Radio Caroline sinking

It was some sort of day around this date-ish, back in 1980 that Radio Caroline sunk.

It waited until lots of people were asleep, but got it just about right in order to be on the telly news.

Back in those days there were VHS video recorders and cassettes, and only phone lines to communicate via.  There were only three channels on t’telly back then, no rolling news, and so stories had time to be highly censored before they got to air on the limited slots available for news broadcasting.

By the time the news about the ship sinking had been made ready to broadcast, all mention of the fact that three of the DJs had ‘gone postal’ and chopped a hole in the bottom of the boat had been carefully removed.  Instead, a storm was blamed.  The Radio Caroline ship had sunk because of a ‘storm’. Yeah, right!

Sunk because of drug crazed hippies who imagined they were chasing a large beetle called Hargreaves through the lower parts of the ship, more like.


They played non-stop music most of the day whilst they chased Hargreaves, and they even tried to cover their tracks by putting out a message saying that they were shipping a lot of water because of a storm. Rubbish, they were shipping water because of the holes they kept making in the hull whilst they were chasing an imaginary beetle.  Why wouldn’t they say that on air, eh?


Yes, it’s the anniversary-ish of Radio Caroline sinking.  And, there’s the picture of the remains of Radio Caroline.  No huge beetles there at all, obviously.  But what a mess of the boat those pesky drug addled radio DJs made.  But, heck those were the 1970s and early 1980s. Different times. Different times.