Peter Berkeley was a record librarian on Radio 390 in 1967. Despite the job title, record librarians on the fort didn't just file the discs. They were more like producers, choosing which tracks should
be played on this middle-of-the-road station. He remembers: “I was employed at a day's notice after most of the DJ crew went off to work on Radio 355. Out of the 18 hours transmission a day
I probably had to compile about half to two-thirds of the programming, the rest being done by the DJs themselves. David Allan and Stephen West did their one hour
Country Style programme every evening; David Sinclair had a programme every day with music from the 20s and 30s.
I think the cook's name was Jeff. He caught sea bass by dangling a bit of silver paper from a cigarette packet attached to a hook. The fish used to congregate around the concrete legs of the generator tower where they liked
the vibrations. Sea bass are greedy and will eat anything and we were always well fed on them. We were all good at table tennis and we had a TV.
We worked with four shifts of seven days - 2 shifts changing over Saturday to Saturday and the other 2 shifts on Wednesday to Wednesday. I worked on a Wednesday-Wednesday shift so I had little contact with the other
Wednesday-Wednesday shift (e.g. Edward Cole, etc.), only seeing them when everybody pitched in to unload the boat at the midday changeover. We always seemed to have Dougie the handyman on our shift.
I had a very easy life, coming off after a week of spending no money with two weeks wages. I had my own 3 bedroom garden flat in Hampstead - a different world!”
Since Radio 390, Peter has been staging and producing events in the corporate sector. At the time of contacting The Pirate Radio Hall of Fame he had just completed curating an exhibition,
which he researched, wrote and presented, about the actress Ellen Terry for her former home Smallhythe Place, Tenterden, Kent, now owned
by the National Trust. Peter comes from a theatrical background himself. His father was the actor Ballard Berkeley who enjoyed a long stage and film career but is probably best remembered now for playing the Major in BBC
television's Fawlty Towers.
Peter has very kindly shared some of his photos with us. He says: “I have had these pics now over 47 years. A few are in rather poor condition but the scanner options and photoshop can clean most of them up. The camera
I used was only an Ilford Sportsman with maximum aperture of f3.5 that I had bought when I was about 12 years old after saving two year's money from my milk-round. So what with the slow film speeds then, all the interior
pics are either shaky from a long exposure or lack enough information to improve them much.” We are very grateful to him.
|
