Big shout to Gerry Hectic for letting us know about the Shipping Forecast all-day special  on Radio 4 yesterday celebrating 100 years of said forecast. All the programmes are now up online on BBC Sounds and all very well worth a listen but here’s one we caught last night about the forecast’s theme tune “Sailing By” here.

A classic tune wrote by a man called Ronald Binge at a room at the end of his garage that was thick with cigarette/cigar/pipe smoke. More on Sailing By here.

And by the powers of the internet we learned there’s a reggae connection too. From Ronald Binge’s wikipedia page here: “Best known today is probably Elizabethan Serenade. A reggae version of the tune, Elizabethan Reggae, was performed by Boris Gardiner in 1970.” Look at his writing credit under the song title.