Chapter 23

A train crash, a costly mistake and Antarctica swims into view

The House of Commons Environment Select Committee asked Greenpeace and others to submit evidence for its consideration concerning the impact of the discharges and it seemed that they were about to endorse the recent Paris Commission resolution by enshrining its terms into law. I hurriedly began compiling evidence, but in truth I was running out of steam on the nuclear issue. I was also under pressure from McTaggart to internationalise the UK board of directors and work increasingly on international issues as well as dedicating more of my time to my international (as opposed to my national) directorship responsibilities. As a result I was handing more and more of the responsibility for the Sellafield campaign over to George Pritchard, our affable Mancunian who had joined us two years previously, having earned his spurs fighting off plans for a nuclear power station development in Cornwall.

George was deputed to be ‘in charge’ of the press interest which accrued from a spectacular demonstration by the UK Atomic Energy Authority when it sought to placate concerns generated largely by the anti-nuclear lobby, concerning the safety of the flasks used to transport spent nuclear fuel. The lobby contended, with some justification, although we at Greenpeace tried to keep out of the central debate, that the flasks, weighing 60 tonnes a piece, were structurally unsound given that they were only tested by dropping the flasks from a height of 10 metres and by exposing them to fire at 800 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes. In real accident scenarios, it was argued, the flasks would be exposed to stresses which far exceeded these artificial conditions: trains upon which these flasks were carried often travelled at 100 mph and fires frequently raged for longer than 30 minutes at far higher temperatures.

In order to lay such fears to rest once and for all, the UKAEA staged a demonstration at Melton Mowbry in conjunction with British Rail in which a regular diesel locomotive would crash into a static spent fuel flask at 100 mph. The prospect of spectacular pictures and the possibility of the nuclear authorities being forced to eat humble pie as their flask disintegrated pulled hundreds of press and television companies to the site. George and I were guests of Jim Slater and we took a grandstand seat as the locomotive hurtled down the track and slammed into the spent fuel flask with a tremendous ‘crump’ and pushed it a few hundred yards down the tracks, a huge cloud of dust enveloping the point of impact. George and I looked at each other in awe. It was a serious demonstration and when the experts had crawled all over the wreckage and announced the fact that the flask was perfectly intact, George snorted contemptuously, ‘I’ve been told by an engineer that they stitched that demonstration up from start to finish,’ he confided.

‘Explain, George,’ I asked.

George told me that his informant had cast-iron information that the carriage which the locomotive pulled was ‘weighted down’ by sleepers in order to (curiously to my simple mind) ‘lessen the overall impact on the flask’. Moreover, the bolts holding the locomotive’s engine to its chassis had been sheared prior to the test so that it would break free of its position within the locomotive on impact and thereby (and again curiously, to my way of thinking) further lessening the impact on the flask. Despite my scepticism of George’s claims, I was prepared to be convinced based on the fact that the information came from an impeccable source, according to George. Thus fortified, we sent out a press release claiming the demonstration was a sham designed to hoodwink the public and the press. The story was covered extensively the following day.

Then George started to get cold feet. His source suddenly disappeared. We were inundated by phone calls from an irate British Rail management demanding a retraction of the allegations and the UKAEA were calling for our blood. George was at a loss to know what to do and finally conceded that he had made a grave error of judgement in putting out the story.

I pulled him to one side and told him, ‘We’ll just sweat it out George. No comments, no press releases, no responses. For the next two weeks, you are not available. Just let it pass.’

George agreed to this strategy but, being a fundamentally honest man, could not live with the fact that he had made accusations which, after much argument, turned out to be a combination of wishful thinking and innuendo and on the fifth day of his enforced silence George cracked. He sent a telex to the Chairman of British Rail accepting the fact that he had falsely claimed the demonstration was rigged. BR did what we would have done, faced with the same circumstances: they paraded the telex from George at a press conference as evidence of Greenpeace’s tacit acceptance of the infallibility of the spent fuel flasks.

We had been hoist by our own petard and George was in the dog house for weeks. He was lucky to retain his position and in fact he offered to resign, a proposition we did not entertain for a second. George had simply made a serious error: could any one of us claim not to have done so?

My uncertain state of mind was not helped by the increasing identity crisis I was facing. Quite apart from my roller-coaster private life, I was alternately seen by the UK board as being an agent of McTaggart and the international board, and by the international board of being a left-leaning nationalist unable to control his board. I couldn’t win and began to lose perspective. I turned my attention to completing the evidence to the Select Committee

I sent off our submission and forgot about it for a while. I had other things on my mind which were crowding in on me and threatening my fragile sanity. I had kept in touch with Annette and possible reconciliation was something we kept alive. Every month I met her in Ipswich where we would go for a drink and rake over old ground, analysing and dissecting our marriage, exploring the avenues open to us. Annette always believed I would come back home, but as time went on I knew it was not an option for me. Had I succumbed to the temptations of home, wife, dog and all the trappings of normality, I knew that we would have gone through the pain and anguish of a second separation as the same pressures resurfaced. I had not yet – by a wide margin – managed to get Greenpeace out of my system.

I recognised this thought pattern as yet another example of allowing events to dictate the path I chose. I had the gumption neither to end our marriage once and for all or to go back and make a fist of it. I mentioned to Annette, disingenuously, as it hadn’t been formally put to me at this point, that I had been asked to go to the Antarctic but that I had turned down such a preposterous suggestion. She told me that if I went then any hopes of our reconciliation would be over. I recognised this ultimatum as an opportunity I could use as an excuse to abdicate responsibility for a decision I did not want to make. I was surprised at the degree of cowardliness to which I seemed prepared to stoop in order to avoid making a decision I found unpalatable .

At work, a crisis was approaching with McTaggart on my back every few days about bringing Greenpeace UK into the 21st Century and doing away with a board of directors he saw as introverted, stale and myopic. The UK board demanded that I stood up to McTaggart and the overbearing international office demands. Bryn Jones was creating huge rifts in the office with his attitude of intolerance of ‘incompetence’ and had arbitrarily decided to fire all the staff, a move which took us a week to resist and left the office staff openly seething about mismanagement. We were, despite our profile, constantly on the verge of bankruptcy.

Although I had resigned my international board position in 1983, I still continued to oversee the embryonic Antarctic campaign from the Lewes office. The campaign was assuming an energetic life of its own. On the occasions when I would slope off with McTaggart for a few beers in the local bar, he would, between kicking my ass at pool, wax lyrical about a ship which had been offered to Greenpeace as a tax write-off from the Maryland Pilot’s Association in the USA. Technically, the vessel – an ocean-going tug called the Maryland – was on offer to Greenpeace at no cost which meant that the Maryland Pilot’s Association, a charity in the USA, could claim back large amounts of tax from the US authorities to swell its diminished coffers. In fact, the ‘sale’ would cost Greenpeace $500,000 in ‘finder’s fees’, but still McTaggart argued the vessel was a bargain and we should buy it. He planned we would send it to the Antarctic and establish a permanent base camp there, to challenge the notion of territoriality exercised – albeit tacitly – by seven of the twenty or so Antarctic treaty nations.

His vision of carrying out such a risky and impish campaign inspired me and we began to plot and plan the ship’s acquisition. Although it had already been mooted that I should lead the expedition, I shrugged off such speculation as being so much wishful thinking. By mid-1984 the expedition phase of the campaign was being openly discussed within the organisation and forced many passions to the surface. The German office was bitterly opposed to any Greenpeace occupation of Antarctic territory on the grounds that we were simply adding to the very disturbance the expedition was designed to oppose. The rows raged back and forth for months while McTaggart kept his head down and ploughed on with the planning and carrying out the necessary politicking required to fund the venture.

I was introduced to Andy Hill, an ex-British Antarctic Survey logistics planner who was put in charge of beginning preparation for the expedition. I was appointed his overseer, answerable to the international board. Andy had by this time been working away for a month or so and my first task was to go through the books with him to discover what he was spending, on what, and where the money came from. The reality was that he had no budget and there were no checks and balances on what he was spending.

Andy was a smooth sort of guy, slim and lithe, always smartly dressed, dedicated to his job and highly competent at matters Antarctic. We got on well and formed a tight team which was augmented by a real firebrand of a Falkland Islander by the name of Gerry Johnson, a tough, stocky, no-nonsense 22-year-old who wore his heart, and his antipathy towards Argentinians, on his sleeve. I liked Gerry a lot. He was scathing about anything he saw as smacking of bureaucracy and often opened his mouth before his brain was in gear – something I was prone to do as well.

The budget I had arrived at for the expedition amounted to $1 million, a figure then unheard of in Greenpeace in connection with a campaign budget. Having asked for comments from the international board and received none, I sent the budget to the national trustees, seeking approval, which caused McTaggart to cut the budget in half, re-write the proposal and re-send to the trustees with a note of apology. His argument was that a budget of $1m was politically unacceptable whereas $500,000 would probably get nodded through, given the size and scale of the undertaking. He was correct, of course, but the $500,000 approved budget naturally over-ran by the same amount and it was me who got the blame. Another lesson in politics from the master.

McTaggart had convinced his friend Ted Turner, who was married to Jane Fonda and who owned CNN, to put up a sizeable amount of money towards the expedition costs. He had likewise secured the support and matching financial investment from a German TV company, headed up by Axel Engsfeld, who would film the upcoming expedition. These financial commitments reduced McTaggart’s politically acceptable budget considerably and was duly approved by the trustees a few weeks later after the sceptical Germans had been outvoted.

We had the money, we had the ship. Now we needed an expedition leader. McTaggart asked me to compile a shortlist of potential candidates for the job and a few days later I sat with the international board in McTaggart’s office reviewing the list. One by one we scratched off the names. Either they were considered unsuitable for the arduous task ahead or they were too fully occupied on other issues. We arrived at the last name and scratched that off the list too. We had no-one available. People leaned back in their chairs and drummed fingers on desks.

McTaggart, ‘Well, now what the hell?’

We all shrugged.

McTaggart again: ‘Well, there is one guy who could go.’

‘Who?’ asked Steve Sawyer innocently as if he didn’t know what McTaggart was about to suggest.

He pointed his pencil slowly and deliberately at me. ‘You, Peter me boy, have the experience and you have the ability to mould crews around you. And, you have the time.’

I began to protest vigorously. I had to sort the UK office out and drag it into line; the UK office was at its nadir and was about to re-group and re-launch with added dynamism and vigour. I also had my life to sort out. But I knew it was all in vain. I had known this was coming. Deep in my heart I welcomed it because it once again allowed the pressure of events to push me in a direction over which I pretended I had no control. This was it: if I went it would remove the need to make a decision about my marriage and I could hear myself saying to Annette, ‘There’s nothing I can do about it. I must go as there are no other people available. What do you want me to do, tell Greenpeace the expedition can’t go ahead because I can’t get involved?’ God, what a pathetic wimp I was.

I hurried back to the London office to discuss the suggestion with my board. The office was seething with ill-concealed anger and communications between the board and the staff were almost non-existent. I sat for days, talking things through with the board and with the staff and we eventually called a meeting at which I proposed a steering group of people from the staff who would attend board meetings and act as a buffer between the two. It helped a little, but the reality was that Bryn was acting as head cook and bottle washer, claiming that he was surrounded by a sea of incompetence, rushing around the office biting peoples’ heads off while puffing out clouds of smoke from his infernal cigars.

There were, fortunately, plenty of distractions. Mark Glover, our laconic wildlife campaigner, had developed a campaign designed to make the incarceration of dolphins and killer whales in aquaria for the amusement of the paying public an unacceptable activity. After compiling an impressive document which demonstrated quite clearly that such animals, ruthlessly plucked from their natural habitat in a vile trade which centred on Iceland, lived miserable and shortened lives of boredom and angst for the titillation of families coming to witness the ‘happy’ animals cavorting around in pools, we planned demonstrations. We split up into two teams and descended on the dolphinaria in Windsor and Brighton and staged protests which interrupted the shows. The reaction from irate parents was swift and hostile. At Windsor, Reg Boorer was almost thrown into a pool in which swam a killer whale and we in Brighton were attacked by a howling mob of parents and only saved from a beating by the security guards.

But our central activity focused on the plight of a killer whale, languishing its life away on the pier of the Essex seaside resort of Clacton. Nemo was owned by an international conglomerate which had paid £250,000 for him and had a leasing arrangement with the owners of Clacton pier, a well-known family from London’s East End. We had to deal with these people in our negotiations over the plight of poor Nemo. Out of the holiday season, he no longer performed and now swam round and round his pool 24 hours a day, obviously lonely and bored witless. We had, a year previously, set up a fund for Nemo in an attempt to buy the whale and release it back into the wild. This fund now stood at £60,000, clearly insufficient for us to make a realistic offer. I was despatched to Clacton to attempt to buy off the security people with the £60,000, which would give us enough time to steal the whale using a helicopter.

The £60k I offered the owners didn’t cut much ice, sadly, although the plan for the release of Nemo did seem to impress them with its novelty. We had at least tried and, although Nemo lived out his days in Windsor after being transferred from Clacton and died shortly afterwards, the campaign overall was a success in that, as whales and dolphins died in their prisons, they were not replaced. Mark Glover fought every single application for the importation of whales and dolphins and every licence issued to move the animals around the UK or to export them. He single-handedly brought the trade in dolphins to an end in the UK and has gone on in his post-Greenpeace life, to fight tirelessly and successfully for animals through his own organisation, Respect for Animals.

Ironically enough, Mark’s tireless enthusiasm for campaigns on wildlife brought us into direct conflict with Greenpeace International. We needed a home-based animal campaign to get our teeth into. Our high profile on nuclear issues was all very well and good, but it didn’t translate easily into hard cash whereas wildlife issues generally tugged at the heartstrings of the animal-loving public, a fact well known and exploited by organisations old and new. We pondered hard and long before deciding to plump for an attack on the trade in furs.

Mark informed us that the global fur trade was responsible for the death of 40 million animals a year, many of those which were wild-caught as opposed to farmed, being discarded as ‘trash’ simply because the coat was damaged in the kill or the fur colour was not a ‘match’. The fur campaign was not long in the planning. As we approached contacts, friends and our jealously guarded ‘celebrity names’, the campaign fell naturally into place. We would run a high profile public awareness campaign based on videos, films, ads and direct actions to shock people into acknowledging the bloody price of a fur coat in terms of suffering and cruelty. But first, it was necessary to have the campaign rubber-stamped by the Greenpeace trustees. This was done in a rather underhanded manner by using the same sort of tactics McTaggart had taught me over the years. I allowed the AGM of 1984 to conclude its business at the end of an exhausting week before I called the meeting to order again to introduce the fur campaign almost as an afterthought, begging the indulgence of the trustees. I trusted that their tiredness and their anxiety to get to the bar would result in a swift and cursory approval of the campaign. It did.

David Bailey agreed to take the photographs for the posters we would plaster on hoardings all over London. He would hire the models who would work free of charge. Bailey charged us nothing. Celebrity after celebrity came forward to support us.

The video Reg and the artistic team around him came up with is, still to this day, a classic shocker of campaigning material. The usual self-indulgent fashion show pomp of the catwalk is transformed into one of self-disgust when the fur coat being trailed by a model suddenly begins to leave a swathe of blood in its wake. Blood is splattered over the painted faces and bloated visages of the fawning audience as the model swings the fur coat across her shoulders. The end caption is ‘It takes 40 dumb animals to make a fur coat, but only one to wear it’, which was designed to be deliberately antagonistic to feminists who did not disappoint in making the campaign even more scandalous with their outraged criticism of its ‘sexist’ overtones.

The video was screened in cinemas all over the country and the support it generated was staggering. We had touched a raw nerve in the British public and the fur industry was caught on the back foot. Ultimately, the campaign succeeded in outlawing all fur farms in the UK and undermining the UK fur industry to the point where it effectively no longer exists in the UK. Ironically, the campaign’s success was to precipitate our demise.

1984 was a rollercoaster of office lows and campaign highs. Pursuing the Sellafield issue with the last vestige of collective energy, we agreed to build on the earlier action when 500 people came down from Cumbria to London to dump a small amount of radioactive mud at the entrance of Downing Street. On that occasion Whitehall had been sealed off in the panic and the fire brigade was left to clean up the small but highly embarrassing mess. This time I suggested we brought five tons of the contaminated mud from the Ravenglass Estuary, close to Sellafield and, in Europe, the most heavily contaminated with radioactive effluent, to the Department of the Environment, to see how they liked having this filth on their doorstep.

Les Parris, an asphalter and one of our most active and helpful supporters, was asked to organise the collecting of the mud and hired a skip lorry for the job, telling the hire company he needed it for a week for ‘local work’. Les and his team donned fake Cumbria Water Authority jackets while they used a hired JCB to scoop up the estuarine mud and dollop it in the skip on the back of the lorry. The mud was then thoroughly doused with water to prevent the top layer from drying out and releasing plutonium particles before being covered with a tarpaulin for the journey back to London.

After a few scares and a false start or two, we finally managed to back Les’s lorry onto the steps of the Department of the Environment just before London’s rush hour began to make the roads impassable. I finally pulled the correct lever to set the skip tipping its load. Five tons of radioactive mud began to slide from the skip onto the steps at the DoE right in front of the national press. Bingo!

The action forced the closure of Marsham Street and streets close by and the fire brigade were called to deal with the waste. The waste was subsequently shunted around the country and eventually taken back to Ravenglass as there was no sea dumping route for it to take. We protesters were taken into custody, fined £5 each for disturbing the peace and released. The police complemented us on a slick and respectful action.

As 1984 drew to a close, it was time to revisit the Big Ben action. This time it must not fail. And this time we had an easier task since the tower itself was festooned in scaffolding to facilitate a much overdue scrubdown to remove the grime which had accumulated over the years.

We bought a redundant double-decker bus and cut a hole in the roof from where a ladder would be extended to reach the scaffolding. The protesters would scramble across the ladder onto the scaffolding, climb to the clock face and hang a banner – ‘Time to stop nuclear weapons testing’.

In truth, we planned and carried out this protest largely to demonstrate our international credentials to the Greenpeace governing body. While the issue was important and while the UK was still, incredibly, testing nuclear weapons, it was a distraction we could have done without. Our climbers planned to suspend themselves in hammocks from the ropes holding the banner to the clock face in order to put themselves in a position where to be cut down from their perch would mean plummeting to their deaths. That was the plan.

We were all a little apprehensive since the IRA were very active around this time and we feared that our action would prompt a rapid and possibly violent reaction from the security forces. I was personally convinced that we would be arrested before we had even had time to get the climbers away from the bus, but we were committed and it was time to get on with it. We collected the bus from the yard adjacent to the Communications Division in the Docklands area of London and we approached Westminster at around 5.30am. As I turned onto the bridge, I received the thumbs up from the climbing crew standing around trying to look as inconspicuous as possible. With sweaty palms slipping on the steering wheel, I pulled up at the Westminster Bridge bus stop and waited with bated breath as the grating sounds of metal on metal, interspersed with curses and grunts indicated a problem or two with the deploying of the ladder through the hole in the roof. Then I heard it: the wailing of a police siren. Across the road, a cafe was opening up and the proprietor stood open-mouthed as he saw the ladder emerging from the top of the bus and climbing-gear clad figures clambering across to the scaffolding.

The police car came hurtling round Parliament Square and continued straight across the bridge past us, obviously after more dastardly villains than us. Dave Roberts shouted, ‘Go! Go! Go!’ I was so resigned to the fact that we were about to be arrested that I fumbled the gears, crunched it into first and lurched away from the bus stop, sending people sprawling down the passageway of the bus. We had made it! I couldn’t believe it. The people in the bus were singing and dancing with delight and as we sedately drove around the four sides of the square and back across the bridge, we cheered the tiny figures now halfway up the scaffolding.

We had to secure the bus as a priority and drove back to the support team waiting at Vauxhall. By the time we had made our way back to Westminster, it was 7.30 and the sight which greeted us as we walked down the Embankment was one of crowds of people, police everywhere, TV crews and general mayhem. The banner obscured the face of Big Ben and told the world that it was time for the UK to stop nuclear weapons testing. I called the climbers on the VHF. They were comfortable and could see for themselves the chaos their escapade had created. During the course of the next few hours, the chaos was to increase to the point where Westminster Bridge became a melee of snarling traffic and the number of people transfixed by the demonstration rose to hundreds.

I approached the chief police officer and announced that we were from Greenpeace. He asked me to call the climbers down at once which I refused to do. He took out his notebook and began asking me questions about how we had delivered the climbers to the scaffolding. When I explained how we did it, he told me the driver of the bus would be prosecuted. I explained to him that we had used a professional driver to whom we had paid a fee and who was now probably having breakfast somewhere in the West End.

‘What was his name?’ he asked.

‘Billy.’

‘Surname?’

‘Bunter.’

By mid-afternoon, police efforts to forcefully remove the climbers having failed, the climbers agreed to descend their lofty nest voluntarily and were greeted with cheers and applause as they walked into the arms of the police.

Despite the problems in the office and my own insecurity and uncertainty about my position, we were still making the news and pulling off some good actions in support of national and international campaigns. The office still buzzed with ideas, all the staff shouldered huge workloads and laughter and tears in equal amounts were evident on most days. Celebrities frequented our cramped, over-worked offices regularly.

Barbara Dickson turned up one day with a single she had cut with Labi Sifre called Dangerous Cargo lamenting the death of the oceans through nuclear waste disposal. Suggs and Karl, front men for Madness, regularly popped in for a pint and held a concert for us at the Lyceum, along with Ian Drury and his band the Blockheads and Nigel Planer of the Young Ones in support. Yet despite all this goodwill we could never quite make it financially and although we now had a membership of 25,000, we needed to reach a 100,000 figure to secure a regular, guaranteed income from membership fees sufficient to support the office, meet our salary and expenses bill and satisfy our international obligation to commit 24% of our income, known euphemistically as our ‘licensing fee’, the price we were required to pay for the privilege of using the name Greenpeace.

In our constant search for money, we left no stone unturned. The Greater London Council was being dismantled by the Tory government and Ken Livingstone had indicated quite unequivocally that large amounts of money were to be had from the coffers of the dying organisation to those who demonstrated innovation in terms of campaign and project proposals. The only problem was that any projects submitted had to be linked in some way or another to London. We put together a proposal to look at spent nuclear fuel shipments through the capital and were delighted when we received notification that two officials from the GLC would visit us to discuss the proposal.