Biography Continued 2

We had been there a few weeks when a guy from Tin Pan Alley – Denmark Street, the home of Londons music business – Terry King, came out to the towers. I remember that as he went to jump onto the ladder to climb up to us, he slipped and fell into the sea! The boat was rolling about and nearly crushed him against one of the concrete legs. We dragged him out with a big boat hook. He was like a drowned rat and his Saville Row suit was ruined. He never made it up the ladder as he got straight back into the boat and went back to dry land. We never saw him again!
  On one occasion Reg Calvert left me and Brian alone to run the station while he went back to land. He instructed me on how to run the manky old transmitter and batteries etc. (you must remember this set up was a bit Heath Robinson – there were wires running and hanging everywhere. It was a compleate mess. I sometimes wonder how we got it all to work, but we did). Once, I was upstairs doing an hour spot on the radio when Brian Paull started shouting, ‘We’re in trouble down here’. I shouted back, ‘ We are always in trouble on this damn station’. I stuck on an LP record (don’t forget we only had one turntable at the time!) and dashed downstairs to find the whole place on fire. All the wiring was ablase. It looked like a giant catherine wheel. Everything was burning while Brian was stood there screaming his head of... thank God for dry foam. I grabbed an extinguisher, started it working-but got it wrong. Brian stood there, covered from head to toe in foam! After we had put the fire out we both started laughing. We didn’t stop laughing for the next 24 hours – and it took that amount of time to clean up the mess. Needless to say Radio Sutch was of the air for three days. When Reg got back he did his nut, blaming me for it all. I just made one comment: ‘Why dont you spend some money and get some decent equipment?’ We did not speak for a week.
 
The Navy Lark – ‘This is the Captain speaking. Come out with your hands up or we are going to board you. You are camped on these towers illegally’. Imagine, it was early in the morning, we were all sound asleep when Her Maj’s ship arrived to try and get us off the towers. The first words that came out of Brians mouth were, ‘Piss off – we’re tired. We have been up half the night trying to fix a broken generator’. David Sutch shouted back, ‘ If you try and climb the ladders to get us, we’ll cover you in chip fat’. The chip fat was two months old and it stunk. I just went back to sleep . I was dreaming about Mandy Rice Davis! When I woke up the navy had gone, leaving us some fresh drinking water and a basket of fruit. They must have thought we had scurvy!
 
 The headlines read ‘RAF Lifts Disc Jockey Colin Dale From Radio Sutch after SOS’. During my time on the gun towers, doing my thing as disc jockey plus general dogsbody (we all had to muck in maintaining generators etc.) I got taken ill with food poisoning. I had eaten some duff salmon and I was in agony! With just the two of us on the towers , Brian Paull and myself, I knew I was in deep trouble. I hung on in there for several hours with massive stomach cramps. I did not want to leave Brian on his own (he was a great bloke and I was very sad when I heard some years later that he died in a swimming accident). Eventually Brian had to put out an SOS and, lo and behold, an RAF helicopter arrived from Manston airbase. They winched me up into the copter and of we went to Margate Hospital. They rushed me into emergency where I was kept there for several days (this episode was later used in a film, Slade In Flame, with the group Slade. David Sutch was most upset about this. He said they had stolen it. I just laughed and said it was free publicity. I have been told that Slade used old footage from BBC and ITV newsreel coverage of my rescue but I have never seen the film so can’t confirm this).