Oliver Smedley
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Major Oliver Smedley MC, (1911–1989) was a British citizen involved in classical liberal politics and pirate radio.
Smedley was a paratrooper during the Second World War and won the Military Cross at the Battle of Arnhem.
In opposition to Clement Attlee's Agriculture Act 1947, Smedley helped to found, and become Secretary of, the Farmer's and Smallholder's Association in 1947. Its first President was the Conservative MP Waldron Smithers. In 1952 Smedley resigned from his job as a Chartered Accountant and campaigned for economic liberalism from his office in EC2. His main campaigning organisation was the Cheap Food League which was against all types of protection and subsidy in agriculture, especially marketing boards. In a protest against high taxation he founded the Council for the Reduction of Taxation in 1954. Then in 1955 whilst a member of the Society of Individualists, Smedley met Antony Fisher and together they founded the Institute of Economic Affairs. Smedley also took over the Free Trade League and the Cobden Club in 1958.
Smedley was also a Liberal politician, standing against Rab Butler in Saffron Walden in the general elections of 1950 and 1951. In all he contested eighteen Parliamentary elections. However he left the Liberal Party in opposition to their favourable attitude to British membership of the European Economic Community in 1962 to found the Keep Britain Out campaign. In 1979 he founded the Free Trade Liberal Party.
[edit] Pirate radio
In 1964, with Alan Crawford, Smedley helped to form the British company Project Atlanta, Limited that successfully launched Britain's second full-time offshore commercial pirate radio station called Radio Atlanta. The station used the ship that had once been the home of Radio Nord, broadcasting to Sweden. Smedley regarded this offshore transmitter as the last bastion of freedom if the country ever went Communist.
Radio Atlanta eventually merged with the Caroline Organization led by Irishman Ronan O'Rahilly and changed its name to Radio Caroline South. Smedley became the focus of international headlines when he shot and killed Reginald Calvert, manager of The Fortunes pop group and owner of rival offshore station Radio City. Smedley was acquitted of murder on the grounds of self defence.
He is the father of Charles Smedley and Emma Currie.
[edit] References
- Richard Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, 1931-1983 (Fontana, 1995).
