Ronan O'Rahilly? Confidence trickster, says 'Peter Moore' ....

As part of our ongoing research project we continue to investigate all avenues and sources that become available. One such source will eventually disappear, due to the time-based structure of its Internet hosting site.

That source contains a very interesting note about the character of Ronan O'Rahilly, and so we made a note of its message, in order to examine it further in this editorial. This character analysis of Ronan O'Rahilly was posted by a person calling himself 'Peter Moore', but who really a human being named Malcolm Smith.

Smith has a lot of self-interest to protect from a widely held belief that Ronan O'Rahilly once created an entity called 'Radio Caroline' which over the years has re-emerged in different forms under different circumstances. The latest incarnation involves a project under the financial control of Malcolm Smith.

Although Ronan O'Rahilly is now deceased, his erstwhile supporters continue to fund the 'Radio Caroline' project under the control of Malcolm Smith, which has no relationship whatsoever to the entity that once existed in 1964 under that name which began with an Australian named Allan James Crawford. In 1964, Crawford stated on film that he first met Ronan O'Rahilly sometime at the beginning of 1963, and this statement made in a Grenada TV production, helps to establish a true timeline of the events that both preceded it, and which then followed.

In another Grenada TV program at a later date, Ronan O'Rahilly admitted on camera that he arrived in London, England from the Republic of Ireland, at some time during the year 1961, and in that program he told the audience that his goal in life was to become a film producer. For many years both on film and on paper documents, Ronan O'Rahilly remained consistent in naming his career choice. He did indeed produce a handful of films which did not receive a financially rewarding reception, or the blessings of film critics.

However, as time moved away from the original era of 'Radio Caroline', Ronan O'Rahilly did tell another TV film crew that he was a "marine broadcaster". But that was after the cloak of legal protection for British offshore broadcasting stations had been lifted; the majority of offshore stations had closed down, and the original 'Radio Caroline' stations spluttered into a financial black hole of debt after investors disappeared.

The original ship called 'Caroline' was sent to the breaker's yard and its second ship called 'Mi Amigo' was abandoned in Holland by the Texas owners. This is when Ronan O'Rahilly tried to huff and puff his way into newspaper headlines by announcing new projects using the name of 'Caroline'.

He was unsuccessful.

When Ronan O'Rahilly met Allan Crawford for the first time in early 1963, Crawford had been trying to put together an offshore broadcasting venture to promote his own record labels. Crawford was not alone in attempting to create a British-based offshore radio station.

Prior to Crawford, a British journalist named John Thompson who had lived in Canada, returned to England where he took up residence at Slough after making noises in various publications about starting an offshore radio station. Thompson lacked the finances to make this happen, so he teamed-up with another local Slough resident and they registered a company under the name of Voice of Slough Ltd.

Because of Thompson's Canadian experiences on radio, he had become aware of the activities of Herbert W. Armstrong who had morphed a religious church service program from very local and humble beginnings in 1934 Oregon, into a Hollywood re-styled monologue called 'The World Tomorrow', named after the eponymous  1939 'World Fair'. This program was a mixture of religion and geopolitical commentary and Amstrong's media buyers bought time for airing this broadcast on Canadian stations.

Armstrong had relocated from Eugene, Oregon to Pasadena, California, which is located on the doorstep of Hollywood in the shadow of greater Los Angeles. Half-way between Los Angeles and San Francisco, Randolph Hearst had built his own headquarters for a publishing and broadcasting empire that Orson Welles mimicked with his movie 'Citizen Kane'.

From the turn of the Twentieth Century, Hearst had also established his own business interests in London, England, and that is where he engaged in both a commercial and geopolitical rivalry with Alfred Charles William Harmsworth, 1st Viscount (Lord) Northcliffe. This Lord had his own publishing empire which included titles such as the 'Daily Mail' and the 'Daily Mirror'. Hearst then tried to create his own version of the 'Daily Mirror' in California, but without success.

Politically both men were on opposite sides of geopolitical divide, in which Hearst viewed Britain as America's natural enemy and Germany as its natural friend. When the Twentieth Century dawned, not only had the British Empire been forced by war to surrender its North American colonies, but during the War of 1812, British mercenaries had invaded the USA and set fire to the White House. In the aftermath of the Great War (WWI), military plans were drawn-up in both London and Washington, DC for another war against each other.

At that time the issue was the Navy in both Britain and America, where the Royal Navy was dominant. It was from this military source that radio broadcasting first emerged, and the creation of the General Electric Company of America which gobbled-up the American Marconi Company to create its subsidiary Radio Corporation of America, was only one part of this intense financial and political and near military 'battle'.

It was Hearst who spotted the potential of Billy Graham as a geopolitical mouthpiece, and it was Hearst who groomed him to become a Christian version of the drunk U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy who was castigated in the United Kingdom for his anti-Communism, while Billy Graham was embraced for claiming that 'Communism was Satanism'. In time even Queen Elizabeth II welcomed Baptist minister Billy Graham to preach to her at religious services held at Balmoral in Scotland.

While all that was going on, Herbert W. Armstrong who had been originally ordained by a different denomination to Billy Graham and then split to form his own brand of religious belief, had begun broadcasting over the original Radio Luxembourg long wave station, before moving to their new and subsequently famous '208' wavelength. But the most time that Armstrong could buy was two nights a week before midnight.

Nevertheless Armstrong's audience grew in Britain, and so he went to the same London advertising agency which had promoted Billy Graham. It was run by two brothers. One managed the Graham account and the other one managed the Armstrong account.

At the time Armstrong was renting a small office in London and as his audience grew, he needed to expand. In Pasadena, California he had opened a liberal arts college, and so he decided to open a second campus in Hertfordshire. The site selected was the former estate of Sir David Yule which had been occupied by his daughter whose interests included a partnership with J. Arthur Rank, and it was the two of them who then built Pinewood Film Studios.

Sir David Yule was buried on the grounds of his estate between Watford and St. Albans, and his tomb reflected images of his days in British India where he was a member of the British East India Company. His interests included exporting jute and publishing newspapers which had connections to those of Northcliffe and his publications.

This is when, at the end of the Fifties, a number of interested parties all converged and ultimately gave birth to 'Radio Caroline'. Ronan O'Rahilly was a mere speck of dust down at the bottom of one leg of this totem pole. In other words he was a young kid who was hired to mouth words written for him to utter. That was it. He was a nothing, a nobody in the scheme of things to come. O'Rahilly's job was to bang a symbolic drum telling the media to look at him and away from the real story. Malcolm Smith has confirmed that Ronan O'Rahilly never amounted to anything in his entire life. He feasted off the droppings from the tables of other people.

Meanwhile, John Thompson with his Voice of Slough Limited company made contact with Armstrong's London advertising agency and managed to get a tentative contract to place the 'World Tomorrow' on his own station which he called the 'Voice of Slough'. This contract was based upon hype and bluff, because Thompson did not have the means to fulfill it. Initially he produced a picture of a small vessel then birthed in Scotland, and he claimed that it was big enough to house a transmitter and broadcast recorded programs that he would make in his own studio. A picture of that studio was also produced.

However, Thompson could not pull off his luck and turn it into cash, and so he became desperate. At that moment a former vacuum cleaner con-man showed up in England. He had convinced a shipping heiress from Vancouver, Canada to leave her husband and children and marry him. His name is Arnold Swanson.

Swanson then started bobbing up and down in the British press along with Thompson, and it eventually became clear that neither Swanson nor Thompson could create a successful offshore radio station, because in reality, neither man had any money in his own right. Both slipped out of the headlines and after Swanson and wife left for Canada, Swanson began to engage in more huff and puff non-broadcasting stories that made the newspapers. But his end came when his wife divorced him following his exposure in the press that he was having sex with young girls, and that episode landed him in a criminal court.

While there are many other elements to this story that takes place between the years of 1959 and 1963, here we want to focus upon Ronan O'Rahilly who showed-up in London, England during 1961, when these real events were already taking place. There are several other major aspects to this story and many more major players who all converge into one timeline, the same timeline that Ronan O'Rahilly enters with his arrival in London. Clearly no one else has this story because no one else has ever written and published it before now, and you will have to wait awhile longer until it is all revealed in a part-work library of books.

​But here we want to focus on what Malcolm Smith has written about the flimsy character of Ronan O'Rahilly and we want to dispose of the nonsense that others have written about this person. Malcolm Smith acts as a very able and dedicated garbage man concerning the removal of rubbish created about the life and times of Ronan O'Rahilly.

Ronan O'Rahilly was hired as a detraction to lure investigative journalists away from the true story about the real origins of 'Radio Caroline'. To that end O'Rahilly invented all manner of really silly stories such as the one about 5 years old Caroline Kennedy, daughter of the assassinated President. O'Rahilly claimed that he had personally named both the station and its original ship after this toddler.

In reality Ronan O'Rahilly didn't name anything.

​But O'Rahilly's big lie was wrapped in another lie about him flying to the New York in order to buy transmitters for the new ship station. We know that O'Rahilly went to the USA, but he did not go there to buy anything. He was broke and so was Crawford. He went to the USA to plead on behalf of Crawford.

We know from our own investigation and corroborating sources, that Ronan O'Rahilly was sent to Houston via New York in June, 1963, shortly after meeting with Allan Crawford for the first time. We know the name of the Houston hotel in which O'Rahilly stayed, and we know that he even bought a pair of cowboy boots while he was in Houston.

We know that he went from Houston to Galveston to see a ship docked there. Its name is 'Mi Amigo' and it was under the care of Bill Weaver, Manager of Gordon McLendon's KILT radio station in Houston. The vessel had been stripped by Weaver, and Crawford wanted to lease it together with all of the broadcasting equipment then in storage at Houston.

Weaver was told to refuse any such request. Crawford, who O'Rahilly represented, did not have the kind of money to buy the ship as a broadcasting vessel, and so Weaver sent O'Rahilly packing back to London - empty-handed.

We will be explaining this extremely complicated story in detail within our forthcoming library of books. But now we want to focus upon a very strange post written by Malcolm Smith. On August 27, 2022, Smith submitted this post using the name of 'Peter Moore'. It appeared on the 'Free Radio Forum' at 10:18:37, and in part, this is what he told another correspondent about Ronan O'Rahilly:

'....  you need to understand the Ronan way of doing things. When still almost a child he saw that his sister who owned a donkey was selling donkey rides to raise money for the local convent. He took over the donkey, sold rides and put the money in his pocket. "Money in my pocket" or "Juicy Lucy" as  he described it was how he ran his life and all was like those donkey rides only hugely multiplied.'

Malcolm Smith claimed to have had a very close working relationship with Ronan O'Rahilly, and so when O'Rahilly died, Malcom Smith came into possession of some rather interesting information. It supports the true purpose and aims in life of Ronan O'Rahilly which for the most part went unfulfilled. Smith continued with these words:

'I his lifetime of possessions that were abandoned in storage  and which we rescued, was a letter from his father who says that people were asking what his son was doing but that he was too ashamed to say. Another letter asks Ronan not to discuss any business ventures with his father as they are "just a ploy to get money.'

Smith added this about Ronan's father who was a very successful entrepreneur and manufacturer who had strong business connections to the British Board of Trade via export licenses. Aodoghan O'Rahilly also developed a container port and the revived a ferry service from the Irish Republic to the main island of Great Britain:

'Aodoghan O'Rahilly wanted Ronan to get some sort of conventional career, thus when he said that for a very substantial payment he could buy an executive career in the film industry, Aodoghan loaned him the money on the promise of prompt repayment. Asking later about his money Ronan said that it had been spent paying the wages for a film crew for one week. Even his own father was fair game. .... Money flowed one way, i.e. to him .... I am just saying from long personal experience, how the man lived his life.'

Simply put, Ronan O'Rahilly was a liar and a con-man.

Ronan O'Rahilly was not in any way, shape or form, the originating creator of the twin stations that existed from 1964 to 1967 which became known as 'Radio Caroline North', and 'Radio Caroline South'. There are really serious political reasons why you don't know the real story behind the creation of 'Radio Caroline', and it has nothing to do with pop music, djs or that ludicrous tag line about "Swinging England".

But to read the complete story, and to learn who the other key players were, and how and why they all converged on one moment in time during 1964, you will have to wait until we are ready to announce publication details of our part-work library of books.