00:00:00.000 - 00:00:26.880

There is an archive in Newbury and this is sort of leftovers because Evelyn just, her house got turned over into it and so she wanted to complete her side of the archiving and then move the stuff on. And then two friends in London ended up with them. It was decided that they shouldn't go in the public domain because maybe, it's difficult isn't it with

00:00:26.880 - 00:01:00.780

copperiting now. Well and also your narrative, your story of Greenham never belonged to you which is one of the reasons I wanted to do this with audio. It was always filtered through somebody else's voice or their pictures or their view or something. There was always a slant put onto it and it was very rarely, apart from I think, I mean Karen Greenham

00:01:00.780 - 00:01:29.740

home is, I think is fantastic. But it's very early. But it's a snapshot. But if you think about, I mean the girl yesterday at school said, she's 13, she said, oh I know about Greenham. She said they broke into the base didn't they and then they got arrested. And I said yeah, anything else? No, I don't think so. So you know, I said, you know, it was

00:01:29.740 - 00:01:54.760

this, it was this huge thing and then I showed them a clip of, there's a clip on YouTube from Karen Greenham home with you all being, singing in front of the police and then, I mean literally manhandling you in the most kind of brutal way. And all of the girls went, they can't do that. And I said, oh yeah they can. They did it for 10 years and

00:01:54.760 - 00:02:31.340

more and the bailiffs did it and the police created a cordon so that the bailiffs could do it. And they would drag women in their tents, you know. And I mean, a little while ago I re-saw Karen Greenham home. And I was really shocked myself at how brutal it was really. Yeah, that's really interesting. Because you sort of, so one of the, oh God, too many

00:02:31.340 - 00:02:58.740

things to say. Too many things to say. One of the things about that big blockade, where there was just hundreds of women and one would get dragged and two more would lie down, was the way that we sang You Can't Kill the Spirit. Because it wasn't a bloody church choir thing. It was actually full of anger and power and we were voicing our resistance and it really

00:02:58.740 - 00:03:19.380

helped us. Actually singing in any way helps your breathing, doesn't it? Yeah, because if you're frightened, you stop breathing. I taught women's self-defence for a few years. So it's important to keep those lungs going. But actually, you know, we didn't sing it like a three part harmony. It was full of like, you fuck off you bastards. You know, you're not going to fucking

00:03:19.380 - 00:03:49.900

kill my spirit. And that's, I find the way that it gets sung now is very sanitised because it's not in context really. And I can't bring myself to sing that song. Yeah, it's a song that gets sung on Million Women Rise, the march down in London. I go on that every year. And again, it's, I think what's lacking is the unity. So there's like a little group maybe of six women

00:03:49.900 - 00:04:19.420

singing it on the march and then somebody else will be singing it. So maybe it extends. But actually, you sang as one voice. It was one voice of resistance. And whenever, when I was putting that presentation, that workshop together for them, you know, it just brings tears to your eyes. It's really emotional. Yeah, really emotional. Yeah. Yeah. So that film, one of my

00:04:19.420 - 00:04:48.920

sort of early things when I was still weaving and living in South Devon, there was a very, very active Totnes Women's Centre. It was three floors. And we did a peace vigil every week on market day. And me and the woman I was living with at the time, who's going to be being interviewed, we went to loads and loads of CND groups all across the West Country showing that

00:04:48.920 - 00:05:20.800

film. And it was it was being shown all around the country when different local, different CND groups. And it was it was a it was a real frontline thing to do, actually, because CND, you know, they gave us endless amounts of support. But they, it's like they were actually part of when when the missiles left, you know, even CND were putting out that the women from Greenland

00:05:20.800 - 00:05:44.360

had gone, you know, we were completely denoticed. We were having visitors from Japan and Australia and America, and all across Europe, still coming to visit us, we were still having journalists from all over the world. But everyone the word was in Britain, the Guardian, all of it was like, Oh, they've gone home now. There's no more women there. And that was a real, that's one of the

00:05:44.360 - 00:06:07.800

things I've got a list here of things that I feel I particularly want to brilliant to cover with you. I've got the conversation that you had with I think Becca. Oh, yeah. And I thought, actually, I don't need to go to any of my questions. I can go through this conversation. There's absolutely loads of stuff. Yeah, there is there is loads of stuff. So I must be careful not to rant. But I

00:06:07.800 - 00:06:43.000

have got it here about like, I thought I had it here about the original. You need to if you want to start taking photos, but look, the original thing was women will reclaim green and common. The missiles were almost a sideline. You know, the march, the original march from Pembrokeshire was because the USAF were moving back on. But the story actually was that that was a USAF base

00:06:43.000 - 00:07:13.220

with a temporary fence around the common for the second World War. And the USAF went home, but the fence never came down and our Air Force stayed there. And then when the Trident thing came back up and there were Tridents all over Europe, like they they never the fence was still there. So what we realised was that it given why, you know, it was given a temporary permission to

00:07:13.220 - 00:07:38.260

fence off the common. And so actually, it was about reclaiming the land and reclaiming the common. And that's why a lot of women stayed, even though the missiles have gone home, because the fence was still there. And the first, you know, the first really big actions were about pulling the fence down. You know, because we wanted to see the back of the fence and we wanted

00:07:38.260 - 00:08:05.940

to reclaim the common. So I fished this this out. There were there were women's fantastic stuff. How do you manage to keep all this in such great condition? Well, my friends, my friends kept it. I mean, I've, you know, because I just had a damp old truck, but there were women's peace camps all over the world at that time. So do you want to do, what do you want to do with the

00:08:06.680 - 00:08:31.440

photographing? Because I'm thinking maybe you want to sit down and talk or do you want to do the photography or how do you want to do this? Christine, do you want to? I'm wondering if I could photograph in here, but I can listen at the same time. Right. Because there are things that you particularly want her to photograph, aren't there? Like, I'm guessing the things that you think are important. Well, there's things that I feel are, I can allow you to photograph.

00:08:31.560 - 00:09:00.920

I understand. Yeah. So, and I haven't been through all of them, but I have put a few stickers in. But what I felt... Look at that. It's like the doomsday book or something. It's got a real sense of history. It's like, are you doing, you're doing moving pictures as well? Okay. But what I could do is actually like handle them and just sort of go, oh, yes. You know, but, but just get a picture of them all together. Yeah, definitely. And certainly the covers.

00:09:00.920 - 00:09:22.000

Do you want to talk about them and then I'll take one photograph and then go on to the next one. Is that good? Sorry, say that again. If you want to open it and talk about it, so that's recorded and then I'll take that. Well, I think, I think I probably need to talk about my list of things that I want to cover. Okay. But in terms of like, because I was, you know, I mean, there's just this, you can't, I can't allow you to take a picture of that because I don't know who drew it.

00:09:22.260 - 00:09:41.520

And there could be issues. You know, there was a lot of falling out. But, but it's ephemera. And I know for an archivist that it's very important. You know, but there are some things that are very non-camille that you could photo. But you'd have to say which ones they were, wouldn't you?

00:09:41.520 - 00:10:09.620

Well, I have put stickers on, so on a few of them. But, but these are more like, this is more like about, you know, there's this, there's diaries with like, there's a bleeding chart diary, you know, and everyone filled in their thing on their moon day when we were bleeding. And, and because we sort of heard about this, oh, if women live together, they all bleed together.

00:10:09.960 - 00:10:31.880

So it was just an experimental thing. Well, and also, I think it's quite good to know because, you know, you can get, you can fall into that trap, can't you? When somebody's a bit grumpy of saying, oh, you, you know, is the, but you can look at the chart and think, rather than being patriarchal about it, you can actually go and look at the chart and think, oh, no, it's not that I am actually pissing them off, which is quite useful, I think, personally.

00:10:32.140 - 00:10:49.200

Yeah. But the thing is, we all ended up bleeding at the same time. So we were all pissed off at the same time. Right. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. But I feel like this, this bedspread is too patterned for you to set to picture them there.

00:10:50.920 - 00:11:00.320

What would you like to do, Rachel? Do you want to put them on the table, some on the table out there, or do you want to have them in over there? Is that better? We can put them on that desk. That's good lighting for me, but you've got a clicker.

00:11:05.580 - 00:11:22.980

We can put them over here, a few at a time. And just like, yeah, because it is quite amazing that they've survived so many evictions. But you see, Evelyn had them. Her house was full of this stuff. And, you know, the thing is, she's getting older.

00:11:23.860 - 00:11:51.060

Everyone's getting to the point of, yeah, we need to start making, we need to be leaving our mark. You know, we need to leave our inheritance. And, yeah, that's a good way of putting it, inheritance. I like that. And I put that in because it's so resonant with today.

00:11:51.540 - 00:12:06.460

One world, many women. That's Million Women Rights. You know, I did go to those a few times, but I just can't cope with such big things anymore. Yeah, it is huge as well. And it's a long way. I get cold.

00:12:09.480 - 00:12:23.960

You know, it's fantastic stuff, but it might not mean a lot. I just like that. It might not mean a lot to a lot of people. But it's, look, I put that in because, you know, we've linked up. We were working with women.

00:12:24.920 - 00:12:36.740

You know, there's all this stuff about, ooh, white middle-class women. Well, do you know what I mean? I can understand why maybe black women wouldn't want to come and live at Greenham. Because they'd be targeted, you know.

00:12:36.800 - 00:12:53.360

And it's the same with anti-fascist stuff, which I've been on some of. And it's so violent. But we were internationally linking with women in Namibia, like the Western Shoshone people. There was a women's peace camp at Nevada test site.

00:12:53.900 - 00:13:10.480

And the women's peace camp there was on Shoshone land. And the tests were being done on Indian reservation land. And the women's peace camp there had their own bit of land. Because in America, the arresting thing is so much harder.

00:13:10.780 - 00:13:31.380

Women from Greenham went, you know, to the Nevada test site. We paid for women to come from the South Pacific islands to come and tour about the sea testing. There was a women's peace camp at Comiso, where there was a USAF base. Two women from Comiso came and lived at Greenham.

00:13:31.380 - 00:13:51.980

There was a women's peace camp at Hiroshima. And right at the beginning of Greenham, a woman who was from that peace camp came and lived at Greenham. She died at Greenham of cancer. So do you want to let Christine do some photography while we talk?

00:13:52.100 - 00:14:01.800

Or would you like to see what she's going to photograph? Just in case there's anything. Because you'd only do the stuff with tabs on, wouldn't you? Yeah, yeah.

00:14:02.060 - 00:14:33.300

It's up to you, Ray. How do you feel about it? And some of it is like newspaper cutting, so it's in the public domain. Oh, this lot are actually about the fact that we didn't leave when the missiles did. This diary, I think it does help to have a little bit of why I've done this.

00:14:33.520 - 00:14:51.140

But this is an article about, you know, the missiles have gone but we're still here. And we did get a lot of being slagged off about why we didn't go. And it became a lot of work to do that. And also the donations stopped coming in.

00:14:51.140 - 00:15:14.240

And a lot of women, some of us signed on in Newbury, or did postal signing on. But a lot of women, for various reasons, wouldn't be able to sign on. Especially if they were underage or escaping domestic violence. And so we had Camp Dole, when we had lots of donations, which were coming from all over the world.

00:15:14.620 - 00:15:30.300

We were able to actually support women financially with what we call Camp Dole. So that they had a bit of personal money. That's really interesting as well, I think. Because what I've read is that when the men were there at the beginning,

00:15:31.140 - 00:15:49.280

that when they would get the money, that they would kind of keep hold of it. And that seems to be a sort of, you know, if you look at the World Health Organisation, and the way the organisations work in a sort of global way. Whether it be African, Somali, whatever.

00:15:49.440 - 00:16:00.700

When they're trying to work with developing countries, they like to give the women the money. Because they know they will spread it around. So that's quite interesting. But the men were only there for a week or two.

00:16:00.960 - 00:16:15.140

There was a call out on the telephone tree. I was back in Devon. And there was a call out for as many women as possible to get up for that. There was going to be a big meeting and a discussion and a decision to get rid of the men.

00:16:15.140 - 00:16:34.960

So I rushed up to be there to vote that we got rid. Because there was no intention to stay, you know, in the first place. And at that time, you know, there were a lot of new age travellers about. And some of them, well, we called them the brew crew.

00:16:35.260 - 00:16:52.580

So we just didn't want them. You know, they were fucking pissheads. And so, yeah, when the decision was to stay, there had to be a decision to ask them to go. And some heterosexual women left Greenham at that point.

00:16:52.760 - 00:17:07.320

Because they said, well, the lesbians can live here with their lovers, but we can't. So we're not going to stay. Well, that's fine, that's their choice. But, you know, even that was actually, it wasn't exactly controversial.

00:17:08.100 - 00:17:29.100

But it was a deciding factor for some women. But it was a deciding factor for a lot of others that thought, right, now we've got a women-only space here, you know. But also it was because of the violence, you might have been told this. But to do blockades totally non-violently, it was much easier to do it as women-only.

00:17:29.100 - 00:17:44.260

In those days, partly because the police were possibly going to be less violent if it was women-only. We just talked about carrying Greenham home. They weren't exactly non-violent. But if there'd been men, it would have probably been a lot worse.

00:17:44.680 - 00:18:01.880

Because it would have ended up with a big fight. Which was sort of sometimes what happened for traveller sites being evicted. You know, there'd be a huge sort of standoff, like at Dale Farm is a more contemporary example. But a lot of people got injured really badly from resisting that eviction.

00:18:05.580 - 00:18:23.260

But anyway, these were three things that I thought you really must get a photo of. Because, again, you might get them. You might have get them anyway from somewhere else. But where was the orange one?

00:18:23.600 - 00:18:30.760

Where's the orange one gone? Where it said about reclaim the base. I think it might be underneath. It might be underneath.

00:18:33.300 - 00:18:51.900

Because I felt like that's one of the really important things to say. We were actually there to reclaim the common as much as to see... You've got to go under. You know, you could take those as a shot with some diaries in the background, couldn't you?

00:18:52.020 - 00:18:59.420

Yeah. Great. That one. There's a few.

00:19:01.380 - 00:19:11.660

That's probably good for the light. Let's do another one that's got a nice... So did everybody write in these diaries then, Ray? No, no, it was voluntary.

00:19:12.140 - 00:19:29.360

It was just whoever wanted to write something could write something? Yeah, a lot of visitors would write because they'd give us their address and say if you're in Sweden... There's always a bed for the... There was a lot of canyoneering between the women's squats in Brixton as well.

00:19:29.540 - 00:19:41.240

There was a brief occupation in London. A lot of Greenham women went to the London Women's Hospital. That was squatted for a while. And it had water, for fuck's sakes.

00:19:41.500 - 00:19:52.020

We were living at camp. It was quite nice to go up there for a few days and have a bit of a rest. Have some water. Yeah, all the diaries have got names.

00:19:54.860 - 00:20:08.720

What do you mean they've got names? Oh, well, look, you know, Erlandtrude or Daisy or, like, Parsley. Some of them have got names, like, you know, this is the friend that's done that. Lodegate.

00:20:08.840 - 00:20:25.880

I mean, it's actually Wodegate, but you've got to call it Lodegate. So they're just sort of nicknames or whatever came up, whoever was around. But, yeah, there's a lot of stuff from visitors that write and say, God, you know, I never knew I was going to be here, and now I'm definitely coming back.

00:20:25.940 - 00:20:41.240

And they would, and they would come back and, oh, they just, like, oh, I'm not going home, I'm staying. So, yeah, I took a little arrangement of that. So, where's my list? Right.

00:20:42.460 - 00:20:54.120

I've done this. This list is slightly chronological. So, yeah, the vote to ask men to leave. So there was a call out on the telephone tree, because I was already in a women's peace camp in Topmouth,

00:20:54.500 - 00:21:01.960

a women's peace group. And was that to men and women or just to women? Well, it was only to women. Right.

00:21:03.380 - 00:21:11.860

And so how would that, what would that have looked like on the day? You know, the women would have arrived. Did you have a big tent that you all sat on? No, no, we didn't.

00:21:12.020 - 00:21:29.760

We were just outside. No, no, no, if you can feel safe. There is one that hasn't got a cushion, which might be safer. So, in amongst all that was the early discussions about what actually non-violence meant.

00:21:30.000 - 00:21:50.500

And the reason, because I was at the silos action, the New Year silos action, I was in a ditch with ladders. There was quite a lot of support, not just the authority on the top. And we used ladders because we felt that cutting the fence was violence. So obviously that got reviewed, but just in those early days we thought,

00:21:50.640 - 00:21:58.400

oh, you know, we cut the fence, they'll say we're being violent, we're not being non-violent. So that's why we used ladders. Right, yeah. And then...

00:21:58.400 - 00:22:12.000

And you had like cushions over the barbed wire or something, didn't you? Bits of carpet and stuff. Yeah, that's it, yeah. And so, yeah, so that was initially why we used ladders.

00:22:12.120 - 00:22:24.980

So when you, to go back to the women only vote, when it was put to the vote, was it just a question and then a raise of hands for... Oh, I can't remember. There was a bit of discussion. Right.

00:22:25.380 - 00:22:32.100

I mean, you know, there were, men continued to be involved with Greenham. Sure. They just didn't live there. Yeah.

00:22:32.360 - 00:22:51.840

And one of the rules was, like, men can come until dark. So, but there were, like, Emerald Gate was basically no men, because it was up in the woods and we needed a place where we could go work. Like, Bluegate was very much on the front line.

00:22:51.980 - 00:23:06.180

You were right on the roadside on a road junction. And by the racecourse, it was near the racecourse, Newby racecourse, so there was a lot of traffic. And it was the first stop coming up out of Newby as well,

00:23:06.240 - 00:23:23.720

although Yellow was on a more main road. So, yeah, so I think the call-out was just for women that had already been, you know, that were already in women's peace groups. I was in a little anti-nuclear group.

00:23:23.940 - 00:23:45.100

Before I lived in South Don, I was in West Somerset, and Hinkley Point was being developed. So, initially, I was involved with a local group, which was against nuclear power. So, when Greenham started up, there was immediately that nuclear chain link

00:23:45.100 - 00:24:03.200

of nuclear power as being promoted, because they need the— it ends up with weapons-grade plutonium, isn't it, to go onto the missiles. So, what was the reaction when the vote was taken and it was decided it would be women only?

00:24:03.420 - 00:24:12.880

What was the sort of immediate reaction? Well, I can't really remember. I suppose we all were very glad, you know, because it was very tied up with the decision to stay,

00:24:13.280 - 00:24:22.440

you know, which had never been the plan. It was very much tied up. It was going, OK, some of us want to stay. Some of us are not going to go home.

00:24:22.440 - 00:24:38.340

Some of us are going to be here half the week or whatever. But to enable us to do that and feel safe and comfortable, we therefore need to ask the men to go and park up somewhere else, you know, because they didn't do the washing up.

00:24:38.460 - 00:24:52.320

To me, the money would have been one thing, but at that point, we weren't really doing Camp Douglas. This was really early days. So, it was quite tied up with, like,

00:24:52.380 - 00:25:00.140

if we're going to stay here and we want to really be non-violent, how can we do it? We can't do it with the men around because then they get drunk, they are violent,

00:25:01.020 - 00:25:11.760

and they won't do the washing up. They expect us to cook for them. There were all those domestic reasons, really, you know. So, anyway.

00:25:15.020 - 00:25:28.660

Right. So, yeah, I got evictions, which led to us having to have night watch as well because of the vigilantes.

00:25:29.940 - 00:25:37.680

Were these local residents? Yeah. Well, some of them were out of uniform squaddies as well. So, yeah, but, I mean, in the diaries,

00:25:37.820 - 00:25:46.900

just endless sort of reports of, you know, vigis came by in the night and they set fire to the sofa, you know. Vigis came by in the night

00:25:46.900 - 00:26:03.240

and all the tents and vehicles were covered in eggs, you know. Vigis came, you know, just, like, endless. We had to go to the shit pit in the woods in twos because there'd be perverts hanging around the shit pit, you know.

00:26:03.620 - 00:26:16.840

It was a real issue. Cars would drive by and chuck stuff out, you know, morning, noon and night, and there's lists of number plates in those diaries, you know.

00:26:17.120 - 00:26:28.540

Oh, white so-and-so car, I think this is most of the number plate, you know. Also, people hitched a lot more in those days, so women would be, like, coming up and down the motorways

00:26:28.540 - 00:26:42.200

and you'd sort of, like, oh, so-and-so memory service station got a lift from this geezer who was really weird. Here's his number, he's up and down here all the time, you know.

00:26:43.600 - 00:26:56.960

And because we had the publicity, men knew where we were as well, you know. So Yellowgate was on a lorry road down to Southampton. Bluegate was a more sort of B road.

00:26:58.300 - 00:27:10.840

But the thing is, I mean, at first, there was only Yellowgate, main gate, and then we gradually would have sort of open other gates, temporary, for big actions,

00:27:11.060 - 00:27:22.420

like Orangegate and Bluegate and Greengate, because Greengate was right opposite the silos, so we watched the silos being built. And a lot of vehicles were coming in and out of there,

00:27:22.500 - 00:27:34.480

delivering the stuff to build the silos. And then you probably know that Yoko Ono bought us a sanctuary, and then there was the whole business with the split and wages for housework,

00:27:34.660 - 00:27:46.220

and I remember that meeting as well, you know, and it was a huge gathering, and that was in what was then the clearing at Greengate. It's all being replanted and everything now.

00:27:46.280 - 00:27:57.260

It's not a clearing anymore. But they had, like, equipment that was out of this world, you know, great big recording things with great big stalks with booms on,

00:27:57.260 - 00:28:06.940

and it was very intimidating, and we just thought, where do they get this stuff from? And also, for a long time, and I think this continues,

00:28:07.560 - 00:28:23.000

but there were a lot of feminist conferences around the country, and women from Greenham were being invited all the time to go and do workshops and speaks about Greenham. And so, you know, we'd pile up in a van,

00:28:23.160 - 00:28:33.580

and six of us would go to Midlands or wherever and go to these conferences to do stuff about what's happening at camp and collect money, you know,

00:28:33.880 - 00:28:48.860

and then you'd go to these things, and there'd be women from King's Cross Women's Centre, and there would be one of them in every workshop. Whatever the workshop topic was,

00:28:49.080 - 00:28:59.720

there'd be one of them in every workshop going, You should be talking about wages for housework. Yes, but this workshop is about abortion rights. Oh, but what about wages for housework?

00:29:00.060 - 00:29:09.660

And it was very disruptive, and it's a bit like what's happening now with the trans activist lobby. To me, it's very similar tactics,

00:29:09.880 - 00:29:24.980

and we ultimately felt like it's a CIA-backed thing. Right, right. I was going to say, why do you think they did that? So you think they were paid to just create disruptive...

00:29:24.980 - 00:29:33.900

That women's centre still exists. It's one of the few women's centres that still exists. It still is pro-pornography. It's still got, what's it called,

00:29:34.400 - 00:29:47.380

English Collective of Prostitutes. And meanwhile, we were being told that the women at Greenham were being funded by the Russians. You know, so we weren't.

00:29:47.380 - 00:29:59.520

But anyway, I'm digressing a bit there. So can I ask you a couple of questions about what you've said? So you were talking about the vigilantes and it being fairly constant,

00:30:00.240 - 00:30:10.700

and although in sort of criminal justice terms it might be pretty low level, actually the constant nature of it must have had an impact on the women

00:30:10.700 - 00:30:21.540

and their feelings of sort of physical safety. Yeah. Well, if you wanted to go to the ship pit, you'd have to find someone to go with you.

00:30:21.980 - 00:30:33.520

And if it's Dole Day and there's only three of you there, that's quite hard because one of you's got to stay at the camp, at the gate, you know. Yeah.

00:30:33.960 - 00:30:43.120

I mean, did you ever report any of this activity to the police? Oh, I wouldn't have. I don't know. I don't know that some of them might have got reported,

00:30:43.120 - 00:30:51.120

but the police weren't on our side. They weren't there to defend us. But also, I think we have to remember that it's actually not unusual

00:30:51.120 - 00:31:04.100

for women to have to be coping with male violence most days of their life, you know, as well. And especially women that were there escaping domestic violence, not necessarily from a marital partner, but from parents.

00:31:04.260 - 00:31:17.660

Young women were escaping abuse in the home. It wasn't anything new, you know. But we weren't on our own, you know. And, yeah, so we, you know,

00:31:17.760 - 00:31:31.060

we just sort of developed tactics of self-defence. And what was the night watch? It was just to keep the tents and the surroundings safe so that things wouldn't get burned?

00:31:31.100 - 00:31:38.080

Yeah. Yeah, but also, to a certain extent, monitoring activity inside the base. Right.

00:31:38.560 - 00:31:46.320

Because, you know, they still do it now. I mean, there's still a cruise watch. And periodically, they would come out and do their tour on the road

00:31:46.320 - 00:31:54.300

and block off all the motorways. And I think they would often come out at night because the roads were quieter. So there's, you know,

00:31:54.360 - 00:32:04.840

there's whole lists of sort of activity in the base, especially when the Americans started to arrive, once the silos were built. And, you know, there's a lot of documentation

00:32:04.840 - 00:32:14.420

about the missiles arriving, because obviously the press were all over it then. They were all over us. Well, obviously they were inside the base.

00:32:16.160 - 00:32:21.740

So... What did they want from you, do you think, the press? They just wanted a story? Or do you think they...

00:32:24.160 - 00:32:34.120

We had to be very careful with the press. Mostly they wanted, yeah, they wanted a story. But, like, you know, all press, you've got to be very careful about what you say

00:32:34.120 - 00:32:40.260

because you know that they're going to put whatever... They'll misquote you. They won't put the bits that you think are important. I mean, it was...

00:32:40.260 - 00:32:47.940

Nobody wanted to talk to the press, and we never did it on our own. We'd always try and, like, not... You know, like, all the stars are in the sky.

00:32:48.140 - 00:32:55.460

We don't have leaders here, you know. Oh, they'd come up and they'd go, you know, three men had come with cameras and all this equipment,

00:32:56.080 - 00:33:00.260

and they'd go, Oh, can we speak to... Who's in charge around here? Can we speak to the leader?

00:33:00.500 - 00:33:08.960

Oh, no, we don't have leaders. And anyway, you're a man and we don't speak to men. Go away. When you send a woman to come and interview us,

00:33:09.180 - 00:33:21.700

if you're lucky, you'll get an interview. You know, I mean, there was that level of resistance of, like, yes, it's a women-only space. And that was a hard thing for a lot of women

00:33:21.700 - 00:33:29.280

to come to terms with, you know, to sort of get the hang of. But it soon makes sense because that's what...

00:33:29.980 - 00:33:38.020

You know, at that time, there weren't many women journalists, you know. There weren't many women photographers. We'd give a woman a job, you know.

00:33:38.420 - 00:33:45.840

And so did women journalists start coming or did they just... Right, right. Because, again, when I watched Carrie Greenham,

00:33:45.920 - 00:33:53.700

I think it was Carrie Greenham home, there's an excerpt with exactly that. There's, like, a sound guy and some other guy and then there's...

00:33:53.700 - 00:33:59.560

I didn't mean to. He's so patronising. Yes. Oh, my God, he's just...

00:33:59.560 - 00:34:03.060

Yeah. He's horrible. Yeah. What a horrible man.

00:34:03.060 - 00:34:08.060

Yeah, and he gets short shrift. Oh, yeah. Well, there we are. There's your evidence.

00:34:08.880 - 00:34:14.520

I mean, I feel like... Am I imagining this? But, no, it is what happened. So...

00:34:15.780 - 00:34:21.060

Right. So tell me about Yoko Ono as well. So just so that we can... If there's...

00:34:21.820 - 00:34:26.720

You know... Verify. Just so that we've got you talking about it. On the outside of the gate,

00:34:27.160 - 00:34:40.400

if you go up the road at Greengate, if you turned left, the camp was on the left-hand side and if you turned right into the woods,

00:34:40.940 - 00:34:51.940

there was a bit of land that must have come up for sale and she bought it for us as a sanctuary. It was our sanctuary. You couldn't see it from the road.

00:34:52.620 - 00:34:57.080

If you walked round the fence, you could probably see it a bit. It was... And it was where...

00:34:57.080 - 00:35:09.380

If women were ill or, you know, just needed some head space, it was our sanctuary. And then when it got sort of occupied by Katrina House

00:35:09.380 - 00:35:20.600

and the Yellow Gate, you know, further along down the line, we lost our sanctuary. So the other side of Greengate Camp

00:35:20.600 - 00:35:30.300

became more of a sanctuary and for a while, like, Greengate, the Greengate Camp was like no caffeine, no sugar, no alcohol, no drugs.

00:35:30.300 - 00:35:41.620

It was like a sort of the pure gate, you know. I mean, a lot of the donations were bottles of vodka and bottles of brandy and, you know, it was great.

00:35:41.840 - 00:35:49.900

You know, it would really help. And then with the... Also, when it was very intense with having Nightwatch and the evictions,

00:35:50.740 - 00:36:01.440

there was a whole sort of rotor of different support groups that would bring hot food because it was impossible to cook.

00:36:01.800 - 00:36:08.280

At the end of the day, they would... The fire service would come and they would absolutely soak our fire pits.

00:36:08.880 - 00:36:17.780

We had no dry wood. It was not possible. They'd take all our kitchen pots and so there was like a very,

00:36:17.960 - 00:36:27.380

very good support network of... Once it got dark, well, because I was there mostly in the winters, but the hot food runs would come

00:36:27.380 - 00:36:35.340

and they would bring, in the back of the cars and the vans, in straw boxes, pots of stew and stuff to feed us

00:36:35.340 - 00:36:44.240

because we couldn't cook. So that was a really important part of the support and that was... A lot of CND groups did that,

00:36:44.400 - 00:36:55.260

Oxford and Southampton. I mean, it sounds almost like a sort of, like torture, like a kind of, you know,

00:36:56.960 - 00:37:02.440

like a state, you know, how you would treat people if they were sort of in a prison camp, if you know what I mean.

00:37:02.560 - 00:37:08.060

You wanted to break them. Yeah, yes, absolutely. Did you never think, I can't do this anymore?

00:37:08.500 - 00:37:17.060

Well, yeah, everyone would think that at times and go off, but, you know, yeah, some, you know,

00:37:18.000 - 00:37:25.840

whatever, I mean, yeah. That's why over a period of 12 years, you know, lots of women left when the missiles left

00:37:25.840 - 00:37:34.040

and they might have carried on. Like that thing with the London Greenham newsletter is actually saying, you know, hardly any of us go to Greenham anymore.

00:37:34.480 - 00:37:43.080

We're not really raising funds anymore. They used to do benefits and send money and stuff. And, you know, if we don't get some more material,

00:37:43.240 - 00:37:51.820

we're going to, it's probably time to stop doing the newsletter. So, but that's healthy. You know, things can't be set in aspect.

00:37:51.820 - 00:38:03.960

They need to sort of be responsive to the circumstances of the time. And so, yeah, because you were saying earlier about

00:38:04.560 - 00:38:15.400

the consciousness raising. I think a lot of that was done on the night watch. Yeah, I think that's really missing from feminism today. I think that, you know,

00:38:16.180 - 00:38:25.120

those spaces always seem very useful, even though they might be completely unstructured. They're very useful. Yeah, because I, you know,

00:38:25.200 - 00:38:36.840

I was in a CR group for a while in West Somerset before I moved down to Devon. And we did have a structure because we started off with very safe things

00:38:36.840 - 00:38:48.160

to talk about what felt like they might be safe, turned out to not be safe, like food. You know, it's actually a Pandora's box for women, the whole issue of food and cooking and eating

00:38:48.160 - 00:39:03.200

and weight and size and kids and childhoods. You know, like when I was born, there was rationing, you know. So my relationship with food is very different to people's relationships now, particularly.

00:39:06.860 - 00:39:19.340

Yeah, so also, like the whole father-daughter rape, the sex abuse, not only from the church, but we started to understand, like, oh, you know, I had a very young sister.

00:39:20.600 - 00:39:36.640

And then we realised that it was actually... ..like... ..young women who got pregnant from their fathers, the mother would pretend it was her baby.

00:39:37.440 - 00:39:46.900

So you thought you had a sister... You know, I'm getting a bit mixed up, but you know what I mean. You know, we talked about that. And then when you're grown up or someone dies or something,

00:39:47.100 - 00:39:59.360

you actually start to find out. If you start to unpick that and really examine the family story... And it was quite consciousness-raising to realise you were the only one.

00:39:59.480 - 00:40:10.500

You know, you weren't the only one. And the same with particularly the Irish women that would come over with what was happening with the church and the schools. And now it's all over the place.

00:40:10.500 - 00:40:20.720

You know, we were going, we told you so. We told you so. Nobody would listen. You know, like the classic Cassandra.

00:40:21.880 - 00:40:35.700

And who was told? Who did they try and tell? Oh, I don't know, because I wasn't part of that. But I know from one particular, this particular Irish friend,

00:40:35.700 - 00:40:46.840

who was sort of hounded out of the country and had to leave her kids behind. She moved to London, but she used to come to Greenham a lot and Aldermaston.

00:40:47.160 - 00:41:00.100

And, you know, she got involved in psychotherapy, working with Gay Helpline, and started to do the counselling. So the trauma work.

00:41:00.180 - 00:41:12.320

Yeah, the trauma work. So they, you know, Irish men and women were part, in the end, part of, like, part of the investigations. I'm not up to speed with it all, really.

00:41:12.600 - 00:41:25.300

But it took a long time, you know, because we knew and we were having these conversations and nobody would listen. So I wanted to talk about webweaving. Have you been, has that been covered?

00:41:25.600 - 00:41:34.580

No, I haven't. OK, because it's on the commisso sticker. It's on a lot of the posters. And I went to the Women's Pentagon Action,

00:41:34.660 - 00:41:47.760

the second Women's Pentagon Action. There was two women from Greenham went to that. I mean, I just was, I went as a woman artist because there was a huge feminist arts movement in New York

00:41:47.760 - 00:41:57.840

and I'd been at art college and my best friend at art college was back in, she was from New York, so I went to stay with her on Manhattan and I got involved with the Women's Pentagon Action.

00:41:57.840 - 00:42:14.280

And the New York Feminist Art Institute. And so I ended up going to that. And so we were doing it a bit at camp anyway, but Arachne, you know, the 13th sign

00:42:14.280 - 00:42:32.100

that was being erased by neo-astrologers. And also Bohemia Grove in Texas, it was a place, a men-only place, where the politicians and the businessmen

00:42:32.100 - 00:42:41.600

would go for their weekend hunting, shooting, wheeling and dealing. And one of their sayings was, like, we have no spiders here.

00:42:41.740 - 00:42:49.240

They were very, there was something about spiders went on with that. But basically, the Women's Pentagon Action was in four, five stages.

00:42:49.840 - 00:43:02.200

Four stages? Oh, I haven't really done my homework on this. But we started off with gathering. We'd slept overnight in a big stadium in Washington, D.C.

00:43:02.420 - 00:43:14.640

And we'd all made tomb, cardboard tomb things with the name of a woman that was killed by patriarchy. It might just have been a friend, it might have been someone historical.

00:43:15.660 - 00:43:27.480

So we had loads of these cardboard tombstones. So the first thing we did was we did a linking hands on the bridge that went from, in the rush hour in the morning,

00:43:27.640 - 00:43:42.820

because we did a lot of this around the country here as well. So we did the handholding with our tombstones on the way to the island that the Pentagon is on, on the Potomac River.

00:43:43.800 - 00:43:55.100

And that was, and then we walked through, maybe it was before or after, but we walked through. There's a huge military cemetery next to it. And we walked in silence through that

00:43:55.100 - 00:44:12.660

to remember the war dead, actually our brothers. But we had our own remembering our own dead. And then we got to the grounds of the Pentagon and we planted these tombstones in the grass.

00:44:13.140 - 00:44:29.180

And that was empowerment, anger empowerment and defiance was three of them. So after doing that, we walked through the cemetery in silence and as we emerged, we wailed and keened and howled

00:44:29.180 - 00:44:38.800

and then we planted our tombstones on the grounds of the Pentagon. And then there was the defiance bit, which was blockading, one of them's a water gate,

00:44:38.920 - 00:44:49.540

so there were only four gates we could get to because there wasn't a water action. But how we blockaded the gates and the American women wouldn't let me do this

00:44:49.540 - 00:45:00.560

because they said, you're too vulnerable. If you get arrested, your life will be a misery. We will do the blockading. But how they blockaded it is with webs.

00:45:00.980 - 00:45:15.200

And so you've got very wide steps with some handrails and women lay and sat on the steps. I have got somewhere some old photographs of this because I met up at the Feminist Art Institute

00:45:15.200 - 00:45:27.740

with a photographer, Michelle, somebody. So they were lying on the steps and they were flinging these balls of wilt at low level. So actually it became impossible to climb up the steps

00:45:27.740 - 00:45:40.640

because you would get your tango. So it was totally non-violent and we blockaded the gates of the Pentagon to do that in that way. So yeah, weaving the wider web,

00:45:40.640 - 00:45:55.760

that whole thing, Greenham women are everywhere. Arachne, the lost 13th sign. And so yeah, women's pentagon actually. And I noticed in Kerry Greenham Home

00:45:55.760 - 00:46:02.700

there's lots of balls of wool and women sit down and they throw them behind them and they hold on to the end of it and it gets thrown behind them.

00:46:03.140 - 00:46:15.860

And as the police are trying to get through they're having to step over these. And if you use nylon wool it's a lot harder to break as well. Which is incredibly effective.

00:46:16.780 - 00:46:26.440

It's very womanly. The knitting and the crocheting, the weaving. We are the weavers, we are the web. We are the flow, we are the ebb.

00:46:26.540 - 00:46:42.520

It was an absolutely crucial symbolic thing. The strength of that tiny, thin little thing. It's hard to break. So when we had very big actions

00:46:42.520 - 00:46:50.740

hundreds of women would be arrested, maybe not charged, but often there was, because a lot of the support action after that

00:46:50.740 - 00:47:00.100

was going to Newbury Magistrates Court, being outside, weaving, and we wove webs outside and if we could get in, inside the court as well.

00:47:00.800 - 00:47:15.300

So when it got to be such large numbers of arrests they started doing the hearings at Magistrates Courts in the part of the country that women came from. So I went to stuff at Totnes Women's Magistrates Court

00:47:15.300 - 00:47:25.800

and only half a dozen of us maybe we'd go in, try and look respectable, sit in the Magistrates Court, a couple of women would be up there from the

00:47:25.800 - 00:47:38.520

Totnes Women's Peace Group from being arrested. And then we would start, whip out our balls of wool and we'd completely web up the Magistrates Court. And the clerks were just like,

00:47:39.060 - 00:47:48.580

didn't know what to do. They were throwing these balls of wool across the public gallery, which was only a small court.

00:47:51.800 - 00:48:05.120

So it was a really fantastic sort of linking, symbolic thing to do this web weaving. And it's quite shocking because it's so non-compliant, it's so unexpected

00:48:05.120 - 00:48:11.960

and also non-violent. It's just absolute genius I think. Yeah. And it follows on,

00:48:12.280 - 00:48:21.920

do you remember, I don't know how many, about maybe 10 years ago or a bit less, there was a pink scarf knitting thing that went from Greenham to Aldermaston.

00:48:22.240 - 00:48:39.560

And so it carries on with that sort of woolly, knitted, womanly craft of it. In 1996 there was a Criminal Justice Act

00:48:39.560 - 00:48:49.160

and I was on a traveller's site in Manchester at that time in Hume. It was all being pulled down and I was involved with the Freedom Network

00:48:49.160 - 00:48:59.280

which was against the Criminal Justice Act. And the first night, the first midnight when the Criminal Justice Act came into operation,

00:48:59.720 - 00:49:07.740

the first action against that was in Manchester and some people did a banner drop or something and they got arrested. So they were up in court in Manchester

00:49:07.740 - 00:49:19.040

and as part of the Freedom Network from there I took the wool. And we wove up the front of the, not to blockade it even,

00:49:19.040 - 00:49:27.540

but just on the pedestrian area with seats and pillars and stuff. And it was very interesting because nobody had ever seen this done.

00:49:27.620 - 00:49:38.980

It was a mixed group. And they were obviously younger than me, mostly, but activists. So yeah, we did the web weaving there

00:49:38.980 - 00:49:54.260

and it was very novel for them. Web weaving and the court cases. Did you, presumably you got arrested at various points?

00:49:54.440 - 00:50:00.800

Yeah, I did. But they put you in the van, throw you out. I never got charged.

00:50:01.200 - 00:50:13.360

You get arrested, they hold you and then you may or may not get charged. So I never was charged. I'd just be bundled up and thrown out.

00:50:13.660 - 00:50:22.700

Or they'd bundle you up and throw you out on the opposite side of the base in the middle of the night and you'd have to get home somehow.

00:50:23.260 - 00:50:34.520

So one of the women I interviewed told me that she had a four-year-old daughter and her daughter was arrested at court. Were you aware of anything like that?

00:50:34.620 - 00:50:45.260

And I think it was part of that punishment for mothers not to be performing their... Good mothers. Yeah, duty.

00:50:45.820 - 00:50:50.220

Yeah. Was that anything that you were aware of? No. No.

00:50:50.420 - 00:50:56.520

I mean, I remember it was Sarah Green, wasn't it, who had the baby? Yeah. Because Becca sent us an email

00:50:56.520 - 00:51:06.440

from Sarah Green about something. Yeah, she had the baby there. I mean, I wasn't full-time there at that point and what happened was,

00:51:06.500 - 00:51:17.020

because I was still weaving, I was doing my own work and I started to go one week a month. So I hitched up with another woman

00:51:17.760 - 00:51:26.520

from Exeter Women's Peace Club. Maybe I was working at Exeter Women's Centre then, part-time, and one week a month I would go up

00:51:27.480 - 00:51:34.600

and that was as much as... And we would hitch up together, stay at different gates and then come and hitch back together

00:51:34.600 - 00:51:44.580

so that we could compare notes and took back different experiences and interviews, information to going anywhere.

00:51:45.360 - 00:51:53.120

So yeah, Green and women are everywhere because that was, again, a non-hierarchical thing. It wasn't like, oh, you're not a real Green and women

00:51:53.120 - 00:52:00.020

because you don't live here. No, there was... And also, there was... I will go on to the other peace camps

00:52:00.020 - 00:52:10.280

because I mentioned Seneca and the Nevada Test Site. I mentioned Camiso in Sicily. Imagine being a women's peace camp

00:52:10.280 - 00:52:18.460

in Sicily of all places. Hiroshima. For a while there was a women's peace camp at Porton Down.

00:52:18.960 - 00:52:30.260

That was a vegan camp. There was South Pacific nuclear test sites. We worked particularly with a woman called Sol who would come and live at Blue Gate quite a bit

00:52:30.260 - 00:52:37.500

and go back and forth and back and forth. And then there was Men With Hill, of course. You must know about Men With Hill. That was a women's peace camp.

00:52:37.900 - 00:52:46.580

And that partly came out of... There were a lot of Greenham offshoots and one of them was women on the road for peace tours. I think there were three or four years of them.

00:52:46.900 - 00:52:53.940

One year it included... There was some sea action groups as well, Southampton, Faslane. I wasn't involved with them

00:52:53.940 - 00:53:06.560

but I've been reminded by reading the diaries. But there were sea actions as well. But the women on the road for peace tour was just going from different routes.

00:53:07.020 - 00:53:18.940

But I went on one of them. I did the second half of one of them when we went up into Scotland. So that was quite a good offshoot.

00:53:21.440 - 00:53:31.800

Obviously we linked up with Women In Black. Do you know about Women In Black? Have you got any records of details of that? Women In Black was actually started

00:53:31.800 - 00:53:48.400

between Palestinian and Israeli women as a peace movement. One of the themes of their public... It still happens once a week in London now,

00:53:48.460 - 00:54:02.120

Women In Black demonstrations. They're silent vigils and you wear black. I used to go to the ones in Southampton. They're still happening in London.

00:54:02.620 - 00:54:14.640

It's a fairly international movement. There's Women In Black in America. I don't know if they're still in Palestine, Israel, quite possibly.

00:54:15.420 - 00:54:28.880

The one in London is still going. It overlapped a bit with Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. So another offshoot was...

00:54:28.880 - 00:54:38.000

So it's a huge network really. It was a massive, massive network. This is another Greenham offshoot. It's a separate project in its own right,

00:54:38.120 - 00:54:53.000

but Women's Aid to Former Yugoslavia was a huge Greenham network outreach thing during the war in former Yugoslavia. We were already connected to Women In Black

00:54:53.000 - 00:55:08.220

in Serbia and Croatia, Zagreb and Belgrade. So we worked with them. There's a difference between displaced people and refugees in terms of

00:55:08.220 - 00:55:15.900

who gets aid from the UN. So if you're a displaced person, you didn't qualify for aid. So we particularly worked through

00:55:15.900 - 00:55:27.240

our sister organisations to support women and children that were not getting UN aid. So we supported a lot of things.

00:55:27.540 - 00:55:35.160

Jo Brand was a fantastic campaigner for us, but we worked with the WI, we worked with the Girl Guides. We had different campaigns.

00:55:35.940 - 00:55:48.040

We did really dozens of convoys. I went three times. I've got a few photos up there of trips. So we hired trucks

00:55:49.040 - 00:56:10.160

and we requested aid. There was a Muslim and Christian women worked together in a town in Krajina, which was a very contested area,

00:56:10.960 - 00:56:23.180

and they'd salvaged out of a bombed building to make a sort of day centre for women, and they got a washing machine because it was very hard to get the washing done.

00:56:23.520 - 00:56:35.160

So we supported them with soap powder. So we'd always collect soap powder to take to that. And then through also another project

00:56:35.160 - 00:56:41.700

that came out of it was the sock project. So women that were in refugee camps, we'd take wool to them, and another knitting thing,

00:56:41.820 - 00:56:49.440

take wool to them, and they would knit their traditional socks and we'd bring the socks back and sell them through independent bookshops

00:56:50.760 - 00:56:59.320

to help raise funds. But it was therapeutic, isn't it? Knitting aid on a good day. And also creating something

00:57:00.080 - 00:57:07.740

that it's not charitable giving, is it? It's an exchange. You've given them something and you get something in exchange.

00:57:07.740 - 00:57:20.900

So every week in Zagreb, the women in black were doing a silent... I've got a few photographs of that. I haven't fished them out

00:57:20.900 - 00:57:28.440

because it's a slightly separate thing, Watfi, but we joined them to do those and they were doing that every week all through the war.

00:57:32.920 - 00:57:40.880

And you get absolutely exhausted and people go, oh God, it must have been really scary, it must have been really depressing.

00:57:41.500 - 00:57:51.420

Actually, it really wasn't because all our links were with amazing women that were resisting so much

00:57:51.420 - 00:57:59.780

and supporting so much that it was very inspiring to go. It was exhausting. And there was a slight overlap

00:57:59.780 - 00:58:10.420

with that women's peace movement with the Underground Railroad that was supporting conscientious objectors to get out of the country

00:58:10.420 - 00:58:18.200

because they didn't want to be conscripted. So there was a little bit of overlap there with the men that were trying to leave because they were war resistors.

00:58:18.420 - 00:58:29.000

I mean, this war resistors internationalism still goes. So why do you think that there's so little celebration of Greenham?

00:58:30.720 - 00:58:40.520

Because once you start looking into it, as you say, the connections and the influence and the impact is enormous. So the suffragettes are really celebrated

00:58:40.520 - 00:58:52.080

whereas Greenham isn't so much. Why do you think that is? We've probably, it's not far enough in the past.

00:58:53.280 - 00:59:01.160

You know, maybe when it's 100 years and we're all dead, there'll be some sort of misrepresentation made, which is why it's really good

00:59:01.160 - 00:59:07.680

that you're doing this. But you know, there's so much more out there now as well, isn't there?

00:59:10.040 - 00:59:18.200

So I don't know. I feel like there is quite a lot of, Greenham was quite well documented. You know, all the newspapers

00:59:18.200 - 00:59:30.160

that might have some quite twisted reports, but there's a lot of evidence about, as you say, it might not be our words, but yeah, I don't know.

00:59:30.160 - 00:59:39.660

I mean, peace became very, like, not fashionable, didn't it, as well? And you know, CND's been sort of poo-pooed and all that.

00:59:39.780 - 00:59:45.600

And now people think nuclear power is, I mean, even George Monbiot, I think he's changed his mind, but thinks nuclear power is a good,

00:59:46.260 - 00:59:56.380

clean solution to, you know. And also, I've been to sort of speaks where people are talking about nuclear power and they don't even think about

00:59:56.380 - 01:00:09.780

the connection with nuclear weapons. And yeah, there's, I don't know. I can't say anything more about that.

01:00:10.200 - 01:00:21.320

So, and in terms of the collective nature of the camp, there must have been conflicts and some of the women I've met

01:00:21.320 - 01:00:31.200

have been quite strong characters. So how would that have been managed in terms of making decisions and sorting out conflicts and so on?

01:00:33.260 - 01:00:40.260

Well, meetings, you know, we'd have, there was a lot of meetings. There'd be a money meeting, you know, there'd be a newsletter meeting.

01:00:42.280 - 01:00:49.700

And when there were, you know, when there were several camps, actually, one of the ways of dealing with conflict is like,

01:00:49.780 - 01:01:04.700

okay, this is going to be a caffeine-free, sugar-free, no alcohol, no drugs camp. So if you don't want to be around women enjoying the donations

01:01:04.700 - 01:01:11.560

of the bottles of vodka at Christmas, you can go. You don't have to be here, you know. So there was partly like,

01:01:11.560 - 01:01:21.900

Blue Gate was a vegan gate, but that could be very unhealthy, you know, chips and beans. So there was a lot of different ways around it.

01:01:21.980 - 01:01:29.120

So if you wanted to eat meat, there was other gates you could go to, to eat meat. So that was part of it,

01:01:29.220 - 01:01:37.540

was actually like, there was quite a lot of freedom of choice because we created that. But I wasn't always at Blue Gate.

01:01:40.440 - 01:01:46.260

And also at one point, you see, Blue Gate, we had to keep moving at Blue Gate because at one point,

01:01:46.380 - 01:01:52.460

they fenced a load of it off and said they were going to do a nature conservation area and they fenced it off

01:01:52.460 - 01:01:58.100

with this little picket fence and planted trees, so we had to move out. So then we went on the other side of the road

01:01:58.100 - 01:02:05.420

and also it got so you couldn't really park, put vendors in the wood because of the evictions and the vigies. So then we had,

01:02:05.920 - 01:02:13.020

there's pictures of it in there, but there were the railings around, it was an old house and it was derelict, I think.

01:02:13.760 - 01:02:23.720

But the railings had hooks on and we'd just have a huge long sheet of plastic and we all slept under there together, ready for the eight o'clock evictions.

01:02:26.520 - 01:02:35.440

And then the Mormons got a planning permission and built a Mormon church there, so the railings went, so then we couldn't be there.

01:02:35.800 - 01:02:44.740

So then we moved the other side of the road, the B road, on a bit of green land that, I don't think it was part of the comment

01:02:44.740 - 01:02:52.420

because there was endless amounts of looking at maps and planning and what was military and what was common and all this.

01:02:52.920 - 01:03:00.340

So then we had to move across that side. Oh, they painted yellow lines as well, so then we couldn't park vehicles. So then I couldn't put my truck there anymore.

01:03:00.580 - 01:03:08.040

So I started going to Orange Gate because there was room to park a truck. And then I had a lover who also had a truck, so there was more room for both of us

01:03:08.040 - 01:03:15.360

to be at Orange Gate. And then they put these mounds in because also there were quite a lot of traditional travellers,

01:03:15.560 - 01:03:27.240

sites and people coming and going. And so the local sort of Irish traveller boys, young men, would sort of turn up round the fire

01:03:28.740 - 01:03:35.620

and go, ooh, what do you do when you get randy then? Go away, young man. Because that's the most important question.

01:03:35.620 - 01:03:40.920

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I was just like, ooh, you know, we're always available if you feel the need,

01:03:41.060 - 01:03:50.400

you know. And so, yeah, so I, you know, I came and went a bit.

01:03:50.600 - 01:03:59.040

And another point, I had a girlfriend who lived in Southampton. And when we did the big, when we did the big sort of embrace of base things,

01:03:59.600 - 01:04:06.480

like in London, but if you were from the south, you went to Orange Gate because that was the side of the Nine Mile Fence.

01:04:06.920 - 01:04:11.840

If you were from the West Country, you went to Emerald Gate because that was that side. If you were from London,

01:04:12.300 - 01:04:19.360

we did Violet Gate and Blue Gate, you know. So it was just partly just a matter of geography and parking.

01:04:19.620 - 01:04:26.540

But yeah, then they came and painted these yellow lines so we couldn't park anything there. And in the end,

01:04:26.580 - 01:04:31.740

we painted the yellow lines out. And to be honest, I've done that on the road as well. I used to park,

01:04:31.780 - 01:04:39.000

I worked in Bristol for a while and I came back one weekend on Sunday night and the bloody yellow lines had been there and I just painted them out.

01:04:39.880 - 01:04:49.280

I've got to get to work in the morning, you know. Blackboard paint is good because it dries very quick. Yeah.

01:04:49.800 - 01:04:57.320

So what was your relationship like with, because there were various, there's the MOD police, there's the Newbury police,

01:04:57.460 - 01:05:07.120

there was the police that came in for the big demonstrations and then there were the residents and so on of Newbury. What were the relationships like with those?

01:05:07.260 - 01:05:13.440

Really bad. I mean, Thames Valley police, it's actually amongst the traveller sort of world as well.

01:05:13.640 - 01:05:25.380

TVP were very, very known because Thames Valley included Stonehenge and there was that huge Battle of the Beanfield thing in 85, 86.

01:05:26.320 - 01:05:31.300

So yeah, Thames Valley police, they were really, there was no relationship.

01:05:31.540 - 01:05:36.700

It was hostile. You know, with the, at one point,

01:05:36.700 - 01:05:40.800

I mean, because there was a, oh, there was a full-time team of fence menders

01:05:40.800 - 01:05:48.860

for quite a while because there was every night, there'd be so many holes made in the fence. Then women were in and out all the time.

01:05:51.140 - 01:05:59.000

And what also, what we did was we'd make our holes and then stitch them back together with a bit of wire. So in the fence,

01:05:59.140 - 01:06:06.840

menders would tour the perimeter fence. They wouldn't see it, but we knew it was there. So they ended up having to employ

01:06:06.840 - 01:06:13.680

a full-time team of fence menders. And then at one period, they had a full-time team of bailiffs. So they literally,

01:06:13.860 - 01:06:22.160

five days a week, they were just touring the perimeter. So it was potluck who got the first eviction because it was random.

01:06:24.000 - 01:06:30.120

So yeah, they were employing a full-time team of bailiffs. And what I heard after camp closed, actually,

01:06:30.520 - 01:06:36.540

was that they were vicious. You saw in Cary Greenham Home, they're really vicious. They wear dark glasses.

01:06:36.640 - 01:06:44.080

There's one in Cary Greenham Home with the shiny dark glasses, big chap. I can't remember all the names.

01:06:44.180 - 01:06:54.340

The names are all written down in the diaries. Do you remember at Hungerford, just the other side of Newbury, one of the first shootings of school kids

01:06:54.340 - 01:07:02.900

was at Hungerford. And it turned out that that guy was one of our bailiffs. So that's the level of psycho,

01:07:03.200 - 01:07:11.700

you know, absolutely violent, psychotic men. Frightening.

01:07:12.260 - 01:07:16.600

Yeah. Yeah, really frightening. You probably know that a woman at Yellowgate

01:07:16.600 - 01:07:20.720

was run over and killed. Yeah, how did that happen? I don't know,

01:07:20.780 - 01:07:24.780

because it was a Yellowgate thing, but it's noted in there. It's noted that, you know,

01:07:25.500 - 01:07:29.340

someone from Yellowgate. Because nothing had happened about that either, did they? Nobody ever got prosecuted?

01:07:30.180 - 01:07:35.500

I don't think so. Arrested or anything? Yeah. And somebody else got their leg broken as well,

01:07:35.580 - 01:07:38.420

didn't they? Someone else got... There was, there was,

01:07:38.540 - 01:07:41.740

yeah, there was probably, I mean, there was,

01:07:43.080 - 01:07:48.100

I mean, you know, we had some women at Bluegate, well,

01:07:48.160 - 01:07:54.300

certainly at Bluegate, I don't know about other gates, but that were really very mentally unwell, you know,

01:07:55.060 - 01:08:03.720

and it was very difficult because we didn't want to be handing them over to the state, you know,

01:08:03.820 - 01:08:09.320

but how to support them when you're so sort of struggling with all the, just the conditions and everything.

01:08:11.520 - 01:08:15.640

Yeah, that was, that was quite difficult as well. We didn't have any expertise,

01:08:16.000 - 01:08:20.420

really, in that field, but we could, and then they'd wander off at night

01:08:20.420 - 01:08:25.340

and they'd disappear for, like, days and we wouldn't know where they'd be. They might have hitched to London

01:08:25.340 - 01:08:29.160

and, I mean, it was really scary and then they'd sort of rock up

01:08:29.160 - 01:08:33.240

and actually, there was, I think there was one time when the,

01:08:33.240 - 01:08:37.700

the, the sofa got set on fire and it was one of these women, you know,

01:08:37.760 - 01:08:42.160

it wasn't always vigilantes, it was, it was sort of, you know,

01:08:42.600 - 01:08:46.600

or like, the post, you know, we'd have the sort of tin box

01:08:46.600 - 01:08:51.180

with the post to go in. One, one morning we woke up and the post was all burnt,

01:08:51.820 - 01:08:56.100

you know, there had been a fire in the post tin and, erm,

01:08:57.840 - 01:08:59.800

er. Yeah, there's a lot of, er,

01:09:00.420 - 01:09:04.840

patience and tolerance in that, isn't there? I mean, given what you were living,

01:09:05.040 - 01:09:08.560

the challenges from, from the authorities to, to,

01:09:08.720 - 01:09:17.720

to be managing those types of mental health issues and conflicts and the survival as well. Yeah.

01:09:17.780 - 01:09:19.320

It's a, it's a lot, isn't it? It was,

01:09:19.400 - 01:09:22.300

it was huge, huge and, you know, a lot of,

01:09:22.400 - 01:09:26.480

I wasn't, I wasn't one of the younger women, erm, but a lot of,

01:09:26.580 - 01:09:28.980

like I say, you know, 15, you just like,

01:09:29.880 - 01:09:35.020

you, you know, you've got no, you've got probably no experience

01:09:35.020 - 01:09:40.500

of any of this and, erm, but you could just concentrate on going wooding and,

01:09:40.680 - 01:09:45.460

you know, sawing up the wood. Er, right.

01:09:46.420 - 01:09:49.560

Oh yeah, do you know about the Salisbury Plain walks? We did some, some,

01:09:49.580 - 01:09:54.300

erm, walks across Salisbury Plain. Only what's, what you spoke to Becca about now,

01:09:54.400 - 01:09:55.720

you can tell us. Er, er, yeah,

01:09:56.160 - 01:09:57.980

I, I, erm, did one of them,

01:09:58.660 - 01:10:01.580

erm, and, er, so we,

01:10:01.680 - 01:10:05.580

yeah, we, we'd gather at Avebury, there were quite a few sort of,

01:10:05.700 - 01:10:10.760

er, little women's festivals at Avebury, erm, and,

01:10:10.940 - 01:10:13.700

erm, and then, so we, we'd sort of take over the car park,

01:10:13.700 - 01:10:18.060

park camp for the night there, and then set off, it was a three day walk, erm,

01:10:18.320 - 01:10:21.300

and, erm, so, that was,

01:10:21.460 - 01:10:24.640

and we'd end up at Stonehenge, just near Stonehenge, yeah, Stonehenge.

01:10:24.980 - 01:10:26.700

So yeah, we, we, we did that,

01:10:26.820 - 01:10:30.140

we walked across Salisbury Plain, all the bomb, you know, the,

01:10:30.720 - 01:10:33.820

the site. And, and weren't you, I mean,

01:10:33.860 - 01:10:37.080

because there, there must have been, because there's quite a lot of activity. Yeah,

01:10:37.160 - 01:10:40.460

the red flags, the red flags, we, we stuck to the,

01:10:40.560 - 01:10:44.500

we stuck to the sort of, route, the path route, you know,

01:10:44.640 - 01:10:49.080

erm, and actually it was quite a good practice for doing the women's aid to former Yugoslavia,

01:10:49.160 - 01:10:52.960

because you'd be driving through, in a war zone, you know, there was no traffic,

01:10:53.860 - 01:10:59.780

except military traffic, there was military roadblocks, and you couldn't get out and have a piss in the bush,

01:11:00.220 - 01:11:03.960

because of landmines. So, erm, you know,

01:11:04.140 - 01:11:07.500

that, that, that was difficult conditions as well, erm,

01:11:07.900 - 01:11:10.500

and, and also, you know, we had no EU,

01:11:10.800 - 01:11:14.640

we had, we only had faxes, erm, and we'd have to sleep.

01:11:14.860 - 01:11:19.220

One, I, I went, the last one that I did

01:11:19.220 - 01:11:24.280

was just after the date and agreement was signed, so it stopped officially being a war. And,

01:11:24.480 - 01:11:29.540

so we were able to get into Serbia, because we'd had, we'd been supporting women in black and that in Serbia,

01:11:29.700 - 01:11:36.260

but because of the sanctions, we didn't try driving in to Serbia. Erm, so,

01:11:37.120 - 01:11:41.480

after the date and agreement, we could actually take some aid, er, so I did that.

01:11:41.620 - 01:11:46.100

There was only the one truck, and erm, and I didn't end up with a co-driver. Mm.

01:11:46.360 - 01:11:50.680

Erm, but we had three. We usually had two drivers and one admin,

01:11:51.220 - 01:11:57.300

because we had all these different currencies and different rules about lorries on the road. Mm. Erm,

01:11:57.620 - 01:12:01.980

and then, some, so also some of the, erm,

01:12:02.100 - 01:12:05.960

like, that had to go through Hungary to get to Serbia, they,

01:12:06.120 - 01:12:10.540

erm, they shut the, the customs points overnight. Mm.

01:12:10.540 - 01:12:13.860

So we'd had to sleep in the trucks. Mm. With, like,

01:12:14.440 - 01:12:20.000

you know, three miles of Russian trucks waiting to come in to Serbia in, in the morning.

01:12:20.460 - 01:12:24.520

Erm, and us in our little seven and a half tonner, you know, three women.

01:12:24.720 - 01:12:28.020

Again, there's no way we went out for a piss. We had a piss pot in the camp. Mm.

01:12:28.020 - 01:12:30.660

And we, and we, you know, we had to sort of,

01:12:30.720 - 01:12:33.120

we got, got, got trucks with camp, with two bunks,

01:12:33.200 - 01:12:38.120

but then one of us had to sleep across the seats and the gear stick. Mm.

01:12:38.540 - 01:12:41.420

yeah, so that was quite, erm, challenging.

01:12:43.900 - 01:12:46.360

And we, and we, and we, and we got to our,

01:12:46.540 - 01:12:51.280

our host group, in, erm, Belgrade,

01:12:51.760 - 01:12:55.000

and, er, they, we had to,

01:12:55.020 - 01:13:00.720

we had to go to a safe house and unload some of the aid because we, they said it's too unsafe

01:13:00.720 - 01:13:05.300

to go to these camps because they haven't had any aid all winter and if you turn up,

01:13:05.540 - 01:13:10.120

you will just get mobbed. So, erm, yeah,

01:13:10.280 - 01:13:13.100

you know, you learn a lot and then we'd have to come back and do reports

01:13:13.100 - 01:13:16.320

and, and that. We had a knicker project one time

01:13:16.320 - 01:13:21.120

to take knickers and sanitary stuff and nappies and we supported

01:13:21.120 - 01:13:25.500

a medical thing called, oh God, I think it's called

01:13:25.500 - 01:13:28.000

Sankogre, erm, anyway, sort,

01:13:28.900 - 01:13:32.560

erm, a medical centre, I think this was in, in Bosnia

01:13:32.560 - 01:13:36.660

and, erm, so we took a lot of medicines out there

01:13:36.660 - 01:13:41.020

er, and also delivered training,

01:13:41.300 - 01:13:45.160

rape crisis training, for, erm, trauma training

01:13:45.160 - 01:13:49.240

and so, er, one of the women,

01:13:49.420 - 01:13:51.900

Sian, she, erm, from,

01:13:52.040 - 01:13:56.460

from being involved with camp and she was really like one of the key, she was the key

01:13:56.460 - 01:14:00.160

sort of woman really in Southampton that, that facilitated WAPFI.

01:14:00.460 - 01:14:04.260

She had an office and she had a fax and, erm,

01:14:05.140 - 01:14:08.480

er, she ended up working for Amnesty as one of the

01:14:08.480 - 01:14:11.940

Balkans representatives. She's just retired now but, erm,

01:14:12.060 - 01:14:15.860

she carried on with those connections so, er,

01:14:15.960 - 01:14:18.620

she told me like last year that, erm,

01:14:19.780 - 01:14:25.460

that medical centre is still happening, it's still there and the women,

01:14:26.020 - 01:14:27.860

you know, they, they, they took it on,

01:14:27.940 - 01:14:31.220

it's their, their project, we just supported to get it going.

01:14:31.600 - 01:14:35.340

They said, we are so pleased that we're here and we have this expertise

01:14:35.340 - 01:14:39.900

because now when women are coming, escaping from Syria or,

01:14:40.080 - 01:14:44.340

you know, wherever, we know what to do because you showed,

01:14:44.500 - 01:14:47.900

you helped us to, to know what to do. Wow, what a fantastic legacy.

01:14:48.140 - 01:14:51.100

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's quite,

01:14:51.100 - 01:14:53.600

it's quite sort of, whoa. Yeah, that is,

01:14:53.680 - 01:14:56.560

that's great, that's great because it's very unusual for things like that

01:14:56.560 - 01:15:00.280

not to, you know, over the years not to just lose their funding

01:15:00.280 - 01:15:03.800

and disappear, you know. Yeah, or to be taken over

01:15:03.800 - 01:15:09.880

by the UN. so, yeah. So,

01:15:10.020 - 01:15:14.620

in terms of, if, if there was a sort of a piece of art

01:15:14.620 - 01:15:18.440

or some kind of, er, picture that you have in your head of,

01:15:18.940 - 01:15:23.620

er, is there something that you think would represent, that represents Greenham to you?

01:15:23.760 - 01:15:26.500

I mean, I know it's difficult because it's so many years but is there,

01:15:26.980 - 01:15:29.840

is there, when somebody says Greenham to you is there something that

01:15:29.840 - 01:15:33.240

flashes into your head? I, I'm, I,

01:15:33.620 - 01:15:38.060

it's the, the bailiffs. The bailiffs and the,

01:15:38.080 - 01:15:42.700

the sort of horrendous state that, the, the only one good thing

01:15:42.700 - 01:15:49.160

about the bailiffs was that they take the rubbish away. Because it was quite a thing

01:15:49.160 - 01:15:53.460

having to get rid of the rubbish. So, yeah, the bailiffs really

01:15:53.460 - 01:15:58.380

and the, and the relentless mess that, and the,

01:15:58.900 - 01:16:04.400

you know, sleeping with your boots on. Yeah, really.

01:16:05.700 - 01:16:09.620

And so, given that this is, some, this is a project

01:16:09.620 - 01:16:15.080

that we're hoping will create the Greenham legacy for future generations,

01:16:15.560 - 01:16:19.440

is there something would you say would be the, the,

01:16:19.440 - 01:16:23.220

the things that, that are the most important legacy for people to understand,

01:16:23.320 - 01:16:30.760

for people to take from, from the Greenham experience? Well, this is a reference

01:16:30.760 - 01:16:34.020

to the Shaffer of Debts, but you stand shoulder to shoulder. You know,

01:16:34.160 - 01:16:39.140

you, you mind each other's backs, but you support each other and,

01:16:39.360 - 01:16:43.140

and you, and you're safer like that. You know, and also just like

01:16:43.740 - 01:16:47.300

naming it, you know, calling, calling it out,

01:16:49.040 - 01:16:51.460

which reminds me of the, the zapping, because have you,

01:16:51.760 - 01:16:54.020

has anyone talked to you about the zapping? They have, yeah.

01:16:54.020 - 01:16:58.660

Yeah, and Elizabeth was a real sort of worker on the zapping. She was based at Bluegator.

01:16:58.740 - 01:17:02.800

She was an older woman and she was a difficult woman, you know,

01:17:03.980 - 01:17:07.660

and, but she was absolutely obsessed with the zapping. Explain,

01:17:08.000 - 01:17:09.620

just. It's, yeah, the zapping was,

01:17:10.040 - 01:17:15.980

it was actually low frequency being used. I mean, you know,

01:17:16.040 - 01:17:20.080

they were experimenting with it in Russia as well as here, but,

01:17:20.220 - 01:17:23.400

and we, we had, we had to tell women that were pregnant

01:17:23.400 - 01:17:26.960

to not come because it, it, it put our periods

01:17:26.960 - 01:17:30.480

out of sync. That might be why we had the moon charts about when we were bleeding.

01:17:30.680 - 01:17:35.040

I don't really know, but, but also you could see the squaddies getting

01:17:35.600 - 01:17:39.980

disorientated by it as well. If they were zapping the gate, then it was affecting

01:17:39.980 - 01:17:45.780

the squaddies that were at the gate as well. And how long

01:17:45.780 - 01:17:50.940

did that go on for? I, I don't know, probably quite a long time

01:17:52.240 - 01:17:54.520

because they were experimenting on us. It's, you know,

01:17:54.580 - 01:17:59.400

it's, I mean now everyone thinks it's okay. We've got so used

01:17:59.400 - 01:18:02.860

to the whole idea of high frequency and low frequency because of the

01:18:02.860 - 01:18:07.660

mobile network and the digital thing and I'm really worried about like 5G

01:18:07.660 - 01:18:09.500

is, we're all fucked. You know, we,

01:18:09.600 - 01:18:12.720

our brains are already being completely zapped and,

01:18:12.720 - 01:18:17.220

and it's, it's an extension of that. But it was low frequency

01:18:18.680 - 01:18:23.520

and it disorientates you, makes you sick. Some women, I mean,

01:18:23.640 - 01:18:28.360

I know quite a few women that were at camp for quite a while and were zapped

01:18:28.360 - 01:18:31.980

and have had thyroid problems and had goiters and had to have

01:18:31.980 - 01:18:36.780

the operations and be on thyroxine and stuff. So,

01:18:36.980 - 01:18:39.640

it was a sort of hormone disruptor as well. Well,

01:18:39.700 - 01:18:42.400

basically, yeah, hormone disruptor because that would be

01:18:42.400 - 01:18:48.700

the, the menstrual cycle. I'm not very good on biology and science

01:18:48.700 - 01:18:51.580

but, um, that's what the zapping was.

01:18:52.920 - 01:18:56.100

So, we did zapping actions which were about holding tin,

01:18:56.220 - 01:19:00.440

tin foil up as a, a shield to it

01:19:00.440 - 01:19:05.120

and it was to reflect the, I think actually water is more of a barrier.

01:19:05.500 - 01:19:08.140

I now understand that water is more of a barrier to it

01:19:08.140 - 01:19:10.980

than metal but we did um, zapping actions

01:19:10.980 - 01:19:13.420

where we did tin foil with Elizabeth sort of,

01:19:13.440 - 01:19:16.080

I think she got, you know, on that one. Um,

01:19:16.080 - 01:19:18.060

so we, one of the actions was like, right,

01:19:18.160 - 01:19:22.060

bring tin foil, you know, bring shiny metal things and we're going to

01:19:22.060 - 01:19:27.000

hold it all up to the gates to highlight the zapping thing but people thought

01:19:27.000 - 01:19:31.020

we were nuts. What, the residents and people

01:19:31.020 - 01:19:32.600

external? Oh, yeah, going back

01:19:32.600 - 01:19:34.800

to the residents. No, I mean, we were banned

01:19:34.800 - 01:19:38.840

from everywhere in Newbury except the Quakers who,

01:19:39.460 - 01:19:42.220

again, even with their amazing sort of

01:19:43.060 - 01:19:46.860

white poppy business, um, it was very difficult

01:19:46.860 - 01:19:50.580

for the Newbury Quakers to vote to support us.

01:19:50.680 - 01:19:53.940

They used to come and do a, various religious groups would come

01:19:53.940 - 01:19:58.020

and do Sunday morning prayer meetings and vigils

01:19:58.020 - 01:20:01.360

and we'd be very respectful of like, let's not make too much noise

01:20:01.360 - 01:20:03.920

and, you know, but, they,

01:20:04.360 - 01:20:07.880

in the end, you know, they turned over their meeting hall

01:20:07.880 - 01:20:12.700

which was right next to Newbury bus station which was fantastic because women

01:20:12.700 - 01:20:16.900

would get off the bus quite disorientated with all these bags and,

01:20:17.000 - 01:20:20.780

um, they installed a shower and a washing machine

01:20:20.780 - 01:20:25.880

and a dryer because drying things was a nightmare and for a long,

01:20:25.980 - 01:20:28.960

and we could have meetings there if we were planning NVDA

01:20:28.960 - 01:20:32.060

where we wanted a safer, more, we could talk

01:20:33.340 - 01:20:36.280

in there so, yeah, that was,

01:20:36.380 - 01:20:39.760

that was, um, a really supportive thing and there was one cafe

01:20:39.760 - 01:20:43.940

called the Empire Grill that would let us in because we did stink, you know,

01:20:44.020 - 01:20:48.000

you couldn't really not stink um, and, and then you,

01:20:48.080 - 01:20:50.840

then you just, oh, what the fuck, we're covered in mud

01:20:50.840 - 01:20:55.340

we'll only get covered in mud as soon as we go back so, and Dole Day

01:20:55.340 - 01:20:58.680

was a big day for the signing on um, but,

01:20:58.800 - 01:21:01.200

and it was Market Day I think, so, er,

01:21:01.540 - 01:21:03.960

yeah, we were banned from everywhere um,

01:21:04.040 - 01:21:09.300

except the Empire Grill which was quite near the bus station and the,

01:21:09.300 - 01:21:15.100

and the Quaker Meeting House um, yeah. So,

01:21:15.340 - 01:21:18.220

given that sort of standing shoulder to shoulder was,

01:21:19.260 - 01:21:21.940

is, is something you feel Greenham, you know,

01:21:21.980 - 01:21:26.960

is it Greenham legacy, how did you feel about the, the sort of,

01:21:27.000 - 01:21:29.780

um, the conflicts that came later on that seemed to split

01:21:29.780 - 01:21:33.200

the, the camp? Because, what with the Yellowgate

01:21:33.200 - 01:21:39.520

thing? Um, well, well,

01:21:39.780 - 01:21:42.060

we, we were just pissed off because we felt like

01:21:42.060 - 01:21:45.500

our, our, our thing was being taken over

01:21:45.500 - 01:21:48.000

and hijacked so, so, you know,

01:21:48.120 - 01:21:50.880

one of the difficult things to negotiate around that was the,

01:21:50.880 - 01:21:53.560

was the post and the money because, um,

01:21:54.420 - 01:21:57.700

because originally there was only the main gate, you know,

01:21:57.940 - 01:22:01.580

and then, then after there was more than one camp,

01:22:01.740 - 01:22:04.080

we, we didn't, we stopped calling it main gate

01:22:04.080 - 01:22:08.500

because it's like there are no leaders so then we took on the rainbow colours

01:22:08.500 - 01:22:11.340

and partly for the big actions. Um, but,

01:22:11.680 - 01:22:15.680

you know, like we had to rest, we had to get

01:22:15.680 - 01:22:20.020

our own bank account and our own signatories and, er,

01:22:20.020 - 01:22:23.720

get women to actually choose who they were

01:22:23.720 - 01:22:26.180

going to send their donations with. Right. So if it was

01:22:26.180 - 01:22:29.620

our newsletter that went out with our date, I mean,

01:22:29.720 - 01:22:33.200

Blue Gates did, we did a lot of newsletters from Blue Gates,

01:22:33.740 - 01:22:36.740

um, er, yeah, we would be the

01:22:36.740 - 01:22:39.280

ones that would do the money. If we went on a women's march

01:22:39.280 - 01:22:42.000

or a speak or anything, we'd be doing bucketing so we

01:22:42.000 - 01:22:44.240

would get the money. You know, we would go to, like,

01:22:44.400 - 01:22:47.940

women's disco in Reading and bucket there or arrange speaks.

01:22:48.040 - 01:22:49.880

Bristol, there was a lot of coming and going from Bristol

01:22:49.880 - 01:22:54.280

as well. Um, so, the money was

01:22:54.280 - 01:22:56.920

a big, a big problem and then what happened with the

01:22:56.920 - 01:23:00.480

sanctuary went on and on and on and on and on. And what did,

01:23:00.620 - 01:23:03.920

what, what was the issue? Well, what the issue

01:23:03.920 - 01:23:07.240

was that Yellow Gate took it over. And,

01:23:07.540 - 01:23:11.220

um, you know, all the time that camp was there

01:23:11.220 - 01:23:13.140

but after, after camp had left, I mean,

01:23:13.200 - 01:23:16.420

me and my girlfriend at the time, we went up to

01:23:16.420 - 01:23:19.640

Blue Gates to remove the last caravan. There were,

01:23:19.760 - 01:23:22.960

like, three women left at Blue Gate and it,

01:23:23.220 - 01:23:25.460

the, it was looking like the fence was coming down

01:23:25.460 - 01:23:27.720

and no, and it was not sustainable. Everyone was

01:23:27.720 - 01:23:30.160

absolutely fed up anyway. So, we went and

01:23:30.160 - 01:23:32.940

moved the last caravan and it was really emotional,

01:23:33.060 - 01:23:36.220

difficult time but the Yellow Gate women stayed on

01:23:36.220 - 01:23:39.320

and they were inhabiting, they weren't even necessarily

01:23:39.320 - 01:23:41.860

Yellow Gate women anymore so they stayed on

01:23:41.860 - 01:23:43.580

because it was owned land. They had

01:23:43.580 - 01:23:46.760

some trailers on there, big statics and,

01:23:46.920 - 01:23:50.000

um, you know, for a while there were a couple of

01:23:50.000 - 01:23:52.620

women, like Spud was one of them, who would

01:23:52.620 - 01:23:55.200

stop by and do a little bit of, you know,

01:23:55.240 - 01:23:57.960

exchange about information about what's happening in the base

01:23:57.960 - 01:24:01.140

or whatever but, um, and then,

01:24:01.540 - 01:24:04.840

uh, after camp had broke, finished but,

01:24:05.520 - 01:24:07.900

um, we, I heard, because we

01:24:07.900 - 01:24:10.580

had some meetings or we had reunions at Orange Gate

01:24:10.580 - 01:24:13.840

partly to deal with the archiving of,

01:24:13.880 - 01:24:16.600

of, of all materials and, um,

01:24:16.600 - 01:24:19.260

so, when, um, when the land

01:24:19.260 - 01:24:23.020

was bought there were three signatories, Evelyn was

01:24:23.020 - 01:24:26.000

one of them, Evelyn lived outside Newbury but,

01:24:26.140 - 01:24:29.940

um, uh, oh God, it was Lynette,

01:24:30.000 - 01:24:32.800

it was Lynette that had the diaries actually in Newbury, not,

01:24:32.960 - 01:24:36.620

Evelyn was, Evelyn had a small holding, she was always bringing us vegetables

01:24:36.620 - 01:24:39.540

and she was one that worked with the commoners, she was an older woman,

01:24:40.060 - 01:24:43.920

um, and, God yeah, it was Lynette

01:24:43.920 - 01:24:46.820

in Newbury that had the, the storage, uh,

01:24:46.900 - 01:24:52.420

and, so there were three signatories, one of them was Evelyn,

01:24:52.980 - 01:24:57.320

um, one of them was a woman who soon after

01:24:57.320 - 01:25:01.040

was disappeared into the mental health system

01:25:01.040 - 01:25:04.000

and was completely lost track of, I can't remember her name,

01:25:04.100 - 01:25:07.600

I probably wouldn't say it anyway, but we never knew what happened to her,

01:25:08.260 - 01:25:12.720

um, and then one of them was Katrina House, and,

01:25:13.420 - 01:25:16.600

so, Evelyn really wanted, shot of the

01:25:16.600 - 01:25:21.560

responsibility of this because we couldn't sell it, what we would like

01:25:21.560 - 01:25:23.300

to, we, we would like to have sold it

01:25:23.300 - 01:25:26.180

and donated the money to, I don't know, Million Women Rise

01:25:26.180 - 01:25:28.440

or something, but, but, and to some other

01:25:28.440 - 01:25:32.540

project, women's peace project, but we couldn't sell it because the three,

01:25:32.960 - 01:25:35.600

well there were only two signatures that were in total conflict,

01:25:35.980 - 01:25:41.600

and then we found out that Katrina House had moved some bloke, some bloke was living

01:25:41.600 - 01:25:46.040

there, and one of the trailers, and she was paying,

01:25:46.100 - 01:25:52.400

he was paying her rent, you know, and, and Evelyn was like

01:25:52.800 - 01:25:55.540

distraught, and like, oh God, I just want to be shot of it,

01:25:55.580 - 01:25:59.060

I just want to be shot of it, and I, I really, I think something did happen

01:25:59.060 - 01:26:03.680

in the end, but I can't remember what, Evelyn Parker is the one you'd need,

01:26:03.800 - 01:26:08.060

I'm not, I think she's still alive. So another offshoot, actually,

01:26:08.200 - 01:26:13.160

was Aldermaston Women's Peace Camp, so that was once a month, so,

01:26:13.580 - 01:26:15.720

I, you know, that's, that still carries on,

01:26:15.800 - 01:26:18.880

I, I carried on going to Aldermaston quite a lot for the weekend,

01:26:18.880 - 01:26:24.200

and, and, you know, a slightly new generation

01:26:24.200 - 01:26:29.060

of women got involved, but a lot of it was older women, because,

01:26:31.280 - 01:26:34.360

well, you know, it's part of this next generation of Trident,

01:26:34.600 - 01:26:43.580

but also when they were doing the D.U. bombs in Iraq, Aldermaston was part of

01:26:43.580 - 01:26:47.320

the, because it's out, it's research and development,

01:26:47.440 - 01:26:52.600

development, and, they were monitoring the D.U. that was being

01:26:52.600 - 01:26:59.380

blown over Europe, and into the U.K., from that, the stuff that was

01:26:59.380 - 01:27:04.880

dropped on those weapons. I, so,

01:27:05.080 - 01:27:08.820

from the women that I've spoken to, class seems to have been quite a,

01:27:09.400 - 01:27:12.820

an, an issue, a source of, not conflict,

01:27:13.600 - 01:27:16.460

but certainly an issue, there was, you know, if you were working

01:27:16.460 - 01:27:19.580

class, then there were sort of, you know,

01:27:19.660 - 01:27:23.080

you had these spaces or this, this voice, and if you were

01:27:23.080 - 01:27:26.360

middle class, then you were encouraged to, to listen rather than

01:27:26.360 - 01:27:31.140

speak. That's, is that something that,

01:27:33.120 - 01:27:35.980

and I think it's more of a sort of sociological, you know,

01:27:36.660 - 01:27:39.380

middle class women have, you know, you get opportunities

01:27:39.380 - 01:27:44.420

to speak all the time, it's time for you to listen. Um,

01:27:45.700 - 01:27:49.120

I don't remember anything that specific, um,

01:27:52.040 - 01:27:55.400

it, you know, it was, class and race

01:27:55.400 - 01:27:58.220

were, were a, a, you know,

01:27:58.280 - 01:28:03.560

an issue, um, but to me, it was sort of

01:28:03.560 - 01:28:06.940

covered by things like, nobody does an interview

01:28:06.940 - 01:28:09.920

on their own, you do, you know, you always work

01:28:09.920 - 01:28:13.420

in at least two people doing that interview. Um,

01:28:14.280 - 01:28:16.060

I mean, you know, at, at,

01:28:16.060 - 01:28:19.020

at Bluegate was a very rowdy gate, but there were

01:28:19.020 - 01:28:22.380

some very quiet women, and you can't, if someone's

01:28:22.380 - 01:28:25.980

got, doesn't want to speak, it's not okay

01:28:25.980 - 01:28:31.480

to put pressure on that either. so, I don't know,

01:28:31.560 - 01:28:36.640

I think, no, I, I can't really

01:28:36.640 - 01:28:38.340

sort of say much more about that. I mean,

01:28:39.800 - 01:28:44.240

also, for me, as a feminist, and part of my

01:28:44.240 - 01:28:47.520

feminist analysis is that it really, actually,

01:28:48.780 - 01:28:51.880

we should be trying to, we can acknowledge the differences

01:28:51.880 - 01:28:55.480

and the entitlement, we didn't use that word then, but actually,

01:28:55.920 - 01:28:59.400

you can be a very well-off woman, with a very,

01:29:00.240 - 01:29:04.200

a wealthy husband and still have no money, you can still

01:29:04.200 - 01:29:08.940

experience domestic violence and abuse, even if you're

01:29:08.940 - 01:29:10.780

a middle-class woman, you're, you know,

01:29:10.960 - 01:29:15.100

you're still, we have these things in common as well.

01:29:16.280 - 01:29:19.380

You may well have still experienced child sex abuse,

01:29:19.640 - 01:29:24.360

you know, you might be, your family might be coercing

01:29:24.360 - 01:29:27.240

you into marriage or the shame on being a single parent

01:29:27.240 - 01:29:32.040

or, all those things transcend class because they

01:29:32.040 - 01:29:35.300

affect us all and those were the things that,

01:29:35.640 - 01:29:40.500

the commonality and, you know, certainly at

01:29:40.500 - 01:29:42.160

Bluegate, we had a camp dole,

01:29:42.340 - 01:29:45.340

so we tried to be on a financial aspect,

01:29:45.500 - 01:29:49.840

we tried to sort of have, have a level playing field

01:29:49.840 - 01:29:58.800

in that. And, yeah. Is there

01:29:58.800 - 01:30:00.920

anything else on your, on your list Maria?

01:30:00.980 - 01:30:03.880

I think, I think possibly not really. We've done

01:30:03.880 - 01:30:05.600

everything that we want to do. Yeah.

01:30:07.840 - 01:30:13.900

Yeah. Yeah. Christine, is there anything

01:30:13.900 - 01:30:18.420

that you want to talk about that you've seen? When you're talking

01:30:18.420 - 01:30:20.640

about the zapping, what form did it take?

01:30:23.400 - 01:30:26.380

I don't, I don't know. I don't know. It's done from,

01:30:26.480 - 01:30:32.000

I think it's done from a fairly long distance. I just need to

01:30:32.000 - 01:30:35.200

identify how it happened. Yeah. I don't know,

01:30:35.240 - 01:30:38.300

you'd have to ask Elizabeth, she was the expert on it.

01:30:38.480 - 01:30:41.000

I mean, and what she made us do with vehicles, she said this would

01:30:41.000 - 01:30:43.440

help with the zapping, is we had to have,

01:30:44.040 - 01:30:47.720

we had to have a wire, we had to have a piece of metal

01:30:48.940 - 01:30:51.700

wrapped around the metal of the frame of the vehicle,

01:30:52.540 - 01:30:56.980

and then a metal prong and earth the vehicle.

01:30:57.340 - 01:31:00.580

So she would always be going around on the, anyone with a

01:31:00.580 - 01:31:02.940

vehicle, she'd go around sort of like putting these

01:31:02.940 - 01:31:08.580

earthing straps on. It sounds a bit basic, doesn't it?

01:31:08.620 - 01:31:11.160

But I mean, it's standard practice for electricity.

01:31:12.480 - 01:31:14.680

But no, I don't really know, I don't really

01:31:14.680 - 01:31:18.180

know. I mean, people did think we were bonkers.

01:31:18.400 - 01:31:21.320

I mean, when I was, when I went, that three months

01:31:21.320 - 01:31:24.040

that I went to New York and went to the Women's

01:31:24.040 - 01:31:27.860

Penta Convention, also Judy Chicago's dinner plate

01:31:27.860 - 01:31:30.960

was being done then. So I went down to Texas

01:31:30.960 - 01:31:33.440

because another woman in my CR group was from Texas

01:31:33.440 - 01:31:38.880

in Houston. And I went to upstate

01:31:39.440 - 01:31:42.320

New York to disabled lesbian

01:31:42.880 - 01:31:46.200

community. And there was one woman who

01:31:47.020 - 01:31:49.960

had big compensation from,

01:31:50.560 - 01:31:53.340

some of them had been involved in the anti-Vietnam

01:31:53.340 - 01:31:56.520

struggles, and again, the Underground Railroad up

01:31:56.520 - 01:31:59.180

to Canada. So I went to the NIAC Peace

01:31:59.180 - 01:32:03.960

Centre. And I heard there about,

01:32:05.180 - 01:32:09.040

again, this was ex-military guys that

01:32:09.040 - 01:32:12.260

were telling me this. And they were quite

01:32:12.260 - 01:32:14.160

damaged. And we didn't have the words

01:32:14.160 - 01:32:19.180

then about post-traumatic stress syndrome. But he

01:32:19.180 - 01:32:22.900

said that a lot of experimenting is done

01:32:22.900 - 01:32:26.040

on squaddies who have got no family.

01:32:26.300 - 01:32:27.840

And a lot of the recruiting, I mean,

01:32:28.040 - 01:32:29.640

it's not very much, to me, it's very

01:32:29.640 - 01:32:33.220

much about class and militarism. But there

01:32:33.220 - 01:32:38.300

was, if there was a squaddie

01:32:38.300 - 01:32:41.940

who had no family, they would be taken

01:32:41.940 - 01:32:45.320

into military mental establishments and used

01:32:45.320 - 01:32:48.360

for experimenting on. And one of the experimenting

01:32:48.360 - 01:32:52.520

was implants. Which, you know, now,

01:32:52.640 - 01:32:54.820

it's not really news anymore, we're nearly

01:32:54.820 - 01:32:57.000

there, aren't we? But in the early

01:32:57.000 - 01:32:59.560

80s, this was total fantasy

01:32:59.560 - 01:33:02.880

land. And he said that it would

01:33:02.880 - 01:33:05.480

pick up electrical things in his head

01:33:05.480 - 01:33:09.360

and it would intercept the radio.

01:33:09.520 - 01:33:10.960

It sounded completely bonkers. And I

01:33:10.960 - 01:33:12.860

came back and I told people about going

01:33:12.860 - 01:33:15.040

to this Nyack Peace Centre and hearing

01:33:15.040 - 01:33:17.280

about this and it actually very much,

01:33:17.420 - 01:33:19.520

you know, later on made me think about

01:33:19.520 - 01:33:20.620

zapping because zapping was a

01:33:20.620 - 01:33:22.040

bit later than the Pentagon actually.

01:33:23.740 - 01:33:25.800

But I think that was another sort of

01:33:25.800 - 01:33:28.540

thing about class and class analysis was like some

01:33:28.540 - 01:33:31.920

women wanted to talk to the squaddies and others

01:33:31.920 - 01:33:34.860

didn't, though it was completely, you know,

01:33:34.940 - 01:33:37.000

at that point for quite a while. I mean,

01:33:37.060 - 01:33:39.380

I partly was at camp because I had a

01:33:39.380 - 01:33:42.960

separatist phase which really actually

01:34:30.160 - 01:34:31.300

didn't have a class

01:34:33.700 - 01:34:35.500

issue there. Yeah, I think

01:34:35.500 - 01:34:38.000

it's perhaps good to remind

01:34:38.000 - 01:34:40.940

yourself about the unethical

01:34:42.260 - 01:34:44.000

way that it was

01:34:44.000 - 01:34:51.180

done. I think it's

01:34:51.180 - 01:34:56.100

good to have that reminder

01:34:56.100 - 01:35:00.920

that ethics is a moveable

01:35:00.920 - 01:35:02.560

phase depending on what outcome

01:35:02.560 - 01:35:06.100

they want to have. Sometimes it's quite

01:35:06.100 - 01:35:10.160

good to have that you know, yeah.

01:35:10.680 - 01:35:17.640

Yeah, that's good to

01:35:17.640 - 01:35:25.440

remind the unethical way

01:35:29.820 - 01:35:36.500

that it done. think

01:35:36.500 - 01:35:40.760

good to remind the unethical

01:35:40.760 - 01:35:44.780

way was Yeah, I

01:35:47.240 - 01:35:49.240

think it's good to remind

01:35:49.240 - 01:35:51.620

the unethical way done.

01:35:51.720 - 01:35:58.900

I think it's good to

01:36:03.880 - 01:36:06.160

the unethical way done.

01:36:10.640 - 01:36:12.660

I think it's good to

01:36:12.660 - 01:36:34.880

remind the unethical that

01:36:35.660 - 01:36:40.560

it done. good to remind

01:36:40.560 - 01:36:41.220

the unethical think it's

01:36:41.220 - 01:36:42.720

good to remind I think

01:36:42.720 - 01:36:42.860

it's good to remind the

01:36:42.860 - 01:37:14.460

em, so that it was the runway sort of side of it. And em, yeah. But there were, that, that's not, but that's the point, there was a range, there was no right or wrong, you know, there was, there was like, well we're gonna do it like this and, you know, it's great, she's stood for, for that, you know. Some people don't, still don't like it, some

01:37:14.460 - 01:37:33.660

women still think, oh her, you know, but I mean, well fair play to her, she's, you know, she's set up the acronym institute, she's, addresses the UN, she's completely put her life and her health on, on the line continually. Em, er, you know, a, a blue gator was like, oh some women gave up their careers to come and live here and others made their careers

01:37:33.660 - 01:38:00.080

out of living here. And, er, well, it doesn't really matter, does it? You know, like, not everyone can do what Rebecca's done. And, em, but I think you've got to be happy with where you are to have that opinion. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Maybe, maybe that says more about you than it does about other people. Yeah. In terms of your contentment

01:38:00.080 - 01:38:19.100

with, you know, with, with your journey and where you've ended up and what you've done and. Yeah, and I'm, I like change, you know, which is why I ended up on the road for so long, because I'm now stan, I'm now a candidate, em, locally for the Green Party. But, er, that's only because I can now vote. You know, for twenty-six years I couldn't vote, so.

01:38:19.700 - 01:38:42.660

Em, and actually voting was an interesting thing at Greenham because, em, you know, we gradually got, we could sign, sign on from Greenham and use Bluegate, Greenham Common, Bury's Bank Road as, as our address. Em, and, em, and then, you know, then we had the whole thing with the census, the national census, because we, you know, that came round

01:38:42.660 - 01:39:03.740

every four, how many, ten years or however long they do that. So, lots of women didn't want to be on the census. But, personally, I felt like, well, if you, you know, it's about standing up and being counted, for a start, but also in terms of history and archiving, I think it's really important that some of us are on this census, you know,

01:39:03.800 - 01:39:21.840

and I've tried since not being at camp to be on a census when I was pa, working and parked up in the forest, and they, there's no way they were gonna put me on that census. I had to, I, I, it was a real struggle to get myself as a traveller on the, on the census in the Forest of Dean because they don't want those, they don't want those statistics,

01:39:21.840 - 01:39:38.420

they erase that, you know, right from the, right from the sort of baseline of your, because on the census, if a county has got so many travellers, then they used to be obliged to put a traveller's site in, so they don't want those figures. Right, so it's a political document as much as it is.

01:39:38.480 - 01:40:00.220

Yeah, yeah, it is. It was a very political thing. I think we had big discussions about the census, and the same with the, with the electoral roll, you know, and I don't know, I certainly didn't vote when I was there, but, well, maybe it was more about the census, but yeah, it was, there was that issue, but it's like, you do what you feel comfortable to do,

01:40:00.720 - 01:40:27.320

you know, there was, for me, there was no right or wrong about that. It wasn't a big thing to have an argument about, it was a thing to sort of have a political consideration over, and then we all make our own decisions, you know, but we all, you know, mostly we had other names whilst, camp names, but, but, so there was a, it wasn't a direct link even,

01:40:27.580 - 01:40:31.380

you know, but once you've got a vehicle, you've got a registration number, and then they've got you.