The state targeted people living on the road because it was anarchy in action and it was working
~ Neil Goodwin ~
Today marks the 40th anniversary of one of the darkest days in contemporary British history, when a convoy of 150 vehicles heading to the 1985 people’s free festival at Stonehenge was ambushed in a quiet corner of Wiltshire. Approximately 600 travellers were contained in a field for several hours, and then brutally attacked by about 1,300 riot police.
Traveller homes were systematically wrecked, most of the people present were assaulted, many with blows to the head, and arrested in the largest mass arrest in British legal history. One young mother carrying her baby was dragged out of her home by her hair. Some of the police, clearly intent on causing serious damage to both people and homes, were masked up to protect their anonymity. Many didn’t wear numbers. Traumatised children were taken into care, and in some cases held for a few days. Seven dogs were destroyed.
ITN were on the field and filmed what their journalist, Kim Sabido, would later describe in a piece to camera as “the worst police treatment of people that I’ve witnessed in my entire career as journalist”.
Observer journalist Nick Davies described an attack on one particular bus: “They just crawled all over that vehicle truncheons flailing, hitting anyone they could reach. It was very violent and very sickening. And it was at that point that my photographer, who was trying to take pictures of it, got arrested, and I myself got threatened and told to leave”.
The event became known as the Battle of the Beanfield, although it was more like a massacre, the Thatcher government’s final solution to the traveller issue. Like the miners, the travellers were portrayed as an ‘enemy within’, anathema to everything Thatcherism stood for. It was estimated that at the time that there were some 12,000 travellers living on the road throughout the UK. And the number of people preferring a bedsit on wheels than to live in a decaying inner city was steadily growing, taking advantage of the then-thriving free festival circuit.
Also like with the miners, Thatcher used an increasingly para-militarised police force to smash the Peace Convoy. Travellers in Yorkshire reported seeing a coachload of riot police heading to the picket line, holding up a sign saying ‘YOU’RE NEXT’. Before the Beanfield, people were given a taste of things to come at Nostell Priory festival in Wakefield, Yorkshire, in August 1984. Just a few miles down the road from Orgreave, the participants were assaulted, fitted up and held in custody, and their homes systematically wrecked.
Thatcher herself eventually said she was “only too delighted to do anything we can to make life difficult for such things as hippy convoys”.
As traveller Mo Lodge explains, “Stonehenge was just an excuse. The real reason was the threat to the State. The numbers of people at Stonehenge was doubling every year for four years. Well, that was a huge number of people that were suddenly flocking into buses or whatever and living on the road. It was anarchy in action and it was working, and it was seen to be working by so many people that they wanted to be a part of it”.
Five years later, 26 people sued the Wiltshire Police for damages at Winchester Crown Court, in what became known as the Beanfield Trial, the closest anyone came to a public inquiry. As film students we went down to cover it.
Everyone we would have hoped to have interviewed appeared at that trial, such as the Earl of Cardigan, who witnessed a heavily pregnant woman with “a silhouette like a zeppelin” being “clubbed with a truncheon”, and the ITN journalist Kim Sabido, who told the court that “the nastier more controversial shots that were taken” disappeared from the ITN library.
So, the Beanfield trial revealed every piece of video and photographic evidence we might need, the official police report, and their radio log, and it would all go into the final documentary ‘Operation Solstice’, broadcast by Channel 4 in November 1991, despite the police’s best efforts to get it pulled. We had had to condense 20 plus hours of rushes down to a meagre 26-minute slot.
We ended up with this sizeable archive, mostly unseen, on an array of now defunct video formats. Each potentially threatened by dust, heat and moisture. And it had lain for 33 summers and winters in a mum’s loft—until now.
I have spent the past four months going through and editing the interviews, conducted just five or six years after the Beanfield, so some very fresh recollections. Bringing out the best of each story, really getting under the skin of what happened and why and placing it all on a website in time for the 40th anniversary. Also, with access to all the rushes again, re-editing ‘Operation Solstice’, so that it explains and contains a lot more.
We had learnt that Dale Vince, the CEO of Ecotricity, social commentator, and one-time backer of Just Stop Oil, was on the Beanfield. We asked him to help fund the saving of this archive, which he did, and he also agreed to do an interview. He had been a motorcycle outrider on the trip down to Stonehenge, passing messages up and down the line, discovering the police’s sneaky roadblock trap up ahead, for which he got a mention in the police radio log, “we have a motorcycle outrider now approaching, if he gets anywhere near our ground unit they suggest they may attempt to take him out”.
One of the lasting legacies of June 1st, and subsequent police operations surrounding travellers and the summer solstice, would be to build an increasingly authoritarian police state. In 1986, ushered in on a wave of news managed moral panic, it was the Public Order Act. Supposedly aimed at a minority, as with every legal knee jerk since, it had binding implications for everyone. In one section, it limited the number of vehicles that could park up together to twelve. Because they really didn’t like people meeting up. This would soon become six thanks to the Criminal Justice Act 1994, another notch tighter, only this time with two new convenient minorities in the cross-hairs: ravers and road protestors. More recently, anti-protest laws that end up controlling everybody, not only Just Stop Oil. None of these increasingly draconian police powers get repealed, you notice. They just get built upon.
A gathering at the site itself (Parkhouse Roundabout, Wiltshire) takes place pretty much every year, where someone has placed on one of the fence posts a commemorative plaque. It says, ‘This marks the spot of THE BATTLE OF THE BEANFIELD June 1st 1985’. With the added inscription, ‘You can’t kill the spirit.’
And despite their best efforts, after four decades, they clearly still haven’t, with hundreds of people now taking up van life in lay-bys, car parks and in fields all over the country. Because no matter how hard they push down with that thumb, the spirit, like water, will always find a way.
Top photo: Ben Gibson