The beginnings of the alternative ‘convoy culture’ date back to around 1970, when Jimi Hendrix and 700,000 other musicians and fans descended on the Isle of Wight, where the idea of a ‘free festival’ nomadic lifestyle was born. People began to live in the vehicles they used to travel to the festivals. Wally Hope (Phil Russell), who had a high profile among London squatters, became a central force, helping to establish the Windsor Free Festival and inspiring a similar event at Stonehenge. (Nearly forty years after his death in 1975, one can still hear the call ‘Where’s Wally?’ at festivals.)
The government’s understanding of festival culture, outlined in the 1973 Report and Code of Practice from the Department’s Advisory Committee on Pop Festivals, was somewhat sketchy. As Alan Dearling, a much-loved chronicler of the festival scene, observed, the official position appeared to be one of wonder: ‘It is remarkable that … hundred of thousands of people, mainly between twelve and thirty, have elected to spend four or five nights at a time under most uncomfortable conditions and sometimes even worse, away from home, tightly packed, listening to music often produced with low quality amplification.’ Officials, Dearling demonstrated, were clearly confused, musing: ‘Yet at the same time they have found a tremendous feeling of togetherness.’1
The reasons why so many so-called ‘hippies’ became nomads varied. Colin Clark, who comes from a Scottish Traveller background and has also studied travelling groups, has argued that there are in fact three separate generations of New Travellers. The first was linked to the festival circuit, and the related social justice movements of the 1970s, but many of the second- and third-generation Travellers, Clark argues, were people forced onto the road ‘seeking refuge from unemployment, hostile government policies and bleak inner-city environments’.2
The first generation of course traced its roots to the 1967 ‘Summer of Love’ and the early free festivals, including the first Glastonbury Fayre, which was held the same year that Hendrix electrified the Isle of Wight. There was growing interest in pagan festivals, with people making the pilgrimage to Stonehenge to celebrate the Summer Solstice. A network of fairs in East Anglia, many with long histories, was revived under the name ‘Albion Fairs’. These fairs, which mostly involved local people, inspired similar happenings right across Wales and the South-West. The locals were often joined by people with a more radical agenda – the emergent Peace Convoy. Sometimes they got along. Sometimes – particularly in East Anglia at the most-loved first Albion Fairs – some local people resented them.
It was ‘a sort of decentred, autonomous counterculture’, said George Mackay, an activist and scholar of the period.3 ‘If you were unemployed during those summers you’d follow the Albion trail from fair to fair, in your own truck or bus, if you had one,’ he wrote. ‘The sense of locality, of landscape, of rural tradition and history was central … The British countryside, ignored since the Romantics, since Hardy and the Edwardians, was claiming back some territory [and] interrogating the limits of enclosure.’ Some of that spirit came alive in the Peace Convoy. As Mackay explained: ‘Many Travellers identify a local or national free festival as the pivotal moment, when the possibility of a kind of change, of something different, was glimpsed, when energy, a good time and some sort of community became woven together, within reach … As well as rejection and exclusion, Travellers emphasise the attraction of the New Age Traveller lifestyle, as in the Romantic pleasure of rural living.’4
But people had also discovered, like many ethnic nomads before them, that living on the road offered economic opportunities too, especially in these days when youth unemployment was soaring.5 Social security changes in 1988, which denied many sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds access to benefits, as well as the introduction of the Poll Tax, drove more people onto the road. In an in-depth survey of ninety-eight New Age Travellers carried out by the Children’s Society, two-thirds said they had been forced into travelling by financial difficulties, relationship breakdowns, leaving care or prison, and insecure housing. Almost one-third said that homelessness was the main factor in their decision, while another third had made a positive choice to go travelling.6 As one sociologist noted, many New Travellers are ‘akin to Baumann’s vagabonds who are “on the move because they have been pushed from behind – spiritually uprooted from the place that holds no promise”’.7
Tony Thomson, now one of the trustees of the charity Families, Friends and Travellers, himself took to the road in 1981. He had just returned from abroad, where he had been travelling. Only later did he learn that his family had a Scottish Traveller background. These were good times as well as bad times, he recalled. ‘In 1984 we ended up travelling on a convoy through the West Country and we were on our way to Corfe Castle, and it was like a cavalcade going through Yeovil, we were dancing and putting on a show, we were a kind of travelling show of odd buses, outlandish vehicles and colourful people.’8
The atmosphere darkened as more and more people, driven by poverty, flooded onto the roads, particularly after hard drugs became a part of the scene, mainly through a group loosely called the ‘Special Brew Crew’. ‘Basically what happened was that in the eighties a lot of people came out into the road without a heritage of common sense. They had been disinherited through enclosures and social fragmentation, so were in the main without a culture, but searching for one nonetheless. What was on offer, a nihilistic and selfish anarchism, was at odds with a commons sensibility. The commons won’t sustain that, and people won’t help them and they won’t make the effort to establish relationships that are sustainable and help them through,’ Thomson said. ‘A lot of them fell by the wayside. Rave wasn’t the problem but speed and other chemicals made people into monsters. [The drugs] destroy [nomadic] communities, just as they have done in urban areas … It affected everybody.’
With more drugs being used by some on New Traveller sites, the lifestyle of all nomads came under scrutiny. There were more conflicts between Gypsies and Travellers and the residents in the settled community. Even if very few were part of the drug scene, they were all suddenly tainted with suspicion, Thomson recalled: there was ‘litter, dogs, bad relations … These guys would stay on sites as long as they could, get evicted and then [the] site would get “bunded” up’ – with big mounds of earth mounded up around it, to make it inaccessible. This, he said, ‘was a loss for everybody, because the state tended to impose indiscriminate sanctions’.
Roxy Freeman, a Traveller, recalled the change in atmosphere when a Special Brew Crew convoy came to an area. ‘Their way of life was very different to ours. They were loud, anarchistic, alcohol-fuelled people [who] were rebelling against society and had a point to make. They’d travel in massive groups, take over places and refuse to leave without a fight.’9 The Brew Crew brought the ire of the police, public and media down onto all Travellers. The Western Daily Press of 3 May 1993 ran with the headline, “The Return of the Rat Pack” – and they fully intended to compare the Brew Crew families to vermin, not Frank Sinatra.
Clashes between New Travellers and the police also escalated in the 1980s as the anti-Thatcher Peace Convoy – not linked to the hedonistic Brew Crew – grew in numbers. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government responded in keeping with its strong ‘law and order’ reputation – they brought down overwhelming force. A crackdown began in earnest in 1984. One of the first and most heavy-handed police operations involved a peaceful New Travellers encampment at Norstell Priory near Wakefield in Yorkshire. The police who were deployed there came fresh from attending the miners’ strike. Tony Thomson was caught up in that particular operation: ‘Something like two thousand police attacked us with truncheons and drove vehicles into the camp at high speed,’ he recalled. Their homes were systematically trashed and their belongings destroyed by the police – but the New Travellers were not deterred.
Another incident occurred at Cannock Chase. ‘We were leaving the site and travelling down the M6. The police commandeered lorries, shut down the M6 and drove through the convoy in articulated lorries, trying to break us up,’ Thomson recounted.
In February 1985, a well-established Traveller site, the Rainbow Village at Molesworth, on a disused air base in Cambridgeshire, was next evicted – graced by the presence of Secretary of State for Defence Michael Heseltine, kitted out in a flak jacket. The army was called in to remove the Travellers in the largest military operation since the Second World War.
George Mackay argues that the defeat of the miners – the first set of ‘enemies within’, as Margaret Thatcher described them – demanded yet ‘another enemy, an easier one to flex its muscles at’.10 The extent of the secret war against left-wing groups under Thatcher only really emerged many years later, in 2012, when a memo was released revealing that a secret army intelligence unit had been set up to infiltrate and destabilise these groups, which the Prime Minister considered to be a danger to national security.11
The most infamous campaign, however, was still to come. The army called it Operation Daybreak, but it became better known as the ‘Battle of the Beanfield’, which broke out on Saturday, 1 June 1985.12 The year before, some fifty thousand people had come to celebrate the Summer Solstice at Stonehenge, a gathering that had been going on for eleven consecutive years. English Heritage took out an injunction in 1985 to prevent people from approaching the sacred stones, which they believed to be an endangered national monument. With the Solstice approaching, around six hundred Travellers in around 140 vehicles set off towards Stonehenge to attend what they thought would be the annual free festival beside the stones. Many of them were veterans of the evictions of the last two years. A few hours into their journey, the convoy was ambushed by more than 1,300 police officers from six counties. Police intelligence had suggested that the Travellers were armed – but this was faulty. After a first wave of violent assaults by the police, in which windscreens were smashed and occupants dragged out screaming onto the road, most of the vehicles broke into a neighbouring field, derailing the police force’s plan.
Eyewitness accounts – from two journalists, Travellers themselves and the Earl of Cardigan, who allowed the Travellers to camp on his land – all substantiate a tale of overwhelming police brutality. The Earl of Cardigan said, ‘One image will probably stay with me for the rest of my life. I saw a policeman hit a woman on the head with his truncheon. Then I looked down and saw she was pregnant and I thought, “My God, I’m watching police who are running amok.”’ Nick Davies, a journalist from the Observer, was travelling with the convoy; he remembered the attack as a ‘chaotic whirl of violence’. As Richard Lowe and William Shaw put it, it was ‘a watershed in the history of confrontation between police and Travellers’.13
Dozens of Travellers were injured, and all but a handful were arrested. Every one of the vehicles in the convoy was destroyed. Eventually compensation was awarded to twenty-four plaintiffs, although the money they received from the police was completely absorbed by their legal costs.
Despite the failure of Operation Daybreak, a year later the police were involved in yet another confrontation, this time at Stoney Cross. They adopted two even more draconian tactics: taking the Travellers’ children into care and impounding vehicles in what Lowe and Shaw call an attempt to ‘decommission the lifestyle’.14 The McCarthys and the Sheridans remembered that, when they later faced down the eviction at Dale Farm. All the Irish Traveller women chose to keep their children close to them – away from school – during the eviction, fearing zealous social workers.
In the aftermath of the Battle of the Beanfield, other nomads felt the crush from the authorities. Roxy Freeman recalled her time in Shropshire shortly after the operation. ‘The Battle of the Beanfield … was only a few years past, and although we were only one family, and not a convoy of Travellers and vehicles like the ones in Wiltshire, we still felt the suspicion that settled people, and the police, held towards us. Travellers, Gypsies – we were all the same to them – meant trouble.’15 But the New Travellers refused to go away – despite police operations against them, including Operation Nomad, an intelligence drive mounted to build up a database about them and the growing rave scene in the early 1990s. Save the Children estimated that the figures had grown to some fifty thousand by the early 1990s.16
Shortly thereafter, the Thatcher government moved to galvanise opposition to the New Travellers. On 5 June 1986, at the Conservative Party conference, the Prime Minister promised that she would ‘make things difficult for such things as hippy convoys’. Later that year the government announced the Public Order Bill, which criminalised trespassing and travelling in a convoy. The government claimed the bill was aimed to discourage the lifestyle of New Travellers, not that of Gypsies. The Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, referred to New Travellers as ‘a band of medieval brigands who have no respect for law and order and the rights of others’ during debate on the bill in Parliament.17 Hurd went on to stress: ‘No one wants to criminalise the activities of a group of ramblers, and no one wants to harass genuine gipsies.’ But the damage was immediate and unarguable – there was no way under the law to distinguish a Gypsy or Traveller convoy from a New Traveller one. And the Conservatives didn’t stand down from their assault with the passage of the act.
In the run-up to the next general election, on 11 June 1987, Conservative party candidate after candidate hurled the Gypsy issue into debates in order to win votes. In March, Peter Lilley, MP for St Albans, announced that no more Gypsy sites should be permitted in green belt or residential areas because the public did not want to live ‘cheek by jowl’ with these apparently undesirable elements. He was careful to exclude the influx of ‘Irish didicois’ from his attacks; these people were different, in his view, and should not be classed as Gypsies. Another MP, Hugh Rossi, claimed that his constituents suffered ‘horrendous problems because of an invasion of the area by so-called Gypsies’. Party officials in Bradford were seen handing out stickers for cars bearing the message ‘Keep the Gypsies Out – Vote Conservative’. After protests, the stickers were withdrawn.18
Backbench Conservative MPs were happy with the provisions of the Public Order Act, but they wanted to go further still. Their constituents, many of them in rural areas, were complaining that Gypsies and other ‘itinerants’ had ‘invaded’ their beautiful villages and were making a mess. The orchestration of talking points was conspicuous, as seen in a study by Royce Turner, who analysed parliamentary language about Gypsies and Travellers around that time and then again about ten years later.19 Turner observed that many MPs used strikingly similar language to describe Gypsies and Travellers – they spoke of them being dirty or defiling places, of invading, of being criminals.
Ann Widdecombe, who was in 1989 a backbench MP, but who later became a Home Office minister, raised the subject twice in just one year. In the second debate, ostensibly about dangerous dogs, she linked Gypsies to anti-social behaviour, accusing local Gypsies of stealing dogs. ‘There are also considerable implications concerning the control of dogs and illegal acts connected with them in respect of itinerants’, she said.20 There were quite a number of unauthorised sites in her district, she reported, and then went on the attack: ‘We have a rather romantic view of gipsies [sic]. We think of people travelling in a painted caravan, telling fortunes and selling heather. The reality of the people encamped illegally is that they do not use their caravans purely for residential purposes. They are also carrying out a trade, quite often an illegal one, in the area surrounding the encampment. Breaking up of metal, tinkers’ business and other such trades are frequently practised. They all cause a great deal of mess, particularly where there are no proper arrangements for disposal of sewage from the caravans or proper rubbish disposal. There is no proper arrangement for disposal of trade waste, which builds up and is extremely detrimental to the environment, particularly to a beautiful part of Kent. Even where they are not directly responsible for assaults on the population, the behaviour of itinerants is a problem. Dogs and cats regularly disappear from nearby areas to these encampments.’ The junior minister replying referred to the Public Order Act: ‘It was not intended to be used against gipsies, but if gipsies fall within the circumstances described in Section 39 they can be dealt with under the act.’21
By the time of the 1992 general election, New Travellers were again high on the political agenda. John Major claimed that combating them would be a priority for his new government. In late May a free rave and festival was staged at Castlemorton Common in West Mercia, attracting twenty thousand people. Rather than arrest the masses on their way to the event, the police decided to wait until after the partying had annoyed local residents and damaged the fields. The media coverage depicted a scene that was out of control. It played straight into the government’s hands.
Immediately after the election, the Home Office and the Department of the Environment issued a press release announcing the intention to reform the 1968 Caravan Sites Act. In fact, Major mostly wanted to repeal the obligation for local authorities to provide or maintain Traveller sites. A Conservative party press release, dated 27 March 1992, stated this goal clearly. ‘Whilst some Travellers behave responsibly and live happily on authorised sites, far too many do not. The public expect the government to take decisive action to bring this nuisance to an end. We will, therefore, review the present legislation.’22
Academic Robbie McVeigh has charted the way in which the media played its part in whipping up a perfect storm against New Travellers as well as other nomads.23 Among the worst offenders he cites are the Sun, which in August 1992 exhorted: ‘Hippy Scroungers must get jobs or starve’. The following summer, the Daily Star wrote of ‘£1m wasted on scum’ and its leader column demanded ‘the scum army should be told they can only collect in John O’Groats. After crawling over broken glass’. Michael Colvin MP wrote of Travellers as ‘unwashed scroungers’. McVeigh concludes: ‘New Travellers have become the subject of an intensifying moral panic in Britain and Ireland. Constructed as a plague or blight, these nomads have come to be regarded as the bane of “decent folk” in the 1990s.’24 A great moral panic was taking hold. Criminal elements were taking over – and they had to be stopped.
The government duly responded. In 1994 Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, introduced what he called ‘the most comprehensive package of measures to tackle crime ever announced by a Home Secretary’.25 The proposed Criminal Justice and Public Order Act contained 172 sections, covering everything from anti-terrorist measures to recognition for male rape. Most pressing to the Gypsy and Traveller communities, Section 80 effectively tore up Lord Avebury’s Caravan Sites Act.
The Labour party abstained from the debate. They would not be a party to such a draconian piece of legislation. It was left to the House of Lords to try to amend it. They proceeded section by section. They expected difficulty with Section 80, though, since the government had consulted on its plans for the bill and had received a huge response from local authorities against its plans to ‘reform’ the laws affecting Gypsies and Travellers – and still the government refused to listen. In their overview of the act, Luke Clements and Sue Campbell state ‘ninety-three per cent of county councils, ninety-two per cent of London boroughs and metropolitan authorities and seventy-one per cent of district councils responding believed the government’s proposals will increase rather than reduce the number of illegal encampments’.26 The government stated that there was nothing useful in the replies to the consultation.
The Association of Chief Police Officers went public with their opposition to Section 80. They sent a letter to the Labour Campaign for Travellers’ Rights announcing that, in their opinion, the general effect of the legislation would be to ‘criminalise the act of living in a caravan’. The Country Landowners Association, the National Farmers’ Union and the National Trust also joined the fray. Memorably, the Journal of the Police Federation described the proposals embedded in the bill as ‘at best a knee-jerk reaction to the government’s wish to be seen to be doing something about this year’s particular problem. At worst they can be construed as direct discrimination against a minority – a discrimination that would not be tolerated if Gypsies were black, came from another country, or were homosexual’. There were massive demonstrations, local events and direct action to oppose the bill, but the government would not stand down. The number of vehicles needed to commit ‘collective trespass’ was reduced to six. Lord Avebury watched as his life’s work was destroyed.
Yet some Gypsies, Travellers and their supporters couldn’t decide to what extent they should mobilise against the bill. To many, the legislation was directed at New Travellers, not at them. ‘The backlash against New Travellers affected all of them,’ Avebury said. ‘Yet there was a schizophrenia about it.’ Would ‘sticking up for the New Travellers … muddy the waters and cause greater hostility’? Avebury went on: ‘People would say if anyone adopted this lifestyle as a voluntary decision then they should fend for themselves. There wasn’t the same obligation towards them as to people who had traditional lifestyles that depended on living in caravans.’ One diary entry from George Mackay, dated 1995, recalls a meeting with two Romani Gypsies on their way up to Appleby Fair. ‘They are hard-working men who despise these [New Travellers] for their sponging, their laziness, their filthy lifestyles, their provocative flouting of the laws of the land, their drug taking, their music, the way they rip up hedges for firewood … I couldn’t have got a more negative reaction from talking to the members of a Conservative Association or the National Farmers’ Union in Wiltshire!’27
This annoyance at the attention that the New Travellers had brought on nomadism was understandable, but the Criminal Justice Act threatened the survival of all nomads. As Michael Howard said, as the bill passed into law on 3 November 1994: ‘New powers will [now] be at [police] disposal for dealing with public order such as raves, gathering of New Age Travellers and mass trespass, which can be a blight for individuals and local communities.’28
The act, predictably, was a disaster for all of Britain’s nomads. Even the shortest of stays at a traditional stopping place was now a criminal offence, potentially leading to fines and even prison sentences for the convicted. Lord Avebury had ‘strenuously opposed’ Section 80 since it did not provide accommodation for Gypsies and Travellers anywhere in the country. ‘I kept asking what was going to happen to the construction or development of sites. I kept receiving vague assurances that the government knew that the provision would be looked after by private enterprise but of course there was no evidence for that and that didn’t happen.’ His fears proved right. There was a long period after 1994 when, apart from the few sites that were already in the pipeline, there were no developments at all. It was, as the writer George Monbiot termed it, the modern equivalent of an act of enclosure.
With the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act in place, the battered remnants of the New Traveller convoys regrouped as they could. Many moved abroad, to live and work in Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, even as far afield as India and North Africa. Others, Tony Thomson said, found alternative ways to get by. ‘People who were still together, they survived, they found quiet corners because they had the social skills to keep the peace. They found quiet corners in the UK, more tucked away,’ he said. ‘They are more static now, and really there is only any movement over the festival season’ – especially for events such as the Big Green Gathering, the Endorse-it and the Levellers’ Beautiful Days. But for the most part, the convoy days are long gone. ‘Now you can’t travel in a group so easily because you are visible,’ Thomson explained.
Some have chosen to live more visibly, despite the complaints they sometimes encounter. The Horsedrawns use horse- and human-drawn transport and run some small festivals frequented by settled people. The Boaters have taken to the water and live on canal boats, reviving the ancient customs of Britain’s Water Gypsies. Some, such as the Dongas Tribe, became key figures in anti-roads campaigns, particularly at Twyford Down, where they protested the extension of the M3 motorway in 1992, and Solsbury Hill in the late 1990s, after which most of the band emigrated to France in order to continue their travelling lifestyle. Others have inspired low-impact living with developments such as the Tipi Valley in Dyfed, Wales, which was first established in 1974, and Tinker’s Bubble in Somerset.
In 2000, fifteen years after the injunction, English Heritage finally reopened Stonehenge to the public at the Solstice. Seven thousand people attended. But the monument was under strict control. New Travellers would not be given free rein.
By then, another group of nomads was drawing the baleful eye of Sauron. Gypsies and Travellers still needed places to live and work. Essex, in particular, was home to many of England’s Gypsies as well as a growing number of Irish Travellers who were dealing in scrap and trading, often between the UK and Ireland.
Scrap dealing was quickly identified as an undesirable business. In 1992 Basildon Borough Council brought proceedings against Ray Bocking, the scrap-yard dealer whose property abutted Crays Hill. The scrap yard was illegal, the council alleged, and infringed on the green belt. In 1994 the council won its case, and Bocking had declared himself bankrupt. Irish Travellers – including the Sheridan and McCarthy families – were already visiting the area, looking for work and places to live, often just finding a place to stay for a few days at a time. The former scrap yard was already covered in much hard standing, because of its previous use – a great convenience when pulling on with a caravan. Some of the Travellers were eyeing up the land. This did not go unnoticed by beady-eyed local politicians.
In 1995, in an adjournment debate, the subject of these Essex-based nomads was raised in Parliament – the first time anyone had raised the issue of Dale Farm there. Teresa Gorman, the MP for Crays Hill, the nearest village to the settlement, proclaimed that Gypsies were a ‘great problem’ in Essex. ‘The public clearly wanted something done about the menace of these itinerants, or gipsies [sic], or didicois, or tinkers, or new age travellers, or mobile totters, which is what they are. There was a huge sigh of relief in November last year when the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act was finally passed, because it seemed as though something was to be done at last. We were grateful in the part of Thurrock and Billericay that I have the honour to represent.’29 She went on to share her version of their history: ‘They travel from southern Ireland, in particular, and spend their summer holidays visiting the tips in Essex. They collect and sort garbage and leave the detritus behind them on the fields. Essex is invaded by Travellers in the summer, and we fear that the police may continue to refuse to deal with the problem.’
In reply, the junior minister, Robert Jones, thanked Gorman for raising the issue of the Travellers who have ‘purchased land at Crays Hill, Basildon’ and also acknowledged Eric Pickles, who represented neighbouring Brentwood, ‘who has tirelessly campaigned for his constituents on this and other issues’.
The moral panic over New Travellers affected all of Britain’s nomads. Irish Travellers were now firmly in the firing line. The first few years of New Labour’s government, from 1997 onwards, didn’t make things any better for them.