The Battle of the Beanfield
Sample from this book:
Chapter Seven Continued...
One particular person was very noticeable at that time. He was
wearing a green motorcycle helmet but with no visor – the
whole of the front of his helmet was exposed. And he had a high-powered
catapult, and occasionally he would come up and approach the police
lines – where I and the rest of the press and others were
hanging around, watching through the fence – and would fire
his catapult in our general direction, which used to keep hitting
the plastic shields of the police, and there’d be a loud
sort of ‘ping!’ beside me, and the stone would fall
to the ground. With the sole exception of him – who we all
tried to give quite a wide berth to – what was going on
there was relatively trivial, and indeed from time to time more
senior members of the convoy would come up to the stone-throwers
and tell them off, tell them to stop, lead them away, and generally
tell them not to behave in that fashion. But that was very much
a fringe activity.
Most of the people were coming up to the fence and trying to
have a more sensible contact with the police, trying to discuss
the various options that were open to them. The police demeanour
throughout all of this was, ‘We are in no hurry at all.
No, we are not about to come onto the field. There is no panic,
we’ve got all day. This is what the position is, and you
have a simple choice, but don’t give me a snap answer now.’
The police seemed to be saying, ‘Go away, talk amongst yourselves,
we’ll still be here when you come back. Come back and tell
us how you feel.’ And it was very striking to me that the
police seemed to be in no hurry at all. Indeed, they said they
had all the time in the world, and it was for the convoy to have
a long, hard think about what they wanted to do, and then come
back and tell the police about it. If one had to try and summarise
the negotiations, they were spasmodic. There’d be a little
group of two policemen and perhaps six travellers who’d
start discussing it, and then that’d break up and then 20
minutes later there’d be a different group of people 50
yards further down the hedgerow and they’d get into a conversation.
I became aware, when I was standing there watching all of this,
that what was happening there was the key to the whole day. I
was frustratingly out of earshot, and I very much wanted to hear
what was going on at the negotiations. I therefore thought the
sensible move was to move into the field, not only because that
would give me access to the negotiations, but because I also felt
that it was only a matter of time before the police started looking
around themselves in the road, and then they would see the three
or four civilians that were standing there, and sooner or later
we would be invited to move along there, absent ourselves, leave
the scene, and then I would probably never discover how this thing
had panned out in the end. And yes, due to natural inquisitiveness,
I was quite keen – without breaking the law – that
that shouldn’t happen, and that I should be able to continue
to watch what was going on. As the missiles were being thrown
from the field into the road, of course those of us standing in
the road without shields were at some small risk, and therefore
of course by going into the field we also took ourselves out of
the rather limited line of fire. So for all these reasons, we
eventually moved from the road into the field, and were able,
with other members of the press – in particular Nick Davies,
I remember – to get right up to the negotiations and indeed
to stand as close to the police and the travellers as the participants
themselves, and actually mingle with them and hear at first hand
who was saying what to whom, who was making what suggestion, and
so on.
Having heard half a dozen of these impromptu groups and gatherings
discussing the options, it slowly became clear what the police
position was, which was a very simple one. They considered that
from that moment, exactly as I had been told in Marlborough earlier,
everybody in the field should consider themselves as good as arrested.
In particular, no one in the field was going to be able to absent
themselves, nobody in the field was going to be able to get in
a car or bus or whatever and go back to Savernake, and nobody
was going to be allowed to proceed nearer to Stonehenge. They
were all detained, if not yet physically. They were totally surrounded
by the police, and they were sort of in the bag, and it was only
a matter of time before they were physically taken away. The choice
the police were making then was very simple: ‘you come out,
and when you come out, as we have said, you will please come up
to the nearest police officer, who will…’ –
I think the euphemism for it was, ‘want to ask you some
questions’ or something, but I think we all knew, or they
said that they all recognised, that that meant they would be arrested,
while they worked out who was going to be prosecuted for various
offences and who was not. The option therefore was that everybody
had to come out of the field, and if that didn’t happen
the time would come when the police would go into the field. But
those were the only two options, and, as I said, I discussed it
endlessly with Nick Davies and others at the time, I paid close
attention to what was going on at several of these meetings, and
anyone who says that the police had other options available, or
were making other options available to the convoy other than,
‘You are all arrested. Are you coming out, or are we coming
in?’ is, in my opinion, wrong, because the police’s
position was crystal-clear to me and to all the others who were
in earshot.
Not much happened apart from these sporadic negotiations, for
want of a better word, until just before seven o’clock,
when I was in the field quite close to where the main negotiating
had been going on, and I was able, from my vantage point, to look
down into the road, and I suddenly noticed that all the people
– all the police, that is – were being told to stand
up from where they’d been sort of lying in the hedgerows
all afternoon, [and were] dusting themselves off, putting on their
tunics, straightening their ties and generally getting ready to
make a significant move.
And on the stroke of seven, because I remember asking Nick Davies
what the time was, the police entered the field in about four
different places all at once, from beside the A303, where the
convoy had been parked, and started to trot and jog all the way
down to the bottom end of the field, where most of the vehicles
were parked up. It seemed to me that this move caught the convoy
by surprise. A lot of people had been out of their vehicles –
making cups of tea, playing with the kids, walking dogs, discussing
their predicament, and half a dozen other things – and they
were not able to get back to their vehicles before the police
arrived, and were sort of caught out in the open, and these people
were immediately arrested by the police. Most people then jumped
up into their vehicles, as best they could, and started driving
them around in a circle. I was told later that this was a traditional
defensive move, the idea being that if everyone’s rumbling
along at ten miles per hour in a circle, there’s nothing
the police can do to stop them and arrest them.
continued on next page
>
|