Throughout the Second World War a number of illegal transmitters operated
in Dublin rebroadcasting the speeches of William Joyce better known as Lord Haw
Haw. Joyce, who had been born in the United States but raised in Ireland,
became a committed fascist following his hasty departure from Ireland where he
had assisted the Black and Tans in their fight during the Irish War of
Independence. He ended up in Germany
where he broadcast Nazi propaganda in English on transmitters seized from Radio
Luxembourg.
Beginning his broadcasts with ‘Germany Calling Germany Calling’ he continued
broadcasting right up until the Allies arrived in Berlin where he was arrested. He was taken
to Britain
and tried for treason. He was convicted and hanged at Wandsworth Prison on
January 3rd 1946. But other pirates, based in Ireland, were far less
political in nature.
‘Where is Waterford’s
‘pirate’ broadcasting station?’ may have been a newspaper headline from the
heyday of pirate radio in the eighties but it comes from the Irish Independent
in 1942. Reports of the pirate broadcasts were initially made in early March to
the Gardai in Waterford who passed the information onto the Post Office’s Chief
Telegraph Censor
who in turn informed Irish Military Intelligence known as G2.
G2 were the protectors of the nation’s security during the Emergency. The man
behind this brazen operation was twenty-four years old Francis Colbert.
Waterford had already seen a number of pirate radio broadcasts in the
run up to the outbreak of the war. The Cork Examiner reported on July 9th
1934 under the headline ‘Mystery Broadcasts’,
‘Waterford
has a mystery radio station. It was discovered to be on the ‘air; during the week
broadcasting programmes of up-to-date gramophone records. No intimation was
given, however, regarding its whereabouts.’
The station had gone on air at 1pm before Radio Eireann’s broadcasts had
begun and was broadcasting on 280m medium wave. The frequency was easy to find
for many listeners as it was between Radio Eireann’s 242m and the 342m of the
BBC. The station closed at 2pm when Radio Eireann came on air but then returned
at 11.30pm after the national broadcaster closed, staying on air until 2am when
all the other broadcasters in the British Isles were closed. The night-time
broadcasts significantly improved both the reach of the station and its listenership.
For some weeks after, the station was occasionally heard announcing that they
were testing only. Then there was silence, but in April the following year, 1935,
the Irish Independent reported under the headline ‘New Mystery Radio Broadcast
from Waterford’, the paper reported that the station had gone on air at 11.15pm
on a Tuesday night once again after Radio Eireann had closed down. The
transmitter was again broadcasting on 280m medium wave. In what was described
as an ‘enjoyable broadcast’ a selection of orchestral and modern gramophone records
were played before the station operator made a statement in a clear voice. The
pirate transmitter was obviously well constructed as the modulation made for
clear reception by the locals tuned in, in Waterford.
‘My dear listeners I will interrupt this programme to make an
announcement. The majority of listeners have probably heard of the Limerick
amateur station but for the benefit of those who have not I would like to
explain that an amateur in Limerick has broadcast programmes which have been
both injurious and objectionable.’
He added,
‘I would like listeners to understand that I disapprove wholeheartedly
and condemn abuses by this amateur of the powers his transmission station gives
him’.
The spat over the airwaves
reached the newspapers the following day when the Irish Press on their front
page headlined ‘Another Mystery Station, Radio Rivals’. For many, the great
pirate radio rivalries in Ireland were ERI and South Coast in Cork, Nova and
Sunshine in Dublin in the 1980’s or the Radio Dublin and Alternative Radio
Dublin’s battles from the seventies but a pirate radio rivalry had erupted on
the airwaves in the 1930’s between stations in Limerick and Waterford.
The 1926
Wireless Telegraphy Act was introduced in November 1926, nine months after the
official launch of 2RN. The Act would regulate the airwaves, write the rules on
license fees and deem what should and should not be broadcast. The Act was
supposed to be a deterrent to illegal broadcasting but that did not stop
illegal stations broadcasting taking to the airwaves. One man in Limerick would
break all the rules. Jim O’Carroll attended the Technical Institute on
O’Connell Avenue in the city and developed a keen interest in electronics. As a
result, while experimenting, he built a crystal receiving set that allowed him
to listen to 2RN, the BBC and with improvements he began to listen to Short
Wave broadcasts from America and Australia.
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In early 1935, O’Carroll added an oscillator to his receiving set and
turned it into a crude transmitter that was powerful enough to be heard all
over the city. After testing its limitations, O’Carroll had to find a home for
his new station, as living with his sister was not an ideal location for
secrecy. He eventually found a location on the third floor at the home of his
friend Charlie O’Connor at 84 Henry Street. The station began broadcasting in
February 1935 on 360m, very close to the powerful transmitter in Berlin,
Germany broadcasting on its allotted frequency of 356.7m, which meant that both
signals interfered with each other and often the Limerick station had to wait
until the Berlin transmitter was turned off to get a good signal out across
Limerick City. By April, reports of a Limerick ‘Mystery Station’ was reaching
the national newspaper headlines.
The station was now named The City Broadcasting Station (CBS) as
O’Carroll had been listening to CBS broadcasts from across the Atlantic and
liked the sound of the name. He went on the air playing whatever gramophone
records he could lay his hands on. On the air most nights from 7.30 – 10.30pm,
the station continued with Billy Dynamite (O’Carroll) and Al Dubbin (O’Connor)
at the controls broadcasting a mixture of speech, gramophone records, and
relayed programmes from American radio, including the news and even swimming
lessons on the radio.
The Limerick Leader reported on April 6th,
‘The
operation of a mysterious broadcasting station in Limerick for some past time
had the citizens and officials agog. Listeners-in are occasionally startled
when they hear an unofficial announcer make reference to local matters and some
well-known personalities.’
The Liberator newspaper in Tralee on the same day reported,
‘The annoyance caused
by this is distinctly perturbing to owners of sets.’
The appearance of CBS on the airwaves of Limerick was greeted by a
variety of different headlines. The Irish Examiner (6/4/1935) headlined their
article ‘Wireless Nuisance’, The Kerryman (13/4/1935) spoke of a ‘Secret Radio
Station’ while the Irish Independent described them as the ‘Mystery Station’.
The station continued from February to October with the only change being its
location, when the station moved to the home of Michael Madden at 25 Wolfe Tone
Street who had been providing the batteries for the station’s transmitter. The
station went from strength to strength and became the first station in Ireland
to carry a paid commercial rather than the sponsored programming aired on the
national station, when the Wolfe Tone Dairy began to advertise its products.
The owner of the dairy was John Toomey, who ran a successful
grocer/dairy/vegetable shop and was the proud owner of an ice cream machine,
selling homemade ice cream cones. Summer was coming and ice creams would be a
popular seller. O’Carroll said after,
‘As I
began to get a little bolder, I discreetly canvassed for commercials. My first
contact was the owner of the Wolfe Tone Dairy, Mr. Toomey. He had a fine
grocer's shop but, in addition, he made delicious ice cream on the premises. I
told Mr. Twomey that I knew a man who could contact the elusive Pirate and
arrange to have his delicious ice cream mentioned on the air. He was to make no
payment until he heard the broadcast. He offered the incredible sum of £10 if I
arranged this transaction. Ten pounds was about a month's wages at the time.
For a schoolboy one could almost retire! Needless to remark, as far as I know,
that was the first radio commercial in Ireland.’[3]
There were queues down the street for the ice cream encouraging John
Toomey to invest in a second machine to keep up with the demand.
‘An
enduring sight in my mind's eye is a very long line of people reaching in the
direction of what was then Gleeson's public house waiting to purchase cones and
wafers from a delighted Mr. Toomey[4]’
said O’Carroll
The station began carrying
ads for Clohesy’s Pub on Charlotte Quay, one of the most popular pubs in
Limerick at the time. O’Carroll also added in an interview with the Limerick
Leader in 1976, that
‘a committee running a sports outing in Castleconnell asked
us to advertise their sports meeting, we had a ‘What’s On Guide’ in Limerick
cinemas’.
The advertising revenue was beginning to pay
off for the radio entrepreneurs. The station would carry local news bulletins
and because they broadcast late at night, they would collect the following
morning’s national newspapers arriving in Limerick railway station at nine
o’clock and broadcast the headlines for their listeners much to the displeasure
of the Irish dailys, and this was replected in their coverage of the station.
In Limerick on October 31st, Halloween, while Michael Madden was on the
air, the station had been tracked down and was raided by the police and an
engineer from the Post Office Walter Dain. Madden was arrested and the
equipment confiscated. O’Carroll partly blamed the raid on Madden himself, who
had been drinking in local pubs boasting the fact that he was ‘the radio
pirate’ and that information was relayed to the Gardai in Limerick. O’Carroll
was in Dublin on the day of the raid visiting his mother and the day after the
Limerick raid his mother’s house in Milltown was ‘ransacked’ according to
O’Carroll as Gardai searched for links to a suspected IRA transmitter that was
also broadcasting in Limerick.
Even before the court case following the 1935 raid had reached the
courts, a radio station was reported on the Limerick airwaves in early February
1936. The station was advertising a local dance and encouraged listeners to
support the event. Following a court case on February 28th 1936 Madden was
convicted and fined £1 and 2 guineas costs. During the case Garda Lenihan said
that,
‘during
the illegal broadcasts names were mentioned and scandalous remarks used’.
It would be the first conviction under the 1926 Wireless Telegraphy Act.
In June 1936 another station was reported by the Irish Independent as
being on the air, calling itself ‘The Curraghrock Station’. The newspaper
reported two females were heard on air followed by a gramophone record
programme. By July 1936, the tone of the station was causing problems for the
authorities in the Limerick area and in Government circles in Dublin. The issue
for the authorities this time was more urgent as the broadcaster was now
broadcasting IRA propaganda. The announcer was reported as telling listeners that
the station was set up ‘to disseminate Irish republican Army propaganda’. This time the station used a frequency used
by the Munich station and again like the station the previous year would have a
better range once the Munich transmitter fell silent. The station was probably
located in the Barrack Road area hence the confusion in the name as there is no
‘Curraghrock’ in Limerick.
This station was seized on September 4th 1936, when a house
on Newnham Street was raided by Post Office Engineer William Carroll and Garda
Lenihan. Despite this raid, another Limerick pirate transmitter was back on the
air by September 16th, on the 360m frequency ‘treating listeners to
a programme of gramophone records’ but while there were announcements, there
was nothing of a political nature.
At the subsequent court case on December 4th, Edward Quin of
Clancy Strand was prosecuted for maintaining illegal transmitting apparatus
contrary of the 1926 Wireless Telegraphy Act. The State prosecutor stated that
the items seized were,
‘one
medium wave oscillator, one low frequency amplifier, one carbon type
microphone, and one short wave oscillator’
Garda Lenihan stated in evidence that Quin
tried to pocket a value from the transmitter which he later claimed he took
because he had it sold and didn’t want to lose it. Lenihan disclosed that he
had spoken to Quin on a number of previous occasions about the need to stop
illegal broadcasting. All the wireless articles found in the house were
produced to the Court and the GPO engineer Thomas Carroll then described what
had to be done to test the-apparatus. The test broadcast worked ‘quite
satisfactorily’. According to a GPO Inspector he had received a test message
from the transmitter and the ‘message was quite distinct’. His finding was
corroborated by another engineer Mr. T. White. The prosecution was determined
to achieve a conviction and were willing to call several experts to ensure the
result. They wanted to send out a message to propagandists who wished to use
the radio waves to propagate their messages that they would close them and that
the only broadcaster allowed to broadcast in the Free State was Radio Eireann.
While Madden and O’Carroll in Limerick were pirate broadcasting for
entertainment purposes, a more sinister type of broadcasts had appeared on the
airwaves in Dublin. On Friday October 25th 1935 at 2.30pm listeners
on medium wave reported hearing a ‘mystery transmitter’ announcing that it was
‘Radio Phoblacht na
hEireann, The IRA broadcasting studio.’
The station’s announcer gave a lengthy statement on the Irish
Sweepstakes and announced a list of winners. The station then played some gramophone
records including those of the famous Irish born tenor Count John
McCormack. The broadcast lasted about
forty minutes. But the illegal broadcasting of entertainment programmes or
occasional broadcasts from subversive organisations would become the least of
DeValera’s problems as the nation faced into neutrality during the Second World
War.
Further broadcasts from the
Waterford station were noted on July 28th at 2pm, when a thirty
-minute broadcast of music was interspersed with announcements in Irish that
there would be further broadcasts to follow. But the airwaves of Waterford fell
silent until September 1938 when the Irish Independent reported ‘Waterford
Hears Radio Pirate’. They reported,
‘For several nights past, listeners who had sets tuned to a wavelength
of 400metres were surprised to hear a man announcing that he played a number of
gramophone records for an unseen audience. The announcer made no secret of the
fact that he intends to continue broadcasting between 7.15pm and 7.45 pm during
the week provided conditions were favourable.’
The Cork Examiner reported
that the announcer had ‘a refined and well educated voice’. After its first
broadcast on Tuesday September 27th, the Waterford pirate made three
further broadcasts before disappearing once again from the airwaves.
To cement Ireland’s neutrality during the Second World War, the
Government implemented the Emergency Powers Act 1939 to maintain control and to
stifle the activities of the IRA. As part of the Act, amateur wireless
operators and experimenters were required to hand in their equipment to the
military authorities for the duration of the Emergency. Most of them did but
some stayed below the radar.
To assist with the defence of the nation against which ever army decided
to invade, the Government augmented the Army strength with a volunteer army
known as The Local Defence Force (LDF). In January 1942 the commander of the
L.D.F. in Waterford set up a communications section and he informed the
Divisional Commanding Officer Batt O’Mahony to either procure a radio
transmitter or to have one built.
The L.D.F. wanted the transmitter in order to contact Army HQ at the
Curragh over one hundred miles away but the Government and the Army were
hesitant about issuing transmitter licenses to the L.D.F. for fear they fell
into the wrong hands especially subversives. There was a certain amount of
paranoia in the country about the IRA and that organisations association with
Nazi Germany. Francis Colbert was a radio repairman and a member of the L.D.F.
and he accepted the task of building a transmitter but was told not to
broadcast as no license had yet been granted. Colbert completed the build but
instead of testing the transmitter as he claimed he was doing after his arrest
on the Army frequency of 120m he began broadcasting on 230m medium wave, a
commercial frequency. The transmitter was never going achieve its objective to
make contact with The Curragh as its power effectively limited its radius to
six miles.
The first broadcast of ‘The Irish Broadcasting Station’[5] was
at 7pm on March 1st 1942. Colbert identified the station and played
a selection of gramophone records for the listener’s pleasure. There were
further broadcasts on March 5th, 8th, 9th 10th,
11th, 12th and 15th but his station’s location
had been discovered. The station had been heard on various frequencies
including 230m, 213m, 238m and 222m medium wave.
Post Office engineer Kevin McNeill
and Garda Michael Shaughnessey arrived at the home of Colbert at 2 Mendicity Lane, Waterford
on April 21st 1942 following a tip off. The lane connected
Railway Square with Johnstown. Colbert let the men in and
on the second floor in a back room they discovered the pirate radio station.
There was a large selection of gramophone records on the floor including the
twenty-two identified by listeners and reported to the authorities.
Mendicity Lane to the Left of the photograph courtesy of the Waterford Historical Society
The raiding party seized the following
1 ‘Radiothon’ valve U 250
1 ‘Marconi’ valve U 10
1 ‘Philco’ valve 3E 42
1 ‘Magestic’ valve G 80
(in poor condition)
1 ‘Radiothon’ G Q 7
1 Variable condenser
1 Inductance
1 Rewound mains
transformer
1 Valve holder
2 Plug in tuning coils
1 Morse Key
1 Power Pack
1 Part receiving set
1 2 ½ m send/receiving set
1 Valve Arcturus
A series of correspondence between the L.D.F., Gardai and the Military
seemed to reduce the pressure on the need to have Colbert charged. He had been
asked by the L.D.F. to build a transmitter and he claimed the broadcasts were
only tests to make sure the transmitter was working and that the cost of the
build came from his own pocket.
The urgency to close the station was dictated by two key factors. Firstly,
the authorities were afraid that the Waterford
station was another propaganda vehicle for the IRA similar to a station that
had operated and had been raided in Dublin
in 1939. Secondly the military were conscious of the fact that German bombers
made use of radio transmitters to locate targets and while Ireland was neutral, the Waterford signal could have been used to
direct attacks against British targets.
The matter was quietly dropped by the authorities although the case led
to a more rigorous enforcement of the Emergency Powers Act with regards to
radio transmitters rather than the lax attitude with regard to L.D.F. companies
operating ‘illegal’ transmitter sets. The L.D.F. were eventually granted
limited licenses to broadcasting on the Irish Army frequencies of 168m – 176m
with a limited power output of thirty watts.
The Local Defense Force parading in County Waterford
Pirate radio in the 1970’s and 1980’s would pave the way for the legal
independent commercial broadcasters of today.
Sources
The Military Archives Rathmines
An Cosantoir Magazine
The Irish Newspaper Archives
