Repeated question ....

We have been asked (again) why we paid a private investigator to discover who is the father of Ian Cowper Ross? We thought that we had answered this question under a prior posting which began: What took you so long?

The answer is the same.

Right now there remains a vast body of work Online; in previous radio and television broadcast documentaries, and in previously published newspaper and magazine features that all identify C. E. Ross as 'Jimmy Ross', and who is then linked with MacFisheries; CarPhone Warehouse or a City of London merchant bank.

The son of C.E. Ross did his best to confuse everyone with a novel about a family called Shaw, which he then implied was really about his own family called Ross. So 'Jimmy Shaw' in Ian's novel was transposed as 'Jimmy Ross'.

We knew of one way to discover the truth and that was to obtain a copy of Ian's wedding certificate that listed his father's name and his mother's name. To obtain a copy we had to buy a copy and that is what we did. We paid a private investigator to locate the official repository from which to buy it, and then we paid him to buy a copy and send it to us.

Once we had that information we had a 'key' to opening many other doors.

If we had simply relied upon the press we would have run into challenges about the veracity of the information, because the press has carried the bogus story about 'Jimmy Ross'. So we paid for an authentic copy and all of that took time. But to get to that point we had to know just who was pumping out this fake story about 'Jimmy Ross', and why they were doing it. We answered that question as well by buying copies of books, as well as magazine and newspaper articles. We then had a vast and growing library of information (much of it was in error), but we then had to assemble it in chronological order. We also obtained copies of those old radio and television documentaries as well as airchecks from old broadcasts.

But because there is no existing single source of the true information about Ian Cowper Ross and his entanglement with Ronan O'Rahilly, we had to obtain official documents from Ireland about the involvement of Ronan O'Rahilly's father in the creation of Radio Caroline. That became a little more difficult and a little more expensive. Then there is that misleading book called 'Radio Man', and that took even more money and time to unravel, in order to find the truth.

What we began to learn from all this information is that the stories about CBC (Plays) Ltd; CNBC (offshore radio); Voice of Slough Ltd; GBOK; GBLN; Radio Atlanta and finally Radio Caroline, are not separate ventures, but one venture with many spin-offs. We also learned that Jocelyn Stevens did not appear at the end of the story in 1964, but at the beginning of the story as far back as 1959, or possibly earlier, and that there were other key players who have not been considered to date as part of a single story thread.

All of that has taken time and money, because before we knew the questions to ask, we first had to have access to some existing answers to reconsider.

This is how we set about uncovering the truth.

It began with a working hypothesis which we tested to see if it was true, or untrue. Sometimes it turned out to be true, but often it turned into a blind alley and we had to ask anew. This is how criminal detectives work on cold case crimes, and this is how we work.

Do we know the whole story as of now?

No, we don't.

Will we ever find all of the information?

Probably not.

Will we find enough of the real answers to publish a true account that will totally rubbish the fictitious nonsense that is already in circulation?

Absolutely we will - because we already have!

Right now we are 'tidying-up' our research by putting it into chronological order and writing it in such a way that it isn't presented as a boring academic paper, but in a book form that readers might enjoy and which will certainly enlightened them.