1 June 2025 sees the 40th anniversary of the ‘Battle of the Beanfield’ – one of the darkest days in contemporary British history, when a convoy of 150 vehicles heading to the people’s free festival at Stonehenge was ambushed in a quiet corner of Wiltshire, contained in a field for several hours, and then brutally attacked by over 1,000 riot police.
Remembering the Battle of the Beanfield 40 years on
Traveller homes were systematically wrecked, and most of the over 500 people present were assaulted, many with blows to the head, and arrested. It was the largest mass arrest in British legal history. One young mother carrying her baby, was dragged out of her home by her hair. Some of the police, clearly intent on causing serious damage to both people and homes, were masked up to protect their anonymity. Many didn’t wear numbers. Traumatised children were taken into care, and in some cases held for a few days. Seven dogs were put down.
ITN were on the field and filmed what its journalist, Kim Sabido, would later describe in a piece to camera as:
the worst police treatment of people that I’ve witnessed in my entire career as journalist.
Additionally, Observer journalist Nick Davies described an attack on one particular bus:
They just crawled all over that vehicle truncheons flailing, hitting anyone they could reach. It was very violent and very sickening. And it was at that point that my photographer, who was trying to take pictures of it, got arrested, and I myself got threatened and told to leave.
The event became known as the ‘Battle of the Beanfield’, although it was more like a massacre: the Thatcher government’s final solution to the traveller ‘issue’. Like the miners, the travellers were portrayed as an ‘enemy within’, anathema to everything Thatcherism stood for. It was estimated that at the time of the Beanfield there were some 12,000 travellers living on the road throughout the UK. And the numbers were steadily growing, taking advantage of the thriving free festival circuit throughout the UK at the time.
The Peace Convoy at Nostell Priory: a taste of the violent repression to come
Moreover, also like the miners, Thatcher used an increasingly para-militarised police force to smash the Peace Convoy. Travellers in Yorkshire reported seeing a coach load of riot police heading to the picket line, holding up a sign saying, “YOU’RE NEXT”. In August 1984, police at the Nostell Priory festival in Wakefield, Yorkshire, just a few miles down the road from Orgreave, gave people a taste of things to come. Police assaulted them, held them in custody, and systematically wrecked their homes.
Thatcher herself eventually said that she was:
only too delighted to do anything we can to make life difficult for such things as hippy convoys.
As traveller Mo Lodge told us:
Stonehenge was just an excuse. The real reason was the threat to the State. The numbers of people at Stonehenge was doubling every year for four years. Well, that was a huge number of people that were suddenly flocking into buses or whatever and living on the road. It was anarchy in action and it was working, and it was seen to be working by so many people that they wanted to be a part of it.
Five years later, 26 people sued the Wiltshire Police for damages at Winchester Crown Court, in what became known as the ‘Beanfield Trial’. It was the closest anyone came to a public inquiry. As film students, we went down to cover it.
Everyone we hoped to interview appeared at that trial, such as the Earl of Cardigan, who witnessed a heavily pregnant woman with “a silhouette like a zeppelin” being “clubbed with a truncheon”. ITN journalist Kim Sabido was also there, and told the court that, ‘the nastier more controversial shots that were taken’ disappeared from the ITN library.
So, the Battle of the Beanfield trial revealed every piece of video and photographic evidence we might need, the official police report, and their radio log. It would all go into the final documentary ‘Operation Solstice’, broadcast by Channel 4 in November 1991, despite the police’s best efforts to get it pulled. We had had to condense 20 plus hours of rushes down to a meagre 26-minute slot.
So, we ended up with this sizeable archive, mostly unseen, on an array of now defunct video formats, each potentially threatened by dust, heat, and moisture. And it had lain for 33 summers and winters in a mum’s loft. Until now.
Dale Vince at the Beanfield
We had learnt that Dale Vince, the CEO of Ecotricity, social commentator, and one-time backer of Just Stop Oil, was on the Beanfield.
He had been a motorcycle outrider on the trip down to Stonehenge, passing messages up and down the line, discovering the police’s sneaky roadblock trap up ahead, for which he got a mention in the police radio log:
we have a motorcycle outrider now approaching, if he gets anywhere near our ground unit they suggest they may attempt to take him out.
We asked him to help fund the saving of this archive, which he did, and he also agreed to do an interview.
So, I have spent the past four months going through and editing the interviews, conducted just five or six years after the Beanfield. These were therefore some very fresh recollections. I have brought out the best of each story, really getting under the skin of what happened and why, and placing it all on a website in time for the 40th anniversary. Alongside this, with access to all the rushes again, I reedited ‘Operation Solstice’, so that it explains and contains a lot more.
The Battle of the Beanfield to today: an increasingly authoritarian police state
One of the lasting legacies of the Battle of the Beanfield, and subsequent police operations surrounding travellers and the summer solstice, would be to tighten an increasingly authoritarian police state belt. In 1986, ushered in on a wave of news-managed moral panic, it was the Public Order Act. Supposedly the government aimed it at a minority, but, as with every legal knee jerk since, it bound everyone. In one section, it limits the number of vehicles that could park up together to twelve – because they really didn’t like people meeting up.
This would soon become six thanks to the Criminal Justice Act 1994, another tightened notch, only this time with two new convenient groups – ravers and road protestors – in the crosshairs. More recently, we’ve seen anti-protest laws, controlling everybody, not just Just Stop Oil. None of these increasingly draconian police powers get repealed, you notice. They just get built upon.
In the coming weeks there will be a screening and exhibition at Glastonbury, and highly likely a gathering at the site itself on 1 June, as there is pretty much every year. This will be hosted at Parkhouse Roundabout, Wiltshire, where someone has placed on one of the fence posts a commemorative plaque. It says:
This marks the spot of THE BATTLE OF THE BEANFIELD June 1st 1985.
An inscription adds:
You can’t kill the spirit.
And despite their best efforts, after nearly 40 years of the Public Order Act 1986, with hundreds of people now taking up van life in laybys, carparks, and in fields all over the country, they still clearly haven’t. Because no matter how hard they push down with that thumb, the spirit, like water, will always find a way:
Featured image via Ben Gibson and additional images via Ben Gibson and Alan Lodge
