32. THE CAROLINES HIJACKED AND FEAR OF REVOLUTION

It was a cold and fairly somber Sunday when I got out of bed on March 3^rd 1968. As always the first thing I did was switch on the radio. But all remained silent. Caroline was not there! It was only when I got downstairs and tried Caroline North on the big Saba receiver and found that her frequency too remained completely quiet, that a feeling of forboding set in. The next day my fearful apprehension was confirmed by the newspapers. In the early hours of Sunday both the Caroline and the Mi Amigo had been boarded by Dutch seamen in the pay of the suppliers Wijsmuller and towed to the Netherlands because of outstanding debts.

As a matter of principle I did not turn to Radio 1 for my music fix. In the months to come it was Radio Veronica that brought some solace, and sometimes also Radio Kuwait on shortwave. Few people remember this, but for a time Kuwait, with a stable and strong signal, was one of the best pop stations around. Truth be told, I had less time for music in those days, because my exams were drawing near...

In the wider world too it was a troublesome period. It began in May 1968 with a student revolt in Paris which turned into a general strike involving millions of workers and the worst rioting for decades. President Charles de Gaulle resorted to brutal police force to counter this attempt at revolution which immobilised most of France.

Subsequently also students in Belgium, especially in university cities like Ghent and Louvain, took to the streets. Suddenly that brought two plain clothes members of the secret police to my house. I was upstairs studying and unaware of the fact that these men threatened my mother not to let me join the protests, or “worse would follow”. The then Belgian prime minister Gaston Eyskens had just formed a coalition government with the help of the Christian Democrats (CVP) and the Socialists (BSP), two parties that had lost seats during the elections in March '68. Eyskens feared that if the protests continued they would bring down the government and revolution would ensue... With hindsight, it wàs the year that the Beatles brought out their hit “Revolution”, not that the Belgian prime minister would have been aware of that.

In the Netherlands all remained calm during the disruptive May days of 1968. It has been said that this was partly due to the existence of Radio Veronica. The station went some way in making the country a happier place and functioned as a valve to diffuse any pent up tension among students and workers alike.   

16. LORD OF THE AIRWAVES

Even in Belgium hardly a day went by or newspapers were reporting on the rapidly expanding British offshore scene. On my 17th birthday the Flemish newspaper ‘Het Volk’ announced that Screaming Lord Sutch was all set to start broadcasting from the fishing trawler Cornucopia in the Thames Estuary. The next day, Saturday May 27th 1964, I managed to pick up Radio Sutch, which was calling itself ‘Britain’s first teenage radio station’. The new pirate was only on the air for a couple of hours in a row. Also, the station started very late in the morning. Not knowing any better at the time I thought that the dj’s were plain lazy and overslept or maybe had wild all night parties and were subsequently suffering from a collective hangover. This proved not to be the reason for the late start however. Later I learnt that the transmitter was battery operated, hence the rather flexible broadcasting times. 

The signal, on an announced 197m (next to Caroline), was fairly weak. Especially in early evening the green tuning eye on the Saba radio at home started winking erratically as interference from other stations moved in. It also soon proved that the crew of motley minions around David Sutch were in fact broadcasting from one of the derelict towers of Shivering Sands Fort off Whitstable in Kent. As a result it was the first offshore buccaneer to take up residence on one of the wartime anti-aircraft sea forts off the British coast. They had been designed by Irish-born Robert Maunsell and the last one was abandoned by the Navy in 1958. 

In the early 60’s Screaming Lord Sutch was known for his horror-themed stage show, dressing as Jack the Ripper. From the start Sutch was of course plugging his own records on the station. In fact I remember being quite taken by ‘Dracula’s Daughter’ and ‘The Monster Man’.  When I listen to the songs now, I can only conclude that there must have been something wrong with me at the time. There probably still is.

In the 60’s David (Screaming Lord) Sutch also started to dabble in politics of sorts. In the General Election on October 15th 1964 he stood in Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s Lancashire constituency. He managed to amass 518 votes.  Years later (in 1977) I briefly met Lord Sutch when he appeared with his group the Savages at ‘Flashback ’67’, the convention held at London Heathrow commemorating 10 years of Marine Broadcasting Offences Act.   

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02. TRAWLING THE FISHERY BAND

About a year later entertainment did come to the house, but it was not intended as such. My greatgrandfather, Leopold Vantorre (Pol Mussche), had decided to install a ship-to-shore transmitter on the remaining fishing vessel he owned (Zeebrugge 34). This meant that if we wanted to receive updates from my father during his fishing trips we needed a wireless set. It was to be my mother’s wireless set, of course. With the money for a first instalment payment in her purse we set off to Bruges. In those days that was the nearest place where radio’s could be bought.

In Degraeve’s wireless shop there was only a limited choice. The owner suggested a state of the art German Saba receiver. It would be delivered later in the week, since first the innovative FM-module had to be ripped out and replaced by the Fishery Band. That was standard procedure for all the families of fishermen who went to buy a set at the shop. To sacrifice the so-called UKW (Ultra Kurtz Welle) was no great loss. At the time there were no FM-broadcasts in Belgium yet.

Installing the new set at home also meant spanning a wire antenna between insulators high above the yard to enable reception of the fairly weak transmissions emanating from the fishing trawlers. Upon my mother’s insistence the antenna wire was also fed through quite a number of evenly spaced wine corks. This was not to flaunt the illusion of wealth, since we never drank wine in those days, but to prevent any near-sighted pigeons in the neighbourhood meeting an untimely death by flying into this unfamiliar obstacle. Also, from day one it was made clear to me that the receiver was only to be used to listen to the news from Brussels (NIR) on Medium Wave and to the calls on the Fishery Band. In addition I was not -under any circumstance- to interfere with the set, since I was liable to break it. For the same reason, I also had to keep my distance, lest I accidentally brush against it.

These rigid rules and regulations soon changed however. Switching on the set to tune in to national radio was easy, but fine tuning to 126m or 133m in the Marine Band soon proved a bridge too far for my mother. So whenever I was not at school I got happily lumbered with the task. Three times a day I made sure that we could hear my father’s messages. Amid the cacophony of calls I usually recognized my father’s signature whistle before my mother did. As soon as I made out the first few notes of “Over the rainbow” I turned up the volume to hear the message. Richard Briers later whistled the same tune in the “Good Life”, just like my father did all those years ago... But in spite of my obvious monitoring talents I was still only allowed to touch the UKW-button for the Fishery Band. The rest remained temptingly out of bounds.

But I soon discovered that at the far end of this band some music could be heard. That was the area where the Marine Band spilled over into the lower end of the Medium Wave. And late at night it got even better with mysterious stations fading in below the Maritime Band as well. At the time I did not have an inkling that in equatorial parts of the world this Tropical Band was used by local broadcasters as a substitute Medium Wave. The ordinary Medium Wave being too prone to interference by electrical storms. In a nutshell, that is how I became lord and master of the mock-ivory UKW-button on my mother’s radio. Unbeknown to her the conquest of the rest of the wireless set was now on my to-do list.

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