Voice of Peace - History

History

The aim of the Voice of Peace, rumoured to have been established with the financial aid of ex-Beatle John Lennon, was to communicate a message of peaceful co-existence to the volatile Middle East. The station's output was a popular music format presented by a team of professional, mostly British, DJs broadcasting live from the ship.

The main on-air studio consisted of a Gates Diplomat mixer, Technics SL-1200 turntables, Sony CD Players, and Gates NAB cartridge machines, on which the jingles and commercials were played. The second studio, used for production, had a Gates turntable, reel-to-reel tape recorders, and an NAB cartridge recording unit.

The Voice of Peace was Israel's first offshore pop station and the first commercially-funded private broadcast operation. The station’s use of catchy American PAMS, CPMG, JAM, and TM Productions jingles, English-speaking DJs, and playlist of Top 40 hits attracted such big-name sponsors as TWA and Coca Cola. Initially, the station transmitted on 1539 AM and in 1980 added a second signal at 100.0 FM.

The original AM/MW transmitter was installed in New York prior to 1972 and consisted of two 25,000-watt Collins units and a Collins combiner, giving the station a potential 50 kW AM signal. The MW signal was broadcast from a centre-fed horizontal antenna slung between the fore and aft masts, a design similar to those used by Radio Veronica and later Laser 558. The station normally ran at 35 kW until late 1976, when it was decided to operate just one transmitter at a time, keeping the other in reserve. In 1985, Keith York's repair of the combiner enabled the two Collins units to be run together again, resulting in a large mailbag from Turkey, Crete, Greece, and Cyprus, areas the Voice of Peace message hadn't reached for nine years. After these AM transmitters became unserviceable, a Canadian Nautel 10 kW AM transmitter was installed.

The 20 kW FM transmitter installed in Israel was manufactured by Harris. This, combined with the antenna array, delivered around 80 kW ERP (Effective Radiated Power) of stereo to the region. A second 20 kW Harris FM transmitter was also installed on board the peace ship.

During the station's heyday, many notable personalities were involved in broadcasting on the station. John Lennon, The Carpenters, Johnny Mathis, and many other celebrities recorded messages of peace which were transmitted from the ship. John and Yoko Lennon signed hundreds of peace posters, held on the ship, which Abie Nathan could sell to raise revenue for the station should times become hard. Thanks to Tavas Advertising, this situation never developed and due to their hard work, the peace ship was able to function into the early 1980s on Tavas-generated revenue pre-May 1976.

During the mid-1970s, the station boasted more than 20 million listeners stretching from the Middle East to southern Europe and Turkey due to the format used by the professional broadcast team drawn from Britain and Australia and led by Keith Ashton. The VoP had several (mostly short-lived) rival offshore radio (and even television) stations during its time on air. The best known of these was the right-wing station Arutz Sheva (Channel 7).

Many notable broadcasters spent time as presenters with the Voice of Peace, including Tony Allan, Bob Noakes, Ken Dickin, Phil Brice, Richard West (now using real name Richard Harding on Island FM), Steve Gordon, Richard Wood, Don Stevens, Alan Roberts, and Crispian St. John, who sailed through the Suez Canal on board with Abie Nathan in early 1977; Gavin McCoy, Tony Lyman (as Vince Mould), Malcolm Barry, Guy Starkey, Tom Hardy, Norman Lloyd, Richard Jackson, Keith York, Kas Collins, Nathan Morley, Mark Hurrell, Steve Marshall, Chris Pearson,Keith Lewis, Steve Silby, Rob Charles, Dave Shearer, Doug Wood, Digby Taylor, Tony Mandell, Nigel Harris, Mike Kerslake (Davis/Coconut), Cliff Walker, Alex Skinner, Andrew Yeates, Neil Turnbull, Nigel Grover, John Macdonald, Steve Rowney (AKA Carlos the Chicken), and Grant Benson. Johnny Lewis appeared on the VoP in the early 1980s as Johnny Moss. Steve Greenberg, who would go on to become a Grammy- winning producer and president of Columbia Records, was another early-1980s broadcaster aboard the ship. Kenny Page is acknowledged as being one of the station's longest-serving presenters, having worked on board from the 1970s to the 1990s. Paul Rogers (ex-Radio Elenore, Liverpool) spent one year on board from 1984–1985, before moving on to become Dave Collins on Radio Caroline, and is currently still working on radio in the UK. Writer/Producer Richard Doran Ticho was a DJ on the Voice of Peace in 1985, and went on to purchase the domain name http://www.VoiceOfPeace.com in the early 1993, around the time the peace ship was scuttled. The site is designed to educated and entertain, just like Abie's Voice of Peace.

A reunion in Amsterdam, Radio Day 2006, celebrated the launch of a new book by Hans Knot of station memories on November 4, 2006, and was attended by many media outlets, including Channel Two Israel, which interviewed Don Stevens, Chris Pearson, and Steve Silby, and broadcast the newsreel worldwide. This resulted in Don Stevens making contact with his long-lost child Sarit, whom he'd prayed for every day, and he was overwhelmed to discover he was part of a three-child family.