He was waiting outside Wickford station for me, an unassuming, quietly spoken man, wearing a black felt fedora, which was his trademark. The fine April morning suited Essex, particularly this part of the Essex countryside, where the garden centres and the houses start to run out until you turn a corner on a dusty, hole-pocked road and find yourself in view of a Traveller site.
The man in the fedora was Grattan Puxon, who had been campaigning for Traveller sites for over forty years before this trip in 2006 to visit Dale Farm. From the outside, it had all the trappings of a place under siege – the heavy gate made of scaffolding poles barred the way in, though a banner inscribed ‘Save Dale Farm’ fluttered invitingly. Dale Farm, billed by the authorities and the media as the largest encampment of Gypsies and Travellers in Britain, sprawled over several acres and was home to about a thousand people. Some of the pitches had barbed wire running along their perimeters.
Grattan turned right onto the grandly named Camellia Drive and came to a cream-coloured chalet set in an immaculate pitch, which was decked out with flowers in pots, a low red-brick wall and statues of lions proudly sitting on the gateposts – a chalet belonging to Mary Ann McCarthy.
Mary Ann, a softly spoken grandmother of seven with dark, carefully set hair, welcomed us into her spotless chalet. Grattan and I sat down on her cream three-piece suite, covered in plastic to protect the fabric, and were offered cups of strong tea. In the kitchen, one of Mary Ann’s daughters was hard at work scrubbing out every single cupboard. Most people from the ‘settled community’ have heard that Traveller sites and homes are dirty places – a pernicious myth. The chalet was tidy and clearly cherished, with alcoves built to show off statues of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, alongside Mary Ann’s Crown Derby china and lovingly dusted wax flowers and fruit.
In 2004, she had taken the fateful decision to move to Dale Farm. She was a widow and she needed to find a way to support herself. ‘It was government guidance; they told us that Gypsies and Travellers should provide for themselves, so we did that,’ she explained. ‘We bought the scrap yard: one half of it was already passed for planning permission and our relations were living there.’ Her five daughters and son-in-law lived on the site, and she had grandchildren dashing in and out of her chalet before and after school. She was learning how to read for the first time. She and her grandchildren would pore over the easy readers they would bring back from school, learning together.
‘Dale Farm is the chance of a lifetime. We can get education, start to use computers and all. We won’t have the time to get education if we get moved from post to pillar again,’ Mary Ann told us. ‘We want to live like human beings, not like rats.’ Dale Farm was the epitome of a settled, matronly, Traveller’s life and her chalet was the perfect home – ‘We get smothered living in a house; we feel like we have been put in jail.’1 But her wish to be left alone to live with her family in a close-knit community was not to be.
Mary Ann’s neighbours, sisters Nora and Michelle Sheridan, jointly cared for their elderly parents, John and Mary Flynn, who had moved onto the site partly because of health problems. They didn’t want to be on the road again, with police constantly pounding at their caravan door. It was a hard decision to make for a family used to travelling. ‘The Sheridans have always got together in big groups, particularly in seaside towns. I remember them turning up at Great Yarmouth one year with around five hundred trailers, and another big get-together in Rhyl in Wales … Dale Farm was a big compromise, to settle down,’ remembered Grattan.2
Nora and Michelle also wanted to give their young children an education. Like Mary Ann, they felt that schooling was a vital part of their children’s hopes to establish a stable way of life. Neither of the Sheridan sisters had gone to school much, and they had both struggled with literacy. A few months before, the local primary school had duly accepted some forty-five Traveller children, but their attendance had thus far been somewhat erratic – and troubled. When they arrived in the schoolroom, all of the non-Traveller children, some three-quarters of the entire intake, had been almost immediately withdrawn from the school. Essex County Council had pledged to keep the school open, though the district council leader questioned this decision: ‘If only a few children turn up each day, shouldn’t our resources be spent elsewhere?’
Mary Ann’s son-in-law Richard Sheridan had spoken out on behalf of the many very young and very old and very sick people who lived at the site, finding comfort in a place where each family could have its own well-kept patch of land. They found that comfort in the sense of community. ‘When Dale Farm was destroyed, they destroyed a community, a village,’ as Candy Sheridan, a member of the Gypsy Council, loosely related to Nora and Michelle Sheridan on her father’s side, would later put it.
But it was a village with just three or four extended Traveller families, living on pitches without planning permission. It was, right from the start, contested land.
Whatever the families wanted, the legal machinations to evict them were gathering pace. Basildon District Council, which was responsible for the site, had voted the year before to evict the people who were living at Dale Farm illegally, at an estimated cost of £1.9 million. Malcolm Buckley, who led the Conservative council at the time, argued that Basildon provided more pitches than most local authorities do. Limited planning permission had been granted to a small number of English Gypsies in the 1990s on a site adjoining Dale Farm. Basildon just could not handle more people moving onto Dale Farm.
Around the year 2000, Irish Travellers started to move to Dale Farm. Two Irish Travellers, Patrick Egan and John Sheridan, and a third man, Thomas Anderson, had bought the land at Dale Farm. They acquired it from Ray Bocking, a scrap-yard owner who had recently been bankrupted for breaching green-belt provisions enforced by Basildon Council in 1994.
There was already a cottage on the site, and Patrick Egan moved into it. He named it ‘Dale Farm House’, and he and the other owners set out to divide the remaining land into pitches. They charged up to £20,000 for each pitch – for many of their fellow Irish Traveller families an entire life’s worth of savings. Nonetheless, news spread quickly, and family after family, many loosely related – Egans, Flynns, McCarthys, O’Briens and Sheridans – moved in.
The council and several people living nearby noticed that the number of caravans was increasing sharply. One horrified local resident was Len Gridley. His parents had bought themselves a retirement home, a spacious bungalow called Windy Ridge, in the green belt in 1984. Windy Ridge backed onto Dale Farm. The year they moved in, a handful of English Gypsies from the Saunders and Beany families, had occupied a field in Oak Lane. Len’s family were at first perturbed, as were other residents in the local village of Crays Hill, but the Gypsy families integrated relatively well, with their children mixing in easily at the local primary school. But by 2003, the rateable value of Windy Ridge had been cut in half – due, Len said3, to the nature and great number of families occupying Dale Farm.
It wasn’t just Windy Ridge that was down in value; others had seen property prices fall by twenty per cent, according to Len, and it was all due to the Irish Traveller encampment. ‘Say if an elderly couple want to sell up, a young couple wants to come in, they ask, “Where’s the local school?” They go there and find out what the history of the school is – the sale falls through. I mean, who wants to move into a village where you haven’t got a school, you haven’t got the pubs, because these people have ruined it all?’
Len saw clear distinctions between the peaceable English Gypsy families, who kept themselves to themselves, and the Irish ‘clans’, as he called them, who had arrived more recently. Like many other Essex folk, he had known English Gypsies for years. ‘I was brought up with the English Gypsies, they came every year to the bottom field. And I can tell you, when they left every season, that field was left cleaner than they come; they took the attitude we are coming back next year so they don’t leave a mess,’ he said. ‘My sister even married an English Gypsy, and they are still together.
‘It’s all these immigrants, these Irish are immigrants, they have come over here and abused the system,’ explained Len about his views at that time. ‘And if they need alternative sites, they should be limited to ten or twelve caravans. You have to limit the size of the sites and scatter them. It was so big, they took the attitude “in numbers we can have mob rule, intimidate people”; they didn’t get away with it with me, because I fought back.’ Len was sure that others had been intimidated, however. ‘That’s why people won’t speak out against them,’ he said.
The settlement had completely changed the Essex way of life, in Len’s view. ‘The noise, at night-time, you get the tooting and everything else. You couldn’t shut the door and pull the curtains shut and say they weren’t there. When the English [Gypsies] were there, they had a rule: they were living in a community and didn’t want anybody to complain. There was no rubbish in the road … It was when the Irish came that the English left; they didn’t want to be tarred with the same brush.’
It was true that the English Gypsies who were living at Dale Farm mostly sold up and moved on not long after the Irish Travellers arrived. But it’s not clear whether this was in response to the influx of Travellers or the shooting in October 2002 of an English Gypsy, Billy Williams, in what some claim was a land dispute and others say was an issue of mental health.4
As the number of families grew, Len became more and more obsessed – by his own admission sometimes donning camouflage gear and watching the Travellers from the back of his garden. ‘I saw smuggling there – cigarettes being smuggled in, sofas, three-piece suites,’ he said.
This allegation might well also have had some truth in it, or at least a fair amount of attention to the proceedings of the local courts and newspapers. The affable Richie Sheridan, one of the many Sheridans who had moved to Dale Farm, had been convicted two years earlier for cigarette smuggling.5 He had allegedly brought the contraband cigarettes into the country in three-piece living room suites that had been manufactured in Poland. In June 2006, just two months after my first visit to Dale Farm with Grattan, Richie pleaded guilty to conspiracy to fraudulently evade excise duty and was sentenced to twelve months in prison.
The stereotypes were settling in along with the residents. Villagers complained of other anti-social behaviour at and around the site: rubbish strewing the road, drunkenness, risky driving. David McPherson-Davis, a local parish councillor, well remembers those early stand-offs. ‘Around 2002 the Irish Travellers started to arrive, and the English Gypsies moved off. We saw the site being bought and divided into chunks – 2002 to 2003 was the worst time for our community. There was a definite trend of Irish Travellers trying to dominate our village; there was sheer confrontation in the shops, and in cars trying to drive us off the road. That was mostly the young men, and it was shocking and appalling.’
Len’s parents were upset by the situation. They couldn’t sell Windy Ridge and move to the Canary Islands, as they had long dreamed of doing. Len spoke with bitterness about how the Irish Travellers had changed their lives. After a number of threats – from both sides – Len was issued with a panic alarm, which he still carries with him at all times. He says his mental health has suffered and he has had to seek psychiatric care.
He felt that the village itself was being shattered. ‘There’s no village community now, no one talks to each other now,’ he said with despair. ‘We tried to get a residents’ association together, but other than a couple of families in this village, I no longer have the time of day with many of them.’
Some of the Travellers had sought out Dale Farm after being evicted from other sites, including one notorious eviction nearby in Borehamwood.6 In November 2002, after the Conservatives took control of the council and Malcolm Buckley became leader, he and the council decided to take decisive action. They, too, would evict the Travellers.
They were stymied. John Prescott, then Deputy Prime Minister, gave the Travellers two years’ leave to stay. Once a ship’s steward, Prescott had often been the Labour Party’s voice on matters of the working class. ‘The Travellers had moved on there at Dale Farm and ignored the planning requirements,’ Prescott recalled in a rare interview.7 ‘I didn’t support them living there without planning permission, but the main consideration for me was to give their children the right to go to school, and provide them with time to deal with the problem. I told them, “Come the end of the two years, you will have to go. Accept that you will comply with planning.”’
By 2004 or thereabouts, with this limited leave to remain in place, the community had reached an uneasy truce. For the most part, the Irish Traveller men were away working much of the time, and the women were settling down and sending their children to school. Many were hurt by the persistent hostility they faced, both in the village and in the local media, but they were committed to making something out of Dale Farm. They organised a regular litter pick-up in the lane, clearing the rubbish by hand, even though some of the younger residents throw things out of car windows as they make their way to the site. They wanted to stay put – for the first time in their lives, they had found somewhere that they could call home.
Prescott’s limited permission to remain ran out on 13 May 2005. It was then that court action to clear the site began in earnest.
The next month, on 8 June, the council called a public meeting to decide whether to force the Travellers to leave the site in compliance with green-belt law. Three hundred people crowded into Basildon’s Townsgate Theatre. They included the actor Corin Redgrave, who was running for Parliament on the Peace & Progress party ticket. Redgrave delivered a passionate speech in support of the Travellers, who he called ‘the most deprived community in the country’. As he made his case, he collapsed. He had suffered a heart attack and nearly died. The meeting was cancelled and the decision to evict was temporarily postponed.8
Not long afterwards, the council passed an order requiring the Travellers to move on. But Basildon officials and local politicians knew there was a fight ahead. The residents at Dale Farm applied for judicial review, pushing off the council’s ability to set a firm date for clearing the site. ‘We have made a reasonable provision. Any alternative site in the district is unacceptable, the site is unsuitable for anyone to live on, and there is a potential issue around contamination,’ Malcolm Buckley explained at the time. ‘We don’t think we should be penalised for our generosity’.
Some in the larger Basildon community felt that generosity was exactly what was needed, most notably a number of parishioners from the Catholic Church of Our Lady of Good Counsel in the nearby parish of Wickford. One was former social worker Ann Kobayashi. ‘I became involved first because … the priest asked me to go up there; I had never been to Dale Farm then,’ she recalled. She was surprised to find the numerous families on the site. They had been all but invisible to her. ‘He asked me to help with a benefits matter, as I had a background in social services. I had never imagined the site was there. Even though I was part of Wickford, I didn’t know it was there.’
During her benefits visits, Ann met Grattan. Soon after, she too became involved in the bigger campaign to save Dale Farm. At that stage, Grattan was playing everything strictly by the book. ‘It started off as “don’t concede, we want to preserve this”.’ As it became more likely that the green-belt argument would win the day, there had to be a back-up plan. They needed to have somewhere to go; they couldn’t assume they would be able to stay. ‘Grattan for years was pursuing the legal route, and then the council homelessness route, in order to demonstrate willingness and in a sense put pressure on the council to provide culturally appropriate alternatives if Dale Farm had to be conceded,’ Ann said. Grattan wasn’t a committed activist – he was a confirmed advocate. ‘Every week he visited, filled in forms, did legal aid stuff, gave advice, all the other stuff that comes up, that carries on in any group that has literacy difficulties – they have umpteen bits of paper they can’t manage.’
Sean Risdale, then the policy officer for the East of England at the Commission for Racial Equality, was first sent out to Dale Farm around this time. ‘I became aware very quickly that Travellers were probably more discriminated against than any other grouping in society,’ he said.9 At the time, the office of the Deputy Prime Minister estimated that there were sixteen thousand Traveller caravans across Britain, with only seventy-four per cent of them located on authorised sites. Thirteen per cent camped illegally on other people’s property. The rest – another thirteen per cent – were on sites like Dale Farm, where the travellers own the land but do not have planning permission to live on it.10 Risdale knew that twenty-five per cent of the 300,000-strong Traveller community lived or regularly passed through the nation’s eastern counties. ‘My immediate reaction was, “What is all the fuss about?” This was a well-ordered set of domestic plots in the middle of a sprawling ex-scrap yard, not a beauty spot violated by unruly incomers … a warm, friendly place to visit, with a very strong sense of community cohesion.’
The judicial review of the council’s eviction order had been expected to come as early as May 2006. The Commission for Racial Equality, then a staunch ally, had intervened in the proceedings to make sure the court took into account the district’s legal obligation to promote good race relations. Risdale was also aware that Prescott’s office had reckoned that another four thousand pitches would need to be found to accommodate Travellers who did not have permission to live on their land. These four thousand pitches had yet to be found.
At the same time, politicians closer to the ground were being lobbied intensively by the residents of Basildon district, who were urging immediate action – that is, immediate eviction. They needed to lay out a line of arguments to help ensure that the Commission for Racial Equality’s intrusion would not put a halt to their community improvement plan. John Baron, the local MP, was under special pressure from constituents, who were increasingly irked by the lack of progress. Shortly after the temporary leave had expired, in July 2005, Baron had raised the issue in the Commons. ‘In 2003 in essence the government gave the Travellers two years to find alternative sites, during which time no enforcement action could be taken by the council. Yet, during this time, the site quadrupled in size,’ he said. For the record, he had ‘no problem’ with ‘law-abiding Travellers’ but ‘no one can accuse us of discriminating against Travellers or of being intolerant or racist. All that we ask is that everyone obeys the same set of rules, especially if they wish to live in the community. Clearly, that has not happened at the illegal Crays Hill site.’11
Separately, Malcolm Buckley called in a firm of bailiffs, Constant and Company, that specialise in removing Travellers, to see if they would take on the job. ‘We have solid expertise going back around five, six years; we go all over the country using common law methods to evict,’ the company’s managing director, Bryan LeCoche, said proudly. ‘The Crays Hill situation, that’s more of a one-off action … I’ve got nothing against Travellers, they are our stock in trade, but what is the contribution made by Travellers to this country?’ he asked. This eviction would go ahead, just like any other. But, rather prophetically, he knew that the aftermath would be different this time – even if the logistics were much the same, the sort of job that wouldn’t ‘faze’ his employees. ‘We have built up a reputation to deal with this very sensitive issue; we are not rent-a-mobs … It is usually fairly cordial – we do respect the fact that these are their homes which are taken into safe storage.’12
On the way to Dale Farm, Grattan had taken a detour to Hovefields, which was then under more immediate threat of eviction, to look into charges that Constant and Company’s bailiffs could be violent – which LeCoche refuted. The five families living at the smaller site expected to be evicted at any time. One of the mothers, her pale face drawn with stress, had been evicted several times before. ‘I was looking at fifty or so police and bailiffs in bullet-proof vests, and I asked them not to block us in, but they did. That was Constant and Co.,’ she said.
If the council managed to get their way, the Irish Travellers who had put down roots at Dale Farm would be on the road again before too long – yet another generation of unwanted nomads.