Joys and Agonies Past: 40 Years Since the Last Stonehenge Free Festival; 39 Years Since the Battle of the Beanfield

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40 years ago, a colourful, kaleidoscopic array of old second-hand vehicles — trucks, coaches, buses, even old military vehicles — began arriving in the fields opposite Stonehenge, the ancient stone sun temple on Salisbury Plain, for what would be the last huge, unlicensed, unpoliced, weeks-long temporary autonomous zone to root itself to the earth of ancient Albion.

The vehicles that arrived were the vanguard of the eleventh annual Stonehenge Free Festival, a month-long anarchic happening, which began in June 1974 with a handful of playful mystics, but had grown significantly in its latter years, as ever-increasing numbers of young refugees from Margaret Thatcher’s decimation of the economy joined the political hippies of an earlier generation, on the road, and on a circuit of free festivals whose biggest manifestation was at Stonehenge, to rock out, to consume vast amounts of drugs, and to — in some cases — visit the stones for invented pagan rituals on the morning of the summer solstice.

It was a demonstration that, more or less, the anti-materialistic US counter-culture of 1960s America, which had spread to the small towns and suburbia of Britain in the 1970s, could create a low-impact nomadic lifestyle, in convoys that travelled across England and Wales from May to September, and that, at Stonehenge, involved a gathering of the tribes, joined by tens of thousands of other participants, who arrived in cars and camper vans, or who came by train to Salisbury, set up tents and stayed for days or for long weekends to soak up the acid rock, punk and reggae, and the rebel atmosphere.

Unimaginable now, the festival was not without its problems — particularly, in that last year, relating to heroin dealers and the aggressive presence of Hell’s Angels — but it’s unarguable that its crime rate was significantly less than that of any booze-fuelled small town of a comparable size over an average weekend.

Much of the darkness, too, came from the jarring psychic realities of living in Thatcher’s Britain, as she literally waged war on jobs, the working class, the welfare state and traditional notions of solidarity, reshaping Britain as a deregulated, privatised basket case of selfish consumers, revelling in their own atomised materialistic appetites, and increasingly hostile to those who refused to conform. “There is no such thing as society”, as she once triumphantly declared.

I had first visited the Stonehenge Free Festival in 1983, spending a day with friends — if you must know, a future ambassador, a future film producer, and, our conduit, a charismatic but troubled establishment iconoclast who is no longer with us — in a delightful magic mushroom haze, but by 1984 the persistent undercurrent of British state violence in Northern Ireland had spread to the British mainland, as Thatcher declared the striking miners “the enemy within”, and paramilitarised the police’s response to them.

The “enemies within”

Just three days before the solstice in 1984, at what has become known as the Battle of Orgreave, which took place near a coking plant in Rotherham, in South Yorkshire, Thatcher’s paramilitarised police violently attacked striking miners in what has been described as “a defining and ghastly moment” that “changed, forever, the conduct of industrial relations and how this country functions as an economy and as a democracy”. 71 miners were charged with riot, which, at the time, was punishable by life imprisonment, although their trials collapsed when the police evidence was deemed “unreliable.” Efforts to hold the police accountable, however, have been persistently thwarted in the decades since.

Personally, I found it hard to maintain much optimism at that time, when, to recall just one incident, I overheard two old ladies in Beverley Minster, in the ancient market town near my family’s home in Hull, declare that Arthur Scargill, the miners’ leader, was “worse than Hitler.”

Almost entirely unnoticed at the time, the police responsible for the violence at Orgreave turned their attention, just a month later, to the next “enemy within” identified by Thatcher — the ‘Peace Convoy’ travellers who set up a free festival outside the Nostell Priory music festival — a paid festival — near Wakefield, and where riot police, as I described it in my book The Battle of the Beanfield, “raided the site at dawn, ransacking vehicles and arresting the majority of the travellers — 360 people in total — with a savagery that had not been seen since the last Windsor Free Festival in 1974” (the Windsor festivals, in the Queen’s backyard, took place from 1972 to 1974).

Afterwards, some of the survivors made their way to RAF Molesworth in Cambridgeshire, which, as I described it in my book, was “a disused World War II airbase that had been designated as the second Cruise missile base after Greenham Common [home of the celebrated Women’s Peace Camp], where they joined peace protestors, other travellers and members of various Green organisations to become the Rainbow Village Peace Camp. In many ways, Molesworth, which swiftly became a rooted settlement, was the epitome of the free festival-protest fusion, cutting across class and social divides and reflecting many of the developments — in feminism, activism and environmental awareness — that had been transforming alternative society since the largely middle class — and often patriarchal — revolutions of the late sixties and early seventies.”

However, the Rainbow Village was finally evicted in February 1985 by the largest peacetime mobilisation of troops in the UK, led by then-defence secretary Michael Heseltine, and, as I described it, “The convoy [then] shifted uneasily around the country for the next few months, persistently harassed by the police and regularly monitored by planes and helicopters. In April they were presented with an injunction, naming 83 individuals who supposedly made up the leadership of the convoy, which was designed to prevent them from going to Stonehenge.”

The Battle of the Beanfield

Ignoring the injunction, on June 1, 1985 — 39 years ago today — after groups of travellers from around the country had stopped overnight in Savernake Forest near Marlborough, 140 vehicles set off for Stonehenge in the hope of setting up the 12th free festival. As I noted, “The atmosphere, as described by many eye-witnesses, was buoyant and optimistic. It remains apparent, however — especially in light of the persecution of the previous nine months — that behind this façade lurked generally unvoiced fears.”

Those fears came heartbreakingly true when the vehicles were ambushed and set upon with violence, as police smashed windows and dragged people out through broken glass, and those who had not yet been attacked escaped by driving into a nearly field — the beanfield — where, after a tense stand-off lasting many hours, they were set upon and “decommissioned” with appalling brutality by 1,400 paramilitarised police from six counties and the MoD.

Violently assaulted — in attacks of such violence that they shock the conscience even now — 537 travellers were arrested, their vehicles destroyed and in some cases burned, their children taken into care, and their dogs killed. As Nick Davies of the Observer described it, at the height of the violence, pregnant women were clubbed with truncheons, as were those holding babies. Davies wrote of the police, “They were like flies around rotten meat, and there was no question of trying to make a lawful arrest. They crawled all over, truncheons flailing, hitting anybody they could reach. It was extremely violent and very sickening.”

Deeply traumatised, much of the travelling community never recovered from the shattering violence of the Beanfield, while the only TV reporter on the scene, ITN News’ Kim Sabido, mysteriously found his career curtailed, just as all the press photos also mysteriously disappeared, along with ITN’s footage in which a clearly shaken Sabido, as the violence still swirled around him, said to camera, “What we — the ITN camera crew and myself as a reporter — have seen in the last 30 minutes here in this field has been some of the most brutal police treatment of people that I’ve witnessed in my entire career as a journalist. The number of people who have been hit by policemen, who have been clubbed whilst holding babies in their arms in coaches around this field, is yet to be counted.”

In February 1991, a civil court judgement awarded 21 of the travellers £24,000 in damages for false imprisonment, damage to property and wrongful arrest, but they received nothing, as all the damages were swallowed up by their legal bill, because the judge neglected to award them legal costs.

As with Orgreave, no official inquiry has ever been held into the events of June 1, 1985, despite the evident reality that it was the largest-scale, and most vicious police assault on unarmed civilians in modern British history.

The impact of the Beanfield

The impact of the Beanfield, though now long gone in time, is still felt today, although in ways that many people don’t even realize. While continuing to actively persecute travellers on the ground in the years that followed, the Thatcher government also pursued them through legislation, passing the Public Order Act of 1986, in which, as I explained in an article three years ago, after many years in which “the assertion of a claimed right to gather freely in significant numbers without prior permission … had often been tolerated by the authorities”, the aftermath of the Beanfield “marked a noticeably authoritarian shift in the politics of dissent.”

As I noted in an article last year, “In dealing with ‘public assemblies’, the Act gave the police the power to restrict ‘an assembly of 20 or more persons in a public place which is wholly or partly open to the air’, if they ‘reasonably believe[d]’ that it ‘may result in serious public disorder, serious damage to property or serious disruption to the life of the community.’”

As I added, “The Act also took aim at Gypsies and Travellers (and at free festivals), via Section 39, which stated that, if the police ‘reasonably believe[d] that two or more persons have entered land as trespassers and are present there with the common purpose of residing there for any period’, that ‘reasonable steps have been taken by or on behalf of the occupier to ask them to leave’, and that either damage or threats have been undertaken by the trespassers, or that they ‘have between them brought twelve or more vehicles on to the land’, they can be ‘direct[ed] … to leave the land.’”

However, despite Thatcher’s strenuous efforts to suppress dissent, the next ten years were a riot of creative opposition to her vision of a dull corporate Britain in which only the rich were allowed to misbehave, and no one was supposed to be allowed to challenge whatever the government pretended was “progress.”

Firstly, a new music scene — rave music, or Acid House — emerged, accompanied by a new drug, ecstasy, and the youth erupted in vast unlicensed raves that no one had foreseen, and which, eventually, through a crossover with the surviving free festival scene, led to the final vast unlicensed temporary autonomous zone — a weekend-long gathering of the tribes on Castlemorton Common in Gloucestershire on the Whitsun Bank Holiday weekend in May 1992.

Predictably, this led to another punitive civil liberties clampdown via the Criminal Justice Act of 1994, which I described as follows in The Battle of the Beanfield:

One of the most notorious aspects of the Criminal Justice [Act] was that it specifically targeted the ‘repetitive beats’ of the sound systems [‘sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’], and was aimed at further limiting gatherings of travellers and the free party scene by reducing the numbers of vehicles which could come together in one place from 12 to six. In many ways, however, these were amongst the [Act’s] milder repressive measures. Also included were criminal sanctions against assembly — specifically through ‘trespassory assembly’, an amendment of the Public Order Act whereby the police were enabled to ban groups of 20 or more meeting in a particular area if they feared ‘serious disruption to the life of the community’, even if the meeting was non-obstructive and non-violent — and ‘aggravated trespass’, which fulfilled the right-wing dream of transforming trespass from a civil to a criminal concern.

As I also explained:

Most savagely of all, the Act repealed the 1968 Caravan Sites Act, which, by removing the obligation on local authorities to provide sites for Gypsies — ‘persons of nomad habit of life, whatever their race or origin’ — finally criminalised the entire way of life of Gypsies and travellers, with baleful effects that are still being felt to this day.

However, dissent was also breaking out elsewhere. Forbidden from travelling freely, environmentally-focused traveller activists took it upon themselves to protect the sacred earth of Albion from desecration by resisting road and motorway expansion plans, living in trees and tunnels, and locking onto construction equipment in a series of battles from 1992 to 1996, which, although they were almost all lost, led the government to drastically scale down its future road expansion plans.

In the cities, Reclaim the Streets began shutting down and taking over main roads, reclaiming them from the polluting, anti-social tyranny of car culture, and, by the end of the ‘90s, a vast, planet-wide anti-globalization movement emerged to challenge every aspect of the neoliberal ideology that had been implemented in the ‘80s — including the power of banks and corporations, the neglected significance climate change and increasing societal repression.

21st century dissent

Despite efforts to kill the movement — literally, through the killing of protestors by police in various locations — and the huge distraction and civil liberties repression of the post-9/11 “war on terror”, dissent and unrest continued, via the Occupy movement in 2011, and, more recently, via protests by people of colour against police repression (and, in the US, an unchallenged regime of murders by the police) and the whitewashing of colonial history, and, in 2018-19, via vast protests against the complicity of government, banks and corporations in climate collapse, led by the oil, gas and coal companies.

Climate collapse is, without doubt, the gravest threat to humanity that has ever existed, and yet one which is so daunting, so existentially exhausting, and so cynically and sweepingly opposed by those profiting from it, that it hasn’t yet led to what is clearly required — a global people’s revolution.

Over the last eight months, another horror — Israel’s blatant genocide of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip — has revived protest on a scale not seen since the protests against the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, and with good reason. Fully backed by western governments — most notably, the US, the UK and Germany — Israel is not only engaging in the gut-wrenching slaughter of an entire civilian population, and proudly, violently and gleefully celebrating it, it is also seeking to clamp down on all criticism of its actions, via the politicians it has bought, or who cling to Israel because they enjoy its reawakening of the worst excesses of their own glory days of colonial slaughter, with alarming repercussions for what remains of legal protest and dissent in an ever more alarming and authoritarian west.

In response to this proliferation of protest, western governments have increasingly enacted ever more punitive legislation to try to suppress protest entirely, although it’s apparent to anyone with a functioning brain that it’s a losing battle.

Anti-colonialism is here to stay, genocide is always evil, and will be resisted by those who have not lost touch with their fundamental humanity, and who still exist in significant numbers, and, when it comes to climate collapse, it is absurd to expect that arrests and sometimes pliant courts can stop a movement that is responding not to something abstract, but to the reality that catastrophic climate collapse is already happening, quicker and more savagely than even most climate experts expected, and that notions that we have until 2030 to act — which were common just five years ago — have been overtaken by events to such an extent that it is now reasonable to assume that half the planet will be unliveable by 2030.

The corruption of music and of festival culture

Compared to all of the above, the loss of the free festival culture may seem largely insignificant, and in some ways that’s undoubtedly true, as it’s more important that people get together in significant numbers to challenge chronic injustice and the collapse of a liveable planet than it is for them to gather freely just to listen to some music.

However, the corporate takeover of festivals, and of the music industry in general, remains deeply troubling, as the Australian commentator and political analyst Caitlin Johnstone recently explained in an article entitled, ‘Why Celebrities Aren’t Speaking Up About Gaza’ (reposted on Consortium News as ‘The Silence of the Artists’). In the article, she noted how, for the last eight months, since Israel’s genocide in Gaza began, “people have been expressing frustration and confusion about the reluctance of celebrities to use their immense platforms to speak out against the US-backed slaughter in Gaza.”

As she explained, however, “it’s not really a mystery why this happens: celebrities are reluctant to criticize the US-centralized empire because they benefit from it directly. It’s actually a very important aspect of imperial narrative-control how all of our society’s largest and most influential voices are intimately dependent on the political status quo upon which the empire is built. Fame and fortune come as a result of being elevated by the wealthy owners of media production platforms like film studios, record labels, TV and news media, and those extremely wealthy people have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo upon which their wealth is premised.”

Personally, I also think fans need to look hard in the mirror and ask themselves why they slavishly devote themselves to egomaniacal musicians whose interest in anyone but themselves is often vanishingly small, but then I’ve always taken to heart a line of Bob Dylan’s, “You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you”, as a reason for not idolizing any artist, including Dylan himself.

Further explaining the emptiness of so much mainstream culture today, Johnstone also asked, “How much depth and profundity can you express if you’re compartmentalizing away from reality like that? How authentic and meaningful can your art be while you are duty bound to help preserve the status quo of a mind-controlled dystopia where everything is fraudulent and meaningless?”

As she added, “We are ruled by weird, phony freaks in Washington and Virginia who collaborate with weird, phony freaks at the top of the corporate world, and their rule is enforced by weird, phony freaks in New York and Los Angeles who use their celebrity status to help create an artificial mainstream culture that is mindless, heartless, soulless, and completely uninterested in the emergence of a healthy world.”

Rise up!

Everywhere we look, the forces that destroyed the Stonehenge Free Festival at the Battle of the Beanfield have remorselessly continued to try to suppress all dissent. They’ve been remarkably successful in many ways, but only by creating an atomised, empty world of mindless consumers of all that is irrelevant and unchallenging.

All of this is doomed, as anyone who remains awake knows from the ever-shortening ticking of the climate time bomb, and this time, drawing on the joys and agonies of the endless struggle of those who are awake — ‘woke’ — against those who are not, the alienation, the doubt and the discontent need to be awakened in a blaze of righteous anger that refuses any longer to self-suppress and to be silenced, and that begins to reclaim the planet from those whose depravity and boundless greed will, otherwise, kill us all.

This has never been a game, but right now it’s never been more important to embrace the struggle, and to fight for humanity and the planet as though our lives depend on it, because that is exactly what this struggle is: the struggle for life against a well-armed death cult.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), 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 (see the ongoing 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 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 you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the 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 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

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