Both Radio Caroline and
Radio Atlanta slipped their moorings at Greenore Port in County Louth in March
1964 and headed towards the North Sea to begin broadcasting illegally to the
East coast of Britain. It was a direct challenge to both the broadcasting
status quo and the Government. The newspapers were full of exciting tales of
pirate radio as the youth of the early 1960’s rebelled against the stereotyping
of their generation, expressing a newfound freedom and embracing pop music.
In September 1965 it was
neither Caroline, Atlanta or Veronica who were dominating the newspaper columns
in Ireland but a new station, Radio Telstar. Just miles away from
Greenore was the County Down town of Newry and it was here, not Dublin, Derry
or Belfast where the authorities were to be challenged by a pop music pirate
radio station. Four students from the Abbey Grammar School in the town decided
to put their ingenuity and enthusiasm to good use and Radio Telstar,
broadcasting on 180m medium wave, was born. The name came from the satellite
that just a couple of years earlier had facilitated the first transatlantic live
television broadcast. The station’s theme tune was the instrumental 1962 Tornados
chart hit, ‘Telstar’ written by Joe Meek.
The 10 watt[1]
transmitter was built from Army surplus material by sixteen year old Dermot McArdle[2],
whose family owned a chemist shop in the town and the station studio would be
built in the loft of the family home[3].
With a 100 ft aerial attached to a tree in the back garden and for the meagre
cost of £2 10s they were ready to entertain the listeners over a radius of five
to six miles. When interviewed by the Sunday News, McArdle said
‘we’re
not in it for the money, just for the kicks’.
His fellow students and pirates were Tommy Hollywood from Coleman’s Park in the town and Ciaran McAteer of Kilmorey Street, both sixteen and fifteen year old Blaise Cronin. They began broadcasting on Sunday September 5th 1965 and would come on air each night for the next week between 6.30pm and 7.30pm, off course once the homework was done.
They quickly built up a
reputation with the youth of Newry, accepting requests in the schoolyard. On
air they were known as DJ’s Arnold, Tony, Ricky and Napoleon. Local resident Olwen
McLeod recalled that the town,
‘was
buzzing when the boys were broadcasting’
From the requests they
received they were able to compile their own top ten chart with the Rollings
Stones ‘Satisfaction’ coming out tops. Joe Carlin of Carlin Records, who
supplied the station with singles to play, said,
‘It is fantastic the number of people listening to the broadcasts’
The newspapers were covering the broadcasts but disparagingly as they began their article, despite a photograph on their front page, defying their description that,
‘four
long haired schoolboys’
were behind the pirate
station. After almost a week of broadcasting, it was not difficult for the GPO
and the RUC to isolate where Radio Telstar was broadcasting from and a phone to
a parent forced the Fab Four to announce their final broadcast on Sunday
September 12th but that they would extend their hours to cater for
the growing audience. On that final day, the transmitter sparked into life
initially from 10am – 12.30 and then from 2pm to 4 pm. Their final tracks were
according to Blaise Cronin[4],
Barry Maguire’s 1965 hit ‘Eve of Destruction’, which had been
banned by British radio, and finally a dig at the authorities with The Dave
Clark Five’s ‘Catch me if you Can’. The end of Radio Telstar was
described by Blaise as follows,
‘My father received a
call from someone suggesting we desist as we were breaking the law, as did the
headmaster of the school. So, the fun and games ended’.
Unfortunately, Tommy
Hollywood has passed on but one of their number the aforementioned Blaise
Cronin has gone onto a stellar career in education becoming a Professor
Emeritus at the Indiana University in Bloomington. He became an information scientist
and bibliometrician and at Indiana University, he was appointed Dean of
the School of Library and Information Science for seventeen years. From
1985-1991 he held the Chair of Information Science and was Head of the
Department of Information Science at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow,
U.K.
According to his Indiana University
website,
‘Professor Cronin taught, conducted research or consulted in more than 30 countries: clients have included the World Bank, NATO, Asian Development Bank, UNESCO, U.S. Department of Justice, Brazilian Ministry of Science & Technology, European Commission, British Council, Her Majesty's Treasury, Hewlett-Packard Ltd., Commonwealth Agricultural Bureau, Chemical Abstracts Service, and Association for Information Management.’
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Radio Telstar was a short lived pirate broadcaster
but it is still fondly remembered by those who excitedly tuned in. In the 1970’s
another station Radio Free Newry appeared on the airwaves and we will
cover their story soon.
Sources:
Professor Blaise Cronin Indiana University
John Savage, Newry
Old Videos and Pictures of Newry Facebook Group
British Newspaper Archives
The Belfast Telegraph
The Sunday News
The Irish News
Irish Newspaper Archives
US Library of Congress Archives
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