Offshore radio back in the 1960s is credited with changing everything radio wise. The one station that is named by the public to ‘represent’ all the offshore radio stations seems to be ‘Radio Caroline’. Ronan O’Rahilly, the wealthy Irish Chelsea set hustler and entrepreneur of the day is on record as saying that he named Radio Caroline after the daughter of President John F Kennedy. Indeed, the tale is that O’Rahilly opened the newspaper to see a large picture of the President sitting in the Oval Office of the Whitehouse busily working on some papers. By contrast, at his feet, playing under the table was, according to O’Rahilly, Kennedy’s little daughter Caroline. She was young, playing and being disruptive, O’Rahilly maintains, and hence the station would be called Caroline.
However, the whole story is a complete myth and misrepresentation of the actual true facts. No picture exists of Caroline playing at the president’s feet. In truth, under the Oval Office table was her brother, John Kennedy Junior. The picture shows him playing quietly with a wooden toy, stopping only to smile at the camera, probably after being called to by the photographer, and not being in the slightest way disruptive, despite ‘disruptive’ supposedly being what the new radio station would be in honour of the ‘disruptive’ Kennedy child.
If the radio station had honestly been named after the child under the Oval Office table, it would not have been called Radio Caroline, but Radio John. Although the station was not, for reasons that will become clear, actually called Radio John, it did manage to mimic the child under the Oval Office in other ways. It came on the air and was not in the slightest bit ‘disruptive’ in its early years such that it was constantly on the brink of going bust, despite being the first UK commercial radio station. In fact, many times it very nearly went …. down the John.
However, the truth of the decision to use the name Caroline goes back to Jocelyn Stevens’ very glossy Queen magazine a year or so before. O’Rahilly had some dealings with Stevens and was quite taken by an idea he’d heard about from music publisher Alan Crawford (Radio Atlanta) which was to play records from on board a ship at sea. O’Rahilly convinced Stevens to invest and get involved in trying to sell airtime.
Queen magazine had for some years profiled an imaginary target reader and called her ‘Caroline’. All articles and all photographs had to be aimed at ‘Caroline’. She was in her 20s or a bit older and was an intelligent wannabe girl eager to climb in society. Queen magazine would contain articles about all the material things she wanted in life, and she would love it and aspire to having more.
Thus, when it came time to produce the radio version of Queen magazine, the Caroline name also became the logical station name, describing, without the listeners knowing, exactly who it was aimed at. Hence why Radio Caroline commenced by playing the same music as the BBC Light Programme and the presenters spoke with clipped accents in a very formal manner. All the output was aimed at the imaginary ‘Caroline’ that Queen magazine was aimed at.
As time moved on and the radio station changed and re-positioned who the output was aimed at from the imaginary ‘Caroline’ to a new brash teenage rebel without a cause, the Caroline name was stuck and accepted, and it was far too late to change it accordingly.
Radio Caroline grew into its own entity and is to this day often referred to as a ‘lady’ by Radio Caroline fans.
Today ‘Caroline’ is no longer the imaginary young lady listener, but is now the actual young lady people once listened to.
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