Roy’s station, “Radio Essex”, and others like it, were known affectionately by the media as “Pirate” radio stations, and were much loved by the British public, as they supplied everything that the BBC did not at the time Pop music and amusing presenters. The theory behind this location was an attempt to bypass the draconian broadcasting restrictions of the time, which permitted little more than formal broadcasting by the BBC. In the early 60’s, Roy Bates, a Major in the British army, established a radio station, situated offshore on an abandoned ex naval fort named “Knock John”. From a legal point of view, it therefore constituted extra-national territory.
This resulted in the portentous uniqueness of the Roughs Tower fortress, situated at the high seas, it had been deserted and abandoned, ‘res derelict’ and ‘terra nullis’. Save the aforementioned fortress, the other forts outside UK international limits were subsequently demolished. None of them were ever manned by the United Kingdom again, leaving the forts deserted to nature and the elements, thus abandoning their sovereignty. Following WWII, the naval personnel and marines were withdrawn from all of these forts by the British Admiralty. To put it briefly, this island was illegally placed in the international waters of the North Sea, but such restrictions were overlooked in a time of war. In contrast to the original plan to locate the tower within the sovereign territory of Great Britain this fortress was situated at a distance of approximately 7 nautical miles from the coast, which is more than double the then internationally accepted 3 mile range of territorial waters.
One of these forts, consisting of concrete and steel construction, was the now famous Roughs Tower, situated in the North Sea. They were situated along the east coast of England, on the edge of British territorial waters. These sea forts housed enough troops to man and maintain anti-aircraft weaponry designed to shoot down German aircraft and missiles. Some of these forts were built illegally in international waters. During the Second World War, the British government built several Fortress islands in the North Sea to defend its coasts from German invaders.
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