6

Payback

In the run-up to the 2010 general election, the Conservative party released a ‘Green Paper’ with proposals to criminalise trespass a policy that had been promised by Michael Howard some five years earlier. They also laid out plans to roll back all the guidance and directives Labour had previously issued in its attempt to give local and regional government incentive to provide sites. The Green Paper passed all but unnoticed. Just a few Gypsy and Traveller organisations, a handful of politicians, including Eric Lubbock, Lord Avebury, raised a quiet alarm. Meanwhile, much of the tabloid press, aided by smaller town and village papers that were unwilling to alienate the local people who provided much of their advertising revenue, helped to stoke the fires, by providing more stories about Gypsy ‘invasions’ and criminality.

Scrambling to hold on to their majority in Parliament, New Labour also joined the fray. The party issued pre-election guidance on anti-social behaviour, naming Gypsies and Travellers as offending groups. Local authorities, police and other agencies would receive strong powers they could use to deal with the alleged anti-social behaviour problems associated with Gypsy and Traveller sites.1

A week before the general election, on Friday, 30 April 2010, one small group of Romani Gypsies, Scotch and English in heritage, moved on to land they owned, but for which they did not have planning permission, in Meriden. The villagers mounted a twenty-four-hour blockade to prevent the Gypsies from bringing building supplies into the field. The courts later forced them to allow sewerage works, but this was a small concession and did not signal a mood change. The chair of the Residents Against Inappropriate Development protest group, David McGrath, was the nearest neighbour to the new site. The Gypsies, he said, had damaged ‘a designated wildlife site’ in a precious ‘green lung’. He went on: ‘We are sympathetic, but the Gypsy and Traveller community, fundamentally, are adopting a cavalier approach to development. What they are doing is unethical and inappropriate.’2

The country’s compass had turned rightwards. On 6 May, the Conservatives won the largest number of votes in a general election. Less than a week later, the Coalition Agreement was approved by both the Liberal Democrats and the Conservative Party.3 Overnight, nomads lost almost all of their friends in high places. Eric Pickles, a sworn foe of illegal Gypsy and Traveller sites, became the new Communities and Local Government Secretary, able, at last, to put his vision of ‘fair play’ into practice. Candy Sheridan, who herself had once been a Liberal Democrat councillor in Norfolk, was horrified. ‘I turned my back on national politics and chose to work for my own community. I couldn’t believe that the Coalition would choose to pick on an ethnic minority within days of the agreement being signed. I was disgusted.’

Just as the Coalition’s policies were being debated (and agreed on), the Sunday Express, the Express and the Daily Mail reminded their readers of the Conservatives’ pledge to crack down on Gypsies and Travellers. The papers conjured up the spectre of unwanted Gypsy camps in the Conservative heartlands, mentioning specifically the threat to William Hague’s seat in Ripon in North Yorkshire, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty that was also the setting for Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and the so-called ‘Battle of Hemley Hill’, a much-loved local beauty spot.4 As the Institute for Race Relations put it, in a summary of the overall line of the articles at this time: the Gypsies and Travellers, according to the Tory media, ‘threatened the beauty of rural England and could invade at any time’.

Testing the waters, on 28 May Eric Pickles issued a press release warning local authorities to be on their guard against Gypsies and Travellers shifting to new spots over a weekend, as the Gypsies at Meriden had done the month before. ‘Communities and Local Government Secretary of State Eric Pickles is taking pre-emptive action to prevent unauthorised development over the coming bank holiday weekend. Mr Pickles is writing to all Local Authority Chief Planners to warn them to be alert and ready for action if any significant planning applications get submitted before the bank holiday Mr. Pickles is encouraging Councils to have planning officers on call over the weekend’ to prevent ‘a small minority of people’ ‘illegally developing their land’ over the holiday.5

He then set his aim at policies that would bear a real impact. He withdrew all funding for new sites, though he was later urged to restore some restricted funding, which he did grudgingly. He also scrapped Labour’s plans for regionally approved targets and announced he was considering limits on retrospective planning permission.6 He also announced that he would legislate to bring in his new vision through a Localism Act, with which he hoped to strengthen the hand of people to influence policy at the local level. This, of course, would also strengthen the hand of those who wanted to resist Gypsy and Traveller sites legal or otherwise.

Resistance, however, was building on the other side too, from the grass roots of the Gypsy and Traveller communities. Most of the organisations that claimed to represent them continued to lack both capacity and money. Committed people, both from the travelling communities and from the settled community, had been working with the Gypsy Council from 1966 onwards, but the body had little money and had even endured the scandal of its one-time president, Richard Sheridan, being jailed briefly for cigarette smuggling. It had also lost its charitable status. In 1999 the Irish Traveller Movement in Britain was established, with a brief to lobby MPs and produce evidence-based policy proposals, but it chose not to combat individual site clearances. Families, Friends and Travellers, which had been set up mainly by New Travellers to combat the 1994 criminal justice reforms, was also cash-strapped. The Commission for Racial Equality had spoken out on behalf of the communities, and its successor body, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) was still offering support. But as key people, most notably Chris Myant, Emily Gheorgiou and Sean Risdale, left, the EHRC’s backing melted away. One prominent insider, when questioned about the shift, said, off the record, that the EHRC would take up disability issues, which were then less controversial, but weren’t going to ‘put their heads on the block’ for Gypsies and Travellers.7 Members of the All-Party Group for Gypsies and Travellers voiced concerns about the new Conservative approach, but many of the most influential, such as Andrew George and Lord Avebury, had their hands tied. Their party, the Liberal Democrats, was now in coalition with the Conservative party.

Small wonder, then, that some Gypsies and Travellers, rather than relying on hamstrung allies or weak and poorly financed organisations, took matters into their own hands. Occupying land illegally was a kind of self-help resistance campaign. As Colm Power noted in Right to Roam, modern mobile phone connections, more media savviness and, among the younger Gypsies and Travellers, growing literacy meant that they could now increasingly do what they needed to do for themselves.8

Of course, some in the Traveller community were looking for outside help by that summer, because the threats to the encampment at Dale Farm were hardening. The Travellers had lost legal skirmish after legal skirmish and were now making plans to resist a full-throttled eviction. The site was growing scruffier month by month as the residents’ focus shifted from making a home to making one last desperate stand. Litter drifted around the empty pitches. Wasps hovered near bins very obviously in need of emptying, and dogs yelped outside the embattled caravans. Yet indoors the homes remained spotless. What was the point of fighting for a site that might soon no longer be home?

Mary Ann McCarthy was depressed. This was not the way she had expected things to go. Her eyes glanced towards the statue of the Virgin Mary in the corner. ‘They call us nasty thieving gypsies, but we are Christian folk. They want to destroy our way of life. Everyone has rights, except for us.’9

Her mood, and that of Grattan Puxon, who was visiting whenever his health permitted, had not been improved by the recent headlines. Nomads were under fire throughout Europe. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy had begun a crackdown on Roma migrants, ordering their expulsion. He had tried to sweeten the ‘deal’ by offering a small resettlement benefit in cash. Some saw it was a bribe and perhaps even a way to reinforce the stereotype that the community was only interested in grabbing money. Some of the Roma, unhappy in France, took the offer and returned peacefully to Romania and Bulgaria but others resisted. In one town that August, a Roma was shot dead, and others had rioted.10 A month later, a row about the French expulsions erupted during an EU summit, with some representatives denouncing the policy and even threatening legal action. Sarkozy had powerful allies, however, including Italy’s then president, Silvio Berlusconi, who had himself deported Roma from his country the year before.11

Tony Ball, the Conservative leader of Basildon Council, publicly said he sympathised with the residents of Dale Farm, but all avenues except eviction were exhausted. The council had offered ‘bricks and mortar’ accommodation to all those it was obliged to house, he said. When asked where the Travellers were to go if they turned down the offers for such accommodation, he replied: ‘They came from somewhere. One has to draw the line at some point. All our authorised sites are full up.’ After the eviction, he mused, perhaps the encampment might well become allotments productive ground for the villagers of Crays Hill.

In fact, Ball was at that time holding secret meetings with several groups, including the McCarthy family, the church, the Equality and Human Rights Commission and the Gypsy Council, in an effort to resolve the situation some other way. Then the eviction of Irish Travellers from the nearby Hovefields site on 7 September 2010 shifted the ground.

Father Dan Mason, who had taken over as parish priest that May, had spent his first few months getting to know local Traveller families at both sites before experiencing the eviction at Hovefields. He reflected. ‘Hovefields was like Dale Farm in miniature; it didn’t get the publicity that Dale Farm did, but there were many of the same issues, there were families threatened with eviction who had been there for some time, for instance. Many of us saw Hovefields as the dry run for Dale Farm, just a year earlier. The way the police mobilised, for instance, it felt as if they were getting ready for the big one it felt as if the drum beat was beginning after Hovefields the pressure was rising.’12 The same bailiffs who were lined up to clear Dale Farm Constant and Company were in charge of the job at Hovefields.13

Grattan had been excluded from the partnership meetings thus far. From his outsider’s view, he believed the Dale Farm residents were quickly running out of options. In desperation, he had started to put out feelers to people he thought might form into a group of supporters, mainly students from Cambridge University. Some, like Jonathan Oppenheim, a nuclear physicist originally from Canada, had been visiting Irish Travellers at a site outside Cambridge, Smithy Fen, since 2004. ‘The local paper was running a campaign to get rid of the illegal nine plots onto which Irish Travellers had moved,’ Jonathan explained. ‘The local people didn’t object to the English Gypsies, and I wasn’t sure why, but I took it as a way of justifying that it was not prejudice against Travellers, just against this lot of Irish Travellers; it provided a cover for prejudice. There was a Rhodesian guy running the campaign he had a homeland policy, and his group was called Middle England in Revolt. He ran a campaign to get the council to evict these guys. The papers made it sound like “a mass of Travellers”, and then you go there and there are just nine families, [and] Patrick McCarthy, this old guy, this harmless guy there is such a dichotomy between the image people had and what was there. We started going to council meetings and speaking to them. We were trying to come into contact with people who were working on this.’14

Others started to join the nascent campaign in 2010. One such was Jacob Wills, who was now a prominent member of the resistance at Dale Farm. Jacob had been drawn into the campaign through his involvement in anti-racism groups in Cambridge. ‘The first time I visited Dale Farm was when Essex Human Rights ran a legal workshop about Dale Farm, and I thought this was a good way to get involved. That must have been before Christmas 2010 that built up throughout the spring and Grattan was a key figure in it. Without him, there wouldn’t have been any mobilisation.’15

Grattan and the others started to put out more feelers, canvassing for more bodies to come out to Dale Farm. As early as January 2011, the charity No Borders Brighton advertised for ‘solidarity action’ against the funding being sought by the local authority to clear the site, and the London Freedom Bookshop held a meeting that same month to ‘plan the resistance to the threatened eviction of the Dale Farm Traveller community’, according to Superintendent Iain Logan, who, as the senior police officer for Essex Police, had been appointed to plan the tactics for eviction day.16

Logan had been canvassing for support of a different sort, gathering information about any and all activities related to Dale Farm. ‘In the months building up to the site clearances at Dale Farm, a considerable quantity of material began to appear on open sources that suggested that protestor activity would become a significant additional factor during the site clearances. Intelligence more specific to the site clearances suggested that activist groups, such as the No Borders Network, and Earthfirst/Climate Camp, were attaching themselves to the protest group at Dale Farm,’ the Essex Police would later disclose.17

This intelligence campaign was in no small part a response to the joint lobbying done by the local MP, John Baron, and Basildon Council as they started to put together the funds they needed to evict the site. The wrangling behind the scenes between various parties stumping up for the eviction of the Irish Traveller families at Dale Farm was getting complicated.18 Civil servants had reluctantly agreed to hand over an ‘unprecedented wad of cash from national coffers’ to pay for Basildon’s little local difficulty.19 Essex Police at that time estimated the policing costs alone could cost up to £9.5 million in a worst-case scenario.

The first letter from Basildon asking for cash from central government was turned down. On 7 February 2011, the Under-Secretary of State in the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), the Liberal Democrat Andrew Stunnell wrote: ‘Local authorities are independent bodies who are responsible for local statutory and discretionary services We have carefully considered your request but believe that these are costs that councils would normally be expected to absorb within their existing budget.’ John Baron and Tony Ball would not relent. They took their collecting hats right to the heart of the government. On April Fool’s Day, of all days, an unnamed official from DCLG wrote to the Treasury, saying that the department wanted to make a grant after all. ‘Our Ministers wants [sic] this treated as a top priority.’ Another unnamed official added that the grant should be ‘finalised before Purdah as a matter of urgency’.20

In mid-April Bob Neil, another Under-Secretary of State at the DCLG, performed an about-turn. In a letter to Ball, he said, ‘The government has decided to make this financial contribution because of the need to resolve the marked planning enforcement and community tension issues that have arisen around Dale Farm This exceptional situation requires support from government, but should not be seen to set a precedent.’ Money, too, was extracted from the Home Office, for what was named Operation Cabinet. But the chief constable of Essex Police, Jim Barker McCardle, was worried that he would end up with a significant shortfall, because of the Treasury’s obsession with match funding their first offer was to cover just fifty per cent of the policing costs up to £3.5 million.

McCardle was not happy. The money for the eviction was partly coming out of police reserves, he wrote back to the Home Office, and could leave Essex Police with ‘a significant shortfall’. A couple of weeks later he received a reply from the Home Office. They would not seek match funding in this case, but cash was still limited to £3.5 million. McCardle thanked the government for the extra cash but he informed them that there was at least a ten per cent chance that the cost of the eviction would exceed the cash budgeted. ‘At the moment that risk is not covered,’ he wrote to the Home Office. It seemed that nobody wanted to pay for the eviction that everybody wanted, primarily because nobody knew how much it would cost.

Baron met with David Cameron to secure the funding necessary. ‘Guaranteed funding had to be put in place to cover the contingency of a worst-case scenario when it came to the clearance,’ he later said. ‘After lobbying various government departments, and with the help of Essex Police and Basildon Council, a meeting with the Prime Minister finally led to the securing of a near £10 million contingency fund.’

In May 2011, as pressure was ramping up at Dale Farm and other trouble spots such as Meriden, the annual Stow Horse Fair, the ancient Gypsy horse fair in the Cotswolds, was held as usual. Candy Sheridan, the vice-chair of the Gypsy Council, was there, along with Vera Norwood, a former Tiller Girl, artist and at one time mayor of Stow-on-the-Wold, who was a doughty defender of Gypsy rights. Candy was hosting a stall for the Gypsy Council, and was in celebratory mode. Smiling, she surveyed the teeming fair grounds. The Gypsy fairs, she said, were their chance for ‘putting ourselves on show, trading with each other and having a sense of pride’.

It was a contented scene. Gypsies and Travellers had come to deal their trademark horses, piebald or skewbald cobs highly prized beasts said to have calm temperaments. Ted Chaney, a horse-dealer, was sure that buyers this year were looking for a glossy mane, a nice size and (the main attraction) finely feathered feet. Another dealer, Loretta Rawlings, and around ten other Gypsy families, including her husband’s, were selling cobs to Australia, Brazil, America and Eastern Europe. ‘They have become luxury items,’ she said.21

Not far away, Gypsy women were trading and buying Crown Derby china, elaborately smocked dresses for their girls and tweed for their boys, bedding, pots and pans. The younger set were clearly on the lookout for love, the girls, with their beautiful long hair, eyeing up the boys, who were showing off by riding cobs bareback across the fields, or cantering their horses and carts among the crowds, scattering them as they came by.

But as Vera sat down at a stall to have lunch, it was plain to her that not everyone in Stow, a prosperous market town in the Cotswolds, was as positive towards the fair as she was. Edward IV had granted the event a royal charter in 1476, giving it legal protection from closure that remains in force and a good thing too. In 1995 the district council took out an injunction to restrict the number of nights that Gypsies and Travellers could stay in the area before and after the gathering. Many local shopkeepers close their doors during the fair. Robin Jones, then Stow’s mayor, was quite chilly about the fair, claiming that petty crime at fair time was commonplace, though the local police report that the event is usually peaceful.

Soon enough, everyone’s attention turned back to Dale Farm. Attitudes on both sides were hardening in the run-up to eviction day. As tensions increased, the Dale Farm Supporters sent out an email alert, asking people to come out for a ‘think-in’ on Sunday, 29 August. It would be held at ‘Camp Constant’ the growing activist encampment at the back of Dale Farm that was named in an ironic nod towards the eviction bailiffs, Constant and Co.

Dale Farm was changed beyond recognition. At the gate to the site was an old trestle table, behind which stood a young ‘supporter’, as she called herself. She asked each visitor for their name and why they were there and wrote the details down in a book. Journalists were proudly offered a press pack. Dale Farm was now being policed by outsiders. The activists had moved in.

A well-known veteran of previous Traveller support campaigns was testing and fortifying a scaffolding tower at the front gate. He had previously been high on the Met’s most-wanted list, though on the whole he favoured non-violent resistance, and it seemed that this was the plan for most of the activists who had arrived. This was corroborated by the Essex Police Force’s intelligence: ‘It was very clear from open source intelligence such as internet traffic that the majority of protestors associating themselves with Camp Constant were planning peaceful, non-violent protest.’22 But it wasn’t true of all who were gathering there.

Some of the activists had taken to wearing raggedy face-masks and the black clothing often linked to anarchism. The Essex Police had noticed: ‘As the date of the site clearances approached, specific intelligence was also gathered that suggested that known activists connected to a variety of protest movements, including some previously linked to movements with a history of extreme action, such as animal rights protests, were present on the site or appeared to be making plans to attend. In some cases, the activists were reported to be planning tactics which could represent a significant risk to the personal safety of bailiffs, police officials or other persons on the site.’23 Other intelligence suggested similar groups being involved: ‘Intelligence received suggests that extreme anarchists who were evicted from Notting Hill, London, will also be in attendance and that their aim is to cause havoc for the police and bailiffs.’

Camp Constant had been set up on vacant plots at the back of Dale Farm by a group of some fifty activists. They had put up sleeping tents, built a kitchen for preparing vegan meals, and erected a big tent to serve as a meeting area. They were now digging holes for compost toilets, and getting to know the Travellers. They were settling in. But the influx of so many new people had changed Dale Farm.

The place looked as though it was no longer cared for. Litter was swirling about, even near Mary Ann McCarthy’s tidy chalet. While the Traveller women remained deeply house-proud about their spotless pitches, the custom of getting together every few weeks to tidy up the access roads had fallen away. Now, as demoralisation spread among the residents, those areas had grown dirty and rubbish-strewn.

Candy Sheridan was in the wooden hut where all meetings at Dale Farm were held. Grattan had got it erected in 2008, using money from Essex County Council much to the fury of the councillors from Basildon District. A few stray dogs wandered in and out, their puppies clambering onto the laps of the people assembled. A dryer was going at full speed. Richie Sheridan was busy clearing out drawers in an old dresser so he could sell it. Candy didn’t even know about the activist policing the gate; the press pack about Dale Farm hadn’t been cleared with her or anyone else on the Gypsy Council (in fact, I gave her my copy).

This was an ominous and early sign of the two camps that were taking shape at Dale Farm. One camp, led by Candy and the Gypsy Council, was pursuing a legal route of resistance, filing paperwork with Basildon and other authorities in protest of the eviction threat. The other side was run by the activists, particularly Grattan, who had stepped down from the Gypsy Council that he had founded forty years earlier. The split would prove to be tragic.

Candy remained hopeful that they could stop the eviction through legal devices, or at least delay it indefinitely, as they had done so often in the past. But she was beginning to see that an eviction was growing ever more possible, and she wanted the residents to face up to it and prepare for some neat legal footwork that she thought might save at least a few pitches. In these efforts she felt thwarted by Grattan and the activists.

She had attended meeting after meeting with Basildon Council, the police and other officials (including some secret negotiations), feeling that Grattan’s presence hindered her chances of finding a resolution. After years of working together, they had become wary of each other. Most of all, they disagreed about tactics. Candy had spent weeks trying to get healthcare workers to visit the residents, and had watched in dismay as it had fallen apart during a meeting. ‘They say, “you stay nice and calm” and you keep doing it, but I’m not calm when I get home in the evening, I get very upset. I was extremely upset with Grattan. I finally invited him into a meeting on Thursday and he threw a cup of water over me and the man from the Primary Care Trust. So those meetings have now stopped, because they feel at risk. And there was almost a breach of the peace last time I saw him he was out there wrestling with a policeman! The policemen said, “Do you want him arrested?” I said, “No, just ask him to leave the log cabin and calm down.” I’ve got all these agencies coming out and I haven’t even had the chance to talk to them yet. The primary issue here is health, the Primary Care Trust, a complete lack of duty of care, and he’s gone away and I want him back again, with that health bus. They’ve stopped coming because of the eviction. It’s issues like that.’24

Candy was under pressure from all sides, so much that she was now nearly weeping. ‘I’m told that this is going to be no ordinary eviction, this is the biggest site ever to be evicted, it’s got the most people, the most support, it’s the most watched nationally, internationally. I feel like Alice at the Mad Hatter’s tea party. People are telling me things, and it all sounds sensible, and then I agree with them, and when I go out of the tea party people say, “You’re a stupid eejit, you’re listening to the police, you’re completely mad, you are on a different planet.” But I am listening and I am hearing what else can I do? How far do I have to stretch my role? I’m beginning to question how far I can go.’

Everything, she felt, had gone downhill since the general election and the Coalition Agreement, especially her attempts to find alternative living sites for the Travellers at Dale Farm. From early on, she had been looking for land that might be suitable, often with the help of local officials. ‘I’ve been identifying land behind closed doors for two years, and researching brown-field sites. I put in the last two planning applications; we have a public inquiry about [a site on] Pound Lane on 21 November. I keep saying to Basildon, “You can solve this; if you identify the land, I will put in a planning application.” It was fine until the election. After the election, they weren’t even able to meet with me.’ She added, bitterly, ‘Welcome to localism and the new Coalition government, where they can’t even meet with you.’

She reported that Pound Lane and another nearby site, on Gardiners Lane, had looked particularly promising. Authorities had identified them as places for planning applications. ‘But then Basildon refused to “determine” them because local residents didn’t want them there,’ Candy said. Until the council approved the sites for residential use, she had to wait. ‘I want to deliver that site. Even if Dale Farm is saved, it’s still overstretched.’

This made the presence of the activists all the more disturbing to her. Like many of the Travellers at Dale Farm, she lumped them all together as ‘the students’, though a tiny handful came from the New Traveller community and others from church groups and political action collectives, and one, named Phien O’Phien, was both an activist and an Irish Traveller. ‘We need to keep everyone calm,’ Candy reiterated, ‘and try and get the scaffolding down. But it keeps getting higher, although the women don’t want it! It’s become a war zone. We don’t know what the students are doing because they are not talking to us.’ Now it was time to open better communications Camp Constant weekend, the meeting between the Gypsy Council and the activists, was set to start.

Johnny Howorth, a film-maker working with the Guardian, was there to film the day’s events. He pointed out a few faces he knew as he made his way to the large white tent. ‘Hunt sabs,’ he said. A number of activists had put on their masks. A few Traveller women had decided to attend the meeting with their children. This did not bode well for a meeting of ‘like’ minds.

A tall, thick-set woman was videoing the proceedings. I was recording audio. She turned to me as Candy was speaking and snarled, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ This kind of intimidating aggression by a small number of activists who clearly thought they were now in charge of Dale Farm and wanted to control journalists’ access to it was an unpleasant new development. Sebastian Hesse, a radio journalist for ARD, a German radio network, had been visiting the families for the past year. Now, suddenly, his access was barred. ‘I had been to Dale Farm several times and for me it was easy to go and knock on doors, it was charming; they were very approachable once they trusted you. One day I came in August and there was a “press officer” there, and he tried to deny me access to the site.’25

Hesse didn’t investigate the activists or their history in fact, he tried to ignore them. Still, he found their presence inconvenient and distracting. ‘In hindsight I don’t think [the Travellers] did themselves a big favour by getting the activists in, because the way in which they occupied the ground was very aggressive. They infantilised the Travellers and didn’t let them make their own decisions. They were so suspicious of media and everybody; they treated every media inquiry as an attack, almost, on their cause, and that backfired.’

Hesse used his contacts to bypass the ‘press officer’ and visit people he knew, but many other members of the press were significantly hampered in their work. Jackie Long, the social affairs editor from Channel 4 News, recalled: ‘We had been to the site in the run-up to the eviction, and then we came one day, and the activists had set up a kind of press office. They said they were running ‘tours’ of the site at 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. and that we would have to wait.’ When Channel 4 turned up again as the eviction loomed, the activists attempted to bar them from entering the site. ‘We ended up breaking in, which was quite ironic, having to break into Dale Farm, just as the Travellers were about to be evicted from it. We dug our way under fencing and climbed in. Then the person who had barred us saw us. She was furious, but luckily Pearl McCarthy came over, calmed her down and let us stay.’

In the big white tent, Candy was trying to soothe the Traveller women and reassure them about the timetable of events before any eviction might occur. Yet she was also trying to get them to face the fact that most of the legal avenues available to them were now basically exhausted. It was time to address the restive crowd and lay out what she had learned.

The police had warned her, she explained, that they might have to close off the access road, except to named residents. The reaction was fierce. ‘I’m not giving them my name, I’ll roll over them [in my car],’ one of the Traveller women said in defiance. This set off a firestorm of other fears. The women were worried about sending their children to school during the eviction and then having them taken away by social services. The authorities could not be trusted. Candy reassured them that she would be given the date of the eviction in advance. ‘You are so lucky. They will give me the date Dale Farm is heavily watched and monitored. I work at all the other evictions, and they just come on without any notice’. Not everyone who heard her thought their life was so lucky.

The activists were not keen on this turn of events either. ‘We do not want to give our names to the police,’ came the reply. One activist asked, ‘Do we have to give real names?’ and another wondered whether it would be possible to get on to the site some other way, perhaps by cutting across the fields. The meeting was spiralling out of all control.

Then Candy began to reveal her fledgling secret plan to get emergency injunctions to stop the process. This would allow time to move people from illegal plots to legal ones, doubling them up temporarily on those pitches, if necessary, before any eviction went forward. ‘The eviction is planned for late September, October. The eviction will give us twenty-eight days. Bailiffs do not have the lawful right to go for lawful removal of all pitches one-third is lawful,’ she said. There was so much paperwork that it was almost impossible to track it all, and the disarray was starting to hurt the Travellers’ image with the public. ‘It’s a patchwork quilt of over one hundred enforcement notices. It’s a mess. Basildon is looking more and more unreasonable. We need to make them look unreasonable.’ She was clearly annoyed about the activists, and the effect their presence was having on the process. ‘The issue here is that the police are extremely concerned about the scaffolding on the front gate and the sheer number of people here.’

As she spelled out what was coming, Candy’s reasonable voice was literally drowned out, however. Activists and Travellers alike were taking issue with her version of the events, with her ideas for getting around the roadblock, with everything she said. She became more insistent: ‘This is going to be hell on earth without knowing the date, but it could be slightly more managed hell with the date I need names for legal monitors to get through the gate if it’s put up, I need to put it on the list and activists need to give names so they can come and go as visitors.’

Candy asked whether any of the activists, who now numbered between fifty and seventy strong, were ready to be trained as legal monitors. Only six raised their hands. She could not believe it. ‘This is really crucial; here you are building scaffolding towers and only six of you will become legal monitors.’

An activist retorted, in an obvious attempt to undermine Candy, ‘I want to ask the residents, Is there is a plan that you are counting on? We will support it. Candy has come into this meeting, to tell us what she is doing, asking for UN observers,’ she said. ‘This is different to what we are doing. We don’t want to give our names to the police.’

Some of the activists asked for the cameras to be turned off. Suspicion was taking over. It was at this point that a Traveller tendered a direct enquiry to the activists: ‘We are going to protest and put up a fight. If we are doing this, are ye willing to stand behind us?’ A shouting match followed. Eventually Candy left, shaking her head. She had not got the legal monitor names she needed in order to manage the hell of an eviction.

Jacob Wills, aka ‘Jake Fulton’, was by now one of the de facto leaders of the activists. He was good at putting on a brave face, stressing in interviews how optimistic the group was that they would be successful in supporting the Dale Farm residents and halting the eviction.26 But in reality, he had been ambivalent about setting up Camp Constant. In his words, they were ‘definitely tentative’.27

At first, he said, he and his friends in the activist camp had been ‘quite worried we didn’t think it was appropriate to impose ourselves on this community’. They moved forward, in a ‘definitely tentative’ manner, because ‘it seemed like people would be quite in favour of it, that they wanted to see more practical forms of solidarity. And it doesn’t seem so useful just to wage a media outreach form of campaign. So I’d say by the late spring we were focusing in on what was possible, trying to let more people know about it.’ To recruit more activists, they used the internet. A ‘Dale Farm Solidarity’ email mailing that had been almost dormant was resurrected.

With knowledge of the activists’ early doubts about their role at Dale Farm, the break-up of Candy’s meeting wasn’t surprising. But former social worker and Catholic peace activist Ann Kobayashi, who had been visiting Dale Farm since her priest had asked her to help with benefit forms in the late 1990s, was just as disturbed as Candy by the emerging rift between the two camps. Tensions were clearly simmering. ‘Candy got it from both sides in some cases because she has done her best for the cause of people not being put out,’ Ann explained. ‘In court she never agreed on a safe eviction which resulted in them being on the road, that was her bargaining chip to get somewhere else. But it didn’t work. If only there had been more transparency about what different peoples’ agendas were Candy, Grattan if we could have all met together, and had some means of uncovering some of the difficulties, for example, around the ways of decision-making’.28 Things could have gone so much better, Ann felt.

The Travellers at Dale Farm had not been entirely cut off from the local community, after all. Indeed, as former EHRC staffer Sean Risdale, who was now with the Irish Traveller Movement in Britain, recalled: ‘There were different strands of activism at Dale Farm in the time leading up to the eviction. Long before Camp Constant, and in some cases going back to the original Dale Farm settlement, there was a group of local women giving continual practical support to Dale Farm families largely in terms of accessing healthcare, education and other services. Most of these supporters were peace campaigners and active parishioners from Our Lady of Good Counsel, the Catholic Church in Wickford. They got to know and like the Traveller families through their joint involvement in the Church and attendance at Sunday Mass. And some had joined the women from Dale Farm when they held night-long candlelit vigils of prayer for the preservation of their community. Sister Katherine, Ann Kobayashi and others worked tirelessly to support and comfort the families at Dale Farm, operating in a non-judgemental way with everyone involved in the struggle. Father Dan Mason, the parish priest at Wickford, has been continually supportive to the families of Dale Farm along with his housekeeper Anne Matthews, providing the only real opportunity for them to feel valued as part of a broader Wickford community.’

Another key volunteer, much loved by the Traveller women, was Susan Craig-Greene of the Washington-based Advocacy Project. Susan was compiling the first inventory of health and housing needs at Dale Farm, working quietly away in the background in order to provide evidence that might underpin the legal challenge to the eviction and the Travellers’ right to accommodation.

Ann believed that the problem had been the uneasy mix of activist and Traveller culture, particularly the sort of horizontal decision-making that had become a hallmark of anarchist and other activist collectives. Much of activist culture, in Ann’s view, ‘was never going to work at Dale Farm. It wasn’t familiar to the Travellers, and from Candy’s point of view it was ineffective, weird, hippyish threatening. The activists were in the main a fairly articulate, educated group, they were able to explain why they were doing things in a certain way and that was very tough for Candy. Because there wasn’t enough space or time to sort it in a helpful way it placed a huge burden on the residents at Dale Farm, who were stuck with conflicting loyalties.’

Candy’s strategy, to cede some ground to the council, was undermined by the presence of the activists, Ann said. ‘Candy sincerely thought this was the best option, to give a little and then when things had died down to go back, wait till the dust died down very much the idea that he who fights and runs away lives to fight another day That’s very much a response of nomadic groups, that they learn that you can go back once things have settled, whereas face-to-face confrontation, in the Traveller experience, has never worked in their favour.’

Sean Risdale understood the risk that Candy took of alienating the Travellers in order to save Dale Farm. ‘Candy was courageous in the run up to the eviction working almost without sleep towards the end to try and avert what everybody else was anticipating would be a violent outcome. She knew she would get little thanks from anyone for dealing with the “enemy”, unless by some miracle it led to a last-minute reprieve for the residents. Of course she was as sickened as anyone else when Basildon officials involved in the negotiations talked about this decimation of an entire settlement as complacently as if they were discussing a greenhouse extension. Many of those affected were her cousins, uncles and aunts, but she couldn’t afford to lose her temper with the officials in case of a possible breakthrough.’

Crucially, however, Grattan disagreed with Candy’s approach. He saw no point in standing back you had to confront the forces that were against you. According to Risdale, ‘When Grattan was angry, his anger was generally focused on the evil of the eviction process both as a matter of principle, and ultimately as it overshadowed and then took away the peace of Dale Farm. He might lose his temper with individuals who contribute[d] directly or indirectly to the eviction process, but he [didn’t] sustain personal feuds or harbour grievances. He has witnessed the bitter intolerance shown towards Irish Travellers and Roma over a lifetime, and has got beyond politeness in discussing the issues with anyone who lacks goodwill towards Travellers.’

Grattan felt, quite sincerely, that if he could attract around a thousand activists to Dale Farm, there was a chance of saving it through direct action. But the police never believed that such numbers could stop them doing what they needed to do, according to Iain Logan of the Essex Police. ‘This was not a life and death situation. If there had been a thousand protestors there, it would just have taken longer. This wasn’t the town centre of Croydon; we didn’t need to seize control. If safety was jeopardised because we were outnumbered, we would have withdrawn and regrouped. There was no time imperative.’

The activists didn’t know that, however, and were busy demonstrating, rather proudly, their various resistance techniques to the bemused Travellers. ‘There were all these techniques that were being introduced They were going around the caravans, having tea, having a chat, and then saying, “By the way, this is a tube, you can put your arm in it, and sit in one van and stick it across to another van and you’ll block the road.” And this is the first time people had heard of this way of resisting,’ Ann Kobayashi recalled. ‘And I always felt it was unrealistic to ask people who are used to depending on mobility to avoid trouble to mobilise themselves voluntarily. I mean, I’ve done it over the years for blockades out of choice, because I’ve seen it work for short-term purposes of blocking a base for demonstrations Faslane, for instance. It does work, but in a different context, when you are trying to keep traffic out here we were trying to stop the police coming in. It was a different situation.’

There were other issues too. Travellers are polite and don’t like to offend, especially to offend people who are offering a helping hand. ‘There were difficulties with the vegan diets,’ for one. The Travellers, too polite to refuse the vegan stew on offer, fed it discreetly to their dogs, who lapped it up. For another, ‘The horizontal decision-making this underlying principle that the Travellers had the right to say yea or nay to suggestions,’ Ann said. ‘The difficulty was that though the Travellers did feel they could contribute, and that was helpful, they felt under an obligation to these young people who had come to help them They may not have felt that it sounded a great idea, but how could you look a gift horse in the mouth, and what else was being offered?’

Careless talk, from a small number of Travellers suggesting that they had access to guns, didn’t help matters. One Irish Traveller boasted to local newspapers that he and other residents would fight any eviction and had firearms on the site. Essex Police intelligence took this in: ‘Information suggested individuals associated with the site, whether members of the travelling community or protestors, had access to firearms or other weaponry, were connected to violent incidents or other criminality or due to previous criminal history would be likely to involve themselves in actions that would endanger others. This would have obvious relevance to any police activity on the site.’29

The police were preparing for a violent confrontation. Intelligence gathered in July 2011 stated: ‘Some residents have started to make a move ahead of the eviction, but the vast majority are intending to stay and are fortifying the site in an attempt to make the eviction lengthy and dangerous. Gas cylinders are being built into walls and buried into the ground in a crude attempt at creating explosions and likely harm to bailiffs, police and contractors connected with the removal Intelligence suggests that petrol bombs are being prepared on Dale Farm.30 Other intelligence suggested that activists would be wearing rucksacks containing ‘ammo’ (rocks and stones), and that they had access to homemade shields, cricket pads and motorbike helmets.

The activists, for their part, were feeling under pressure. Some were taking or had just taken their exams at Cambridge; others had work commitments. Jonathan Oppenheim said that recruiting people to join Camp Constant was a hand-to-hand job lots of work, lots of time, lots of persuasion. ‘Grattan had this email list [and] he was sending out these reports, and there weren’t many people [showing up]. It was difficult because they felt it was a constant state of emergency, so people just lose energy. Also, it was one of the most difficult things to mobilise for I’ve been involved in, compared to migrant stuff, climate, World Trade Organisation. You had to explain the issue more with Dale Farm; there were lots of questions, lots of barriers it just wasn’t on the radar for some reason It’s a bit outside of people’s vision. Climate change was a huge task we have to engage with, and I don’t think that people saw Traveller rights in the same light.’

Given the increasingly desperate email alerts that were going out to garner support, it’s no small wonder that there was little ‘quality control’ around the sort of activists who were allowed to take up at Camp Constant. ‘There was a lot of restraint being exercised and there were people going by principles. But there were some who came on the site, for instance on the night of the first eviction day, who were unknown,’ Ann remembered. ‘They were telling different stories to different people, purporting to be Travellers, and they vanished again, after causing trouble. They scared people; some of their talk was very violent. They were unpleasant to some of the women. There was talk about the IRA and stuff.’

Father Dan Mason was also troubled by the lack of scrutiny of the activists. ‘The women welcomed the activists because they saw them as support and [because] they are naturally hospitable, but one of the concerns for those with young children was that there were all kinds of people turning up, some with concerns about alcohol and drugs. And they felt really uncomfortable about this group of people they didn’t know. There were child-protection issues.’

A few well-known activists came on board, notably Jonnie Marbles, who had famously thrown a custard pie at Rupert Murdoch during a parliamentary hearing in connection with phone-hacking, and Marina Pepper, a former Liberal Democrat mayor for Telscombe in East Sussex, and an articulate climate-change campaigner. Jonathan had approached some of these ‘celebrities’ to raise the profile of Dale Farm. ‘I targeted Marina because she was great, she was perfect, she was good at talking to people, having cups of tea with them.’ But the core group remained tiny, with only a half-dozen able to stay put for the duration, organising the larger group of people coming and going at Camp Constant.

‘We needed people who could stay,’ Jonathan explained. ‘It was great when Jake could stay; initially it was a rotation of five people. I set up a text alert: sign up for days at Dale Farm we had a month to fill.’ Starting from no one had been a challenge, but eventually things had improved. ‘We were lucky it was so many people It did ramp up, but I didn’t think we had the capacity to sustain the camp for three months. Cooking meals three times a day people have jobs, they can’t commit to it. It was a nightmare having a three-month-long presence for people who had limited capacity. We had a constantly changing group of people; they would put in a week, and then they were gone.’

‘It was literally friend by friend, mobilising other friends. So Tom and Sam said they would do the kitchen, Natalie volunteered to do media, and it was very slow, person by person. It was hard. It wasn’t something where you could send out emails, say there was an info thing in London, and people would come; we had to recruit people A lot of it was that it was hopeless; you don’t know when it’s going to happen, and then it’s a lost cause. People don’t have months to sit in Essex. You know that when the bailiffs come there will be five people.’ He knew that wouldn’t be enough.

The activists had been hit almost immediately by very hostile media coverage, even in these days before Occupy had taken over the area in front of St Paul’s. This carried the risk of doing more harm than good, encouraging even more hostility towards the Travellers. Jacob Wills disagreed. ‘We were running quite a successful media campaign as part and parcel of a much bigger thing,’ he said, and he and others thought that this very hostility towards them might be of some use. ‘I think, to be honest, sometimes we did quite well in deflecting adverse media attention away from Travellers to us We were used to that sort of denigration, not that Travellers aren’t, but considering all of the other strains on them, I definitely don’t think it would have been all right to leave.’

Many of the residents, Jacob said, were welcoming, despite the ill will forming in the media. ‘The Travellers really ensured that we were aware that they had never really experienced this sort of solidarity before, or even this interaction with the settled community before, and obviously few of us were Travellers. But to my knowledge there has never been any comparable situation where a large number and a large kind of varying population of people from the settled community end up staying on a site. So we were amazingly well welcomed, cooked for, given bedding, we had our clothes washed, we built up really strong friends that is part of the strength now of the national network. Some of the people who were at Dale Farm are now at Smithy Fen, and I think it’s those links with those Travellers that have provided us with some sort of passport to other areas of the Traveller community.’

Indeed, Mary Ann was pleased that the supporters were there. ‘The students are absolutely beautiful. I have never met nicer people in my life. I said, “Thank you very much for coming, for showing so much support.” There are good people in the world. They are here to help. They are living in tents, everywhere, so they are here for our support,’ she said. ‘I was shocked, really and truly: they came from all over to show their support, which was very nice and thoughtful. I was speaking to some of them, and they were saying, “Look, Mary Ann, we don’t know what’s going to happen to us one day, but we would like to help.” We all need a friend, a friend in need is a friend indeed.’

By this time, her chalet was almost bare. ‘I packed up my china in case they come and break it up,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a lot of sentimental things I’ve got over the years, I wouldn’t want them to come in and break them. I’ve just got my Bible out now.’

Quietly, she then added, ‘We are just living in fear.’