Rádio Clube Português (the Rua Sampaio e Pina studios)

Rádio Clube Português (RCP) grew in 1931 out of the Rádio Clube da Costa do Sol of Jorge Botelho Moniz, an Army officer who had taken part in the coup of 28 May 1926. The studios moved from Parede to Lisbon at the beginning of 1960.¹⁰

The operations plan of the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) made this station the voice of the Movement. At around 03:00 on 25 April 1974, a company of Light Infantry Battalion No. 5 (Caçadores 5) set out on foot from its barracks in Campolide to secure it.²³ A group of officers — Majors José da Costa Neves, Delfim Campos Moura and João Sacramento Gomes and Captains Artur Mendonça de Carvalho, José Correia Pombinho, José Santos Coelho, Nuno dos Santos Ferreira and Nuno dos Santos Silva — occupied the studios without incident,¹ and Captain Santos Coelho telephoned the Command Post: “MEXICO occupied without incident”.³

At 04:26, with the airport already occupied, the announcer on duty, Joaquim Furtado, read the MFA’s first communiqué, drafted by Major Vítor Alves. Major Costa Neves was supposed to read it, but Furtado, on learning what it was about, volunteered. The communiqué asked the population to stay calm and doctors to go to the hospitals.³ Then came the national anthem and military marches and, throughout the day, songs by censored songwriters — José Afonso, Adriano Correia de Oliveira, José Jorge Letria, Luís Cília, José Mário Branco.⁴

At 08:00, the government had the electricity and telephones cut off at the studios and at the Porto Alto antennas. Generators kept the broadcast going, and contact with the Command Post was kept up from a public telephone box near Rua Sampaio e Pina. Shortly after 13:00, a lieutenant colonel said that his son was picking up and recording the communications of the regime’s forces; the head of the station’s record library went to his house with a tape recorder, and RCP began putting those conversations on air, which showed the government’s disarray.³ At around 14:30, a communiqué reporting the objectives taken and the siege of Marcelo Caetano in the Carmo Barracks was read by a woman, Clarisse Guerra.³⁴ At 20:00, the station broadcast the MFA Proclamation, which announced a programme for “the restitution to the Portuguese People of the civic freedoms of which it has been deprived”.⁴

In the attempted coup of 11 March 1975, the Porto Alto transmitter station was attacked and RCP stopped broadcasting on medium wave from Lisbon, carrying on in FM and from Porto.⁶⁷ On 25 November 1975, it went off the air at 22:10.⁸