The Battle of the Beanfield
Sample from this book:
Chapter Seven Continued...
Could you describe the events you witnessed on the day?
So, at about one o’clock, from memory, the convoy formed
up in the campsite at Savernake, and headed out onto the road,
turning left in order to go south down towards Stonehenge. The
journey took a very long time. We constantly stopped every mile
or so, long stops of perhaps 15 minutes at a time. It took almost
the entire afternoon – at least that’s my memory –
to get ten or 15 miles down the road. The atmosphere I’ve
often described – and we’ve seen clips on the television
of it – was carnival-like, really. There was music playing,
there were flags flying, and not a policeman to be seen. The only
policemen were in the helicopter that occasionally flew overhead.
I was not quite sure of the reception I would get from the convoy
if they knew who I was, so I was in complete anonymity, on a motorbike
with a friend [John Moore], and we stuck fairly close to the HTV
television film crew who were there, for we reckoned that professionals
like that would know where to be to get the best news; an intelligent
place to station themselves. We reckoned, if we stuck fairly close
to them that would probably be for the best. So, sticking close
to the big wagon, we went all the way south as far as what has
now become known as the Beanfield.
The first I knew – that we’d arrived, as it were
– was when the convoy came to a sudden halt, after turning
off a side road to join the A303. I could hear shouts from the
head of the convoy – for I was with HTV, some ten or 15
vehicles back from the front – and I ran up to the front
after a while, having parked my motorbike. Once we got up to the
roadblock, there were about six policemen in ordinary dress –
ordinary police uniform – and they were having an exchange,
for want of a better word, with a similar number of travellers.
The two positions were quite simply, ‘Get out of the way,
we’re coming through’, and ‘No you’re
not, this far and no further.’ This went on for a short
period of time. It has to be said, in the interests of fairness,
that quite a few of the people who came up to listen to this conversation
were carrying things that could have been interpreted as weapons.
One of the travellers was carrying a pitchfork, and one was carrying
a length of wood, which could have been used as a weapon, although
he was not using it as a weapon at that time. Before long, there
was quite a huddle around the police – or rather, in front
of the barricade – of people trying to tell the police to
get out of the way, and the police saying that they weren’t
going to be allowed to proceed to Stonehenge, and ‘Why can’t
we go to Stonehenge?’ and ‘What’s it to you
if we go to Stonehenge?’ and endless variations on that
theme.
Eventually, it was clear that something of an impasse had been
reached, and I remember a vehicle coming up from the very back
of the convoy – it came up on a little grass verge –
overtaking all the parked cars. It got right up to the front of
the convoy, and suddenly, with no warning that I could see, did
a right turn and went smartly headfirst through the hedgerow at
the side of the road and ended up in the field, leaving something
of a hole in the hedge right in front of the police roadblock.
Once that first vehicle had got into the field through the hole,
the next vehicle tried to go through, and, from memory, that vehicle
also got in. At about this time – either just before the
second vehicle, or just after – the police realised that,
with this hole in front of the barricade, if they didn’t
do something about it, one by one every other vehicle on the road
was presumably going to play follow-my-leader and go straight
into the field.
In order to prevent that, the police moved up one of the Transit
vans that was just behind the barricade, moved it up with a deliberate
intention also, it seemed to me, to park the vehicle across the
hole, thereby blocking it. As they started to roll the vehicle
up towards the hole, the next convoy vehicle – be it number
two or number three – was just starting to go through the
hole at the same time. I seem to remember that it was a large
motorcoach. They both went for the same hole simultaneously, but
it seemed to me, standing right beside it, that the police were
just a fraction too slow. If they’d moved literally two
seconds earlier, they would have got there before the bus. Sadly,
they were just too slow to prevent the bus getting through, but
the two vehicles collided right in the mouth of the hole, and
the bus, being five times the size, went on through the hole,
leaving the front end of the Transit extensively damaged.
That incident was – or seemed to me to be – the
cue for the police to take a very different view of proceedings.
Up until then, it seemed to me that it had been little more than
sort of push-and-shove, and no one had done anything too outrageous,
but, understandably, the police thought the damaging of their
Ford Transit was putting us into a totally different ball game,
for want of a better word, and the attitude of the police present
changed, instantly and dramatically. What happened thereafter
was that the police who had been in ordinary police uniforms seemed
to all stand to one side, and out from behind the barricade –
where we previously hadn’t been able to see – came
quite a number of police in a very different manner. They had
their police helmets secured with a chin-guard and strap, implying
they were going somewhere where there was some risk of those helmets
being dislodged. They were all in sweaters. Each man carried a
drawn truncheon, and they came out 20- or 30- strong, or so it
seemed to me, and started to work their way down the line of vehicles.
Their tactics were to surround the front of each of the vehicles
in turn, and my most vivid memory, I think, is the terrible noise
of them drumming their truncheons on the sides of the vans. If
I had been inside, as some were, it would have been very frightening.
They were shouting, ‘Get out! Get out! Get out!’ loudly,
and lots of them shouting it all at once, and in particular, ‘Give
me the keys!’ People were being told instantly to take the
keys out of the ignition, give them to a police officer, and to
get out of their vehicles. I must stress that it must have been
very frightening to have been inside those vehicles at that time,
surrounded by men banging on the outside of your vehicle. The
other thing that they were doing was banging on the windscreens
of the vehicles, and some of the windscreens managed to survive
this treatment, and many of them didn’t.
As they worked their way down the line, it was noticeable that
the police fell into two categories. When they came to each vehicle
in turn, with some of the vehicles the occupants were given what
one might describe as a reasonable chance to respond to their
instructions. There was a brief pause between the instruction
being given and their vehicle being damaged, in which they had
time to comply. Not a great length of time, but there was some
time before your vehicle was smashed up, your windscreen was put
in, or whatever the thing was. With some of the other groups,
it seemed to me that the smashing up of the vehicles, and the
instructions to ‘Get out! Get out! Get out!’ and hand
over your keys, were given absolutely simultaneously, and therefore
there was no possible chance to understand what was being shouted
at you, and to respond and comply, before your vehicle started
disintegrating around you, with your windscreen broken in, and
your side panels beaten by truncheons, and so on.
This operation went on, vehicle by vehicle, for quite a number,
starting at the head and working back towards the tail. I was
standing on the bank, right at the edge of the road, and eventually,
the line of police having dealt with the occupants of the first
few vehicles, reached a vehicle which I was quite close to, which
again was instantly memorable, because it clearly, in some early
life, had been a county ambulance, with the glass place where
they put the word ‘ambulance’ over the windscreen,
and the joint double doors at the back –straight, and with
windows at the side, it was an ambulance, or had been. And it
was very striking, when the police got up to that vehicle, because
the very first thing that happened – long before any conversation
had taken place between the police and the driver of that vehicle
– was that a policeman rained an enormous blow on the windscreen.
I mean, the man brought his truncheon right back over his shoulder,
and gave a colossal blow to that sheet of glass, which to my amazement
didn’t chip, didn’t crack, didn’t do anything.
The man’s enormous blow just bounced clean off it, as though
the windscreen had been made of rubber. I was standing next to
John Moore on the bank at the time, some 20 or 30 yards away from
the scene, and I remember asking him if he had seen that, because
it was the most extraordinary thing. I remember thinking, ‘Gosh,
if I ever have a new car, I should like my windscreen to be made
from whatever that one’s made of’, because the blow
just bounced clean off.
Then, unfortunately, this ambulance fell into the second category
– as evidenced by this great blow on its windscreen –
of being one of the vehicles where the destruction of it started
long before the occupant had a chance to comply with the instruction.
The destruction of the glass in the side windows and the attempted
destruction of the front window happened simultaneously with the
shouts of ‘Get out! Get out! Get out!’ and the banging
and the crashing and the shouts and cries of people, and the whole
chaotic scene. I can only guess what reaction this produced on
the occupants. From where I was, I was aware that there were two
girls in the vehicle, in the front seats, and immediately the
police started smashing up their side windows. Some of them turned
their truncheons round, so they had a bit that was just sticking
out of the back of their hands, and sort of stabbed the windows,
which exploded inside, breaking the glass. The side windows having
now been broken, one of the police reached in through that broken
side window – the passenger window – and grabbed a
handful of hair. I couldn’t see clearly into the vehicle
from where I was standing – I was some little distance off
– but it was clear to me that he had hold of the top of
her hair, and was pulling her vigorously. She, of course, was
screaming blue murder, not wanting to be pulled, because what
she was being pulled through was a window that had been broken
ten seconds earlier. There was broken glass everywhere, and there
was what looked like an attempt to pull her out of that window
that was framed with broken glass. She was screaming badly that
she didn’t want that to happen, and she was pulling one
way and the police officer was pulling the other.
Eventually, the police managed to get the back doors to the
ambulance open – or they came open themselves, or whatever
– and managed to climb in through the back doors of the
ambulance. And there came a point where one of the policemen who
had climbed in through there appeared to have hold of the driver
– or the person who was being pulled by her hair –
round the middle and was holding onto her body. And briefly, it
seemed to me, the policeman inside the ambulance was unaware of
the policeman outside the ambulance, and they were both pulling
in different directions, with the occupant’s hair and the
broken glass being what they were both pulling in opposite directions,
which was not very nice. The policeman on the outside then realised
that his colleague inside the van had actually arrested her, or
got hold of her, and released his grip, whereupon the policeman
inside the ambulance took her out through the back. She was arrested
and taken away, and I didn’t see her again that day.
After the ambulance and the head of the convoy had been dealt
with, the police then retired back behind their barricade –
or at least those that had smashed up the vehicles – but
the effect of what they had done produced total panic in the ranks
of the convoy, and everyone tried very hard to get their vehicles
out of the line on the roadway, and get them into the field at
all possible speed. I suppose, if you’d been vehicle number
20, you could have seen what had been happening to the first 19
vehicles in front of you, and the knowledge that you were likely
to be the next vehicle smashed up would have been rather frightening,
in all probability. Anyway, some vehicles then made fresh holes
in the hedge. About halfway along the hedge there was a gateway,
and quite a few vehicles went through the gateway, but by various
means all the remaining vehicles ended up in the field. I can
only speculate why they went in there. Some probably went in there
because… just follow-my-leader… others probably went
in there to avoid destruction, as they saw it, and others probably
went in there with a view to getting round the roadblock. But
for whatever reasons, all three lots of vehicles ended up parked
in the field. They immediately got off the road and went down
to the far end of the field, as far down to the bottom end of
that field as possible away from where the police were. They having
departed, and those occupants in the vehicles they had smashed
being taken away into custody, the police then had control of
the whole of the roadway, and fairly rapidly it filled up with
police.
There then followed a long period of inactivity, really. The
police could see that the convoy wasn’t coming out of the
field, and they – the police – made no attempt to
go into the field. With the convoy vehicles parked down the far
end of the field, there was then the start of a very long stand-off
period, when for long periods of time virtually nothing happened,
other than groups of the convoy who came up to the fence line,
and spoke, shouted, discussed, argued, whatever, through the hedgerow
– them on one side, the police on the other – what
the options were now. Could they go back to Savernake? Could they
go down to Stonehenge? Are we coming out? Are you coming in? –
and endless permutations thereof. That’s what most of them
were doing. Occasionally, certainly the younger members of the
convoy would taunt the police. There were offensive remarks being
made through the fence, and there was, from time to time, some
missile throwing. It was of a relatively trivial nature, though
of course, if one of the missiles had hit you, you wouldn’t
have thought it so trivial. But it was just small sticks and stones
that they found lying around the field that were being thrown
at the police. The police by that time were appearing in the road
in full riot gear – the helmets, visors, full-length see-through
shields and riot truncheons – and were protected, as long
as they kept their shields up and about them, which they did.
So the occasional stone coming over the top, or someone chucking
a bit of wood over the top of a tree… I don’t want
to minimise it, but I don’t think anyone thought they were
at risk of life and limb at that moment.
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