Then the government sent a gun boat. It was a very old-school prime minister called Sir Alec Douglas-Home, and they sent a fucking (sic) gunboat out to our ship.
Imagine, we scrambled to get there! So we were all on board, the gunboat arrived, the sailors were all going , "Yeah, fuck (sic) you." There's no way these guys could ever open fire on us, but it was huge. It was the most huge publicity ever.
The event as described by Ian Cowper Ross did not happen, and neither did he go out to the ship for that reason at that time.
It was the beginnings of all those bands we think of as rock and roll: The Stones, The Beatles, The Yardbirds. We played Chuck Berry, Elvis. This was a formative time, and the BBC just didn't want to play this music. There was no question of playing it, for them. So we changed the face of radio. I'm not saying there was anything particularly radical about what we played, but we certainly played blues, rhythm and blues - everything from America we could get our hands on. Everybody loved it. We had an absolutely huge audience, 30 million people. That is the biggest audience ever. Everybody was listening to it.
The problem with the entire paragraph above, as reporting the actual words uttered by Ian Cowper Ross to his daughter's husband, and transcribed into print and edited by his daughter Liberty, is that it is 100% untrue.
In March 1964 when Radio Caroline first began transmissions, it sounded like a poor announcing version of BBC radio, because the announcers were not disc jockeys in the American sense, they were low-level English film actors simply announcing the titles and artists on records played by a technician sitting in a booth behind a glass window. The BBC-style announcer merely introduced the record to be played, and often commented about what had been just played.
As for the BBC, when Radio Caroline first began, the Beatles were already a huge fad called 'Beatlemania', and the BBC had even given the group a radio program of their own. In fact, Radio Caroline called itself "your all day music station" because it signed off at 6PM and sounded more like an extended version of the BBC Light Programme daily record show aimed at stay-at-home housewives which had been broadcast from 1946 onwards during weekday mornings, and appropriately and eponymously called 'Housewives' Choice'. That BBC record show played a variety of popular music, and so did Radio Caroline. It was certainly not a rock 'n' roll station along the lines of American format top-40 radio.
American top-40 radio did not arrive until one year later, and that was thanks to Texas car dealer Don Pierson. He copied the style of Gordon McLendon's Dallas top-40 radio station identified by the call letters KLIF. Originally, Pierson planned to call his shipboard station 'Radio KLIF London', but he dropped the Dallas call letters before it began transmissions during the last few days of 1964. Pierson had previously been in England with another Texas car dealer to sign contracts for the importation of British cars for sale to Texas car buyers. When his station did start, it all but wiped-out listenership to the southern station of Radio Caroline which was anchored off southeast England, because its programming was so amateurishly pathetic by comparison with its Texas clone anchored nearby.
The so-called 'British Invasion' of the American market by the Beatles, and then other groups from Liverpool, was due to the frenzy created by British broadcast music pioneers such as Jack Good and his shows transmitted first by BBC-TV called 'Six Five Special', and then by one of the ITA program franchises after Jack Good went to work for them. He later emigrate to America and recreated his television show form of popular music presentation there. The other early creative record pioneer was Joe Meek who even had his own Radio Luxembourg sponsored record show which promoted his own label, and that was also long before the arrival of Radio Caroline.
Everything 'spun' by Ian Cowper Ross about the arrival of Radio Caroline in 1964 is one gigantic lie!
The billionaire husband of Liberty Ross, the Editor and daughter of Ian Cowper Ross, jumps ahead in time using his own timeframe narrative, and his father-in-law remarks: "So, it's 1969. You're around 25, right?"
Yeah. I'd got married to Bunty then I wasn't really working. I mean. I'd never really had a job for Radio Caroline - I had things to do. But past a certain point, it wasn't the same as it had been at the beginning. We actually stated a business making dresses, but I wasn't really making any money. It was highly competitive. Oddly, I knew what dresses to make, but not how to turn a profit.
"But the making money thing, those are details, right? I mean, the idea is what's important."
It's the detail I never really mastered!
This is a contradiction because for a brief period of time Ian Cowper Ross did join with other people when they got into the fad of opening clothing boutiques. One such venture centered upon The Cavern in Liverpool, but, as he admits, he was not successful financially. Exactly how involved Bunty became in any of the rag trade businesses is not known. It was not until 1966 that she married Ian. Bunty was a fashion model whose pedigree linked to two different aristocratic families. Both families were financially secure. Even the lead-in comment by Ian's son-in-law is misleading, because his son-in-law is a billionaire!
"But the idea and the spirit is more important in the end. The money somehow works out. Okay. So it's the 70s now, you're selling dresses, but you still have that fire in your belly of, 'I want to do something.' Tell me about that?"