutely loved it and in a few months after caroline started to broadcast it had a bigger audience and all the bbc networks combined of course the attitude of the government as well somehow we have to stop this and that's what set off the battle between the government saying we will close you down and radio caroline's saying you will not they would try and come close to us in a rubber boat to try and measure how much water and fuel that we had on board and on on a ship you've got a plimsoll line so you can normally tell by that plimsoll line how the ship is laying has how much fuel and water is on board so we all we used to do was pump seawater into empty tanks and disperse it around the ship so every day we sat differently in the water and in the end they gave up it was a cat and mouse game but we used to have a lot of fun with them or when they came close to us in a rubber boat a couple of times with measuring equipment to measure our signals and again they were just trying to be menacing so on this ship the roster revenge we have a very a very powerful fire hydrant so we can spray water put fires out so all we did was when they came close to us we warned them what we were going to do they took no no so we just sprayed them with sea water they soon disappeared and they never tried that again it was it was basically a junior minister in the british government trying to make a name for himself and it had back five in some respects laser they got off the air but caroline remained on the air and they just gave up in the end and let us continue and here we are [Music] this is a test transmission of the voice of peace radio station the voice of peace broadcast from the motor vessel piece lying in the eastern mediterranean the voice of peace was abnetta and abe nathan was the voice of peace i mean there was a lot of music and he saw that through the music he can get also to the hearts of the people but by the end of the day it was his monologues his interviews he interviewed people he did his monologues about peace and his spirit was on the whole boat i remember one interview that he did together with me i think it was with nabil shah i think it was with nabil shah when the palestinians first mentioned the jericho first idea before oslo and this was really a sensation because they never talked about the jericho first and he was very proud about it later on it gained some momentum but above all it was uh he tried to reach young people and he saw that he can reach young people through the music and this what he had done i don't think anything is going to happen and yet while the politicians are going to keep talking about the problem and the united nations and the big powers and the wise men all over the world i think every day we're having more and more people dying on the borders and there'll be more bomb throwing and there'll be continuous retaliation actually what is happening is the politicians will live to talk about these wars and the ordinary man is going to keep [Music] dying [Music] october was started and again there was a fight between israel and the arab countries and during the war abe took his ship to the port of near the the port of port said and broadcasted the messages for peace or people who stop the war and and think reasonably and and and speak with others but he said it was like it was surrealistic because he he could see the missiles and the planes and the plane are being heated and falling to the sea and everything was killing the others but they didn't touch him they didn't touch the the the voice of peace after the war he returned to broadcast again aby have you got permission from the egyptians to go through the canal not yet but i never asked for permission they wouldn't they wouldn't let you go through last time why would they change their minds now i think there's a better climate right now and i think what we're doing right now is really they can understand it's a people-to-people effort it's a gesture of goodwill it's with flowers this day long be remembered yom kippur as a day of a lot of violence maybe we can help change that day by presenting flowers this is panamanian vessel peace panamanian vessel peace papa echo alpha charlie echo do you read you are not permitted to remain in jordanian waters and you have to leave the jordanian immediately over okay we are leaving now thank you very much and good morning [Music] caroline could have got involved with politics in 1970 the station did but only for a short while but most of the time it was here just to play music the chances are had the station really got political had it overstepped the mark then as had happened in 1970 it would have been jammed by by government probably any government and and then you know if you're an embarrassment to the government they do their utmost to close you down caroline knew how far to go but didn't overstep that mark and until the 80s when the dutch invaded the ship they were reasonably safe we we kept ourselves to ourselves and and just played the music and that was the intention that's clive gregson an american car sounding very much like ralph motel 13 minutes away from eight and we have colin blandstone next in late summer 1989 a ship came out from england and spoke to this ship and said we want you to shut down and switch off and go away and if you don't then something else is going to happen which is far more severe than our our nice request and of course the law of the sea is you can't board a ship in international waters unless you're invited to do so so our thought was well i don't know what they have in mind but they won't board the ship because international law says you can't do that but the next day a very much larger ship arrived and tied up alongside and it came from holland and on board with dutch police and dutch coast guards and in holland the dutch police and coast guards they wear guns and there are a lot of them so they climbed on board and nobody's going to confront a uniform man with a gun and so they took the ship over now my contention is they had no right to do so because they had no authority because you're only a policeman in the country where that power is awarded to you the second you are in a foreign country or no country you're not a policeman anymore but you are a man with a gun and they wrecked and stripped every part of this ship during the course of a day and took all of our equipment away and left the ship behind but the crew were invited to give up and go ashore and they said no we won't we'll stay and we start all over again which is what happened and this is the most wonderful moment for me really to come back out on a caroline ship into the studio play um wonderful old vinyl again this is what radio is all about it was a great adventure yes i was aware that i was breaking the law but i don't make a habit of breaking the law and if the worst thing i ever do in my life is sit on a rusty ship and play a beatles record i i haven't got much of a problem with that my conscience is clear i wasn't that keen on rough weather and out at sea we did have some really really really rough weather but equally we had flat calm days beautiful sunny days so people pay to go on cruises we were on a ship playing music sitting in the sun when the sun's shine it was lovely you were with friends all doing the same thing they all wanted to be part of radio caroline and let's face it if you're going to work for a radio station why not work for one with the most famous name in the world we all used to discuss the music that we played so the great thing with everybody who was on the ship was if you can imagine a radio station on land you've got somebody come through the door do the program go home another person comes through the door do the program go home here we're doing what we're doing a record library you know we used to sit around talk about music you know what got us into music when new records used to come out to the ship and we used to get a lot of new records every week being sent to us even though the record companies weren't supposed to but they did because they knew we had the listeners you know we actually listened to what the listeners want as well that's what that was the beauty and the success of caroline it was you know the listeners controlled us we controlled the listeners that's the beauty of the station abe paid the hell of a prize being in jail and i visited him in jail not for the radio station but for his so-called illegal meetings with plo leaders soon after it it became thanks god uh legitimate to meet plo people but in in this stage it was still israel was not ready yet after all the brainwash against the pro israel was not ready yet to for such a step [Music] he understood very early on that peace with egypt was not the main issue the main issue was peace with the palestinians and although the voice of peace is not changed because of saddam's visit his own personal activity became more focused on the settlements in the occupied territories the meeting with the plo so i think that it was to his credit that it was a moment of achievement for him and not that he contributed directly to this piece but he understood what many other israelis did not understand that this was not the whole picture that there was still a lot of work to be done well it's a huge thing with caroline when everything's going well something real bad happens and when everything seems so terrible that there's no means means a possibility of rescuing it and something good happens but the worst time was in around 1990 when we absolutely ran out of money we couldn't broadcast a signal the ship was in the middle of the ocean the living conditions were appalling nobody should have been expected to live like that but people did live like that because it meant that some part of radio caroline still continued and then the ship was shipwrecked in a part of the coast where if you get shipwrecked there you just die i mean it's part of the coast where 250 ships have been shipwrecked and no one has survived and no ship has survived and when i heard this was in the process of happening me having put the people on the ship encouraged them to be there i thought well this is good i'm probably going to be responsible for the death of six people with all the repercussions that will follow after that but astonishingly and thanks to the british royal air force there were no deaths and all the six crew were rescued without injury but then it seemed absolutely certain this ship would just be lost would break up with sync but it was the only ship of 250 which was rescued and brought in to shore and at that point we had a ship but nothing else so our choice was okay you know we've given it our best shot let's walk away and get on with our lives or do you know i think we started over and over again and we did 09 with caroline on 199 your all-day music station it's now exactly nine o'clock b-u-l-o-v-a full of the watch time boulevard [Music] caroline continental it was a david and goliath thing you know you had big brother the government trying to stop us all the time and to be fair they could have stopped us but we had a lot of friends within the government a lot of friends within the police who've just turned a blind eye because i mean since i've been working on shore uh and i've worked for legal radio when i first came ashore i remember talking to a policeman and he said we have better things to do than chase djs up and down the river you know we've got criminals to catch all you a lot of doing is playing music and most of the police and most of the government listen to it anyway but i think that's what kept us going the fact that we shouldn't have been there but we were doing no harm you know anybody who worked on the station if we were doing any harm we wouldn't have done it that was it but we were entered we were there as to entertain not not to do any harm and we brought about a change in radio and british radio and again that was you know that was what what we were there for to change british radio we've done it but we're still here you know we've got a license now and that's why we're sitting in you know if you like a river not in international waters anymore but still doing it on the ship to say thank you because there's so many listeners who say caroline's not caroline unless it comes from a ship so for two weeks you know for a weekend every month we do the hot everything from the ship after the original radio caroline ship sank the me amigo i got a call to say will you come out and work for the voice of peace and i thought yeah go on and i initially went out was gonna go out there for three months but enjoyed it so much that uh i you know i stayed for nine months and we used to broadcast um you know from off tel aviv but we we broadcast to the whole of the middle east so again we kept everything very short very sharp because a lot of people couldn't understand english could they you know so yeah and that was why we kept that the links very short and sharp there that played pop music because at the time i was there in 1980 at the time i don't think there was many stations playing you know sort of pop music so and that was what we used to do well the bbc doesn't float so that that's the first difference but you still work with people who are committed to bringing good radio but it's a different sort of radio to the the caroline radio here on the ship you you're it's part of your life you you live on the ship you eat on the ship you sleep on the ship you are a part of the ship's crew whereas with the bbc you wake up at home you get in your car you drive to work you do the program you go home again and whilst you've got friends there and the guys there are very friendly and nice guys to to work with as around the world any radio station but you don't sleep with them you don't eat with them you you don't talk with them other than with your program because it's then time to go home again and that's the difference with caroline you you live sleep eat radio on the me amigo which was the one of the original radio caroline ships the one that sank in 1980 uh that was probably the most challenging because literally every day it was so old the ship we used to spring leaks you know so technically the boat was sinking so every day it'd be like we're you know there's water coming in pump it out but it just became like one of those daily occurrence so you just got used to it but there was one particular night where at the time you know you you think to yourself yeah it's windy it's rough you know we're in a situation here where you know like we were walking around in the record library on the amigo which was downstairs and the water level was coming up to about here on your legs so you know it was like do we call a lifeboat don't we call a lifeboat we thought no let's see if we can get the pump started we got the pump started pumped the ship out very cold but then she started to ride again and didn't take you he's still taking water but we were pumping water faster than we were taking it and we used to fill the holes in the bottom of the ship with a piece of wood knock them through the holes so it made it bigger stop the water then concrete around them that was our way of patching up the boat and i suppose the next day there was myself a guy called peter chicago was our chief engineer and another guy we sat at the mess room table and we actually said that was probably the closest we've ever come to losing our lives but at the time you didn't realize it you know because there's so much going around in your head you don't have time to think about it but even thinking back to it now you think that was probably the closest of my life i've nearly come to lose in my life i just love it the chances are you heard that for the very first time on this radio station many years ago the paddy smith group and because the night here on caroline you know when you turn the radio on and suddenly a radio blasts out of the speaker and you think wow i haven't heard this for ages and ages and ages this is that moment but the whole attitude has changed over the years following on from what radio caroline started it's taken an awful long time i mean here we are now with a license with a government license but why couldn't they have given that to caroline 50 years ago it just seems that they were worried about something that really they shouldn't have been worried about and and perhaps that's the way with governments around the world they they worry that they haven't got control and the government didn't have control of caroline but they had nothing to fear because we we only wanted to play music we weren't spies we weren't terrorists we weren't bad guys we just wanted to sit on a ship and play music and some politicians some politicians still even today find it hard to understand that's the other thing it didn't matter how bad the weather got you never felt unsafe on the ship even on the me amigo you never felt unsafe on the ship you thought to yourself it's because we call it the lady you know you say the lady's looking after her she's looking after us and again something we often talk about is in the history of caroline which was 1964 to what 2019 nobody's been you know seriously hurt or even you know worst killed yet we've had a few injuries but that's it you know and when you consider what we went through to keep a radio station on the air it's remarkable very good morning morning madam and a special good morning to you sunshine it's 604 for tuesday morning the 10th of june 1918. those are the eagles peace is the word and the voice of peace is the station 24 hours a day it was quite tragic because the whole project of ab was finally was it was a very sad end it's a very sad ending personally his life ended in a very very sad way lonely forgotten in a wheelchair israel didn't appreciate this man as he deserved and also the sheep it got into financial troubles nobody was there to help him there was oslo and everyone thought that there will be peace without abi natal which was obviously not true and in a certain stage he gave up and made the the ship sink there were very few listeners and it was all dying and it's a very very sad story i mean it's a it's a good story it's a good opening and and many good years but the end both of the boat and of ab are both very tragic very sad and shouldn't be like this it should have been different if israel would know to appreciate heroes of peace and not only heroes of war then abe would be more remembered and his boat would maybe broadcast until [Music] today they were going to also i could not afford to maintain here you can't work on the ship and also go to violate laws and go to prison we lost a lot of money i lost all the funds i had i think the ship has done its job the radio station the whole purpose was to bring the two parties that sit and talk with each other and now they started talking let the government do their work i think that by and large it is a lovely fairy tale with a unhappy ending uh abe was a dreamer he was not taking seriously enough as he deserved people liked his parties people liked his own life he was a bohemian also women food parties he owned a restaurant i mean he was really a social project but when it get it got to politics and he was even elected for the parliament he was running for the parliament but israel didn't take him seriously enough and i wish that israel would have taken him more serious than it take by the end of the day it is one of those colorful aspects of the conflict but unfortunately it's not a story of success because we know how the boat ended we know how a b ended both of them forgotten today and whenever i think about a b and i think about him quite often i must say whenever i think about him i feel deep sadness for the fact that not only he deserved more success but we israelis and the palestinians obviously deserved more people like abe who really could have changed the picture but never did abe had many many friends and finally he was quite a lonely person he had those annual big parties in the hilton every year to commemorate his flight to egypt and he had the dinners at home almost every friday or every second friday which i attended and all the who's who came also there but as i said finally he was lonely okay let's put this is a song we cannot possibly end without the song why don't i hear it ah okay we shall this is a song i think we should all sing so let's sing all of you together and with this we end the broadcast of the voice of peace after more than 21 years of broadcasting thank you all for all your support over all the years thank you thank you and shalom to everybody [Music] we shall overcome [Music] someday

Channel: Al Jazeera English

Views: 18,732

Keywords: airwaves, britain, culture, israel, media, palestine, pirate radio stations, politics, pop music, radio caroline, the voice of peace, united kingdom, youtube

Id: PXsJB9_VAXA

Length: 45min 9sec (2709 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 09 2021