This is Radio Free Scotland calling – how a pirate station is born

Nationalism, although thriving and spreading, had been banned from the air by the London-controlled BBC, he asserted. The problem was outlined briefly: no party contesting fewer than 100 seats was allowed to make broadcasts. Scotland had 71 seats at that time, so the SNP (which had only contested two seats at the 1955 general election), fell foul of the rule.

The pirate broadcast, which lasted for 20 minutes and ended with Scots Wha’ Hae, was heard only in the Perth area. “Everything came through quite clearly,” remarked a Maryhill man who heard the broadcast in a Perth hotel. BBC engineers urgently tried to pinpoint where the broadcast came from. An Aberdeen-based TV expert suggested that the transmission equipment could have been portable enough to have been transported in a car or van.

Sunday newspapers seized on the story with glee. “Scots TV sensation,” ran the Scottish Sunday Express headline. SNP president Dr Robert McIntyre said that if similarly illegal broadcasts were made by Scottish nationalists, and continued to be responsible, he would support them.

Over the next few days, the pirates twice crashed the BBC’s television sound wavelength from Kilmarnock. A husky-voiced woman, “Sylvia”, told the Scottish Sunday Express that she had been one of the pirates. “We really have little fear of being caught,” she insisted. “Do I realise that I could be jailed? Of course. We all knew before we started this.”

Dr Robert McIntyre was the SNP's first-ever MP, capturing Motherwell from Labour in a by-election in 1945 (Image: Newsquest)

John S Thomson, an independent Greenock councillor, director of Morton FC and member of the Scottish Covenant movement, offered the Scottish nationalists the use of his motor launch, which was equipped with a licensed radio transmitter, as a floating wireless station if they could operate it three miles of the Scottish coast. The Post Office swiftly countered that this would be in breach of the law.

GPO detector vans were reported to be patrolling hilly Scottish roads, waiting for any further broadcasts. Leaders of various nationalist groups hailed RFS as the biggest coup since the theft of the Stone of Destiny, nearly seven years earlier. Newspapers said that Special Branch detectives had been called in to help track down the pirate transmitter following reports that RFS had been heard in parts of north Glasgow.

Radio Free Scotland, it turns out, was the work of David Rollo, the SNP national treasurer. He was also a consultant electrical engineer and an enthusiastic radio “ham”, and had built the radio transmitter in the back-shop of the Townhead Cafe in Kirkintilloch.

One of the many nationalists who admired the new station was Gordon Wilson, then a first-year law student. Not only would Wilson become Director of Programmes in the second incarnation of RFS, but he would, later still, become leader of the SNP.

David Rollo died in December 2006. As Wilson observes in his own account of RFS (Pirates of the Air, published by the Scots Independent), Rollo considered the creation of the pirate station to be his greatest political achievement.The station articulated nationalists’ grievances that they were being kept off the airwaves and denied a voice.

As Wilson reminds us, the nationalist movement was in the doldrums in the 1950s, with the latest serious split having occurred in 1955. The movement was enfeebled, but at least it was under a unified leadership, with the SNP the largest body. At the 1955 general election, the Conservatives and their allies won 36 of the 71 Scottish seats, and Labour 34.

In 1956, television was still a BBC monopoly (STV would not go on air until August 1957), as was radio. Aware that the nationalist cause was at a low ebb, Wilson and his friends in the Edinburgh University Nationalist Club saw the publicity generated by RFS as a significant confidence boost. They sensed, he wrote, “a way ahead for the national movement despite its fissures and electoral failures, perhaps even by way of unorthodox political methods”.

David Rollo, Gordon Wilson and Norman Thorburn in 1961 (Image: Newsquest)

Inevitably, as the novelty of RFS wore off, newspaper interest declined, though the Scots Independent was happy to publicise it. The station continued to thrive, opining on matters ranging from increased unemployment to city slums, civil aviation and Scottish exports.

With uncertainty over any fate that might befall the pirate broadcasters, Oliver Brown, a prominent nationalist, volunteered to contribute towards assistance to families of any RFS volunteer who might end up in jail. At one point, says Wilson, Rollo and his son, David, had to escape from a rear window with their transmitter when “two men in long raincoats and soft hats” called at a Dundee house being used as a transmission site.

By November 1958, Rollo, who had political connections with Plaid Cymru, had provided a transmitter for a new station, Radio Free Wales.

The station was fizzling out when Rollo made a broadcast on RFS as he unsuccessfully contested Hamilton for the SNP at the October 1959 general election. But it was reborn under co-founders Gordon Wilson and Louis Stevenson, and made its first publicised broadcast on March 11, 1960. The new station, which went out on the BBC wavelength, had a large and enthusiastic team, who aimed to broadcast weekly for eight months a year.

At a press conference Wilson said he did not consider that what RFS was doing was against the law. “We declare that any law which detracts from the liberty of citizens of one of the most ancient and respected European nations from making their views known to fellow countrymen and women is illegal itself,” he said.

As with the original station, the press took a keen interest, and reported on GPO efforts to track down the pirates. On one occasion, a live transmission from an Edinburgh house was ended just as GPO officials were in a nearby street. The RFS team gained in experience and confidence, and were adept at attracting publicity. It recorded interviews with notable figures including Wendy Wood and Hugh MacDiarmid, and expanded its base from Edinburgh to Glasgow (where Rollo was in charge) and West Lothian. Douglas Henderson, later an SNP MP, and Allan Macartney, later an SNP MEP, were part of the team.

Station staff even made a point of giving the microphone to candidates contesting by-elections. At Bridgeton in 1961, GPO engineers jammed the broadcast, and the team had to smuggle equipment out of a flat past waiting police officers. Edinburgh police later asked Wilson if he would attend an ID parade at the request of Glasgow police, but nothing came of the matter. No wonder Wilson could reflect: “Running a pirate radio station was exhilarating. No-one knew what was around the corner”.

Wilson’s involvement came to an end in 1963 and the station faded, only to be revived again in the late 1960s, but it was closed by the police and GPO in May 1972. Glasgow RFS continued for another few years.

In 1964 the Westminster parties allowed the SNP to take part in a series of Scottish election broadcasts, a victory for RFS. Over the years, writes Wilson, constant campaigns gave the SNP a greater share of broadcast time. Without RFS, he believes, “it is arguable the battle would have been harder and longer”.