All text in bold was written by Ian Cowper Ross and it has been reproduced verbatim, as it was originally written and then published by Liberty Ross, Ian's daughter and the editor of this book. Because Ian Cowper Ross does not adhere to timelines, details of his life and the events that he comes into contact with will be gradually listed on the ONEKEYFREE pages.
I went to a nightclub called The Crazy E on Jermyn Street, where I met Chris Moore - he was the DJ there.
His full name is Stephen Christopher Moore and his mother whose maiden name is Moore, gave her son his surname after her military husband died before her Chris was born in California. His mother, age 28 brought Stephen Christopher age 8 to England on board the Cunard White Star liner Queen Elizabeth. They arrived at Southampton on May 19, 1948, after departing from the Port of New York.
He introduced me to both Bunty (Ross's future wife) and Ronan (O'Rahilly, Radio Caroline co-founder).
Ronan managed a band called Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames. And he tried to get a record deal for them along with a lot of other people trying to get record deals for a lot of other bands - and nobody could get a record deal.
He figured that you couldn't get exposure on the radio, so the answer was to make your own radio station and then take it from there. Start with a radio station, and start plugging people. And that's what we did. That was his whole idea, and it was entirely to do with Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames. That's why it began.
The person Ian Cowper Ross is referring to is Stephen Christopher Moore, who was known as Chris Moore. Ian Ross always refers to himself as the co-founder of Radio Caroline because, according to the Ian Ross version of this story, it was the father of Ian Ross who provided the money that made it possible. This explanation is dependent upon the fictitious tale invented by Ian Cowper Ross as told in his novel 'Rocking the Boat'. In that novel, the person who has links to the money is a person named Paul Shaw, and the person who gave him the money was his 'Daddy' who the novel calls 'Jim'. Neither the names of Ian Cowper Ross, Stephen Christopher Moore or Ronan O'Rahilly appear in the actual storyline of the novel, and neither does the name of the ship or radio station called 'Caroline'.
The claim that Ronan O'Rahilly managed Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames is also fictitious. Not only is that story ridiculous, but Georgie Fame already had a record contract with the EMI label, and EMI issued an LP featuring Georgie Fame in 1963, months before the ship station called 'Radio Caroline' came on the air in March of 1964.
In 1963 when this story by Ian Cowper Ross begins, there were already many record companies looking for new acts to record and 'Beatlemania' was well underway.
After falsely claiming that he was a co-founder of Radio Caroline, Ian Cowper Ross explained that Radio Caroline was located at sea, and then he explained where it was located.
Well, it was a ship. The station was the idea: you make a radio station, on a ship big enough to withstand the North Sea, which is a rough kind of a sea. And it needs to be quite a long way out, outside British territorial waters. You have everything on board. You have a transmitter. You have a 200-foot mast. The whole thing was highly experimental.
My dad went for it - he was prepared to put his money and his friends' money into this insane venture because he simply loved Ronan. He was probably the son he never had! Also my dad knew that at last there was something it looked like I wanted to do. He'd been trying to persuade me to get a job for a long time.
The only source for the claim that the father of Ian Cowper Ross is the novel written about a fictitious person named Paul Shaw who had a, in the novel, a father which Ian Cowper Ross either referred to as "daddy", or "Jim", who by extension of the surname assigned to Paul Shaw, his name would be Jim Shaw.
Ian Cowper Ross not only hinted at the truth in his last line, but a court of law had fined him for driving a Jensen car headlong into the path of an oncoming bus. This act of reckless driving at age 17, had been proceeded by an act of driving a motorbike into a shop window when he was 16, and there were more motoring offences to follow. But it was the Jensen car crash that first landed him in hospital where he lost a foot, but then landed him in a court at Derby where his licence was suspended and he was given a fine to pay.
His father was the director of a Scottish dry-cleaning company which began franchising its business plan, and Ian's father was its sales director. The last thing on Earth that Ian's father wanted to do was pay his son's court fine. Instead, he told Ian to get a job and his father found him a junior position at Stevens Press Ltd on Fetter Lane in London. As for Ronan O'Rahilly who worked for Peter Rachman in the criminal environment of the Kray Twins, he was not the sort of person that Ian's father ever wanted to be associated with.
But that didn't stop Ian Cowper Ross from inventing a story in 1990, that he was a co-founder of Radio Caroline back in 1964. Ian told his daughter Liberty's second husband who financed the 2021 'Flipper' book - named after the artificial foot attached to him following his Jensen car crash ...
Oh, yes, We first went on the air in March 1964. Bunty and I had an area in Kent where we had to go and test the signal in the car, to see if we could pick it up. And we picked it up! We knew the signal was working, so we started broadcasting that day. So it went on air about a year after we first met, first had the idea, first got the money, started getting the ship, getting the stuff together in Ireland. And then Ronan had this big press conference just off Fleet Street - they had this huge radio and when he turned it on, nothing happened. You couldn't hear a thing. It had all gone wrong, the way things do. It was something to do with there being a lot of steel buildings around there. They all just laughed themselves sick. It lasted until 1969. It took the government that long to figure out how to get rid of us.
In his 1990 novel, the wife of Paul Shaw is called Natasha. However, the wife of Ian Cowper Ross is known as Bunty, although her birth name is Roxana Rose Catherine Naila Lampson. She was born on December 26, 1945, several months after the death of her father Miles Wedderburn Lampson, 1st Baron Killearn. He was born on August 24, 1880, and he died on September 18, 1964.
Bunty married Ian Cowper Ross on November 24, 1966. This is an important factor, because Ian Cowper Ross admits that he first met his future wife through a club disc jockey named Stephen Christopher Moore, and he introduced Ian Cowper Ross to Ronan O'Rahilly. Therefore, the timeline of real events involving real people is extremely important.
But Ian Cowper Ross does not stick to a timeline of events, either in his novels, which are fiction, or, in real life concerning real people, and real events. In this regard his claim about the cessation of Radio Caroline is false. It began on March 27, 1964, and it was terminated by new legislation that became law at midnight on August 14, 1967. However, the two Caroline ship stations did not cease transmission until March 6, 1968, and that is when the two ships were towed away to Holland by a shipping supply company for not paying their bills.
Ian Cowper Ross was asked in 2021 whether Radio Caroline made any money, his answer as a self-proclaimed co-founder, was rather ambiguous for such a supposedly entrepreneurial person:
Well, I don't know. I mean, there was a lot of money flying around . There was a lot of money coming in, and a lot of money going out. We had an advertising department , we had sponsors like Bulova watches - time on Radio Caroline was always Bulova watch time!
In 2021, Ian Cowper Ross portrayed himself as the original conduit source of funding for Radio Caroline, but the only basis for his claim is the implied link to a 1990 novel and a fictitious person named Paul Shaw. That imaginary person met a disc jockey called Johnny Meadows at a club called 'Pandora's Box'. Then, that make-believe club DJ introduced the fictitious Paul Shaw to a fictitious Irishman named Liam O'Mahoney.
None of that happened because the story is fiction.
But, that is the basis of the claim by Ian Cowper Ross that he had co-founded Radio Caroline.
In the follow-on BBC-TV show of 1990, Ian Cowper Ross implied that he was Paul Shaw in his novel, and that Johnny Meadows was Chris Moore who was a club DJ at the 'Crazy'. Ian Cowper Ross also implied that Liam O'Mahoney was Ronan O'Rahilly.
However, what Ian Cowper Ross did not admit was that as a reckless teenage driver he first crashed a motorbike into a shop window, and the following year he crashed a car head-on into a bus. This is the real story predating any meeting with Chris Moore whose full name is Stephen Christopher Moore.
Following the car crash where he lost a foot and then rushed to hospital. That is where he was fitted with a metal substitute for which he was nicknamed 'Flipper'.
Ian Cowper Ross left hospital and appeared at a court in Derby where his driving licence was suspended and he was fined. Ian Cowper Ross gave his home address to the court, as reported in the press, as that of his father at Reynardswood in Surrey. His father's name is Charles Edward Ross.
None of that is mentioned in the novel about Paul Shaw.
But, by selectively implying that he, Ian Cowper Ross, is Paul Shaw, then Ian Cowper Ross as Paul Shaw, met Chris Moore who was Johnny Meadows, and Chris Moore who was Johnny Meadows, introduced Ian Cowper Ross who was Paul Shaw to Ronan O'Rahilly, who was Liam O'Mahoney.
Once you have swallowed that convoluted and fictitious narrative, you are primed to imbibe and believe the next part.
All three, Paul Shaw, Johnny Meadows and Liam O'Mahoney drive to Surrey in Paul Shaw's car with Liam O'Mahoney at the wheel, to meet the father of Paul Shaw whose fictitious first name is Jim.
Upon Liam O'Mahoney meeting Jim, who, as the father of Paul Shaw must be Jim Shaw, although the 1990 novel by Ian Cowper Ross does not say that, Liam O'Mahoney begins by addressing Jim Shaw, who is senior in age to Liam O'Mahoney, and who Liam O'Mahoney has never met before, by calling him Jimmy, as though they are long acquainted mutual friends. But none of that happened because it is fiction.
However, in the 1990 follow-up BBC-TV show Ian Cowper Ross begins to imply that this fictitious tale is in fact biographical. He does not make that claim in an outright manner, but he constantly implies that these fictitious events relating to Jimmy, actually refer to his father Charles Edward Ross, and again by inference, Charles Edward Ross is Jimmy who becomes Jimmy Ross.
As a result of the fictitious first meeting between Liam O'Mahoney and Jimmy Shaw, Liam O'Mahoney persuades Jimmy Shaw to call his friends and arrange to give Liam O'Mahoney a case of cash the following day which Paul Shaw, Johnny Meadows and Liam O'Mahoney pick-up at a bank, no questions asked.
That is supposedly how Liam O'Mahoney then gave Johnny Meadows enough cash to go to Holland and buy a ship, because Johnny Meadows had once been a Purser on board a cruise vessel. Then, Liam O'Mahoney re-imagined as Ronan O'Rahilly flies to New York to buy some transmitters. On his flight he opens a newspaper or maybe its a magazine, the stories change, and he sees a picture of a 5-year-old Caroline Kennedy, daughter of the recently assassinated President John F. Kennedy. So he decides to call the ship bought by Johnny Meadows, now called Chris Moore, the motor vessel 'Caroline', and the station on board he calls 'Radio Caroline'.
That is the entire basis for the story that Ronan O'Rahilly co-founded Radio Caroline with Ian Cowper Ross, who also claimed that at first, the British government ignored its existence. Therefore, claimed Ian Cowper Ross, it took a bizarre 1964 publicity stunt which was paid for by Ronan O'Rahilly, to even acknowledge the presence of Radio Caroline:
Yeah. Ironically, it was only when we made the British government aware of it that people started listening. Ronan's reaction to the first press conference, which didn't work, was to give a Welsh MP £200 to stand up in Parliament and say, "What are you doing about this pirate radio ship in the North Sea?"
Saying, "It's a danger to shipping, a danger to the emergency services, not to mention the morals of the young people of this county."
Then it went crazy. He used the word 'pirate'.
Ronan said, "Make absolutely sure you use the word pirate."
Ian Cowper Ross claims that Ronan O'Rahilly bribed a Welsh Member of the House Commons for a paltry sum of money, which, if this claim had been true, and if a Welsh MP had been exposed as the target of bribery, would have resulted in that person's expulsion from the House of Commons. This has happened in other situations, but not for such a small amount of money, and it never happened in this instance for any amount of money. Not only was the risk too great, but it was entirely unnecessary because the British press did cover the arrival of Radio Caroline.