Video: The Battle of the Beanfield, Free Festivals and Traveller History with Andy Worthington on Bristol Community Radio

Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist.

 

Last week I was in Bristol for a screening of ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, the new documentary film about the cynical destruction of council estates, and residents’ brave resistance to the destruction of their homes, which I narrate. The screening was at the People’s Republic of Stoke Croft, a pioneering community space in a once-neglected area of Bristol that has now started to be devoured by the insatiable profiteers of the “regeneration” industry. My article about the screening is here, and a brief report about the screening is here, and while I was there I was also interviewed by Tony Gosling for Bristol Community Radio, which is based in the PRSC complex.

Tony and I have known each other for many years, through a shared interest in Britain’s counter-culture, and it was great to take part in his politics show for the station as the author of two very relevant books, Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. Although we discussed the film, that interview has not yet been broadcast, because Tony’s primary focus was on discussing the traveller community of the 1970s and 80s, the free festival scene, focused particularly on Stonehenge and Glastonbury, and the Battle of the Beanfield, on June 1, 1985, when, with Margaret Thatcher’s blessing, 1,400 police from six counties and the MoD violently decommissioned the convoy of vehicles — containing men, women and children — that was en route to Stonehenge to establish what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival.

To discuss the above, Tony had also contacted Sean, a veteran traveller, who still lives in a vehicle, and still upholds the DiY values of that time. We had a wonderful discussion over 40 minutes, which Tony has put on YouTube, illustrated with traveller photos by Alan Lodge, and which I’ve cross-posted below.

The discussion began with Sean, a sprightly and articulate 66-year old mechanic (whose skills very invaluable to the travelling community) talking about life on the road in the 70s and 80s (prior to the Beanfield), the reasons people took to the road (because of Margaret Thatcher’s destruction of the economy), and what life was like travelling in small convoys, and constantly being harried by the police.

I joined in to discuss specific aspects of this history, notably my recollections of the mass discontent that led to the traveller and free festival scenes exploding the the 1980s, and, with Sean, discussing the important chain of events that ultimately led to the Beanfield, beginning with the extreme police violence at Nostell Priory, a festival in Yorkshire in the summer of 1984, when, as Sean remembers, one particularly violent act involved a pregnant woman being assaulted. Crucially, Nostell Priory took place just after the police violence at Orgreave, as part of the Miner’s Strike, and while it remains apparent that a full investigation into Orgreave should take place, its remit should also include an investigations of what happened at Nostell Priory, and everything that followed, up to and including the Beanfield. For first-hand analysis, see this chapter from The Battle of the Beanfield, featuring an interview with Phil Shakesby, aka Phil the Beer, who, sadly, died in 2010.

After Nostell Priory, the police harried the convoy back to southern England. Some joined a peace camp outside RAF Molesworth, in Cambridgeshire, which was meant to be the second cruise missile base after Greenham Common. That camp, the Rainbow Village, was evicted in February 1985 in the largest peacetime mobilisation of troops in modern British history, symbolically led by defence secretary Michael Heseltine, and from then on those who were intending to set up the Stonehenge festival were constantly harassed, on the basis of an injunction preventing 84 named individuals from going anywhere near Stonehenge, leading, eventually, to the brutal events of the Beanfield.

Is the UK on the verge of a second traveller revolution?

It is always worthwhile to discuss this history, because it not only shines a light on serious crimes committed by the state, and on how the establishment has no patience whatsoever with upstarts asking questions about land ownership and land reform, but also reminds us how even comparatively recent history can seem ancient, as we continue to endure the hugely materialistic times we are currently living in, overlaid with a cynical “age of fear”, opportunistically introduced after the 9/11 attacks, that has done away with any notion that living in Britain involves any kind of meaningful “freedom.”

Of more contemporary relevance, revisiting the travellers’ movement of the 70s and 80s also led to a discussion of whether the time is ripe for a second traveller revolution, a valid question given that the circumstances that prompted the first — work problems and housing need, essentially — are as pressingly relevant now as they were then. We may not have 3m unemployed in quite the same stark manner as in the Thatcher years, but unemployment has been carefully hidden through decades of bureaucratic subterfuge, and for those who are in work the perilous reality for many is that they are part of the rise of the precariat — plagued by zero hours contracts, and a stunning absence of anything well-paid and protected.

On the housing front, the situation is far worse than it was in the 70s and 80s, as unfettered greed has been dominant for the last 20 years, sending house prices spiralling out of control, and also leading to a hideously overpriced rental market, a situation exacerbated by the savage decline in social housing over the same time period.

Nowadays, of course, it’s much harder than it was 30 or 40 years ago to simply buy an old vehicle and take to the road, but the impetus is certainly there. Figures are heard to come by, and the government likes it that way, but above and beyond the horrendous rough sleeping figures and the estimates of vast numbers of sofa surfers, stories emerge regularly of working people living in their cars and vans, and anyone who has paid attention while walking or cycling around cities will have found people living in every liminal space imaginable — homeless people in parks, and others living in tents, in underpasses, or in scraps of generally unmonitored woodland, for example, and in January this year rural homelessness also emerged as a topic crying out for further investigation.

In addition, although the Tories cynically and brutally outlawed domestic squatting in 2012, huge numbers of empty commercial premises are now squatted. Then there are people living in containers, and in caravans — a whole under-explored area in which, I strongly suspect, the traditional efforts to prevent people living in caravans all year round are falling away spectacularly, as are the supposed restrictions on people living in tents. During my West Country holiday that preceded my Bristol visit, it was common to find seasonal workers living for the whole summer season in tents.

I can’t see any immediate way that there could be a second traveller revolution, but I could certainly see some kind of situation in which the marginalised in modern society, who are more numerous than anyone in authority wants to acknowledge , could start to become more organised, and to cause the establishment the same kind of headaches that were widespread from the 70s to the 90s, and which were only stifled by the soporific New Labour project, and the excuse for the suppression of civil liberties that was provided by the 9/11 attacks.

The time is ripe for some kind of housing-based insurgency, given the establishment’s comprehensive failure to do anything to stem the chronic flow of wealth from the poor to the rich, which continues to make life harder, with every passing year, for those in society who aren’t wealthy. It is something of miracle that major civil unrest hasn’t already happened.

Note: Also see here for the show, which is also available as an MP3 here, and which, after the section on travellers, also featured an interview with the inspiring activists Grandparents for a Safe Earth.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.