Ronan O’Rahilly was the godfather of the pirate radio stations which revolutionised British broadcasting in the 1960s, but he could not have done it without the help of Sir Harry Pilkington.

After Pilkington was commissioned by Harold Macmillan’s government to consider the future of broadcasting, the complacent conclusion of his 1962 report persuaded O’Rahilly to challenge the BBC’s monopoly of the airwaves and launch Radio Caroline as Britain’s first commercially independent radio station.

Pilkington had decided that the British public did not want commercial radio, a claim presented without any real evidence and which outraged O’Rahilly. “The government report was just complete and absolute hogwash. They were 110 per cent wrong,” he said.

Having discovered a loophole in the radio licensing laws, O’Rahilly bought a