Ray Clark's page 46 is now the focus of our attention ....

Although the same foundational text appears in the first edition of Ray Clark's book, his second edition contains a major, but very brief addition.

While everything on his page 46 is more-or-less a word-for-word repeat of exactly the same text that appears in his first edition, he added these lines to his second edition, by quoting Ian Cowper Ross:

"Dad was involved with a little bank called Close Brothers that was his base, I think they came in. If he recommended something, people bought it, he had a reputation, they thought it was a flutter. Anyway they put the money in that night."

A few lines earlier, Ian Cowper Ross partly identified the persons referred to by him as "they" in his second sentence. They are the people referred to who are alleged to have bought "a flutter" and "they put the money in that night."

These people had been named in preceding lines: ".... (he) rang his mates Jocelyn Stevens, John Sheffield, and these stockbroker guys who were in his kind of gang." So what what Ian Cowper Ross is claiming is that this was not an official Close Brothers merchant bank transaction, but something that happened after hours, via a telephone call, from the home of the father of Ian Cowper Ross.

However, while he refers to his "Dad", he does not give his "Dad" a name. Instead the mythology of Skues; Clark and Rusling is left in place for readers to conclude that the fiction of "Jimmy Shaw" has now morphed into the real life person of "Jimmy Ross", notwithstanding that the father, the "Dad" of Ian Cowper Ross is not "Jimmy Ross", but Charles Edward Ross.

Ian Cowper Ross told Ray Clark, years after the first edition of Clark's book was published, that these people who bought in for "a flutter", did so when "Dad .... rang his mates Jocelyn Stevens, John Sheffield, and these stockbroker guy who were in his kind of gang."

Then Ian Cowper Ross claimed that his "Dad was involved with a little bank called Close Brothers", but his "involvement" had nothing to do with his after hours activities concerning his "gang" of Jocelyn Stevens and John Sheffield.

That is what Ian Cowper Ross told Ray Clark who had previously name-dropped Jensen and Buxted without providing any sort of proof as to connectivity with the "Dad" of Ian Cowper Ross. In fact, what Ian Cowper Ross has done, is to trip very carefully by referring to his "Dad" - without referring directly to the person of Charles Edward Ross!

But what of the first sentence in Clark's paragraph?

Again, Ian Cowper Ross does not actually say what he appears to be saying here: "Dad was involved with a little bank called Close Brothers that was his base, I think they came in."

So who are these "they"? Obviously not the people who attended Close Brothers bank in person during normal business hours. These "they" were part of "Dad's gang" that he called after business hours on the telephone. Supposedly, this "gang" then made it possible for Ronan O'Rahilly; Ian Cowper Ross and Christopher Moore to go to a bank (unnamed by Clark), and receive a pile of cash which Ronan O'Rahilly stuffed into a suitcase.

First, let's consider Ian Cowper Ross' statement that: "Dad was involved with a little bank called Close Brothers that was his base, I think they came in." It is clear that Ray Clark knows nothing about Close Brothers because he would have challenged Ian Cowper Ross when he claimed that Close Brothers was "a little bank".

Close Brothers began in the mid-1800s as an international concern with huge involvement in both the USA and Canada with money connections to London, England. The term "little" is quite meaningless because it conjures-up the impression of some sort of neighborhood concern.

Close Brothers was anything but a "little bank"! Instead, Close Brothers, like Norcros, was an amalgamation of businesses tied together for the purpose of raising capital. Each one of these businesses under each umbrella, had its own board of directors. So a director of one Close Brothers or Norcros company within their group, was not necessarily a member of any other company within that group.

This is making it very difficult to identify which sub-company within these groups Charles Edward Ross was a member of. While on one hand, according to a court document we have, he appears to be on a board of directors related to the Jensen Motor Car company of Birmingham, there is no record to show that he was, and that is according to available Jensen records which have been collected over the years by Jensen enthusiasts of the original and now defunct car company. Looking for Charles Edward Ross in the Close Brothers conglomerate of individual companies as they originally existed, presents an even bigger problem. This seems to be to the advantage of the deceit enacted by Ian Cowper Ross.

While Norcros concentrated more on UK businesses of varying types, Close Brothers did the same sort of thing on an international level with heavy involvement in North America, and then, disastrously so, in a failed investment venture in Africa. Both were into forms of merchant banking.

These were prudent investors who did not give out piles of cash to total strangers who stuffed it into a suitcase, took it to a flat in London, opened the suitcase and threw these piles of money into the air like children in a pillow fight. But that is what Ian Cowper Ross wrote in his novel, and that is the rubbish that Skues, Clark and Rusling want everyone to believe is a factual account of how 'Radio Caroline' was financed.

Now consider this: Ian Cowper Ross claims that he first met Ronan O'Rahilly around the same time that Allan James Crawford first met Ronan O'Rahilly, and both of them, independently of each other, claim that this took place around the beginning of 1963, with a focus upon the month of March of that year. Since the beginnings of the bogus story about 'Radio Caroline' as told by Ronan O'Rahilly and Ian Cowper Ross is tied to that date, let us examine the known timeline to see how it fits in with reality.

Well, the next major event that is a known fact, is that Ronan O'Rahilly was sent to Texas in June 1963, and to do so, he had to fly from London to New York, New York, and from New York, New York to Houston, Texas. We even know where he stayed in Houston and who he saw and that the people who greeted him took him to buy a pair of cowboy boots. Guess what? Ronan O'Rahilly admits going to Texas and buying cowboy boots, he just doesn't admit to when that happened. We know as a verified fact that it took place in June 1963!

In Houston he met a representative from Wijsmuller and an engineer working for Gordon McLendon under the supervision of Charles William (Bill) Weaver, who had custody of the ship docked in Galveston island, Texas, and renamed 'Mi Amigo'. That vessel had been stripped of all broadcasting equipment upon instructions from Bill Weaver, and that happened in March 1963, which is when Ronan O'Rahilly first met Allan James Crawford.

O'Rahilly then met Ian Cowper Ross at the Kenco coffee shop on King's Road in London.

We know that he met Crawford before meeting Ian Cowper Ross, because prior to meeting Crawford, O'Rahilly did not have Crawford's notes about the 'Mi Amigo', and supposedly - according to the fable - they are the documents that O'Rahilly showed to Ian Cowper Ross.

However, Crawford had previously met Bill Weaver in London during 1962, and that was his reason for sending Ronan O'Rahilly to Texas in June 1963.

Ronan O'Rahilly went with hope of getting Crawford a lease, but brought back news that Weaver would not lease the Mi Amigo to Crawford. Weaver repeated what he had said before: he would only sell it and the broadcasting equipment, to Crawford - he would not lease it.

If Crawford did ask to buy it, a slight problem would have to be overcome in that all of the broadcasting equipment was now in storage at Houston where it was available to be used as replacement parts for any of the McLendon stations needing equipment. So if the equipment was reloaded on to the 'Mi Amigo', then some new parts would have to be obtained to make up for the parts already recycled.

In July 1963, Oliver Smedley and Allan James Crawford formed a new company that was registered in London at the beginning of August that year. It was called Project Atlanta Limited. At first this was merely an unimpressive registration, but within a few months it  was loaded-up with an impressive board of directors. They included representatives of various printing and publishing companies, and the grandson of the founder of Royal Dutch Shell who lived on the coast of East Anglia, not far from the first major onshore natural gas and later oil installation. It was operated by Shell to serve offshore exploration and development in the North Sea.

Now we come to Jocelyn Stevens who places the beginnings of 'Radio Caroline' around September, October of 1963, and he says so in person, on camera, and in a recorded broadcast that is still available! But Jocelyn Stevens made his claim during March 1964, because between August 1963 and September-October 1963, there was no such venture as 'Radio Caroline'. In fact, the name 'Caroline' had been in use by Stevens' editor since at least the year 1960 in a style sheet describing the typical reader of one publication produced by Stevens Press Limited.

On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in the middle of the day, in the middle of a street with crowds watching him ride by in Dallas, Texas. That event  quickly focused attention upon Gordon McLendon when strip club owner named Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald in the Dallas Police headquarters garage in full view of the cops, and with both print, radio and television journalists being witnesses in person to that event. Ruby had connections to the Chicago Mob, but he also claimed attachment to McLendon! This caused the eyes of investigators to look closely at what McLendon was up to, because McLendon was also involved with Democratic Party politics.

McLendon's ship 'Mi Amigo' had previously received press coverage in Texas when it first arrived and their were hints that it was tied in some way to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). This ship was now a 'hot potato' and Crawford's request to lease it suddenly warranted a second look. Within weeks, the 'Mi Amigo' was dry docked; reloaded with the old and some new broadcasting equipment, and hurriedly got out of port during the Christmas-New Year holiday season of 1963.

In the dying hours of 1963, that ship sailed for a private island in the Bahamas owned by Clint Murchison because he was one of a trio who had put together its original incarnation as the base for the Swedish operation called 'Radio Nord'. In his own book, Bill Weaver claimed that 'Radio Nord' was a CIA operation in the Baltic Sea. We met Bill Weaver in Texas in the Nineteen Seventies, and his family have recently sent us copies of Bill Weaver's original manuscripts information that was not in the published book, but which pointed to a secret mission involving detection of USSR nuclear submarine movements off the coast of Sweden.  

Within hours of the 'Mi Amigo' departing from Galveston island, Wijsmuller bought a retired Danish ferry named 'Fredericia' and taken it to Rotterdam, Holland at the dawn of 1964. At this moment in time, neither Ronan O'Rahilly or Ian Cowper Ross was attached to any company in the UK related to a venture involving 'Radio Caroline'. In fact, it would not be until February 25, 1964 that a company called Planet Productions Limited was registered in Ireland, and according to a UK Board of Trade investigation in 1965, there was still no separate entity in the UK that was representing the financial ownership of 'Radio Caroline'. Planet Productions Limited was an Irish company supposedly acting as the parent of a British sales company called Caroline Sales Limited, which not not exist.

'Radio Caroline', unlike all of the other offshore stations remained a phantom. It simply did not exist as an independent entity!

Just like all of the other mythological tales spun by Ian Cowper Ross, the hack vanity writers such as Keith Skues; Ray Clark and Paul Rusling, have all swallowed the bait dangled in front of them by Ian Cowper Ross, and they have swallowed his words - hook, line and sinker. Then, after repackaging, they sold them on to gullible anoraks who have purchased their wares of deceit.