A Fortuitous Intermediary - the “Pirate” Radios in Britain during the 1960s

 Topic: A Fortuitous Intermediary - the “Pirate” Radios in Britain during the 1960s

 

The 60s’ “pirates” has long been a controversial yet unavoidable topic in the history of British broadcasting. It is not only because of their immeasurable effect in promoting the 60s’ rock n roll music to the British public, which had contributed considerably in founding the swinging 60s and the counterculture in Britain, but is also because of the fact that their presence had symbolized a challenge to the dominant position as well as the seemingly unshakable ideology of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), namely the “public service” (or “public broadcasting”), as opposed to the unrestrained commercialism and free market, like that of the US. And ever since the first operation of Radio Caroline, the “pirates” had come under ferocious criticism from no matter the government, the politicians, or the mainstream media, as they labeled them as being irresponsible to the notion of “public service” and was morally degraded. However, they were also undeniably popular among the public, as even the BBC's Comptroller Lance Thirkell later had to admit that “most of our part of Suffolk is listening to Radio Caroline and, I am sorry to say, comparing it favorably with our own output”,[1] and such situation could be best summarized by Chapman’s words, “Nobody loves the pirates – except the listeners”.[2] So here comes an interesting paradox, which was that the “public good” proclaimed by the government to justify her centralized broadcasting policy since WWII was seem to be at odds with the public will after the 60s. And in this paper, I would argue that rather than infringing the British ideal of “public service”, the “pirates” had in fact revealed a “public” that had previously been ignored by the authority and had also complemented the deficiency of BBC in satisfying the taste of younger audience. Most importantly, is that these offshore radio stations actually did not see themselves as “pirates”, as they were concerned very much with the quality and diversity of their programs as well as to whether those programs could enrich their audience’s knowledge (though mainly on the side of music), and many had also exhibited a level of public consciousness in their broadcasting and were even to an extent willing to bear the responsibility of public services. Therefore, calling those offshore radio operators as “pirates” was nothing more than political means used by the government to stigmatize non-official broadcasting, and the subsequent outlaw of the former could only reflect the Government was at a loss in facing a novel teen-culture from a generation sprung from postwar affluence, rather than the former’s will to safeguard “the principle of public broadcasting” as it was claimed.

 

The notion of “public service”, a wavering and inconsistent ideology?

 

Before discussing the sudden boom of pirate radio stations after 1964, it is necessary to firstly look at the relation between BBC and the British Governments’ ideology of “public service”. As we know, the BBC had received royal charter and started broadcasting as a “public service” corporation rather than a private “company” as it had been since 1927. And under such circumstance, it was given the privilege to broadcast free of any competitors and was funded by the Post Office which collected broadcast receiving licences from the public. Yet, given its nature as a “public service”, it was not allowed to editorialize nor to carry any advertising materials in its programs.[3] So here instituted the unique broadcasting policy of Britain, which was different from the US’ one which would simply let everything subjected to the law of “free market”, but was also surely not as manipulative as the Nazis’ approach. It should be recognized that in its early years the BBC was quite successful in incorporating the national audience, as by 1925 it had already covered over 80 percent of the population in Britain.[4] And people can actually equate the BBC with Britain’s centralized broadcasting policy, as Hajkowski has also mentioned, although regional programs also existed in different relay stations, many of them would simply transmitted the output of the London station, and mainly thanked to WWII, the BBC was even chartered to takeover the responsibility of conducting regional network afterwards.[5] Conceivably, programs were greatly homogenized even if they were able to maintain unbiased reporting, and what received more criticisms, was the rigid “formality” that London imposed to the regional stations, as Scannell and Cardiff writes, “the friendly informality of local broadcasting... was foreclosed in this country [Britain]... by the implementation of the regional scheme.”[6]  Such “formality” could also be exemplified in instances like forcing their announcers to wear dinner jackets while broadcasting in 1925, and distributing a “book of instructions of the do’s and don’ts of broadcasting,” to each BBC station in 1926.[7] Certainly these examples are not enough to say that the BBC had long lost its audience’s favor, but it is reasonable to deduce that as times went by and the society was growing more and more affluent, people were likely to look for more options in radio than to solely stay tuned to the BBC as it was in the war years.

 

Back to the question asked at the start of this paragraph: What was the ideology of “public broadcasting”? Here is a well-celebrated interpretation offered by scholar Andrew Crisell, which is “to provide ‘something for everyone’ and ‘everything for someone’”.[8] The former means that “public broadcasting” should offered a diversity of programs so that no matter its audiences were differed in age, education level, job sector, or cultural background, each of them could still find something that were interesting and comprehensible to him/her under the service of BBC. For the latter, it was even more ambitious, as Crisell describes “it was not simply that each individual should seek and find her own interest and then switch off: the hope was that she would be enriched by exposure to the full range of the programming... not only to make her listen... but to ‘surprise’ her into an interest in a subject she had previously not known about or disliked, and at all times to give her ‘something a little better than she thought she wanted’”. Just by looking at the above description, we must admit that the design cannot be more ideal. However, if we further juxtapose it with the reality, we might find that such ideology had in fact never be put into practice thoroughly and consistently, and there was also a more important “mission” behind the notion. Firstly, for the last point, it should be note that rather than simply providing unbiased informational or educational programs, the objective of BBC was to present the “Empire image” to the audience, as Hajkowski points out, the BBC’s elites were “despaired” at the public’s lack of knowledge of the empire, and ironically, despite the great change of the latter in reality between 1922 and 1953, it looked almost always the same in the BBC’s schedules.[9] Therefore, we can see that the aforementioned notion could actually be modified as “everything (about the Empire) for someone”, and the criticisms regarding BBC’s paternalistic approach to its audiences was actually not wholly ungrounded. Then, we will now move to examine the Governments’ inconsistency with regard to the notion of “public service”. The most striking example of this would be the introduction of ITV by the Television Act of 1954, which was largely based on the suggestions of Selwyn Lloyd, a conservative from the 1949 Beveridge Committee. For the first time, competition was endorsed by the government, as Lloyd believed that it could help to raise BBC’s standard of broadcasting.[10] And if we look at a speech that he made in the parliament in Dec 1953, we might as well be staggered by how much dissent it had shown toward the BBC’s monopolist ideology,

 

“There are four reasons why I think that this monopoly should not continue... Firstly... I think that there has been a tendency towards centralisation and bureaucratic methods... Secondly, I think that a monopoly inevitably leads to complacency and rigidity, and that new techniques will be dominated by the old... I believe that the vast majority of Members in this House would throw up their hands in horror at the idea of a single national newspaper, or a single national theatre corporation deciding what plays should be produced, or a single national publishing company deciding what books should be published.”[11]

 

Obviously, this account was a stark contrast to the tone of the later 1962 Pilkington report, which deemed commercial radios as socially unsuitable for British public and refused to grant licence to commercial radio companies.[12] And also as a result of the latter, the BBC was awarded a third national television channel (i.e. BBC2) while the ITV was “limited to its one channel, under strict control, and forced to mimic the BBC in much of its programming”.[13] Lastly, which is also the most interesting part, was the unthoroughness of the Governmental policy of centralization after the release of Pilkington report, as it increased the power of the Independent Television Authority (ITA), but the detailed and more radical plans for the reorganization of ITV were rejected.[14] Some worth-pondering questions are that why would the Tory support a monopolized system which was apparently at odds with its free enterprise principles, and what had led to the subsequent cross-party collaboration upon issue of pirate broadcasting? And the answer offered by Milland, is that “it was the ambivalence about social change which characterized Conservatism until the Thatcherite victory of the 1980s, and in the puritanical anti-commercialism of the Left”, that had coincidentally made this alliance come to life.[15] Here, “the ambivalence about social change”, is clearly referring to the teenage cultural movement known as the Swinging Sixties, and the word “ambivalence”, can actually be understood as a sort of hesitance toward something new and yet uncertain. In this case, the paternalists side of the Tories did undoubtedly triumph over the Party’s laissez-faire traditions, though not permanently. Yet, the most ironic thing is that after the release of the report, on June 8 1962, Prime Minister Macmillan had actually written the following paragraph in his diary:

 

“Happily for us, the tone and temper of the report is deplorable. Such spleen and bias are shewn in every sentence, that the recommendations (which might be very troublesome) are weakened in force and persuasiveness. There will be a splendid political row over this— for, unlike economics, here is something which everyone can have an opinion — highbrow and low-brow, rich and poor.” [16] 

 

Macmillan was actually glad that the influence of paternalists in the party were weakened by the “deplorable” reasoning of the report as well as the unfavorable reception that would likely follow, so that the Government could reject the radical proposals for the reorganization of ITV far more easier. From the above, it is fair to conclude that the Conservative Government was actually not so resolved in implementing the original ideology of “public broadcasting”, and given the former’s tendency to “temporize things” especially during a decade of both uncertainty and great cultural shift, the notion was just a convenient rhetoric for the Governments to tighten or loosen their policies in response to the various political speculations behind. And this explanation is also applicable to the case of the banning of “pirates” in the subsequent years.

 

Revealing a new “public”: The aftermath of Pilkington and the emergence of “pirates”

 

As mentioned above, the Pilkington report was never wholly embraced by the Conservatives, and predictably, it had caused outrage among the ITV contractors and the press. The most sensational and representative news cover for the report was from The Daily Mirror, on June 28, 1962, titling “TV: PILKINGTON TELLS THE PUBLIC TO GO TO HELL”, as it went,

 

“You can't have the Television programmes which a two-thirds majority of you prefer. You must have a different set-up controlled by the Government. An "Uncle" ITA, responsible for planning and selecting programmes - just like the “Auntie” BBC... The one and only democratic principle applied is - EQUAL MISERY ALL ROUND. The guiding maxim is - IF IT'S POPULAR IT'S WRONG... The Mirror believes that NO Government the British people are ever likely to elect would contemplate the acceptance of the whole report.”[17]

 

Although the news was mainly addressing the ITV instead of radio, it also to an extent reflected how the people of the time reacted to the paternalistic attitude of the report, as the Authority was mocked as “Uncle”, while the BBC was taunted as “Auntie”. And even though the report was able to gain support from dominant press like the Guardian and the Times, it was nonetheless disapproved by a wide range of papers varying from right wings to left wings, like the Daily Mail, the Daily Sketch, the London Evening News, the Mirror, and the Daily Telegraph.[18] Then, if we further look at some actual changes brought by the report, we could see that in 1965 the ITV had noticeably reduced her quiz programmes in spite of their popularity, and in 1968 the two most successful programmes, Double Your Money and Take Your Pick, were even canceled.[19]  As Milland put it, “The popular hunger for entertainment that had driven the medium's growth, and to which ITV had responded, was effectively ignored”.[20] Aside from the direct effect of the report, there were also other factors which had contributed to the later flourishing of the “pirates”, and one of the most crucial factor would be the pop rations during the 50s and 60s, known as the “needle time”, advocated by the Musicians' Union (MU) and Phonographic Performance Limited (PPL) in order to protect their copyright interests. The New copyright rulings in 1956, also caused the BBC to rationalize its Light Programme, and unbelievably, even up til the late 50s, the BBC still had only 28 hours per week of needle time for its entire network.[21] Without a doubt, this situation is inconceivable to many of our minds, as we know the UK would soon enter a decade which was emblematic for its rock n roll music, and it was particularly paradoxical when we contrast it with cultural phenomenons like the Beatlemania in UK or the British Invasion in US during the 60s. Therefore, it is not hard to imagine why when Radio Caroline first came on the airwaves on 29 March, 1964, people soon find its programmes irresistible, especially when comparing to the paternalistic style of the BBC.[22] According to BBC’s statistic, Caroline had captured an audience one-third the size of its Light Programme’s, and at its height, Radio Caroline was estimated to have over eight million listeners.[23][24] Yet, the most remarkable thing is that the Light’s audience had not lessened during this period, and after the Labor Government officially outlawed the “pirates” in 1967, while the BBC had also carried out a series of reform in its programmes which was obviously modeled on the latter, the BBC was even able to swell its audience by 14 percent afterwards.[25] And the only sensible inference to this phenomenon, is that rather than stealing audience from the BBC, the “pirates” had actually “discovered” a new group of audience. In other words, it had expanded the size of “public” and had brought more audience who had been ignored previously by the BBC into floodlight. So here comes the questions of how could those offshore radio operators be construed as “pirates”? And was their existence truly at odds with the British notion of “public service”?

 

A political forging: the “pirates” and the freedom of sea

 

There are two things we should keep in mind before we proceed to discuss the matter. Firstly, is that those offshore radio operators was never “real” pirates no matter in its essence or nature. And secondly, the later intervention of the Government on the “pirates”, was also seemingly at odds with her long held tradition of the “freedom of sea”. For the first point, we might firstly look at the international definition of “piracy” in the 1958 Convention on the High Seas, as it was specified as “violence, detention or any act of depredation... directed... against another ship or aircraft, or against persons or property on board such ship or aircraft”. The idea of “broadcasting” is completely absent in the article, and the Convention also guaranteed that the high seas should be opened to all nations, and no State may validly purport to subject any part of them to its sovereignty.[26] However, two months right after the airing of Radio Caroline, we soon found that the term “pirate” had kind of become a “customary appellation” for the offshore radio operators. As on 29 May, Robin Cooke, a Conservative MP for Bristol West voiced his opinion on the subject,

 

“The main objection to the pirate stations is that they are not obliged to keep to any recognisable standards on behaviour. There is nothing to prevent their pouring out Communist or Fascist propaganda, or perhaps more dangerous to the otherwise sensible British public, urging them to indulge in expensive self-medication with unnecessary potions and pills”  [27]

 

This clearly reflects the politicians’ mindset as well as the typical ideological atmosphere during the Cold War, though he also mentioned his concerns over the possibility of drug advertising on the offshore radios. Apart from politicians, the mainstream media also played an important part in stigmatizing the “pirates”, as Chapman notes, that the ITV Granada’s World in Action was the first television programme to “thematize” the pirate radios. In May 1964, its ship carried out an investigation to Radios Caroline and Atlanta, and intentionally promoted a buccaneer image for the stations, thus the term “pirates” was in fact by and large invented by the media.[28] And three years later in a speech given by Edward Short, the Labour MP and also the Postmaster General succeeded Tony Benn, on 15 February 1967, when the Marine, &c. Broadcasting Offences Act was ordered for Second Reading in the House, elaborated even further on such term,

 

“I use the term "pirate" broadcasting because it conveys vividly what these broadcasters are. They operate outside the law—or so they believe—and they "pirate" wavelengths which have been assigned by Governments to legitimate broadcasting authorities.”[29]

 

And when he was asked if Britain was the first country to be proposing such a Bill, he replied, “...We are the third country to enact legislation, but, of course, we are the chief offender... If hon. Members opposite oppose the Bill tonight, they will do precisely what they did in the case of Rhodesia. They will be opposing world opinion on a matter of this kind.”[30]  The “clumsy” rhetoric as shown above is particularly intriguing, as it should be clear that what the offshore radio operators had “pirated” was certainly not the “wavelengths” but the authority of the Government. As Peter explains, since the British traditional concept of sea space was not just a protection of immediate seas adjacent to the coast but also the protection of the “freedom” over the high seas (which was embodied most conspicuously in the Suez Crisis), so “aligning radio operators to traditional pirates was a way to legitimise the action sought by the British government, without compromising the allegiance to the concept of free seas”.[31] In short, we could see that the forging of the term “pirates” was just a mean used by the Government to stigmatize those offshore radio operators. The double standards and hypocrisy within such rhetoric is evident, and what it implies is in fact a latent fear toward the newly-emerged adolescent subculture in the 60s’ society.

 

“Public service” vs serving the public

 

It would be rare for someone who grew up in the 60s’ Britain to say that they know absolutely nothing about the conflict between the Establishment and the Swinging Sixties culture during his youth. With regard to the former’s attitude toward the latter, Chapman has offered a compact depiction in the beginning of his celebrated work Selling the sixties,

 

“The subculture was meticulously combed for traces of a moral malaise, scorned for its tribal wants and needs, and decried for its antisocial behaviour... Its totems were denigrated, its icons mocked, youth’s postwar existence and identity were solemnly conceded but never celebrated.” [32] 

 

Indeed, the above account did illuminate one important fact, which is that the conflict was not only a political one, but also was about the different experiences as well as the aesthetic and culture that derived from it between the pre-war and post-war generation. And some might even remember the Mott The Hoople’s hit single “All the Young Dudes” in 1972, written by David Bowie, along with its sharp line saying that “Television man is crazy saying we're juvenile delinquent wrecks”. Undoubtedly, the spectacular and unrepeatable cultural phenomenon took place in the 60s has long been misread by the Establishment as a social conundrum that was waiting to be solved. Therefore, taking BBC as an example, even when sometimes its programmes were keen to reconcile its content with the “issue” of teenagers, they would nonetheless present it in a paternalistic attitude, and occasionally even with a kind of “ridiculous aloofness”, as for once a programme had depicted an Etonian presenter to “interview” a little boy, yet the interview was set on a school rugby field on a foggy day, so the presenter was like “bending down from the clouds” when he asked the boy “what he would do when he left school”.[33] Chapman has once commented harshly that the BBC “approached the youth phenomenon anthropologically, as species”, and from the above instance we could tell that even if there were exaggerations, it should not be far from fact.[34] And given that the “pirates” were by and large representing the taste of teenagers of that time, it was not hard to see why the Establishment would impulsively “extend” their hatred and contempt to them, especially when it was well aware that the teenagers were in fact potential audience which the BBC should better think twice before offending, the “pirates” were obviously not applicable to such concern.

 

Then, when we change to look at the “pirates” side, we might be surprised by how “unpiratical” they actually were in both their programming and behavior. It could even be argued that the “pirates” had displayed a certain level of public consciousness in their broadcasting. For example, in Dec 1964, Radio Caroline had actually made a formal request to the BBC for a copy of the Queen’s Christmas Day message, and both her and Radio London had suspended their programmes on the day of Churchill’s funeral.[35] Another common misconception regarding the “pirates” is that they were just “floating juke-boxes” that “played a non-stop diet of pop” to indulge their audience. However, as Chapman’s work has shown, there were in fact great diversity in the pirates’ selection of music, which included jazz, pop, ballad, rhythm and blues, etc.[36] Most importantly, is that the British “pirates” were much more single-minded in entertaining the listener than their counterparts, namely the BBC and also the Radio Luxembourg, as the latter would often fade the songs earlier so as to tease the listeners and to stimulate record sales due to its covert bargains with record companies, while the BBC was restricted by its needle-time, so its disc jockeys would often have a “gift of the gab”, and there were always more talks than musics.[37] Comparing to them, the “pirates” were clearly more generous and considerate to their listeners, as they would usually play each record in full.[38] So at least for the aspect of music, while the BBC was still bearing the notion of “public service”, it was de facto the “pirates” who were serving the public. Then, if we further contrast the situation with the aforementioned ideology of “everything for someone”, we might find that while the notion was used by the BBC to promote the Empire, the “pirates” were also performing it in their own way, just that their endeavor was greatly limited by the resources that were available for them at the time.

 

Conclusion

 

Scholar Andrew Crisell has once described the 60s’ “pirates” as “the most romantic episode in British radio history”.[39] Calling them romantic is probably because of their short-livedness (though Radio Caroline is an exception), but it is also because that they were seen by many people as the “pioneer” that had successfully circumvented the BBC’s control of airing. The word “romantic” is particularly illuminating, as it had not only mirrored how “unromantic” the BBC were, but had also marked a decade that lived a “demand for romance”, while such romance was inseparably linked to beliefs like anti-authoritarianism and self-realization, and was also welcome to the experimentalness of various art forms, which was clearly not the same to the sole indulgence of commercialism in the 80s. Regrettably, viewing from a historical perspective and an aloofness which was not much different from the aforementioned BBC’s presenter, we must still concede that the “pirates” had only played a transitional role in history. And the most ironic outcome is that when the“pirates” was officially outlawed in 1967, we could see the BBC had started to imitate both the style and programmes of the pirates, to which the latter was once being solemnly dismissed and censure by the former in the past. For example, after a month of the passage of the Marine, &c., Broadcasting (Offences) Act, the BBC had created a whole new network Radio One to “played a non-stop diet of pop” in order to appease the public.[40] It had not only mimicked the “pirates”’ style, but had actually recruited many of their former presenters.[41] The more hilarious thing was that the old-fashioned session musicians that had long employed by the BBC was now forced to play a complete different musical style, and sometimes they even had to parrot the idioms of the rock groups in the shows.[42] Therefore, combining the aforementioned fact that the BBC’s audience had risen by 14 percent after 1967, we could say that the “pirates” had actually “introduced” a whole new sector of audience to the BBC, though such result was never intentional nor voluntary, and had set an example for the BBC to follow. Historically speaking, the 60s’ “pirates” had served as a fortuitous intermediary (or bridge) between the BBC and the adolescent audience, while had also help to revise the BBC’s long-standing flaw perception to what the public truly wanted and needed in reality. And brushing aside its highfalutin yet hypocritical rhetoric in justifying its “reform” after 1967, the BBC should indeed be secretly glad that it had earned such a valuable lesson from the “pirates” without paying much of a price in history.

9 Dec, 2020

Footnotes

[1] Milland, Jeffrey, Paternalists, populists and Pilkington : the struggle for the soul of British television, 1958-1963, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing , 2005, p.217.

[2] Chapman R., Selling the sixties: the pirates and pop music radio, Routledge, London, 1992, p.50.

[3] Crisell Andrew, An introductory history of British broadcasting, Routledge, London, 1997, p.18, 28.

[4] Hajkowski Thomas, Rethinking regional broadcasting in Britain, 1922-53. In The BBC and national identity in Britain, 1922-53 (pp.109-134), Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013, p.115.

[5] Ibid. P.109-110, 115.

[6] Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff, A Social History of Broadcasting: Volume I, 1922–1939. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991, p.320.

[7] Hajkowski Thomas, Rethinking regional broadcasting in Britain, 1922-53. In The BBC and national identity in Britain, 1922-53 (pp.109-134), Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013, p.117.

[8] Crisell Andrew, An introductory history of British broadcasting, Routledge, London, 1997, p.29.

[9] Hajkowski Thomas, Rethinking regional broadcasting in Britain, 1922-53. In The BBC and national identity in Britain, 1922-53 (pp.109-134), Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013, p.21.

[10] Matthew (editor), Colin (2004). Dictionary of National Biography. 34. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-198-61411-1., essay on Selwyn Lloyd written by D.R.Thorpe, p.159.

[11] TELEVISION DEVELOPMENT (GOVERNMENT POLICY), Commons Sitting of 15 December 1953, vol 522 cc215-344. From

(https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1953/dec/15/television-development-government-policy)

[12] Pilkington Report on 13 July 1962, p.15. From (http://filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pdfs/small/cab-129-110-c-62-102.pdf)

[13] Milland, Jeffrey, Paternalists, populists and Pilkington : the struggle for the soul of British television, 1958-1963, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing , 2005, p.2.

[14] Ibid. P.1.

[15] Ibid. P.ii.

[16] Quoted from Milland, Jeffrey, Paternalists, populists and Pilkington : the struggle for the soul of British television, 1958-1963, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing , 2005, p.153-154.

[17] The Daily Mirror, June 28, 1962.

[18] Milland, Jeffrey, Paternalists, populists and Pilkington : the struggle for the soul of British television, 1958-1963, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing , 2005, p.151.

[19] Ibid. P.6.

[20] Ibid. P.5.

[21] Chapman R., Selling the sixties: the pirates and pop music radio, Routledge, London, 1992, p.21, 23.

[22] Kimberley Peters, Sinking the radio ‘pirates’: exploring British strategies of governance in the North Sea, 1964–1991, Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Area (London 1969), 2011-09-01, Vol.43 (3), p.282.

[23] Crisell Andrew, An introductory history of British broadcasting, Routledge, London, 1997, p.143.

[24] Jones, Steve, Making Waves: Pirate Radio and Popular Music, p.10. From (https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED295272.pdf)

[25] Crisell Andrew, An introductory history of British broadcasting, Routledge, London, 1997, p.143-144.

[26] Article 2 and 15. Convention on the High Seas, 1958. From (https://www.gc.noaa.gov/documents/8_1_1958_high_seas.pdf)

[27] Television Mail, 29 May 1964. Quoted from Chapman p.33.

[28] Chapman R., Selling the sixties: the pirates and pop music radio, Routledge, London, 1992, p.40.

[29] Edward Short’s speech, House of Commons Debate, 15 February 1967, vol. 741, cc. 627. From (https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1967/feb/15/marine-c-broadcasting-offences-bill#column_627)

[30] Ibid.

[31] Kimberley Peters, Sinking the radio ‘pirates’: exploring British strategies of governance in the North Sea, 1964–1991, Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Area (London 1969), 2011-09-01, Vol.43 (3), p.283.

[32] Chapman R., Selling the sixties: the pirates and pop music radio, Routledge, London, 1992, p.2.

[33] Ibid. P.56.

[34] Ibid. P.2.

[35] Ibid. P.50.

[36] Ibid. P.66.

[37] Crisell Andrew, An introductory history of British broadcasting, Routledge, London, 1997, p.143-144.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Ibid. P.150.

[40] Milland, Jeffrey, Paternalists, populists and Pilkington : the struggle for the soul of British television, 1958-1963, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing , 2005, p.217.

[41] Crisell Andrew, An introductory history of British broadcasting, Routledge, London, 1997, p.144.

[42] Ibid.

Bibliography

 

Chapman Robert, Selling the sixties: the pirates and pop music radio, Routledge, London, 1992.

 

Committees of Enquiry. From (https://web.archive.org/web/20061012060952/http://www.bbc.co.uk/heritage/more/pdfs/committees_of_enquiry.pdf)

 

Convention on the High Seas, 1958. From (https://www.gc.noaa.gov/documents/8_1_1958_high_seas.pdf)

 

Crisell Andrew, An introductory history of British broadcasting, Routledge, London, 1997.

 

Dennis Lloyd, Some Comments on the British Television Act, 1954, 23 Law and Contemporary Problems 165-174 (Winter 1958). From (https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/208620585.pdf)

 

Edward Short’s speech, House of Commons Debate, 15 February 1967, vol. 741, cc. 627. From (https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1967/feb/15/marine-c-broadcasting-offences-bill#column_627)

 

Hajkowski Thomas, Rethinking regional broadcasting in Britain, 1922-53. In The BBC and national identity in Britain, 1922-53 (pp.109-134), Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013.

 

Jones, Steve, Making Waves: Pirate Radio and Popular Music., From (https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED295272.pdf)

 

Kimberley Peters, Sinking the radio ‘pirates’: exploring British strategies of governance in the North Sea, 1964–1991, Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Area (London 1969), 2011-09-01, Vol.43 (3), p.281-287.

 

Marine, &c., Broadcasting (Offences) Act 1967. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (71st, Portland, OR, July 2-5, 1988). From (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1967/41/enacted)

 

Matthew (editor), Colin (2004). Dictionary of National Biography. 34. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-198-61411-1., essay on Selwyn Lloyd written by D.R.Thorpe.

 

Milland, Jeffrey, Paternalists, populists and Pilkington : the struggle for the soul of British television, 1958-1963, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing , 2005.

 

Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff, A Social History of Broadcasting: Volume I, 1922–1939. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.

 

Pilkington Report on 13 July 1962. From (http://filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pdfs/small/cab-129-110-c-62-102.pdf)

 

TELEVISION DEVELOPMENT (GOVERNMENT POLICY), Commons Sitting of 15 December 1953, vol 522 cc215-344. From

(https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1953/dec/15/television-development-government-policy)