The Battle of the Beanfield
Sample from this book:
Chapter Seven Continued...
The police then stopped the vehicles, one by one, as best they
could. The means employed was to hurl enough missiles at it to
call it to a halt. They threw all sorts of things at the windscreens,
and presumably many drivers, when their windscreen exploded around
them, rapidly came to a halt, whereupon the police were able to
climb up the steps into the buses, arrest the driver and all the
occupants, and lead them away to detention. As time went on and
they had weeded out those that were going to stop at once, and
they were left with those that were not going to stop at once,
the police used more and more frantic methods to stop the remaining
buses. They threw their truncheons. Policemen took off their helmets
and hurled them at windscreens. One large flint, about the size
of a grapefruit, was picked up by a policeman and hurled through
a windscreen, which exploded. They used their round black plastic
shields… some policemen were using them like a frisbee,
holding it on its edge and flicking it out of the back of the
hand through pre-broken windscreens to try and hit the driver
and bring the vehicles to a halt. Some policemen indeed even unbuttoned
the fire extinguishers that some of them wore chained to their
legs – or chained to the outside of their shin – which
is a steel container, and they would unchain them from their legs
and hurl them through windscreens – anything to stop the
drivers driving their vehicles. And by these tactics, one by one,
all the vehicles were brought to a halt, drivers arrested, occupants
arrested and taken away.
So having moved in at seven, for the next quarter of an hour
or so it was pretty much mayhem in that field, with these buses
careering round, and the police slowly bringing them, one by one,
to a stop, and then arresting the occupants. All sorts of little
tiny flashes of memory particularly stick out. There’s one
particular teenager who was led past me at one point with an enormous
cut on the top of his head – I don’t know how he got
it – and he was led past me screaming ‘No no no!’
and the blood was just running down his face like a waterfall.
He was to feature next morning on the front page of quite a few
newspapers, and as he was led right past me – and the fact
that it was such a young person screaming like that – obviously
I remember that very vividly.
There was another scene, again at the height of the battle,
for want of a better word, when one policeman broke away from
the main action and ran up towards where John and I were hovering
on the edge of it, watching, and we thought this was another occasion
when a policeman would come up to us and try and arrest us, thinking
we were part of the convoy. That had happened a couple of times
before, but on each occasion we’d been able to persuade
them that actually we were nothing to do with the convoy, we were
just onlookers, and that policeman had then gone back and left
us alone. So when this latest policeman came up to us, we assumed
this was more of the same, but he wasn’t coming to see us,
and he trotted past us, going up to one of the many empty buses
that were littering the field, just behind us. Just as he got
up towards the bus, he saw, lying in the field, which was now
littered with the contents of many of the vehicles, a large mallet
– a hammer – about 18 inches long, that was just lying
discarded in the grass and had fallen out of one of the many vehicles.
He rushed up into the bus, up the steps, and, with half a dozen
amazing blows with that mallet, reduced the dashboard of that
vehicle to powder. Then he came out of the vehicle, flung the
mallet back down on the grass where he’d found it in the
first place, and went back to rejoin the struggle. I remember
looking at John, and saying to him, ‘What an extraordinary
thing. What was the purpose of that? That bus was not even occupied,
much less threatening anybody, or driving in anyone’s direction.
Why on earth did he feel the need to do that?’
The battle then continued and, one by one, all the vehicles
were taken away. Eventually there was only one bus left, which
everyone has now christened the Rasta Bus – brightly painted,
horizontal stripes down the side – and though the police
eventually got all the buses to halt, there was this one bus that
was left, and it defied the police’s most frantic attempts
to bring it to a halt, driving round the field in increasingly
frantic ways. As the police initially couldn’t stop it,
they tried all sorts of things, including, at one point, getting
into one of the other buses that had been abandoned, and trying
to ram this one remaining bus with the vehicle that they’d
commandeered. It became something rather like Starsky and Hutch,
or one of those American films that’s always got a good
car chase, but this was sort of a bus chase, a coach chase, with
these two machines, like demented elephants, careering around
the field. Whenever they came alongside each other the sides would
bang together; they would try to push each other out of each other’s
way. It was an amazing sight in a Hampshire field on a Saturday
afternoon. Both drivers, of course, were only concentrating on
the job in hand, and I and all the police who were on foot had
to keep well out of the way, because there was some risk, if you
were just wandering around the field aimlessly, of finding yourself
in the path of these two vehicles, who had only eyes for each
other.
I suppose that brings us onto the question, that I’ve
often been asked, as to whether the drivers of these coaches were
actually trying to drive at the police. I’ve always said
that, in my opinion, from what I saw, the answer to that question
must be no. There were that many police in the field that day
that if any one of them [the drivers] had wanted to hit a policeman
with his vehicle he could very easily have done it, therefore
I’ve always rejected that theory. We all had to get out
of the way of vehicles during the course of that day. Certainly
I did. If there was a policeman chasing after a bus and it was
careering across the field and I was in its way, I never felt
that that driver was trying to hit me. He was just fleeing, and
I was in his path, and as a pedestrian it was down to me to get
out of his way, which was very easy to do, and I and all the police
did exactly that. I understand the police said that the driver
of the last vehicle was pretty close to being able to be charged
with driving his vehicle at the police, and, if any of them could
be, I suppose it would be him.
Anyway, eventually even his vehicle, for reasons unknown, did
come to a halt, and the police were then able to totally surround
it – all of the others having been taken out of action –
to climb up into the bus, and to arrest all the people in it.
Unfortunately, that last bus had been the one that had been keeping
them going longest, and briefly, when the police got into that
bus – in my opinion, from close range – they briefly
lost the control that they’d held that afternoon. All their
pent-up frustration and adrenalin of the afternoon was vented
on the occupants of that last one bus, and the violence that was
shown to the occupants was appalling. The truncheons were rising
and falling on their bodies like no one’s business. It was
– very briefly – very ghastly to see.
Apart from what happened to that last bus, I suppose the single
incident that distressed me the most that day was very close to
the end, when a woman was seen at the front of a bus that had
just come to a halt; that had been brought to a halt by the tactics
I’ve described. She immediately picked up her baby, which
was behind her, and stood up in the front of that bus, and shouted
to the police that – though she realised that she was now
going to be arrested, and, you know, the game was up and the bus
was going to be taken on by the police – would they please
come in with a very high degree of caution, for want of a better
word, because, as she said when she held the baby up, ‘Look,
there are babies on this bus, so come on in if you must now, but
have a care’, basically. And as she stood there by this
large sheet of glass, holding the baby up, a missile from the
back of the police ranks hit the windscreen, which exploded into
a hundred pieces, and the woman and the baby were both covered
in broken flying glass. And that was as appalling a thing as I
shall ever see.
Thereafter, that being almost the end of the battle, most of
the people were taken to the roundabout and put into buses and,
by all accounts, taken to prisons and police stations the breadth
of southern England. John and I watched that briefly, but the
whole operation was now winding down, so we wandered back to the
field before starting to go home, and were surprised to see that
the police were going through all the vehicles that they’d
insisted were left behind… For many people earlier that
day had said, ‘If we come out of the field, we must bring
our vehicles with us’, for fear of them being broken up
like happened once before in similar circumstances, I was told,
but they were told, ‘No, the vehicles must stay.’
And when the vehicles and the people had been separated, we saw
the police searching the vehicles, which we watched closely for
some time. Many of the vehicles were open, and the police were
able to just walk in and inspect the contents, but some of the
vehicles had been left shut, or locked, and some of the police
methods of gaining entry to those vehicles were unorthodox, to
put it mildly. If they couldn’t get in, they broke in.
By then the whole thing was winding down, so eventually we found
my motorbike and went home.
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