Chapter 21

Victory at Sellafield, disaster at home

Greenpeace was going from strength to strength internationally. Our German friends were well organised and making headlines with imaginative actions and dynamic campaigns, but they were saddled with a structure which allowed active supporters to inflict their will on the organisation through a committee called the Verein. Effectively, the German office had pursued a corporate structure which accommodated something which was largely spurned in Greenpeace – democracy. And the German board of directors were threatened – as were the French – with a takeover by the faction in the Verein which could muster sufficient votes to impose its will. This meant that the management of the French and German offices could change with monotonous regularity to the point where continuity ceased and the organisation was hamstrung: even McTaggart’s awesome diplomatic skills were being stretched to the limit.

I was spending more and more time on international board duties and constantly commuted between Suffolk, London and Lewes on the south coast where Greenpeace had established its HQ. In the space of three months, I was seconded to the boards of both the German and the French offices and was exposed to a crash course in boardroom skulduggery of the first order. The German situation was quite straightforward and was helped by the fact that there was no split on the existing board. My task of supporting them in the job of fighting off the Verein faction was quite straightforward.

The French situation, however, was totally different and involved all sorts of passions, rivalries and allegiances. I knew all the French board members very well and had campaigned with them on many occasions. I considered Remi and Louis Trussel, who had been living together for years, as my friends. The other members of the board were Katia Kanas, a young, attractive Parisienne, and Jackie Bonmain, mop-haired with the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen, who had likewise paired off. The two factions had fallen out big-time. Remi had compounded the situation by splitting up with Louis and heading off to Spain, where he not only set up the Spanish Greenpeace office but also eventually married a Spaniard and assumed Spanish citizenship. Louis dragooned her accountant onto the board, who became Remi’s defacto replacement.

The two sides wouldn’t even speak to each other, despite the fact that they shared the same office and were attempting to work on the same campaigns. One side – the Louis/accountant faction – felt, with justification, that the need was to consolidate the position of Greenpeace in France by underpinning its campaigns with scientific material and dedicating more time to securing the financial base of the organisation before getting too heavily targeted by the forces of vested interest, particularly in the nuclear field. Katia and Jackie, on the other hand, argued, with equal justification, that Greenpeace was an action organisation and should take the fight against nuclear power into the streets and should refuse to be compromised by this woolly idea of ‘consolidation’.

It was a philosophical split which was the precursor of debates which were to tear great chunks from the organisation in later years. But this problem had to be dealt with now and my co-director on the Greenpeace International Board, Monika Griefahn, and myself, were drafted onto the French board and told to go and sort the problem out. The AGM was conducted aboard a barge on the Seine, a venue which would have been ideal under different circumstances. One hundred ‘founding members’ of Greenpeace, those entitled to vote, were crammed into the huge open saloon. After most of the day was spent listening to carefully prepared speeches, which I tried to keep abreast of using my schoolboy French, it was clear that no resolution was about to present itself. The board were asked to sum up and deliver its opinions. One by one we gave our views and a resolution which Monika and I had prepared before the meeting was put to the assembled members. We proposed that the board of Greenpeace France would be Louis, Katia, Monika and myself for a year and that during that time we would prepare and distribute a development paper which drew on everything we had heard. The meeting broke up in good humour and we headed for the nearest bar.

Katia kept her powder dry until the next morning when she accused us, rightly, of simply papering over the cracks and ended an impressive tirade by banging her fist on the table and calling us all the names under the sun. It was clear that she would have to go and we fired her on the spot, effectively handing over the organisation to Louis and her accountant. I was very unhappy about the situation, but at least for the time being the matter was settled and we could all go back to campaigning, not to mention our wives, boyfriends, husbands and lovers.

Back home for what would be a fleeting visit, I took stock of my life. I had no private or social life at all and simply worked every waking minute. I was afraid to be out of the house with Annette for more than a few hours in case I missed a crucial phone call. I had become a Greenpeace junkie; nothing else mattered in my life – not even, if I was honest, my wife, my house or the pursuit of rural happiness which had originally drawn us to Suffolk. Annette told me that I would have to make a decision – Greenpeace or my marriage. I knew she was right, but I pushed the awful thought to the back of my mind and as usual, contented myself with dealing with the now, the immediate, the imperative. Greenpeace had become an excuse for everything.

Sellafield continued to engross me. I had by now been to Cumbria more times than I could count and had made a lot of friends, and a few enemies, both there and in Barrow-in-Furness, our chief area of activity. We had climbed the clock tower in Barrow, occupied the harbour on many occasions, blocked the railway line between Barrow and Sellafield and had underpinned our actions with increasingly sophisticated research.

Sellafield continued to spew two million gallons of contaminated waste into the Irish Sea every day. In the 50s, when the plant began operating, the authorities had openly admitted that they were conducting an experiment by releasing large quantities of waste to examine how it behaved in the water body of the Irish Sea. Thanks to those experiments, and to the continued discharges, more than a quarter of a tonne of plutonium lay on the seabed around the outfall pipe. Instead of remaining locked to the sediments as scientists had once predicted, it was now being mobilised by the action of currents, winds and sun, to be scattered along the Cumbrian coast. The incidence of childhood leukaemia in Seascale, just half a mile from Sellafield, was twice the national average.

Early in 1983, I met James Cutler of Yorkshire TV. James, an extremely likeable, intense, dedicated and very serious man, had, like me, a passionate dislike of the nuclear industry. The high incidence of leukaemia in the area around Sellafield had largely been uncovered by his research and he was in the process of filming a documentary about the plant called Windscale, The Nuclear Laundry. James’ activities and those we were developing at Greenpeace coincided nicely since we had resolved to physically block the outfall pipe later that year. It was a risky business as we would be asking divers to expose themselves to a high dose of radioactivity and even finding the pipe outfall would be a difficult task in itself. The pipe end was two kilometres out to sea and lay on the seabed at a depth of 70 feet. Mindful of these problems and recalling the difficulty – not to mention embarrassment – we had encountered previously when the world’s media waited for days while we lamely trawled the sea bed looking for the pipe, I asked our action organiser, Dave Roberts, to spend a few days in Cumbria with a small team of people and an inflatable dinghy to pinpoint precisely the pipe’s location. BNFL normally marked the pipe end with a buoy conveniently labelled ‘BNFL’.

I hoped that a small team of people could unobtrusively pinpoint the pipe end by taking transits from the shore or from sea to enable us to go directly to the pipe, whether it was buoyed or not. That was the theory anyway. Dave and his team set off and we got on with the task of preparing the material we would need for the action. We knew that the pipe ended in an unusual configuration – a diffuser or secondary pipe welded parallel to the main pipe in which three to four inch diameter holes were drilled. Late at night in our workshop down in the London Docks, we fashioned individual wooden bungs for these holes. Each bung was drilled through and a metal bar passed through the middle, on top of which a padlock could be fastened, attached to a chain to wrap around the pipe. We didn’t want to make it easy for the bungs to be removed.

As we all beavered away preparing the ship and equipment for this showdown with BNFL, we received some disturbing news. Dave and his team had been bobbing around off Sellafield in their dinghy when Grace O’Sullivan noticed what she thought at first was an oil slick on the water. She put the Geiger counter to the slick and, to her horror the counter went off-scale. They were in the middle of a gigantic slick of radioactive ‘crud’ used for washing out the holding tanks at the site. Although we didn’t know it then, the ‘crud’ had been wrongly diverted to sea instead of channelled into holding tanks.

Dave brought his crew back to shore immediately and called me in London. The dinghy and most of the equipment they were using were all giving high readings and they were naturally worried. Our first concern was for their safety and I called the National Radiological Protection Board in Oxfordshire for advice. They instructed us to send the entire team, plus equipment to their laboratories for a thorough checkout. This contamination incident triggered a series of events which culminated in massive publicity for Greenpeace, fines of thousands of pounds both for us and for BNFL and in my finally walking out on Annette and the life I had tried to build in my ‘rural idyll’.

In order to impart some idea of the traumatic events of 1983, a story which predates the Sellafield action must be related. After the double-whammy meted out by Hans to the nuclear waste dumping nations in 1982, I had redoubled our efforts to bring the National Union of Seamen in line with our policy of opposition. Jim Slater, the general secretary, had paraded me before his executive several times in an attempt to convince them of the need to stop handling nuclear waste destined for the Atlantic sea bed. In February 1983, Jim convened a meeting of all the related transport unions – Seamen, Transport and General, Railwaymen and ASLEF, the train drivers’ union. He called me later that day to tell me that he had all the unions on board except the Railwaymen who wanted more time to consider it.

It transpired that the unions would back the ban only if and when we could satisfactorily provide answers to a series of questions. These related to the routes taken by the waste, through which nuclear free authority constituencies the waste passed, alternatives to dumping and the employment implications of a ban. We had three short months in which to find this information and we set about producing a dossier which would be the final nail in the coffin of radwaste dumping – we hoped. We worked like fury to meet the deadline which would give the unions sufficient time to put all the necessary motions before the necessary committees in time to stop the 1983 dump going ahead.

In the meantime, the London Dumping Convention was meeting in London and Remi, Hans and the other members of the lobby team had been courting the new socialist Spanish government who arrived armed with a resolution calling for the banning of sea dumping of radwaste. In an unprecedented turn of events the Spanish forced a vote – after the British had used every trick in the book to prevent the motion being introduced – and won it handsomely by 18 votes to seven. Sadly the vote was advisory, not mandatory, and the British dismissed it as a politically motivated manoeuvre by the Spanish who were ‘in the pockets of Greenpeace’ and argued that they would ignore the ban. But the big majority the vote attracted strengthened our hand with the unions enormously and gave Jim a huge amount of leverage.

We presented the dossier to the unions a month before the dump was to take place. While we waited for their response, news arrived that the nuclear authorities were preparing a different vessel, the Atlantic Fisher, to carry out the disposal and, at a cost of £500,000, had installed a moon pool on the vessel which allowed the waste barrels to be disposed of directly through the hull – out of harm’s way for any troublesome Greenpeace activists. Then, incredibly, a brown paper envelope turned up on my desk one day. It contained the minutes of a meeting which had been held between the Ministry of Defence, Department of the Environment, Rolls Royce and others, at which it was mooted that plutonium contaminated waste – outlawed for sea disposal under the convention – could be packaged in such a way as to pass for low level waste – permitted to be dumped – and disposed of at sea. This was absolute dynamite, especially when the minutes revealed that it was only the unavoidable use of large and therefore suspicious-looking packages to contain such waste that had forced the abandonment of the ruse.

We released this news at a packed press conference. The story made most front pages and it was clear that we had the UK authorities completely on the back foot. We had won the vote at the London Dumping Convention, we had exposed skulduggery at the highest level in government and had demonstrated that the UK would lie and cheat – not to mention ignore internationally agreed motions – in order to continue to sweep its embarrassing waste beneath the carpet of the Atlantic. We were ecstatic in the office and revelled in our successes. And then the police turned up.

They turned the place upside down. They took files, letters, address books and all manner of material which they thought was relevant to the leaked minutes. I was hauled off to the Serious Crimes Office in Scotland Yard where it was pointed out by the Deputy Director that under the Official Secrets’ Act, it was not only the purloiner of secret information who can be prosecuted, but also those disseminating the purloined material. I told the official that perhaps I should be locked up in the Tower or tried for treason. After refusing to tell them even the gender of the person who dropped the envelope off at the office, I was released after a day in custody.

Jim Slater finally called. The ban was in place. The ‘unique alliance’ as Jim dubbed it had become a reality. The UK would no longer dump radioactive waste in the Atlantic, only because the unions refused to move the waste, not because of any change of heart by government. We had won a hands-down victory. I was whisked to Barrow by the BBC where, standing beside the now-redundant Atlantic Fisher sporting her £500,000 also-redundant moon pool, I was introduced as the ‘man who stopped ocean dumping of radioactive waste’. I was beside myself with pride.

The rare peaks of success in a desert of slog and graft were worth all the heartache and angst which paled into insignificance beside what seemed to be at the time, towering achievements. We had won, but what’s more, we had forged a link with a sector of society – the trades unions - which, in the 80s, was still relatively powerful, organised and unmolested by Thatcherism. Little did I realise that while I was feeling like a million dollars, some Greenpeace people were watching me with ill-disguised concern at my ‘left-wing’ tendencies. Jim asked me to go to the TUC meeting that year since he felt it was necessary to consolidate the transport unions’ ban on radwaste dumping into a full TUC-backed policy. That was achieved, but only after Jim had been put under enormous pressure to ‘remit’ the resolution, a euphemism for dropping it quietly into the rubbish bin. His stoicism in the face of the political shenanigans of the executive was heart-warming. Jim never gave up on his planned objectives and was a constant source of inspiration and hope.

Within a year, the International Transport Workers’ Federation had, largely thanks to Jim’s unstinting work, unanimously supported a resolution to ban radioactive waste dumping at sea. British Nuclear Fuels finally admitted that they had ‘accidentally’ released the slick of crud which had contaminated our people as they sat in inflatable dinghies taking transits off the end of the Windscale pipeline, the easier to allow us to locate it when we came to block it. The government ordered the closing of the beaches along a ten mile stretch of Cumbrian coast and, at the height of all this interest over radioactive contamination, the activities at Sellafield and the effect the plant was having on normal everyday life, we began our pipe-blocking attempt.

Despite Dave’s previous promises about being able to locate the pipe, at the appointed time we could do no such thing. I was beside myself with frustration as Dave and his crew resorted to trawling for the pipeline while I placated a restless, on-board paparazzi. I had sworn the journalists to secrecy about our intentions and although our plan to block the pipeline was known even to BNFL, there existed no evidence to use in court in support of an injunction against us. I had briefed the journalists carefully and explained to them the reason for secrecy. If BNFL had any grounds for an injunction then the press and Greenpeace would be compromised. A BBC journalist proceeded to give them the very evidence they needed by filing a pre-emptive news story and the courts granted an injunction within the space of 24 hours. Now we were in a fine old mess.

It still behoved BNFL’s lawyers to deliver the injunction to us – a difficult task as we were on a ship two miles away from land and not receiving guests. They resorted to sending out their tug boat and reading the text of the injunction to us, filming the event, as evidence of the injunction having been served. We sang our way through the delivery of the injunction, asking them with hands cupped behind ears, ‘Watssat? Can’t hear mate!’

On a second run to deliver the injunction, we turned our ship’s speakers on them and blasted them with a bit of rock and roll, demonstrating that we definitely could not hear them. Finally, and incredibly, they made a pass along the starboard side of the ship and threw the injunction on board tied to a brick. At the crucial moment, Dave announced that they had finally found the pipeline outfall.

I told him, ‘When we do want it, you can’t locate it and now, when it would have been rather convenient to misplace it for another 24 hours or so, you go and find the thing.’

Dave looked at me with a hurt expression and threw a ‘double six’ – rolled his eyes up into their sockets while chucking out his chin as if to say, ‘I can’t do anything right for you, Wilks, can I?’

As the press milled around on the ship waiting for us to act, we were faced with a huge dilemma. It was clear to me that the action we were about to undertake had been put before the British public in a series of unprecedented exposures over the course of a year, to the point where we were at a now-or-never position. If we backed off now, we would never again be in such a strong position to foster widespread opposition to the plant. Intuitively, I felt that we should carry public opinion with us and ignore the injunction.

However, I had three hoops through which to jump before I could press ahead. Firstly, I had to carry that opinion with the crew, without whose co-operation I could not continue the action. Secondly, I had a board of directors back in the UK who had to approve of my desired course of action and lastly, I had to convince the international board, plus the trustees, who were at that very moment locked into the politicking of a Greenpeace AGM in Lewes. It was a daunting prospect and I began the process with the crew. Within a few hours of debate, we had a united position – break the injunction and press ahead with blocking the pipe. Next came the UK office. I had several conversations with Bryn, the last of which I taped using a small recording machine on the bridge held up to the VHF. Bryn didn’t take long in delivering the board’s opinion. In a voice full of emotion, Bryn told us that the UK board and the staff of the UK office were united in their support of our actions. I now felt I had sufficient mandate and left the negotiations with the international gathering to Bryn. As I learned later, those discussions were acrimonious and the decision to back the UK action was far from unanimous and only agreed to on the understanding that the UK office would bear the brunt of the High Court’s wrath alone. Now Bryn and Reg Boorer, as representatives of the UK board, had to scuttle down to the High Court in the Strand to face the judge as he considered the effects of the imposition of the injunction. Bryn and Reg listened with false reverence to his pontifications over the dire consequences of any party which wilfully showed contempt for the authority of the judiciary. Meanwhile, back at the office . . .

I realised that the office and its meagre assets were at risk of sequestration. Fearing the bailiff’s arrival, the staff set about preparing for a siege. Mike Marmion, a laconic scouser who was Tony Marriner’s right hand man, took charge of turning the office into a fortress. He sent people out to buy provisions, sufficient for a month for twenty people, and on their return he began nailing up every possible point of access. Using huge timbers from the wood yard next door, he stressed and secured every window and door in the building. At the rear, the fire escape stairs led to the back of the office. After stressing the door which was the building’s weakest point, Mike hinged upright a series of planks, through the ends of which he drove a wicked array of six inch nails, on the premise that should the rear door be breached, the planks would threaten to fall on any invaders. If they survived the prospect of a rain of nails, the planks would at least provide another temporary barrier. Thus secured, the staff settled down over the next few days to wait for the turn of events.

Reg and Bryn came back from the High Court which had granted them a few hour’s grace in which, ostensibly, to convince us on the ship not to go through with our planned action of blocking the pipe. Bryn and Reg, suited and booted, stepped out of the taxi and attempted to enter the office. The door wouldn’t budge. Bryn tried the entry-phone which prompted a face to appear at the window on the top floor of the building. Bryn was informed that the office had been made secure and that the only way in was via a rope ladder which he could climb to gain access to the first floor window.

Incredulously, Bryn peered up at the face, ‘What do you mean, you stupid boy? Let us in this moment. I have to speak to Pete on the boat. We’ve got to be back in court in 30 minutes! Now let us in.’

When the situation was explained in more detail to Bryn, he became agitated and dropped his clipped ‘chairman’s lilt’ in favour of more direct language.

‘Open this door at once. I can’t climb up a rope ladder. I’m the damned chairman! Now open up at once!’

Bryn and Reg eventually accepted the situation and, overlooked by guffawing neighbours from the flats opposite, clambered up the rope ladder to be hauled headfirst over the window sill. They made their way back to the packed court just in time to deliver their decision to the weary judge. We would not abide by the injunction.

On the Cedarlea we finally prepared the divers for their task. The three guys we were using had been fully briefed on the hazards involved in this dive and had, during the week they had been on board, become thoroughly inured to the crew and what we were attempting to do. Despite the hazards of the dive they agreed to continue and even waived their fee. We, in return, had done everything we could to minimise the risk to the divers. We were equipped with Geiger-counters with which to monitor the extent and nature of the radioactivity the divers would inevitably pick up and had fresh water hoses ready on deck to wash them down the moment they stepped on deck after the dive.

It was time, and as dusk settled over the choppy waters off Sellafield, Dave Roberts, Jan O’Gorman and the divers slipped away from the side of the ship and moved towards the buoy which Dave had earlier weighted at the end of the pipe. We were about to block the notorious Windscale/Sellafield pipeline in contravention of a High Court injunction and the atmosphere on board was tense as the press endlessly sought interviews and reactions to this snub to the British judiciary.

The divers descended for a recce as Dave and Jan prepared the bungs we had so laboriously fashioned in London. As I watched from the gently rolling deck of the Cedarlea, surrounded by camera crews and journalists, I saw the divers surface and hold a brief conversation with Dave. Instead of taking the weighted bags of bungs and making a second dive, I saw them haul themselves back into the dinghy which slowly headed back to the ship. Something had gone wrong, that much was clear. I told the press I’d brief them after I had been informed of the situation by the divers, and walked over to the divers who were climbing up the short access ladder to the deck.

The first thing was to check them for radioactivity. The Geiger counters revealed only modest contamination on the suits, but when we came to run the machine over the hands of one diver, the needle went off-scale. It appeared that actually touching the diffuser on top of the pipeline had caused concentrated radioactivity to transfer to his hands and we washed him down thoroughly until the readings on the Geiger counter registered close to zero. As we hosed him down he told me the grim news. ‘The diffuser has been altered very recently, probably within the last 48 hours. There are newly welded rods across the top of the diffuser which sit right in the holes. There is no way we can fit the bungs. We’re knackered.’

I made a statement to the press, explaining what had happened and how we had been outfoxed. It transpired that the alterations to the pipe had indeed been carried out very recently by BNFL divers who had been deployed from the tug which had come to deliver the injunction to us a few evenings previously. We were devastated, although the twist in the tail of the story did give the press something else to report.

Ironically, it appeared that BNFL’s actions to prevent us blocking the pipeline might have the effect of getting us off the contempt hook: we had not actually blocked their precious pipeline which was the act prevented by the injunction. As we began ferrying the press back to Whitehaven, I wondered how the courts would deal with us the following day when the hearing took place in London.

Bryn had clearly been considering the same point and at the High court the next day, he, unlike me, had no illusions about how the judge would react. Bryn was a past master at playing to the gallery and as he took his seat in court, he made sure that he was in full view of the ranks of press who had come to witness the manner of the vengeance the court would mete out to Greenpeace. The judge made a short speech in which he expressed his lack of doubt concerning the honourable nature of the people who would seek to prevent pollution of the Irish Sea, but informed Bryn that he had no alternative but to find us in contempt, despite the fact that we had not actually blocked the pipeline. We were fined £50,000.

At that point Bryn, glancing to his left and right furtively to ensure the press were looking at him for a reaction, let his head fall in a dead faint onto the wooden rail in front of him, with a dull ‘thonk’ which reverberated around the court. At a press conference later, he pointed out that Greenpeace had been fined £50,000 for attempting to prevent contamination while BNFL had been fined a mere £10,000 for releasing a huge slick of radioactive crud which had forced the closure of the Sellafield beaches. The routine contamination of the Irish Sea from every day activities was sanctioned and authorised by the regulators.

The Sellafield pipe blocking incident had huge repercussions throughout the Greenpeace organisation. It virtually crippled the UK office financially. But from a campaigning perspective it demonstrated to our opponents that we would not be cowed by the courts when we knew we were right and when we felt confident of having the public’s support. It changed the way in which we were viewed in the field of green activism. We pulled in every possible bit of help we could in an attempt to raise the money for the fine. The Cedarlea was put up for ‘sale’ and we asked all our celebrity friends to buy ‘shares’ in the vessel at £1000 a throw. The response was magnificent. Bruce Kent of CND, the Monty Python crowd, Pamela Stevenson, Barbara Dickson and many, many others, all kicked in a grand. Appeals in the press, unsolicited donations and a stream of £20 notes in the post raised £38,000 in the space of a month. On the appointed date, our solicitors went to court with the cheque and made a case for the waiving of the remainder which the judge accepted without so much as a second thought. In fact, he told the court that he had no doubt that we were honourable people. 1983 was drawing to a close. It had been a tumultuous year but it was to be one which would fundamentally change my life forever since it had one last act to play out.

Yet not even these events could have prepared me for the twist in the tail of this extraordinary year. As our contribution to a campaign against nuclear weapons testing, the UK office had agreed to scale the Big Ben clock tower in Parliament Square to hang a ‘Time to Stop Testing Nuclear Weapons’ banner over its face. The original demonstration, planned a year previously, had been abandoned after an infiltrator in the organisation had tipped off the police (we never did identify the person to everyone’s satisfaction). We arrived at Big Ben to be greeted by a swarm of police officers.

George Pritchard had been planning the next attempt in closely guarded secrecy ever since and as we wound down the Sellafield pipe-blocking action I called George to speak to him in semi-code about the progress of his plans which were due to culminate in two days. To my horror, George indicated that grave problems faced the planned action and he wished to discuss them with me as soon as possible.

‘George, are you going ahead or not?’

‘No,’ came his gut-wrenching reply.

The Big Ben climb was off.

I rushed back to London on the next train. I walked into the office to see George in deep discussion with Robert Taylor, our toxics campaigner and brother of Peter, whom we had used with great effect to underpin our case against the Sellafield discharges. George saw me coming and his look turned decidedly sheepish.

‘Sit down, Wilks. Some things have happened that you should know about,’ he began.

‘I’m all ears, George.’

The story which was unveiled to me was unbelievable, and not because it revealed further infiltration of the organisation which is what I was expecting. George had fallen totally under the spell of Robert and Peter who believed in and indulged in ‘astral travelling’. During one of their ‘travels’ they had met Sir John Betjeman, the former poet laureate, who had warned them of dire consequences should we go ahead with the planned climb of Big Ben. As George laid out the entire, incredible story before me, I couldn’t believe my ears. But there was nothing I could do to revive the plans. George had stood everyone down, and the action would not go ahead. My most immediate worry was McTaggart He called on schedule.

‘Let me get this straight,’ he began in relatively calm tones, ‘you called off the action which you had been planning for months, which was paid for by international and which involved three of the best climbers in Europe and formed a central part of a strategy agreed by international as a vital element of a major campaign (I was getting the point by this time), on the word of a guy who has been dead for a year and who Peter Taylor met while he was moving around the stars one night?’

‘Bingo. You got it in one.’

He let fly, telling me that there was something fundamentally wrong with our office, that we needed to weed out the ‘whackos’ and ‘get real’. I could feel his venom snaking down the phone wires. I was not his most popular person at that particular time and the UK office was top of his hit list to sort out.

Full of bonhomie and giddy with the notoriety we had achieved, I went home to face a crisis in my marriage. Annette was inconsolable and I was in no mood to pander to her outburst. The local paper did a two page ‘personality’ piece on me. Annette’s picture appeared on the front page. I had been on every news and current affairs programme on TV and radio and BBC2 were about to screen a major documentary about Greenpeace UK. Despite our fine, or perhaps because of it, Greenpeace were riding the crest of a wave of popularity. Bryn Jones had been grilled on Meet the Press, a popular current affairs programme on ITV in which interviewers pulled no punches, during which he gave a stunning performance. The following Monday, an anonymous millionaire had sanctioned a payment of £100,000 to Greenpeace, swelling our pathetic bank balance and allowing us to make our annual payment to Greenpeace international which was a prerequisite for the UK office retaining its vote at the international meetings, retaining its licence and continuing to be allowed to use the name Greenpeace.

Yet Annette and I were at the nadir of our relationship. After ten years of courtship and marriage, a stark and terrifying choice confronted me. I could either stay, and inevitably forego my stewardship of Greenpeace, or leave Annette and the ruins of my rural idyll. I had for years attempted to allow events to dictate my actions in a most cowardly manner and I was now reaping the bitterest of harvests. My head swam with the enormity of what I now felt I was fated to do. I told Annette I was leaving. In a state of blind automation, I packed a bag containing a few oddments of clothing and, ignoring as best I could Annette’s state of incomprehension and utter dejection, I walked out one Saturday morning, took the train to London and joined a Greenpeace demonstration in Trafalgar Square.

I can’t quite recall what happened during the rest of that day. I know I drank large amounts of alcohol and I know that on the one hand I felt a huge sense of relief that I had finally had the guts to do something about my intolerable domestic state and on the other, a massive, towering sense of loss. Whatever way I tossed it up, I was free to be myself at last rather than the pretend figure I had become.