The 41st Anniversary of the Battle of the Beanfield: Still No Accountability for a Monstrous Crime of State Violence

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Somewhere south of Savernake Forest, and just to the north of the A303, in Wiltshire, is a crime scene that has never been examined by the British authorities.

It was in a field here that, 41 years ago today, on June 1, 1985, the British state undertook the most savage assault on unarmed civilians in modern British history.

This has become known as the Battle of the Beanfield, although, in reality, it was a one-sided rout of heartbreaking brutality, as riot police from six counties cornered a vastly-outnumbered convoy of vehicles seeking to make their way to establish what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival, in fields around the ancient sun temple on Salisbury Plain, and “decommissioned” them with extreme violence, brutally assaulting the men and women of the convoy, terrorizing their children, destroying their live-in vehicles, and making 537 arrests in total.

The events of that day dealt a crippling blow to a growing counter-cultural movement of modern-day nomads, known as the new travellers, or new age travellers, who travelled around the country in old coaches, buses, vans, trucks and even decommissioned military vehicles.

Many of the travellers took part in a loose network of free festivals at rural locations, mostly in southern England and Wales, which ran from May to September, and whose focal point, in the month of June, was Stonehenge, the Neolithic and Bronze Age sun temple, and one of the wonders of the ancient world.

While coveted by the state and by the archeological community, Stonehenge had also long been a focus for a colourful array of outsiders, from the Druidic revivalists of the early 20th century, to the students and beatniks who partied there in the 1950s and ‘60s, and, eventually, to the anarchists, mystics and political agitators — generally described, with sweeping imprecision, as “hippies” — who first held a free festival in the fields around the ancient temple in the summer of 1974.

Slowly, but inexorably, the Stonehenge Free Festival grew in the decade that followed to become, by 1984, an autonomous settlement, the size of a small town, where acid rock and punk rock collided in a druggy haze, and where, on the morning of the summer solstice, the still-existent Druidic revivalists continued their rituals in proximity to the counter-culture’s own midsummer celebrations.

1984: Margaret Thatcher’s “enemies within”

The 1984 festival took place against a backdrop of increasing darkness and oppression in the UK. Margaret Thatcher, elected as Prime Minister in 1979, ironically contributed enormously to the growth of the new traveller movement, through the economic carnage she unleashed, which saw unemployment reaching unprecedented heights in the early 1980s, as she took an axe to traditional manufacturing communities. The lack of prospects encouraged untold numbers of young people to take to the road in response.

Thatcher also encouraged dissent through her close association with Ronald Reagan, the US president whose election in 1980 cemented a reaction, in both the US and the UK, to what these two leaders perceived as the permissiveness and anti-capitalist dissent of the 1970s. When she agreed to host US Cruise missiles — nuclear weapons — at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire, she enraged a generation of politicised women who set up a long-running Women’s Peace Camp in response, to protest and disrupt the complicity of the UK in the US’s dangerous, nuclear-powered military expansion.

Travellers from the free festival circuit, describing themselves as the “Peace Convoy”, visited Greenham Common to show solidarity with the Greenham women in the camp’s early years, and were also involved with the Molesworth Peace Camp, at the site of the second proposed Cruise missile base, in Cambridgeshire, which also involved Quakers, Christians and environmental activists.

By 1984, the country was more bitterly divided than ever before, as Thatcher co-opted the police as a politicized paramilitary force in the Miners’ Strike, using them against striking coal miners, who she described as “the enemy within.” While the 1984 festival was taking place, the police responded with startling violence to a picket at the Orgreave coking plant in South Yorkshire on June 18, immortalized as the Battle of Orgreave, and, just over a month later, after the Stonehenge festival had moved on, pursuing travellers — as a second “enemy within” — at a festival in Nostell Priory, just 30 miles north of Orgreave.

Violently attacked, the convoy members, subsequently harried all the way south, sought solace at the Molesworth Peace Camp, but, on February 1, 1985, the entire camp was evicted via the largest peacetime mobilization of troops in British history, symbolically led by the defense secretary Michael Heseltine.

From then on, the convoy was again harried throughout the south, as the noose tightened on their actions, in preparation for the assault on June 1, which was justified by the authorities through injunctions, supposedly aimed at the festival’s organizers, preventing them from approaching Stonehenge. After staying overnight in Savernake Forest on May 31, 1985, they set off for Stonehenge, little realizing the gravity of the threat that faced them.

The Beanfield remembered

The Battle of the Beanfield has never been forgotten, although it has never had much mainstream resonance. The Levellers wrote a song about it, and in 1991, after some of those brutalized and detained on the day had taken the police to court, a documentary film, ‘Operation Solstice’, directed by Gareth Morris and Neil Goodwin, was shown on Channel 4, and subsequently became a popular DVD in the days before streaming.

In 2005, following up on my first book, Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, a social history of Stonehenge in which the Beanfield features prominently, I compiled interviews from those who were present on the day — including travellers, journalists and other key individuals — for my book The Battle of the Beanfield, and both books are still in print because of an enduring interest both in Stonehenge and its counter-cultural history, and in the shameful and perpetually shocking events of June 1, 1985.

Last year, marking the 40th anniversary of the Battle of the Beanfield, there was a noticeable revival of interest in its enduring and corrosive effect on liberty in the UK. With support from Ecotricity’s Dale Vince, who was the motorbike outrider on the day of the Beanfield, a revised and expanded version of ‘Operation Solstice’ was produced by Neil Goodwin and Gareth Morris, and the archive of interviews for the documentary (some of which I had transcribed for my book) was preserved, on a website, ‘The Beanfield’, that is well worth a visit.

BBC Wiltshire published a detailed analysis of the events of the day for the BBC’s website, highlighting ongoing calls for a public inquiry, which have been shunned by the government even more than their delaying tactics regarding an inquiry into the Battle of Orgreave, and there were also several screenings of ‘Operation Solstice’, including a well-attended screening that I organized on the anniversary in my home borough of Lewisham, in south east London, as part of the Brockley Max arts festival, and another well-attended screening that I was part of, which took place in Salisbury in October.

The most prominent screenings, however took place at the Glastonbury Festival, which was attended by Dale Vince, and at the Green Gathering, which I attended, and where I was grateful for the opportunity to trace how a line can be drawn from the punitive legislation that followed the Beanfield to the extraordinarily authoritarian repression of protest and direct action that has been taking place in the UK over the last four years.

The authoritarian line that connects the Beanfield to now

This is via unprecedented and unprincipled legislation imposing prison sentences and even a terrorist designation on those seeking to highlight the existential perils of fossil fuel-engineered climate collapse, and the UK government’s complicity in Israel’s ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip.

The first of these legislative responses was the Public Order Act of 1986, with its restriction on gypsies’ and travellers’ rights, and on our ability to gather freely, and this was followed by further draconian legislation in 1994 — the Criminal Justice Act, provoked by hysteria following the last great free and unlicensed gathering in the UK, the Castlemorton Free Festival, in 1992, after years of extraordinary dissent, via the rave scene and the road protest movement, none of which had been foreseen by Thatcher.

Although dissent never went away, the passage of the CJA marked a noticeable clampdown on our freedoms, and although Stonehenge itself was eventually liberated, by the Law Lords, from the military exclusion zones that were erected there every summer after the Beanfield, the post-Beanfield and post-Castlemorton legislation set the scene for the increasingly draconian assaults on our right to protest and our right to gather freely that have been particularly noticeable since 2022.

This ferocious clampdown began under the last Tory government, when two authoritarian home secretaries, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, sought to criminalize protest and dissent by climate activists and activists opposing the state’s whitewashing of its colonial history, including through the imposition of prison sentences.

Disgracefully, the current Labour government has gone even further into dystopian “police state” territory, designating the direct action group Palestine Action, which had been targeting facilities owned by Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, Elbit Systems, as a terrorist organization, and seeking long prison sentences for those involved.

While the historical resonances from the Beanfield to now will continue to be picked up on by those who are aware that our politicians and our mainstream media like to keep the truth about our history hidden, it’s rather sad that, today, the horrific and still resonant events of June 1, 1985 seem, in general, to have fallen off the radar, because what the authoritarian line drawn from the Public Order Act of 1986 to now shows most clearly is that, once enacted, draconian laws are rarely, if ever repealed, and, as a result, authoritarianism only ever increases until it starts, as is happening now, to increasingly resemble the fundamental suppression of rights that accompanies the rise of fascism.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of a photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’, which ran from 2012 to 2023), 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.”

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. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

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