Oonagh Huggard ....

The obfuscation and misdirection about the story of Radio Caroline begins with three people: Ronan O'Rahilly; Oonagh Huggard (who was known in the Nineteen Sixties as Oonagh Leigh), and Ian Cowper Ross (who was simply referred to as Ian Ross. His father was simply identified in the early days as C. E. Ross.)

While it appears that the story of Radio Atlanta (which was folded into the Radio Caroline storyline under the name of Radio Caroline South) is well documented and plain for all to see and understand, it is neither well documented, nor is it plain for anyone to see and understand. By the middle of 1964 the story of Radio Caroline had become a convoluted mess, but the only people paying any attention to it were its fans.

Those fans were not just listeners who turned on their radios to hear music and anything else that may have come out of their loudspeakers and headsets, but those fans of the offshore stations also began to follow (with hero-worshipping interest), the people who played the music and engaged in meaningless banter with other predominately male record spinners. Consequently the people who were issuing literature about the offshore stations such as Radio Caroline, were not suppling reading material written by academics, but by the employees of public relations firms whose target market was the offshore radio listener.

As time went by, academics began to recycle old publicity material as citations within various scholarly publications, and popular press writers having far less reason to be careful about what they were claiming as factual information, increasingly wrote from off-the-cuff personal experiences; unverified hearsay gossip, and foggy memories. Consequently a vast body of work has now emerged that is a totally distorted version of the true story. When investigations into the authenticity of the original public relations literature are conducted, it is discovered that those publications were not accurate at all.

Now add to that hodge-podge of misinformation, the work of people like Ian Cowper Ross who seems to have been hired - probably by Jocelyn Stevens - as a very young noisemaker whose job it was to lend support to the braggadocio - blarney of another young man named Ronan O'Rahilly. With O'Rahilly's help the fog of deception descended in perpetuity over everything. The mystery of Radio Caroline then became one with the mystery of Ronan O'Rahilly. Who was he?

If ever there was a man who dealt in sweeping claims lacking any form of logical or authoritative biographical support, that man would be Ronan O'Rahilly. To simply classify him as a fraud and con-artist would be an understatement. First of all he was only effective at his job to deceive, because his listeners hung on to his every word like a messiah, when in reality he was more akin to being a pariah.

It was within his world of deception that Oonagh Leigh emerged as a 'personal assistant', and because Oonagh Karanjia (as she now calls herself), has recently added more misinformation to the mix, we are now peeling back those layers of distortion to reveal the part she played in past events relating to Ronan O'Rahilly. That is why we are now delving into the documented backgrounds of Ronan O'Rahilly; Oonagh Karanjia (previously known as Oonagh Leigh* and Oonagh Huggard*), plus Ian Cowper Ross; his step-brother Charles Cowper Ross, and their father, Charles Edward Ross. (*Now corrected. Sometimes our 'typos' are actually tests to see whether anoraks are reading, or scanning for pictures while looking for words written in error. This 'inspires' them to blast off yet another email full of rage and lacking reason. If that describes you: gotcha!) 

See our companion Blog linked above for additional information of a factual nature, including individual profiles of the people shown in the banner at the top of this Blog.