As dawn broke, word of the daring raid reached the station’s owner, a music promoter and occasional club DJ named Reginald Calvert (this being the era when “it’s DJ Reginald!” was not taken as a signal to mob the nearest fire escape). Calvert had made his fortune managing Screaming Lord Sutch, a horror-themed pop star who later became famous for repeatedly running for parliament. But he soon saw an even more lucrative opportunity in the emerging field of pirate radio. Back in the ‘60s, the BBC had an official monopoly on UK radio, subjecting listeners to an inhumane diet of light opera and patriotic banjo music. As a result, illegal “pirate” stations began transmitting rock and roll from ships off the British coast. Calvert realized that the old sea forts would be the perfect base for a pirate station and established Radio City on the Shivering Sands in 1964.
But like any lucrative criminal activity, pirate radio soon fell prey to violent turf wars. When goons attacked Shivering Sands and destroyed a transmitter, Calvert knew exactly who to blame: Oliver Smedley, the founder of Radio Atlanta. In a rage, he drove to his rival’s house, where he became locked in an undignified shoving match with the housekeeper before Smedley produced a gun and shot him dead. A jury subsequently found Smedley not guilty on self-defense grounds (the brief unsolved kidnapping of a key witness also helped). The case became a media sensation, and serious questions were asked in parliament about reining in the radio pirates. Which was terrible news for a pirate named Roy Bates, who had recently seized control of a sea fort from Radio Caroline, sparking a small-scale ocean war between the two stations.
Bates had originally founded his Radio Essex station on a fort named Knock John but later dislodged Radio Caroline from the Roughs Tower fort, which was further offshore and away from the authorities. Radio Caroline responded by launching a number of boat-based attacks on the fort, which Roy and his teenage son Michael fought off with Molotov cocktails. At one point, a Radio Caroline guy was abandoned when his comrades retreated, leaving him dangling from a ladder high above the ocean for several hours. After Calvert was killed, the British government became determined to get Bates off the fort before his own feud turned equally deadly. Under extreme legal pressure, Bates decided to double down -- by declaring independence from the United Kingdom.