‘Update on black side, please?’
‘People moving forward now, lights flashing, cameras are going off at the location.’
‘Silver, you getting the downlink?’
‘Negative from silver.’
‘Fifty-five persons on the inside, black fence, closing in on the officers, confirm if missiles still being thrown.’ …
‘Confirm if you have any hostility on white side?’
‘Within the site, protestors are there, no hostility.’
‘Black side. Extremely large lumps of concrete being thrown now, powder being thrown, along with concrete.’
‘Move to right-hand side, please, quick as you can.’*
* Helicopter uplink, audio provided by Essex Police. Code: white side: front of site, black side: back (point of entry), green side: left (near Len Gridley and other settled homeowners on Oak Road), red side: right (near legal site on Oak Lane).
On Wednesday, 19 October 2011, the clearance of Dale Farm finally began. Around 150 police, clad in full riot gear, arrived at 7.18 a.m., according to legal monitors, and broke down a fence at the back of the site. The bailiffs from Constant and Co. followed some twenty minutes later.
At 4 a.m., Tony Ball, the council leader, was informed that the site was going to be cleared, and how the day’s events would proceed. ‘Standing in the field on the morning and seeing riot police lined up in a field in Basildon is not something I would ever have wanted to see, and certainly wouldn’t want to see again anywhere,’ he said later. ‘And you go through, “How is this going to play out?” and the risks … Something very serious could have happened.’ The police had to take control of the operation, he said, because of the risk of violence. ‘There were gas canisters … The Travellers had made threats before to the bailiffs, that they would set them off, they had made those threats … There were people on lock-ons, we weren’t sure how to get them off safely, things like that. I believe in September there was someone with a noose round her neck. Of course, I didn’t know that the police had decided to go in through the side. I wouldn‘t ask. Not a matter for me. I had to leave it to the professionals to be handled. I knew the date, but not how.’
Cormac Smith, Basildon’s director of communications, sat on Gold Command, the body led by Chief Superintendent Tim Stokes, which was charged with determining the date of the eviction, but he was also not told of the operation till early that morning. ‘Right up to the last moment, it was a council-led operation. The police, literally at the eleventh hour, decided, because of intelligence they had had, that they expected danger. The decision was taken for the police to take the lead, as opposed to the bailiffs.’ That meant that at the last moment the council lost control of the operation, Smith said. ‘The police would not have discussed the details with us, that was a strategic decision to catch the Travellers and supporters off guard so they could enter the site, to minimise the dangers … to take primacy of the operation, to transfer that from the council to the police, due to the intelligence. When the commander of the police announces that, we have to agree.’
Ball added that the police had brought in trained negotiators to talk to the activists. ‘The police took the view that there was too much of a risk to the bailiffs’ for them to go in. Indeed, Essex Police had earlier released a statement saying that they had ‘received intelligence that indicated protesters had stockpiled various items’ with the intent of using them against bailiffs and police. They were taking the intelligence seriously.
Superintendent Iain Logan of the Essex Police was serving as Silver Commander, in charge of the actual operation to clear the site, and reporting up to Gold Command. ‘Work was being done to reinforce the boundaries – we had all seen media images of people carrying stones and rocks up onto the gantry at the front of the site, we had seen bottles of urine going up. Nothing specific led us to go in on that night, but the court proceedings had concluded and the action could now take place,’ he said.20
Police intelligence from just two days before the eviction had convinced him of the need for decisive action: ‘Intelligence suggests that the activists have been preparing petrol bombs made of glass bottles with rags in the top. Intelligence suggests there are four to five large gas canisters on site. The residents and activists plan on attaching a form of piping to the canister and turning on the gas so that it pumps out of the piping. They will then light the end and move it around like a flamethrower, which will scare off the bailiffs from bringing vehicles onto the site. Intelligence suggests that the activists have made a number of devices that look like a ball of metal nails.’21
Logan had spent many hours inspecting the perimeter of Dale Farm, trying to assess what tactics would allow his team to gain control of the site on eviction day, particularly in light of the reports he was receiving about possible weapons. ‘We knew that gas – in this case acetylene – was there, and it is an immense threat if it gets hot: it explodes. It is really dangerous … the Fire Service was watching very carefully. In terms of how we felt about violence, it really did concern me, after what happened on the previous move forward by the bailiffs’ – he was now referring to the hot tea allegedly thrown in the face of one of the Constant and Co. officers. ‘My view was that to force an entry through the front gate was too dangerous an enterprise for everyone,’ he continued. ‘I kept looking at the site, asking myself, How can we do this in a way that minimises the risk of injury to activists, Travellers and police officers?’
In the end, Logan decided that ‘the old-fashioned way, using surprise’ was probably the best option available to him. ‘I spent a lot of time walking around, and decided we would approach this in a different way, and find the least risky way of entering. We were trying to be audacious, use the element of surprise.’
He was particularly concerned to avoid a direct confrontation between the bailiffs and the protestors. ‘There are videos on YouTube of bailiff-led evictions of Travellers that are awful, heartbreaking, from around here, Essex, as well as further afield, Birmingham. These remain in people’s minds and they [the evictions] were not dealt with subtly,’ he said. ‘Also, bailiffs only have tabards and helmets. If we identify there is a serious risk of injury or death, it is our responsibility [as] the police to act, because of our training and [the] kit we are able to deploy.’
Logan also had it clear in his mind that the police role would be limited – their job was really only to kick-start the process and to keep the peace. ‘Our decision was that we would facilitate entry to the site and return it to Basildon Borough Council control,’ he explained. Then the bailiffs and the council would take over clearance of the site. ‘It is not our job to evict anybody. Our job was to create an environment that was safe.’
Around 4 a.m. that Wednesday morning the police had sent a text message to Candy Sheridan’s mobile, suggesting that she come to Dale Farm immediately. ‘I was packed up ready to go to Stow Horse Fair,’ she recalled. ‘Instead I drove to Dale Farm with my [fair] stock in the back, a long drive with residents phoning me, saying the electricity had been cut off. The police were ringing me, telling me to hurry … Residents crying … and [me] miles away.’ She had always stressed how important the fairs were for celebrating Gypsy and Traveller culture when the rest of their life was so hard. Now, here she was, forced to detour from the fair to attend an eviction – hard times indeed.
Logan’s team was preparing to enter the site in less than three hours. The site perimeter had been divided into four quadrants by the police. The front gate at the southern edge of the site was to be known as ‘white’. The western edge, near Len Gridley’s back garden and Oak Lane, was ‘green’. The south-east edge, near the legal site with Patrick Egan’s cottage, was ‘red’. The north back of the site – the place that Logan had chosen as his point of entry, if the front gate proved impassable – was codenamed ‘black’.
The Essex Police officers had remained in their own homes during the run-up to the eviction, but their numbers were going to be reinforced by officers from the London Metropolitan Police, South Wales, and elsewhere. These forces had been barracked at the local Ministry of Defence training centre at Wethersfield, in Braintree. Given the number of different units involved, Logan had appointed two trusted Essex officers to report to him – Bronze reporting up to Silver.
‘They were ready to convoy in. My steer was that if they [could] open the front gate, we go in that way, if it was easy and safe to do so,’ Logan explained. ‘I had two Bronze Commanders there that day, one at the front gate, one at the back.’
Logan’s plan involved the use of Tasers as a form of defence against any weapons on the site. ‘The Taser is a very effective piece of protective equipment; we describe it as less lethal rather than non-lethal. The Taser is designed to provide immediate protection for officers if they come under attack … It is designed to deal with a close-quarter threat,’ he said. ‘The Taser was authorised for the officers to carry who were engaged in the first entry to the site … I think I authorised it to only the method-of-entry team, so in single figures; it was allocated just to them, as part of their protective equipment.’
‘I took the decision to go in at 6.56 a.m. Everyone had already been briefed and the resources were in place. The time of day [was] important because I wanted the ability to get the officers in safely. The nature of the site, the way it is laid out, is hazardous, and we didn’t know whether other hazards had been built in,’ he said. There had been intelligence about booby-trapped walls, in addition to the various weapons. ‘You need daylight for this, you can’t do this with searchlights, we wanted the maximum number of daylight hours. I also wanted to get the officers into position without disrupting the community.’
The Bronze Commander at the front gate had reported that the force would not be able to gain easy access there. So the entry team in their full riot gear made their way to a rickety fence at the back of the site. As they approached, a bell went off, warning the protestors of their presence. At Silver Command, Superintendent Logan’s video down-link had failed, and he was left to rely on live audio feeds to learn what was going on.
‘Black side. We are getting extremely large lumps of concrete being thrown now … also some sort of powder thrown over the unit at the front.’
‘Some foul-smelling powder, we don’t know what it is.’
‘Some powder over units at black side.’
‘Yes, along with large lumps of concrete, about a foot square.’
Logan recalled: ‘The entry team came under attack from rocks. There was almost a hierarchy of ammo used. There were bigger rocks nearer the [back] fence and smaller rocks further back and we did sustain injuries. The level of violence we encountered was the worst I have ever experienced, in terms of the hostility – speaking to the officers who delivered that action, very close-quarters and a horrible level of violence. It was probably the close-quarter nature of it. We come from Essex, we don’t get riots … This was a wholly exceptional level of violence; the officers would have never have encountered that level of violent resistance before.’ In the fight, a Taser was used ‘against one male who was presenting a lethal threat with wood with a nail on it’, said Logan. ‘The piece of wood coming across, powder being thrown across, we didn’t know what it was, there was paint being thrown at them during that initial very violent interaction.’
Len Gridley was hosting some of the media, who were covering the event from spots in his garden. ‘About quarter to seven more police riot vans turned up, around 250 officers came down the hill to the bottom of the site. They made a hole through the fence – they were getting pelted by everything, by metal poles – that’s why they used the Tasers. They broke into the site and within twenty to forty minutes they had control,’ he said. ‘It was very professionally done, hands up to the police – a job well done. If they hadn’t done it in that manner, they would have hung the eviction in for months, maybe years. Sending the police in was the correct way to control the site; they came in through the back of the site, the legal part of the breakers yard.’
Jonathan Oppenheim had come back from working in Poland just the night before, and one of the first things he had done was talk with the other core Dale Farm residents and activists about when the council might move forward. ‘We were trying to gauge when it would happen. The problem is that if you put out false alarms, you tire people out,’ he said. As the eviction date kept moving, the number of activists at Dale Farm had dwindled to fifty from about two hundred. The week previously, a call had gone out for activists to converge on the London Stock Exchange on Saturday, 15 October, as part of the Occupy movement that had been launched on Wall Street in September. The activists had been pushed off the Stock Exchange’s property by the police, and had relocated their protest to St Paul’s Cathedral. Two hundred and fifty people stayed there overnight. Two days later, the Occupy London group – now numbering between 150 and 500, based on various reports – issued a nine-point ‘initial statement’ to the media and authorities. Point eight read: ‘We stand in solidarity with the global oppressed and we call for an end to the actions of our government and others in causing this oppression.’
By the time of his return on 18 October, Jonathan and the others at Dale Farm felt sure that the eviction would come almost immediately. He tried to rally more people to the site, but it was not working. ‘It was a sleepless night, trying to get vans to come from Occupy London, and then the trains were down so lots of people couldn’t get there. I didn’t sleep much – I was already in my climbing harness,’ he explained.
Jonathan was one of the activists assigned to the gantry, the twelve-metre-high scaffolding barricade that had been erected at the front gate and become an iconic symbol of Dale Farm, for both those inside and the media gathered outside the site. Still, the activists knew that the gantry was their strongest line of defence – a highly visible barrier. They also knew that they would need to keep a watch around the entire site. ‘I got woken up at five in the morning just to discuss whether we should sound the alarm. We could see some activity happening in the compound, but we weren’t sure … But then it became apparent that something was going to happen, so we sounded the alarm, the siren. We did expect them to come at the back, but we were the crew who climbed up the gantry, so that’s what we did.’
The time at which the decision was made to enter Dale Farm is questioned by the activists, including Jacob Wills. ‘They said they made that decision at three in the morning, but I totally don’t buy that. I think, I’m very sure, that that decision was made a long time before that; that’s not how operational decisions are made, at three in the morning with a map the night before. We all looked at the back fence, and said, “Ooh, that fence needs a bit of work,” but so much stuff needed work. I think it’s kind of clear why they ended up coming through there – it means we did a good job of barricading the front, I guess. We were obviously outnumbered. And then there was the use of the Taser, really immediately, and the sheer numbers of police was really difficult. Also, the previous day there had been quite a lot more people … it was unfortunate, in essence, that we weren’t able to mobilise more people to be there on the day.’
‘Resistance would have been very different if there had been hundreds and hundreds of people there,’ Jacob continued. ‘If there had been one thousand people there, the eviction just wouldn’t have happened and that’s what we were trying to build towards, that’s the sort of movement that we would like to have built … [but we were] under a hundred. There were fewer of us than the police. So I think it was clear to people that it was a rearguard action, and we would try and stay there for as long as possible.’
There was another reason for the lack of support at the site on eviction day. The English Gypsies, particularly those from the stronghold of North-East England, had made a crucial decision not to support the Irish Travellers. Billy Welch, the organiser of Appleby Horse Fair and a much respected shera rom, an elder in the community, was ambivalent about the events at Dale Farm. He had watched as the activists had amassed there, he was in close contact with Candy during the whole campaign, and he had been persuaded that things would not end well.
‘There were other Gypsy men round me, asking me, “Should we give them some support, should we stand with them?”’ he recalled. ‘I said, “No, I would do, but if you are watching the TV, there are no men there, just the women and kids. They [the men] should stand up for themselves, and then we would go and stand up for them.” They should have followed protocol and the law. I do feel they have made mistakes.’ He added: ‘They had the wrong people there, [the activists] didn’t do themselves any favours. You don’t set up tea-party shots outside the High Court. And look at all the shouting, violence and abuse, being abusive is not good.’22 Influential Gypsy families from East Anglia and the Midlands were also ready to pull on to Dale Farm and stand with the Dale Farm residents – but only if the activists went, they told Candy. She relayed this news to Grattan – but he wanted them all to stand together, travelling peoples and activist allies. It was an either/or situation for the English Gypsies. They didn’t come.
Parishioner and peace activist Ann Kobayashi was away that day too, in Japan, and only a handful of her Catholic congregation gathered in solidarity during the eviction process. ‘I was enormously disappointed that more local people from the Christian community didn’t come,’ she said later. ‘I have seen the power of encirclement, and standing vigil. You won’t stop a determined group of people, but it’s hard for them to act rough in the face of people standing silently, if possible, or sitting. Very hard. The difficulty was … one, there weren’t enough people to tip that balance.’
Despite the rocks and powder and barricades, the police quickly took control. According to Superintendent Logan, ‘Once we were able to get in to the site, it was methodical. We just moved forward, the issue was to get hold of the gantry from the reverse side, slowly, safely and in as dignified a way as possible, so that the bailiffs could do the work they had to do.’
The few activists and residents who were left inside rushed to the back of the site, where the police were now streaming in too. Some protestors physically fought the police in hand-to-hand combat. ‘Some Travellers were violent, and so were some women [Travellers] as well,’ reported Logan. In the scuffle, one Traveller, Nora Egan, fell down after allegedly being hit by a baton. She was later taken to hospital with a back injury.
But any such resistance was futile. Constant and Co. were on the site around fourteen minutes after the entry team had breached the rickety back fence.
The police and the bailiffs moved systematically towards the front of the site and the gantry. Some activists had positioned themselves on fences, scaffolding and platforms around or attached to the gantry. Some now hurled bricks, bottles – some with urine in them – and other debris onto the police and bailiffs below.
When Candy arrived, she was allowed through the police cordon on Oak Lane. ‘It felt like a war zone on a film set,’ she said. ‘A police officer told me, “I have orders to bring you onto the site ASAP.” I told him I wanted to walk on by myself.’ She was not allowed to do so. ‘He said, “I am here to protect you and stay with you,” so I was walked on with a police presence, past the jeering activists and past distraught women Travellers.’ It was not how she had imagined her last day trying to save Dale Farm.
At about 9 a.m., teams of riot police, in groups of eight, moved at a swift pace to assemble in front of the main gate. Two fire engines stood by, and soon fire officers had entered the site as well. A smoky haze hung over the site – a caravan had been set on fire by an activist and a plume of evil-smelling orange smoke curled upwards into the sky. Ten minutes later, bailiffs wearing climbing gear started to go in at the front. A clinical psychologist, Robin Jamieson, had come out to support the Travellers, and was watching the events unfold at the front gate. ‘They are already having appalling problems; the children are having nightmares. The bailiff is the bogeyman for them. This will have a huge effect on the children.’
Three helicopters hung overhead. Inside Dale Farm’s makeshift barricades, activists and some Travellers were shouting, ‘Fight, fight, fight,’ and then, from the gantry at the front, ‘Dale Farm will never be defeated!’
On the police audio, there was chatter about the fear of greater violence:
‘99, you got a number of protestors by a barricade in Camellia Drive, they appear to have bottles, possibly petrol bombs.’
‘Just confirm that location again.’
‘Yes, Camellia Drive, towards red, on the main entrance.’
‘Silver ta to Bronze 2.’
‘Silver, for your information from the Air Support Unit, there may be petrol bombs near to the main gantry on white side so far.’
The bailiffs were by now pushing the packs of reporters back, away from the front gate, ‘for security reasons’. The front gate was heavily fortified, with little space for the assembled media to get in for a closer view. There was Fergal Keane, reporting for the BBC; Jackie Long, the social affairs editor for Channel 4 News; Johnny Howorth, the Guardian film-maker – all the regulars from the eviction coverage of the past two months, among them Sebastian Hesse from ARD Radio in Germany and international press agencies. Two legal observers who had come up from the Occupy London camp, Ben Doran and Alex Bennett, helped some journalists to sneak into the site.23 ‘The ironic thing for me was visiting trailers and seeing the families watching a live feed of footage of the “scaffold tower”,’ Howorth remembered. ‘They just needed to step outside to see it. They seemed amazed that they were a part of history in the making.’
This had once been a makeshift but fully functioning hamlet – a strong village community. Now it was being torn apart, plot by plot. Women were sobbing, but the police continued to move forward, step by step, calmly. It didn’t feel quite real, more like agit-prop theatre designed for the cameras. Perhaps this was because, as Superintendent Logan later said – the ‘real’ confrontation had been avoided, the feared, violent altercation between the Traveller residents and the bailiffs. Instead, the outsider activists and the police were slugging it out. They were proxies for the real protagonists. The Travellers had become pawns in a much larger battle, a media war, staged for effect.
‘In many ways, the activists relieved the Travellers of the need to do any hand-to-hand combat,’ Long said. ‘I remember seeing women sitting out in their yards, watching what was going on. There was a level of excitement there, and I think some of the children quite enjoyed it. The Travellers were very savvy, and the activists helped them in terms of physical elements, such as getting the barricades done, fighting for them. But there was a genuine relationship there as well.’
By mid-morning all eyes were on the gantry.
‘Silver ta to Bronze one.’
‘Urgent.’
‘Gary, from other means, there are believed to be hostiles in balaclavas hiding within caravans on red side. Near to one of your access points.’
‘Do you receive?’
‘Yes, received that. We may need to come back to deal with that and stick to following the objective.’
‘Objective is agreed, get to the gantry.’
And other exchanges:
‘From the Air Support Unit, there may be petrol bombs near to the main gantry.’
‘Males in blue boiler suits in white masks mounting the gantry.’
‘And also from other information males in blue boiler suits wearing white masks are actually mounting the gantry.’
Jonathan Oppenheim, in his distinctive wide-brimmed hat, sat alone on one small platform attached to the gantry. Protestors were locked on all over the place – to cars, to fences. About a third of the activists were masked.
On the gantry itself, a number of people were delivering dramatic speeches. Hanging off the scaffolding, Marina Pepper addressed the bailiffs and media: ‘This is their home. They have nowhere to go. You are evicting them for money. Why is there money for your cruel jobs, when there is nothing for schools and hospitals? I don’t know how you will sleep well tonight.’ As the police moved forward, activists gave a running commentary on their performance and the injustice of the situation. One masked activist standing on the gantry squeaked out a few irked observations about the police and their ‘fucking weapons and shields’, like a scene pulled straight out of Monty Python’s Holy Grail, when the Black Knight has all his limbs chopped off but continues to fight to the last – an inadvertently light moment in a dreadful day.
The gantry had become the centre of the activists’ media strategy. The activists had appointed a spokesperson – a student going by the name of Ellie Wilkinson – and she was standing on the gantry. She promised that they would stay there for as long as the Travellers wanted them to. The McCarthy sisters were also prominently featured, giving press interviews in front of the scaffolding inside the embattled Dale Farm. ‘We stayed through the eviction, we were screaming. It was terrible,’ Joanna McCarthy said later.24
At just before eleven the ‘Save Dale Farm’ banner was hauled down from the gantry by the bailiffs. In an interview with Sky News, Wilkinson stood firm: ‘We aim to stay as long as we possibly can to show the law is unjust, but we realise we can’t stay here forever. If the residents ask us to come down, of course we would do that.’
Pearl McCarthy, who had for some weeks taken the lion’s share of the media work from the Traveller side, shouted at the massed riot police, ‘Shame on ye, shame on the lot of ye!’ She was taken aback by the overwhelming force of the police – the Travellers had not expected that.
Susan Craig-Greene, a human rights advocate who had visited the site many times over the previous three years, was stunned by the force enlisted. ‘It’s tragic. I don’t know how it’s come to this; I’m surprised by the force. It just makes it all more traumatic for the residents, they are really distressed. This isn’t a solution – for them, local people or the government.’
Michelle and Nora Sheridan were standing among the ruins of their old plot, trying hard to stay calm. Many of the Travellers who had gathered at the back of the site looked pale with stress; some were crying. ‘I saw someone being Tasered, he fizzed, I tell you,’ Nora reported as she tried to prevent her three boys from going near the police lines. Michelle added: ‘He was properly lifted off the ground, he was fitting.’25
‘Yes, some of the protestors were throwing stones, but it was inhumane,’ Michelle continued. ‘I was running away with a child in my arms. I didn’t stop to look. I was terrified.’ Tom, Michelle’s youngest, who was just eighteen months, was wailing, being passed between her and her husband, Pa, for some sense of comfort in the middle of the clearance.
‘They just kept coming,’ one of the activists said, clearly shocked.
Michelle replied, bitterly: ‘There’s nothing great about Great Britain.’
It was Nora’s son Jimmy Tom’s eighth birthday. ‘In the midst of this chaos and devastation, I felt powerless but tried to help with the small things,’ Susan Craig-Greene later recalled about the celebration that day. ‘Probably the most useful thing I felt I could do that day was to help Nora … who was determined to give him a little piece of normality on his birthday. The community police, who have always been helpful and well liked at Dale Farm, escorted Nora, Jimmy Tom and me off the site to my car so that we could go to Asda to buy him a cake and a few decorations … For a few moments during the small celebration, with his immediate family and cousins in his trailer, we shut out what was going on outside. Jimmy Tom, who had excelled during the last two years at the local school, was excited to read The Gruffalo (the book I’d got him) aloud to me several times. At one point, the generator died and he was so eager to continue, we read by the light of my phone screen. All I could think as we were reading in the dark was that this was not just about one phenomenally bad birthday for Jimmy Tom.’26
Nearby, Candy was trying to get two older, sick residents off the site. She turned for help to one of the Bronze Commanders, asking that ambulances be called to evacuate the sick and older people. When the ambulances arrived, just after twelve, she cried out: ‘If anyone needs to leave, tell me. This is unbelievable. What’s happening?’
She was angry, and justifiably so. An injunction had been filed with the court protecting certain fences on the site – fences that the police had broken down as part of their plan of entry. ‘It’s against all the notices. They have made a mockery of the injunction. Look at these people, two have already gone to hospital,’ she said.
When the electricity to the site had been cut by the council, it had left some of the older residents without access to necessary medicines, in particular those given using a nebuliser. She’d requested that portable generators be provided for these residents – but they had not shown up. ‘I asked for the generators, and the police and the head bailiff, Jeff, were endlessly helpful. I rang Dawn French [a senior Basildon Council officer] and asked her why the generators for the nebulisers were still in the pound. She told me she couldn’t get them on, as the activists had blocked the gantry gate. I felt a huge swell of anger against the activists – they wanted publicity but had no care for the sick or the elderly. It was a huge task, all eyes on the students, while residents began to take in the reality of the eviction and what would happen next.’
Sean Risdale, who been an officer for the EHRC, but had since started working with the Irish Traveller Movement in Britain, disappeared to find Grattan. There was some urgent work to be done, far from the heights of the gantry. ‘I spent some of the afternoon … sitting in an abandoned chalet with Grattan, with a wall of acrid flames on one side of us and a line of riot police on the other, phoning every agency we could think of to intervene even at this stage,’ he said later. ‘I rang the Children’s Commissioner – we were concerned about safety for the one hundred or so babies and children still on or around the site, or potentially on the road, that night. They initially said they wouldn’t do anything, because the Travellers had brought the situation on themselves by inviting the activists into Dale Farm. Eventually they agreed to ring Basildon’s Eviction Control Centre to remind them about child safety.’
Grattan had stayed in a private yard belonging to Jim Hegarty, an Irish Traveller from Dale Farm, the night before. ‘I felt sickened by the amount of force the police used that day,’ he said. ‘I have been present at some forty evictions; [in the past] the police have been there to keep the peace, and they let the bailiffs do the dirty work. I couldn’t believe that they let seven police officers advance with Tasers.’ Grattan worked tirelessly behind the scenes with several lawyers in a last ditch attempt to stop the eviction, the efforts funded, he said, by Vanessa Redgrave. But it was hopeless.
Just before the one o’clock news reports went live, another cry went up from the gantry. ‘Dale Farm, we won’t go. We love you, Dale Farm!’ Shortly afterwards, the cherry picker moved slowly up towards the platform on the scaffolding.
‘Our objective was the gantry,’ Superintendent Logan later said. ‘It was slow work … But the officers who deliver that type of work are trained and they had rehearsed it previously. They build bits of scaffolding to train on, they are trained in the use of the cherry picker, which we use for helping possible suicide victims as well. There is no technique we would use that hadn’t been tried before. We had a bit of an issue with legal advisers taking their tabards on and off,’ a tactic used so that they could melt into the crowd and become activists when it suited their purposes, and vice versa, the police claimed. ‘But once we contained the gantry and prevented legal observers from getting on there, we knew we were in a situation where it takes as long as it takes … We felt it was important to take the people off the gantry ourselves. It was a health and safety issue.’
At this point, Jacob was on the top platform attached to the gantry. A cry went up, ‘We won’t go!’ as a scuffle broke out between the protestors and the police in the cherry picker trying to remove them. ‘It’s very difficult to know how to deal with that situation when you are being charged by loads of cops,’ Jacob said. ‘You are just trying to shut gates, which is what loads of people were trying to do. Yeah, I certainly don’t think that there is any forward planning of those kinds of tactics. There are just lots of bricks at Dale Farm, because it was a scrap yard, but I imagine also – I am guessing here – lots of people have had difficult and traumatic experiences with the cops, and those were definitely exacerbated by what happened at Dale Farm.’
He claimed: ‘It is important to note that, not only at an institutional level was it a very racist act, but we experienced – and this is only me as a privileged player in this – we witnessed really racist behaviour and really sadistic and fascistic cops … There was both an utter disregard for any interaction with Travellers whose homes were being destroyed but also verbal racism against them, them being called “pikeys”, during the eviction and clearance operation. That’s the bailiffs.’
At just after 3 p.m. Jacob was brought down by police. He shouted to journalists: ‘They’re torturing people up there! We are trying to resist peacefully!’ He was hospitalised later that day.
‘I was the first one to get taken off, so I can’t say for everyone else, although I knew it continued, the verbal abuse was really concerning. They were putting their hands over my mouth and nose, putting their boots down on my chest, so I couldn’t breathe for a few seconds, using lots and lots of pressure points, shoving my head into the corner of the scaffolding clip, a very sharp bit of metal, and saying, “I’m going to keep doing this until you go on the cherry picker.” I mean, I was entangled in quite a few people there, but I wasn’t actively resisting,’ he said. ‘I had a seizure; I have a muscular condition that has never manifested itself like that; I have lots of tendon problems. I lost control of my limbs and was hyperventilating for a while there. I was arrested and taken to hospital with two cops by my bed, which was not good for my mental health.’
Jonathan Oppenheim was also removed from the scaffolding tower. ‘We had the tripod … in front of the tower, and that was needed to stop them from opening the gate … I was on the tripod, so I was separated off from everyone. There were many bailiffs and police on me, so I was treated fine,’ he recalled. ‘I was running back and forth between the two poles.’
Later, he said, when they were taken into custody by the police at the site, the accommodations were objectionable. ‘They put us in a portable jail and – there may be lawsuits about this, as they had to pee in their chairs, basically.’ When officers tried to interview him, he ‘just said, “No comment, no comment”’.
The skirmishes continued for most of that day. One activist shouted, ‘No more racist evictions!’ as she was detained.27 Twenty-three people were arrested.
At the end of Wednesday the police and bailiffs scaled back their teams. ’Daylight was important for us,’ Superintendent Logan said. ‘We weren’t keen to deal with lock-ons overnight.’
Darkness fell. With the electricity shut off, activists and Travellers stumbled around the site, trying to work out their tactics for the next day. Accounts about these discussions differ, with some Travellers saying that they were prevented from leaving with their caravans after the gates were locked shut after around 10 p.m. Grattan, for his part, said that there was much controversy about Candy’s plan to leave the gates open, so that police and bailiffs could continue with limited action that respected the terms of the injunction she had won a month earlier.
‘That night was the worst ever, as panic and fear grew,’ Candy said. ‘The police retired to guarding the gantry. The activists kept on building fires, tearing down fences to feed them, while those with breathing problems suffered. Most Travellers were saying prayers in their trailers.’
Candy herself had retired to Mary Flynn’s trailer. ‘Suddenly there was a large whooshing noise. A fire had been lit nearby. Michelle, Nora and I went down the gantry and begged the activists to open the gate. The police said it was too dangerous to prise off the locked-on protestors. We didn’t even know if we would survive that night. My daughters were begging me to come home.’
Others said that some activists were talking in terms of more violent resistance, and of using petrol bombs. An Irish Traveller family, who had come from Wellingborough to support the Dale Farm residents, became hopelessly suspicious of everyone in the dark. One member of the family threatened Candy and punched an activist in the face.
Now everyone could feel that Basildon Council had won.
The operation to clear the site continued at daybreak, with the main objective among the police forces being to cut free the last six protestors, who were still locked on to various barricades inside. Around 8.30 three were arrested. Tony Ball released a press statement: ‘Again, we have been made aware that there are residents who want to leave the site and are being prevented from doing so by the barricade and the actions of the protestors. Along with our contractors and partners, we want to do all that we can to help them to leave safely, and removing the barricade is key to achieving this.
‘I hope that there are no repeats of yesterday’s scenes of pre-meditated violence and disorder from the protestors on the site, and that we can get on with the job of upholding the law, and clearing the site in a safe, professional and dignified way.’
The press coverage from the day before centred on the use of the Taser and the efficient force used by the police. The Times, for instance, said that the use of Tasers had prompted accusations of a breach of guidelines about not using it for crowd control. But because the police could truthfully say that a Taser had only been used on one person, it never really took off as a story. It had, however, been pointed at others, and the threat of its use remained very clear.
By 10 a.m. the main gate at Dale Farm been reduced to rubble. By mid-morning the two last protestors, named Arran and Danya, who had locked on to a barrel, were also removed. Pearl McCarthy, finally defeated, told journalists that there was nothing more to be done. Just after lunchtime, Joseph P. Jones of the Gypsy Council said Travellers just wanted the Dale Farm eviction to pass without any more violence.28
At just after half past five, the last Dale Farm Travellers, three of the McCarthy sisters in the front row, marched peacefully out of the site together, along with the remaining few activists. Some of the activists chanted, rather quietly, ‘Save Dale Farm,’ as they went. Pearl McCarthy told journalists: ‘It is a terrible moment, very sad, but the time has come’ and added that they were walking out with dignity, with their ‘heads held high’.29
Despite the police intelligence about weapons at the site, no guns were ever found. There were no booby-trapped walls or petrol bombs. However, two wheelie-bins of rocks were found near the Gate Tower.
Grattan said: ‘I had thought we could hold on for a few more days, but Pearl’s decision was right. It allowed all the caravans to move out into Oak Lane. It was a kind of victory.’ But in many ways, the end of Dale Farm was a crushing blow that no one had ever expected would come to pass.
A week later, Candy too left Dale Farm. ‘I walked into a garage on the A12 and the assistant said, “I saw you on the TV.” I had forgotten about the “real world”.’