It’s 25 Years Since The Last Stonehenge Free Festival

Happy solstice, everyone! As an estimated 30,000 people descend on a field in Wiltshire and its ever-inscrutable ancient stones, I’d like, first of all, to pay tribute to John Michell, English mystic, iconoclast and provocateur, who passed away on April 24, aged 76 (see obituaries in the Fortean Times, the Guardian, the Times, the Independent, the Daily Telegraph and the New York Times).

I last saw John at Megalithomania, a conference in Glastonbury in 2006. He had been asked to talk about The Old Stones of Land’s End, his pioneering work on leylines in West Penwith, and arrived, spliff in hand, with a box of slides which he promptly dropped on the floor. When he came to do his talk, his memories of trawling around Cornish fields were punctuated by a quietly hilarious slideshow, as pictures emerged in random order, and often upside down. “Here’s some lads on a stone, smoking,” he said, as a slide popped up of some Breton boys on a standing stone in the late 19th century. “They look like they’re having fun, don’t they?”

Ever the iconoclast, John had been a stout defender of the right to gather at Stonehenge, and was appalled when the free festival (see below) was terminated with appalling brutality at the Battle of the Beanfield in 1985. He immediately published one of his Radical Traditionalist pamphlets, “Stonehenge, Its History, Meaning, Festival, Unlawful Management, Police Riot ’85 & Future Prospects,” in which he cut to the heart of the conflict between the State and Stonehenge’s many non-establishment admirers, stating:

Those who knew not of Stonehenge, who had never experienced its weird and lasting attraction, were astounded. What is this old pile of rocks which inspires such intensity of popular religious feeling and such vicious expressions of official jealousy?

Exactly five years ago, my first book, Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion was published, which told, for the first time, the full story of “how the celebrations at Stonehenge have brought together different aspects of British counter-culture to make the monument a ‘living temple’ and an icon of alternative Britain,” and in the acknowledgments, I wrote that John’s “multi-faceted mysticism hovers over the whole book like a guardian angel,” an appraisal that still strikes me as true.

This year’s solstice is one of many anniversaries, not just the fifth anniversary of the publication of Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion (which, I’m glad to say, is still in print and available to buy), but also the 35th anniversary of the first Stonehenge Free Festival, and the 25th anniversary of the last Stonehenge Free Festival, before the events of the Battle of the Beanfield, which are chronicled in The Battle of the Beanfield (also still available) — a book I edited and compiled in 2005, and recalled in this recent article for the Guardian (and here) — brought the people’s celebrations at Stonehenge to an end for 16 long and strange years, in which, every solstice, the temple and its environs resembled a war zone.

It is also, I’m glad to note, the tenth anniversary of the reopening of Stonehenge on the summer solstice, following a momentous House of Lords ruling in 1999, which prevented the government from establishing an exclusion zone around the temple, and so, to mark all these anniversaries, I’m reproducing below some excerpts from Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion that deal with that first free festival in 1974 (inspired, elliptically, by John Michell), and its last manifestation, as a riotous outpouring of dissent in the midst of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, in 1984.

We begin in 1973, when the organizer of the first Stonehenge Free Festival, a charismatic young man called Phil Russell, first enters the picture.

1974: Phil Russell and the first Stonehenge Free Festival

An orphan from a wealthy background, [Phil] was due to inherit land and property in Hertfordshire on his thirtieth birthday, but in the meantime was funded by a private allowance that left him free to pursue his own interests. In many ways, Phil was typical of the free festival agitators of the time — part acid prankster and part well-heeled dandy. In London, he fell in with a group called the Dwarves, “a kind of Notting Hill version of the Yippies in America: a joke-prankster group,” and adopted the name by which he became better known: Wally Hope. He took the name Wally from a popular festival cry (a kind of “Everyman” joke that arose when the crowd began echoing the name of a lost dog being summoned by his owner at the last Isle of Wight festival) and he had the word “Hope” embroidered on a shirt that “became his trademark: a riot of spectacular colour with the eye of Horus in the middle banked by a rainbow.”

Phil’s allowance also left him free to travel. He regularly visited America, where he sympathized with the plight of the Native Americans, Cyprus, his birthplace, and Ibiza, where he became entranced by the mythology of the sun. According to his friend Jeremy Ratter, who took the name Penny Rimbaud and who later co-founded the anarcho-punk collective Crass, it was at a well-known hippie café on the White Island that Phil first came up with the idea of a free festival at Stonehenge. He “wanted to claim back Stonehenge (a place that he regarded as sacred to the people and stolen by the government) and make it a site for free festivals, free music, free space, free mind.”

The two had met in the early 70s. Phil’s guardians lived near Jeremy’s commune in Essex, and one day Phil just turned up. Here the festival developed from its Mediterranean origins, filtered through his exposure to other cultures, his interest in the legends of King Arthur, and his central fascination with sun worship. It was at the commune, moreover, that he revealed aspects of himself that were significantly different from the other privileged individuals who had set up the festivals in Hyde Park and Glastonbury.

According to Jeremy, it was during the preparations for the first Stonehenge Free Festival that Phil performed miracles: “One day in our garden, it was early summer, he conjured up a snowstorm, huge white flakes falling amongst the daisies on the lawn. Another time he created a multi-rainbowed sky — it was as if he had cut up a rainbow and thrown the pieces into the air where they hung in strange random patterns. Looking back on it now it seems unbelievable but, all the same, I can remember both occasions vividly.” On another occasion, beating out rhythms with sticks on the dying embers of a fire, Jeremy was convinced that he and Phil were “speaking to each other ritually by ESP in an acid-religious ceremony without drugs.” It was after this experience that he allowed Phil to use the facilities of the commune to organize the first festival at Stonehenge.

The first Stonehenge Free Festival duly took place at the summer solstice in 1974, alongside a by-way just a few hundred yards to the west of the stones. Despite a leafleting campaign and promotion by Radio Caroline, it was a small gathering, numbering about 500 people at the most. The only music was provided by early synth pioneers Zorch, who set up stage facing the stones, and who had to compete with a wonky PA system.

It was obviously a slightly surreal affair. Tim Abbott, a friend of Russell’s and later a councillor in Wilton, recalled that “Rhonan O’Rahilly of Radio Caroline sat in his limousine suffering badly from hayfever and muttering about private television coverage of the proceedings being broadcast to Europe from an aircraft above the North Sea.” Nik Turner of Hawkwind, who stopped by for a few hours on the way back from Wales to London, seems to have been at a different event: “There were no bands, no PA, no stage. It was just a gathering of people to celebrate the solstice.”

Roger Hutchinson’s poster for the second Stonehenge Free Festival in 1975. © Roger Hutchinson.

Phil Russell’s fence-hopping antics may have had little impact if the festival had stopped soon after the solstice was over, but by this time he’d persuaded thirty people to stay on in the field beside the stone circle. They styled themselves “The Wallies of Wessex” and lived a makeshift, communal lifestyle in tents, a rickety polythene-covered geodesic dome and a small fluorescent tipi. Nigel Ayers, who visited at the time, said, “It was an open camp, inspired by a diversity of wild ideas, but with the common purpose of discovering the relevance of this ancient mysterious place by the physical experience of spending a lot of time there.”

The Wallies went to court in August, in the newspapers’ silly season, and the story was widely reported. They included in their number Sir Wally Raleigh and Wally Woof the Dog, they gave their address as “Fort Wally, c/o God, Jesus and Buddha, Garden of Allah, Stonehenge Monument, Salisbury, Wiltshire,” and they had a snappy motto: “Every Body is Wally, Every Day is Sun Day.” The fancy dress went down well too, with Phil appearing in the uniform of an officer of the Cypriot National Guard. When they lost the case, Phil told the press: “These legal arguments are like a cannon ball bouncing backwards and forwards in blancmange. We won, because we hold Stonehenge in our hearts. We are not squatters, we are men of God. We want to plant a Garden of Eden with apricots and cherries, where there will be guitars instead of guns and the sun will be our nuclear bomb.”

1984: the biggest free festival in British history

My first visit to the Stonehenge festival took place in 1983, and in Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion I described how “this seasonal settlement of impossibly weathered and wildly decorated tents, tipis, vans, buses and old army vehicles was little short of a revelation, an alternative state within Thatcher’s Britain that seemed to have rooted itself to the ancient sacred landscape with nonchalant ease.”

In The Battle of the Beanfield, I added, “I returned the following year, to discover, like so many others in their late teens and early twenties, that this edgy, exuberant, anarchic jamboree still provided a thrilling antidote to the grim reality of everyday life under the Tories.”

And this was how I described the 1984 festival in Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion:

Against [a] backdrop of concerted political activity, widespread social agitation and a deeper, darker undercurrent of anger and frustration that was to see riots breaking out across the inner cities once more, the Stonehenge Free Festival grew even larger in 1984. Despite the continuing problems of managing the unmanageable without any official leadership, conspicuous problems were tackled head-on. Heroin dealers were dealt with even more sharply than the year before, and a burnt-out car, dumped at the entrance, carried an explicit warning: “This was a smack dealer’s car.”

The main drag at the Stonehenge Free Festival, 1984. © Ian Oakley.

Overall, there were reasons for those involved in the organization of the festival to feel, as the Festival Zone website put it, that “the fun far outweighed the fear.” The unprecedented mingling of the tribes continued unabated, breaking down social barriers that were all too noticeable in the “real” world, and [festival veteran] John Pendragon tried to counter the drift towards chaos by establishing a mini-festival within the larger festival, a dealer-free zone with its own stage that sought to recreate the spirit of the early gatherings. He was also one of the founder members — along with the pagan George Firsoff — of “Robin’s Greenwood Gang,” another internal organization that was set up to counter the damage caused to the nearby woods through a process of guidance and education.

Musically, there was a more diverse line-up than ever before, and even the traditional headliners, Hawkwind, tried to top their performance of the year before (when they’d played a two-hour set at sunrise on solstice morning) with a conceptual performance — Earth Ritual — that was spread over two days.

Most spectacularly of all, on solstice morning the fences came down, the sun shone out in all its summer glory, and the Druids and the festival-goers were once more at the stones together. There were pagan weddings, children were blessed, there was nakedness, and all manner of other rituals were performed, from the profound to the impenetrable. For myself, the occupation of Stonehenge was an opportunity to appreciate for the first time the sheer scale of the monument and the skill of its construction, giving me a visceral rush of astonishment and admiration that has not left me to this day, despite the fact that, behind the scenes, the authorities responsible for the temple and its immediate environment — the government, English Heritage (a quango that took over management of the monument on 1 April 1984), the National Trust, local landowners and the police — were already working on plans that would deny access to the stones at the summer solstice for the overwhelming majority of people for another sixteen years.

Summer solstice in the stones, 1984. © Alan Lodge.

I wish everyone a peaceful and happy solstice. Have fun for John Michell, who knew more than most that it was not worth taking life too seriously. In an interview with the Observer, he said, “My pursuits are a joke in that the universe is a joke. One has to reflect the universe faithfully.”

Also see: Stonehenge and the summer solstice: past and present (June 2008), which has more photos.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

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