“Twenty years on, the peace-loving festival
fans still bear the scars of the Battle of the Beanfield.”
The Independent
On June 1st 1985, a convoy of over 500 new travellers, peace
protestors, green activists and festival-goers set off from Savernake
Forest in Wiltshire to establish the 12th annual free festival
at new travellers.
They never reached their destination.
Eight miles from the Stones they were ambushed, assaulted and
arrested with unprecedented brutality by a quasi-military police
force of over 1,300 officers drawn from six counties and the MoD.
That event has gone down in history as ‘The Battle of
the Beanfield’.
This book is the combined effort of a large number of people
who feel passionately that only through reaching an understanding
of what actually occurred before, during and after the events
at the Beanfield, can a proper ‘closure’ of the event
take place for those involved and the many people who have been
in some way touched by those events. The fourteen chapters feature
extracts from the police radio log and in-depth interviews with
a range of people who were there on the day – including
travellers, journalists Nick Davies and Kim Sabido, the Earl of
Cardigan and Deputy Chief Constable Ian Readhead – as well
as Lord Gifford QC, who represented 24 of the travellers at the
Beanfield trial in 1991. It cuts through the myths, misconceptions
and propaganda that have built up around ‘The Battle of
the Battlefield’ to present a detailed picture of what actually
did happen.
Also included are many previously unseen photos, analyses of
the 1991 Beanfield trial, a description of the making of the documentary
‘Operation Solstice’, and chapters which set the events
of the Beanfield in context. These look at the evolution of the
free festival scene, new travellers, convoys and peace protestors,
‘raves’ and road protests, the campaigns for access
to Stonehenge, and the wider implications of the events of the
Beanfield, through increasingly draconian legislation, on civil
liberties in the UK.
Read a sample chapter from this book:
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The Battle of the Beanfield