Radio Veronica
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Radio Veronica was an offshore radio station that began broadcasting in 1960, and has the distinction of having broadcast from offshore for the longest continuous period — more than fourteen years.
(Radio Caroline broadcast offshore over a longer period — more than twenty-six and a half years — but this included non-consecutive periods totalling around eight and a half years off the air.)
Radio Veronica was set up by independent radio, TV and household electrical retailers in the Netherlands. They hoped to stimulate the sales of radio receivers in the country by broadcasting more popular programmes than the established and state-licensed stations in Hilversum.
Broadcasts began on 21 April 1960. The station announced itself as VRON (Vrije Radio Omroep Nederland; Free Radio Station [of the] Netherlands) but changed to Radio Veronica, after the poem "Het Zwarte Schaap Veronica" — The Black Sheep Veronica — by the children's poet Annie M. G. Schmidt.
After the closure of the radio station some of its staff applied for a broadcasting licence and continued as a legal organisation with the same name.
The original Radio Veronica became the most popular station in the Netherlands, broadcasting from a former lightship Borkum Riff anchored off the Dutch coastline. The ship was fitted with a horizontal antenna between the fore and aft masts, fed by a one-kilowatt transmitter. The majority of programmes were recorded in a studio on the Zeedijk in Hilversum. At the end of the 1960s the studios and offices moved to bigger premises on the Utrechseweg in Hilversum.
For a short time the station also ran an English-language service under the call letters CNBC (Commercial Neutral Broadcasting Company.)
Later the Borkum Riff was replaced by a former trawler, the MV Norderney.
