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So we've just been having a brief chat about your involvement with Greenham, so let's start with how you first came to hearing about the Greenham Common and being a Greenham woman. Well really it was my mother who came to Greenham and I think she visited at least once. My mother was a refugee from Nazi Germany, actually Austria. She was very much a pro the underdog,

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hated nuclear war. My father was a Quaker and she came with a friend who was a Quaker called Diana. Rachel was another Quaker friend of hers and another lady whose name I don't recall and if I ever knew it. And they decided to stay in a guest house. My mother would have camped, she always camped. She went camping on her own with Quaker groups and things like that.

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And I've got a set of photographs which show the four of them by the barbed wire with Rachel holding a walkie-talkie and my mother lying on a camp bed with a big grin on her face. And when they got to the guest house in their anoraks and you know an old banger, the guest house owners looked extremely worried and they said I wonder if you could make

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yourself scarce on Saturday night because we've got all the bigwigs, all the officers and people from Greenham coming for a meal. So they did make themselves scarce and I just guess that might be a sort of story you haven't got. You know it's something slightly different. But the other bit I've got is from a book called The Chiefess Grain by Diana's husband

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Maurice Barley and I think it's sort of quite telling because there's a paragraph on page 144. When an anti-nuclear camp was set up at Greenham Common in 1981, Diana's pacifist convictions came to the surface again. On one occasion a mass demonstration there included Diana, Keren and Susanna, three generations of Barleys. Eventually she found the militant feminism at

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Greenham not to her liking, but a Quaker-led demonstration at Mallsworth represented her feelings. She and friends stood silently outside a barbed wire fence with police and their dogs on the other side. It may have seemed only a gesture dictated by conscience but since then the missiles have gone. So I think that possibly reflects people who went in good faith, found it

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too militant and that she clearly went more than once, Diana Barley, who's long dead and you know found other places to protest and my friend who had come from Bury St Edmunds also said she went to Lake and Heath so very often there were spin-offs into protesting at other camps. So how old were you when your mother was doing? Old enough to have gone to Greenham

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um but I was living in London and beyond university working I think and um probably I would have gone if I'd been at university still because there was a group who were sort of friends but it was it was it was beyond that for me but actually Alex went. Oh really? Well this is uh Joanna's husband. Yeah do you want to swap? I went twice. You'll have to come

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here. Just we had visitors and I lived in London and the visitors we went to Cambridge which is not too far away from Greenham and on both occasions we went to see the site of the camp nothing was happening but I remember um the fences which often had things tied to them attached to them um I can't remember in great detail but I remember that

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and I remember quite a lot of debris on the inside of the fence as well but not much else uh one thing I did remember because I took photographs of this um and gave them to a friend who took them away uh very well done uh graffiti on a bus shelter uh and uh that's another visual memory of what went on there but effectively that's all I know there were

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no guards there at that stage and um no protesters. So it was after the protest? Or between protests I don't know I think I think it's probably after the protest. Because I think Greenham's not in Cambridge near Cambridge is it? No that's Lake Neath. It was um Newbury. Yes yeah but it was on the tours that we used to do to Cambridge. And then you'd sort of circle

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around. So that's all I remember. And one of the people I took there was another memory uh was a Brazilian journalist a TV journalist who knew about the Greenham women and was very keen to to see see anything that was happening nothing was happening. That's it.

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Um so Joanna your um how long was your mother um at Greenham for? I think there was it was probably a long weekend um and um she may have gone another time but I just remember her telling us this story yeah um and um she died how many years ago it's got to be about 10 10 11 yeah so uh and I think the friends have also died so yeah it's sort of yeah at least that's the older

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generation. I mean being around um you know obviously a young working woman at the time of Greenham how how do you think uh Greenham was um portrayed in the news and the media? I think incredibly negatively um and my friend Heather was saying that you know it was all hairy lesbians and um you know anti-men brigade um and um you know I think if friends of mine had

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been going I might well have joined them but I I you know as I say my mother did her own thing with her mates and um and I wasn't particularly involved with the Quakers at that point so again I think Quaker groups from London would have been going. Okay um is there anything else you'd like to to say? I mean um any other did you did you know

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anybody else who was at Greenham other than your than your mother? Um I've I've got a a work colleague in Cornwall who went as a 15 year old with her mother and I think I'm finding if I talk to people almost you know invariably people will say I went trying you know my friend went or something like that so I think I think it was um you know widely supported. I think I think

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I supported the aims but I didn't feel I needed to be there yeah I think that's probably probably the sort of thing. There were several people at Quaker's actually tour meeting who uh you would never have imagined that they would go to Greenham yeah but they went for that particular event in the base yeah and somebody else had actually um um offered hospitality I think it might

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actually have been a Quaker meeting in what's the name Newport in South Wales um offered hospitality to the women when they were walking to Greenham um so there there was uh and you would never know unless you talked about peace in particular um and looking back on our lives that there were quite a few around here who in some way or other had had some link with Greenham of which they're

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really really proud actually but whenever women who've had anything to do with Greenham talk about it there's a real pride yeah. I was going to ask like how do you think um Greenham has influenced you know protests today and sort of the peace movement today? Well I could speak for ages I could speak for ages about that but yeah my turn will come this is this is your interview

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Jane yeah um sorry that would have been really loud. I think um the problem with a lot of protests is that they although they were peaceful the reaction was quite violent and I think that to my mind that still goes on um I'm probably someone who actually talks to individuals rather than actually I was put off group activity at a very early age I was

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bullied at school because I stuck with a friend who was being bullied and that's marked me for life and I think that's tended to mean that if there's a group activity I'll walk away from it I'd rather do things as an individual and that's possibly a bit different for my mother but that's me being honest that's where I think I'm coming from.

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And the decision to make um Greenham you know women only camp how do you think that impacted? Um I was sort of comparing it with suffragettes where I think actually uh making the suffragette movement women only was actually a mistake because there were a lot of supportive men and I think Greenham was a slightly different thing there were other

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camps where men could go and obviously my husband um went and took friends um but I think possibly the comment Diana made about it being too militant was that it became rather polarised yeah and a bit more extreme because of that you know it wasn't then just women it was militant women it was you know um and probably partly in reaction to the the sort

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of reaction they got um that things tend to get more extreme the longer they go on yeah um and yeah any any other um I suppose observations around the time of Greenham um regarding yeah just the impact it was having at the time? I remember conversations with friends in London um in my London bed sit and it was

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probably Greenham or soon after and my friends were convinced there was going to be a nuclear attack um so I don't and I don't know if it was related to Greenham but they were they were absolutely convinced that we were in imminent danger and it wasn't just one or you know it's about three or four of us um and I kind of went common sense will prevail I don't quite so I don't know whether

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things were being hyped up at that point in time um and there were news stories that people were you know sort of taking on board and take it face value but I do remember this sort of very intense fear among my friends um in the 19 it would have been the 1980s it was probably thinking about it was probably post Greenham it was it was probably about 87 or 8 but you know

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I think that was sort of legacy yeah I mean compared to I suppose what we hear about the suffragette movement um do you can you sort of see a difference I mean obviously there's a difference I mean I've put my hands up and admit that I had hardly heard of the Greenham movement but yeah obviously have been talked about the suffragette movement and yeah the suffragette

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movement is more you know taught and I suppose my comparison would be uh the suffragettes got all the glory good and bad they got the publicity they got the the really unpleasant force feeding side of things they were middle class the suffragists who were there from well really about 1870 onwards maybe even earlier um were working class in the main and they were pacifists

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so it's a sort of Greenham's quite an interesting mixture of that because it's pacifist whereas the suffragettes definitely weren't um certain amount of working class certain amount of middle class and probably an uneasy juxtaposition but um you know I I think there were similarities and very great differences

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but I think what I'd probably say is that where the suffragettes got the publicity and the good and bad Greenham probably detracted from other protests it became the major one that everybody was focused on but there were plenty of other you know Lake and Heath was an American base Molesworth you know there were plenty of other places where protests were going on perhaps in

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a quieter way and you know perhaps the spin-offs yeah so going going back to the fear that you that your friends had at the time um and I suppose the fear of nuclear weapons how how do you think that compares to that fear now I've never had that same conversation again and as I say my my sense is it was probably about 86 87 something like that um and um

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may even have been but it would certainly have been before 1990 um no I think it was it was quite visceral it was a very bizarre evening and um I'd heard the same programs but my take was completely different yeah but I think I think you know Greenham probably raised awareness and made people aware that you know a nuclear attack could happen and

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you know I think it was a much more discussed issue yeah do you think that had anything to do with the fact that it was an all-women camp perhaps um the people I remember talking to were women now you know that may be uh may be significant um but as I say I think you know the negative side was that the women were slagged off yeah really pretty badly and um

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and I think I don't I mean Helena can probably say more I think that one got a sense there were factions and it wasn't you know if there were different groups all you know wanting to control things but um yeah and have you had or have you seen any um representations of of Greenham um you know in I think there was a film um or you know any stories or whatever you sort of heard

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I think the main thing I've heard is what we were talking about earlier which was an archaeological dig that happened about five years ago nobody I've talked to remembers that and it was on the radio and uh probably on an afternoon and they were treating it like a serious archaeological dig and they because they had the oral history to some degree um they could sort of relate that

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to patterns of finds and they hoped that that might also inform prehistoric societies with campfires because they found a lot of objects around the campfires Helena's laughing they found a lot of objects close to the fires and the further you got from the fire the less object and so that was one pattern socializing around the campfires the other pattern they found was

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when people were being evicted from the camps then there was a scatter of dropped items because they were being moved so quickly and that again you know related to this um you know sort of um that behavior and um I don't know if the results were ever published but they ought to be somewhere on google or whatever yeah um you can dig that out quite literally yeah

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um and the the photographs the photographs I was saying are color but they're you know it's sort of everybody seems to be wearing really muddy colors um uh greens and browns and dull you know not back oranges and things there's no bright colors um they basically look like scruffs a pack of scruffs my mother and her friends and you know I can just imagine the guesthouse people going oh

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my god we've got another lot what are we gonna do with them you know um and um they dress down because they you know all of them could be quite glamorous if they wanted to but they were definitely dressing down for the occasion and um they came to light because I had if I ever knew I think at the time I think my mother had told the story about the guesthouse but

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I didn't see them as far as I know until my mother's memorial which is about 10 years ago and they came out my sister found them when we went this has to be Greenham