The Boat That Rocked: Meet Birmingham women who was a pirate DJ

Apr 19 2009 by Andrew Coleman, Sunday Mercury

A BIRMINGHAM singer’s hopes of becoming a top pirate radio DJ were sunk when the station she worked for closed down just three weeks after her first broadcast.

Prompted by the release of hit movie The Boat That Rocked, Jill Embury recalls how she became the first female DJ to front her own show – on the infamous Radio 390.

The station didn’t operate from a boat but from the former British Army Maunsell Towers, known at the Fort, located on the Red Sands sandbar in the Thames Estuary.

But Jill, who now lives in Kings Heath with husband Don, had made only three programmes when the station was forced off the air by the Government in 1967.

An injunction was granted by the UK courts to silence the station after allegations that it was broadcasting illegally within British territorial waters.

When the tide was in, the old network of defence towers was all at sea.