by I Fought the Law- A Riotous Romp in Search of British Democracy (epub)
Finally, I asked him whether Albion meant anything to him. ‘Absolutely nothing, to be totally honest with you,’ he replied. ‘Although ... hang on a minute ... there is a pub round here. Now, what’s its name? It’s called The Ship Albion. How about that then, eh?’
Chapter 6. Serendipity Strikes Again
You can’t embark on a quest for Albion and not have Glastonbury in the back of your mind, but John Nicholson had warned me about ‘the mystical shit’ that seems to surface whenever that town is mentioned. The theory goes that Jesus’s uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, visited Glastonbury with the young Jesus in tow and that there the two of them built the first true Christian church. This is what William Blake writes about in his stirring anthem ‘Jerusalem’.
As delightful, or not, as it may seem for the English to be the chosen people of God, it wasn’t something I wanted to get too mixed up in. I was desperate to keep Druids, crystals and middle-aged men in flowing robes at arm’s length. I couldn’t escape the feeling that, as interesting as the myths and legends of ancient Britain are, if I went down that road it would be a long time before I came back to the surface or found anything that would be relevant to today. But speaking to Sergeant Gary Brown had put the idea of King Arthur back in my head. Perhaps there was a role for our ancient history, traditions and values in modern life.
It was Easter, and Rachel, Wilf and I spent a few days in a hotel near Glastonbury with my mum and some of her friends. They were going to walk and cycle, and we were looking forward to eating, drinking and catching up on some sleep. John had described Glastonbury as a ‘theme park’. We were too close to avoid it completely, but we limited ourselves to a cheap lunch and a half-hearted amble through the vast array of mystical bookshops. I bought a few books about England from Oxfam for a fiver, we went back to the hotel, and that was the end of that.
But when we got back home a few days later I began to dream about King Arthur. I seemed to see his shadow lurking in my mind in the tortuously early morning light while Wilf watched Muffin the Mule. I became convinced that there had to be some way of fitting Arthur in without turning this book into some kind of mish-mash of visionary weirdness. Which was when coincidence decided to lend me another guiding hand.
Rachel and I both work part-time so we get to spend lots of time with Wilf. We don’t have much money as a result, but we do have plenty of time. The week after we got back from Glastonbury, Rachel was supply teaching in New Cross Gate. For some reason, because I had never even thought about doing it before, I decided to push Wilf down to meet her at the end of the day at half-past three. The school was little under a mile away, so I looked at the A to Z, worked out the route in my mind and left home giving myself half an hour to complete the journey. It really wasn’t very far, but I still managed to get myself lost and I started to drift aimlessly through the beautiful but battered streets of Brockley and New Cross Gate. I began to wonder what Arthur would make of the row upon row of terraced houses, some done up like those in Notting Hill while others, often next door, had been left to rot No doubt he would be pretty unimpressed with the land of Albion today, the land of the Britons he supposedly rescued from the Anglo-Saxons back in the Dark Ages. But then I chastised myself for being overly romantic. Arthur was from a different world, if he was ever of this world at all. The problems we face are the problems of today; hiding in some lost mythology of fifteen hundred years ago would surely not make any difference to Britain now. I put my recent obsession with him down to reading The Sword in the Stone once too often and resolved to dismiss the whole nonsensical idea from my head once and for all.
But at that exact moment he appeared on the pavement in front of me. Or rather, I saw the word ‘Arthur’ in bright red lettering on the cover of a book in a cardboard box at the end of someone’s drive with a note attached that said ‘Please take me!’
As I say, coincidence can be a daunting thing if you have enough time to pay attention to it. I had never walked down that road before. I didn’t even really know where I was. I picked up the book, read the cover — The Trials of Arthur - The Life and Times of a Modern-Day King - and felt the backs of my legs tingle. I looked around for some explanation and began to shake slightly. It’s not often that you find a box containing a book at the end of someone’s drive that potentially offers an answer to a question exercising your mind at that precisc moment, but there you are. Maybe it was a sign of something. As 1 said, if you have the time to let serendipity and coincidence guide you they can lead you to some interesting places.
I read the book’s blurb. Its subject wasn’t King Arthur of Round Table fame, it was about a modern-day hairy tattooed biker and Mensa member called John. He’d had an interesting life, having served in the army before getting into all sorts of trouble with the police, and after years of adventure he became convinced he was the reincarnation of King Arthur. After all, according to legend our great king never actually died: he is sleeping in a cave somewhere until his country needs him again. Finding the book had freaked me out slightly, and it’s very easy to dismiss a man who thinks he’s the reincarnated spirit of King Arthur, but the way I’d come across his story made me give him the benefit of the doubt. I put the book in the pram. Later, when I got home, I started to read it. It was a staggering tale of one man’s battle to save our heritage and old traditions. Once John had decided to let his ‘old’ self emerge, he changed his name to Arthur Pendragon through deed poll and, to cut a long and unbelievably funny and surprising story short, went round the country looking for his sword, Excalibur.
One afternoon Arthur was with his girlfriend driving through Farnborough and Aldershot with the sword on his mind. After all, he could hardly claim to be King Arthur if he didn’t have Excalibur. He knew the roads like the back of his hand, having spent so much time riding around there on a motorbike in his youth. All the same, he managed to take a wrong turning and was about to correct himself when the lights went red and he brought his van to a shuddering halt. At that point his girlfriend, Angela, spotted a shop down a side road called the Casque and Gauntlet and suggested they stop and go in. Arthur was unmoved, assuming it to be a stupid medieval reenactment shop, but she insisted they park and have a look. When they got to the shop a few minutes later, as chance would have it, there was Excalibur sitting proudly in the window. And when I say Excalibur, I mean the sword that was used in the 1981 film. Arthur became rather agitated and went inside to speak to the owner. He pointed at the sword and said, ‘I want to buy it.’ The owner flatly refused. It turned out that he’d made lots of lightweight copies for the actors to use in the film, and he let Arthur hold one of those instead. The one in the window weighed a ton and no-one had been able to handle it. (Sound familiar?)
‘No, I don’t want that one, I want the real thing,’ said Arthur.
The man looked at him. ‘Why do you want that?’ he asked. ‘Anyway,’ he added, ‘I promised I’d only sell it to the real King Arthur, if he ever returned.’
Arthur threw his passport down on the counter. ‘I’m the real King Arthur,’ he said, ‘and I’ve got to have that sword.’ The man opened up the passport and looked at it. Then he looked up at Arthur. You could see the gears shifting in his brain, the cogs whirring. He looked back at the passport and let out a little soft laugh of resignation.
‘I can’t argue with that. How much have you got?’
‘I’ve got a hundred quid.’
Even Arthur knew this was silly. The man had charged the film company £5,000 for it. He’d already told him that. It had gold on the pommel and the hilt, and gold inlay on the tang. It was sprung steel, a real fighting blade. Aside from that, it was a film artefact, and worth even more because of that. The man looked aL him again and laughed bitterly. You can’t refuse fate.
‘Go on then. A hundred quid and it’s yours.’34
So from then on Arthur carried Excalibur in a scabbard attached to his belt as he travelled around Britain.
I read the rest of the book over
the next few days and by the end of it I’d discovered a man who welcomed anyone who wanted to join his ‘Warband’ as long as they came across it through some kind of strange coincidence and were interested in protecting Britain. He also didn’t take himself too seriously, was into drinking in a big way, and was prepared to stand up against the tyranny of the government’s attempts to remove our civil liberties. This stance had led to his being imprisoned many times over the previous fifteen years while fighting for our right to use Stonehenge and then against various road developments that threatened the British countryside. On the occasions when he did find himself threatened with prison his lawyers successfully argued that Arthur Pendragon and his followers should swear an oath on Excalibur rather than the Bible when giving evidence in court. You can imagine him in the dock, wearing full ceremonial robes and a crown on his head, swearing on Excalibur in a court of law in the twenty-first century.
It makes you wonder, idly perhaps, what King Arthur would do if he actually reawakened in modern Britain. It’s hard to imagine that he’d spend his time in Parliament or Buckingham Palace. Somehow the idea of him tied halfway up a tree thrashing at the police to protest against a road development, or riding from one pub to the next on a Harley Davidson, or managing to persuade the legal establishment in court that his sword is Excalibur and that as King Arthur his oath sworn on it is as valid as anyone else using the Bible, seems a little more likely.
I told Rachel the whole story and I could see a look of horror begin to spread across her face. ‘It is a very odd coincidence,’ she agreed, then trailed off. When she spoke again there was an air of determination in her voice. ‘You’re not about to tell me you want to go off to join King Arthur though, are you, Dan? I mean, I think I’ve been pretty supportive with all this criminal behaviour since you started this book but I’m going to lose patience if you suddenly start claiming to be one of the Knights of the Round Table.’ I have to admit that the thought had occurred to me, but in the end it wasn’t to be. I tried to track down King Arthur through my new radical contacts but he eluded me. Either that or he had done his job as a signpost on my journey already. It was certainly reassuring to know he was out there somewhere fighting for Albion. I like to think I will meet him one day.
As chance would have it, King Arthur’s first anti-road protest turned out to be my first one too, the M3 extension at Twyford Down outside Winchester. His experiences there as the fight drew to a close prepared him for a much greater role in the protest at Newbury, where he settled his travelling ‘Camelot’ on part of the proposed route of the bypass. My first brush with protest began back in 1993, at the age of eighteen, when the Twyford Down demonstration became a regular item on the national news. It was a protest that redefined environmental activism and radically altered the then Major government’s road-building programme. It was also a defining moment in my life because it all took place seven miles from the town where I grew up.
Despite deriding Winchester as the fifth crappest town in Britain a few years ago (for its violence, growing heroin problem and insufferable smugness), it was, back in the early nineties, one of the most beautiful cities in England. According to Sir Thomas Malory, who collected the Arthurian legends into one volume in 1470 and whose work was condensed into a single book by William Caxton’s new printing press in 1485, Winchester was actually the site of Camelot. As with lots of the Arthurian legends there is no actual proof, but the view of the city from Twyford Down was certainly something to behold. Professor Martin Biddle, president of the Twyford Down Association, described it before the road-building began: ‘the proximity of downland, water meadow and city produced an intimate and rare backyard, perhaps unique in providing a thriving modern city with a visual perspective reaching deep into its remote past. Here, perhaps alone in modern urban England, it was possible in the course of an hour or so to walk from the twentieth century to the prehistoric past, or even to glance from one to the other in the course of a moment at work or in school.’
I remember flying kites on the hill as a child and listening in wonder when I heard it was considered by some to be the final resting place of King Arthur. Now, cynicism aside - there have to be at least five ‘resting places of King Arthur’ up and down the country — if you’d sat on that hill and looked down on medieval Winchester, once the capital of this country, on a summer’s evening you’d have agreed it wasn’t so far-fetched. There was something in the air of that place, which is probably where the delightful guff about King Arthur came from. Whatever it was, it was something the local residents were damned they were going to lose without a fight.
Barbara Bryant, one of the key campaigners, wrote a book, Twyford Down: Roads, Campaigning and Environmental Law, about the experience she and her fellow protesters went through while fighting the development through the proper legal channels. She wrote it to give an insight into the process to anyone considering taking a similar stand elsewhere. Bryant was an unlikely campaigner who didn’t dispute that the road needed to be built, or even, in the end, where it should be built. She and the huge team of dedicated campaigners that swelled around her simply wanted a tunnel so that the road could pass under Twyford Down rather than the brutal white scar that now cuts right through it. After all, the proposed cutting meant obliterating an area of outstanding natural beauty which contained a site of serious scientific interest and two scheduled ancient monuments, including an Iron Age setdement. Miriam Rothschild, a valued supporter of the campaign, wrote at the time, ‘It is extraordinary that if a famous picture comes on the market and is about to be sold, a large sum of money is immediately made available to retain it in this country. Yet, a picture merely changes walls, and other people, say in America, can enjoy it. Yet at Twyford Down the same authority [the government] destroys forever thousands of years of irreplaceable beauty and the enjoyment of countless generations.’35 The project to extend the M3 from Basingstoke to Southampton was first considered in 1970. A route was proposed that passed to the west of Winchester, through arable land, and joined the north-west outskirts of the city of Southampton. It made perfect sense to everyone in and around Winchester with the exception of the wealthy landowners on that side of the city. Quite without explanation, that route was suddenly dropped. In 1971, a new route was proposed west of the old bypass and straying into the water meadows between St Catherine’s Hill and Winchester. A public inquiry was held in 1976 to look at the compulsory purchase of the land involved, much of which was owned by Winchester College. The college, along with other residents, formed the Winchester M3 Joint Action Group, which successfully lobbied for other routes to be considered. In 1981, Kenneth Clarke MP announced that the engineering company Mott, Hay and Anderson were doing a ‘fresh study’. They came to the conclusion that the only viable route left was a cutting through Twyford Down. Of course by this stage the government was getting sick of dragging its heels and decided to push it through despite local opposition. More public inquiries followed, but according to Barbara Bryant ‘the problem with road-building inquiries is that for it to get to that stage ministers will have been advised that the best solution is the one on the table to be discussed. They will have given it their support; the public inquiry is just rubber-stamping or giving lip service to the idea of public consultation. So any new ideas or protests have a formidable opponent. If you successfully make your case a lot of powerful people will be left with egg on their faces, and powerful people don’t like that.’
An example of the hopeless task facing you if you wish to engage in the public inquiry system was the tunnel Bryant and her team proposed. They submitted a drawing of what the tunnel could look like but had no idea how anally retentive the system would turn out to be. Any alternative plans submitted by the public had to be costed by the inquiry to see if they did offer a practical alternative. So the tunnel Bryant and her team submitted was costed, exactly according to the submitted drawing. Now the drawing was supposed to give an indication of how much better a tunnel would look rath
er than being an actual architectural plan, so the idea was thrown out because in the drawing the tunnel was set too high up on the hill and tons of earth would have to be moved to raise the path of the road up enough to pass through it. It never occurred to the inquiry to get an expert in building tunnels of this kind to look into the proposal seriously and set a tunnel at the correct level. They just looked at the submitted drawing, worked out that the cost would be prohibitive because it wasn’t a perfectly workable plan designed by an architect, then threw out the idea completely.
If playing by the rules and involving yourself in the public inquiry system is unlikely to alter the government’s decision, you can forgive people for using more immediate and physical methods to get their views across. But the then Conservative government had something up their sleeve to combat that tactic too.
I wasn’t actively involved in the protests that took place at Twyford Down, but I do remember the influx of people with strange coloured hair and eccentric clothes in Winchester’s town centre. I can also remember political graffiti appearing, and that was not the kind of thing you usually saw in Winchester. All of it said just one thing: ‘Down with the Criminal Justice Act’. I remember at the time thinking that these oddballs must all be criminals if they didn’t agree with a bill designed to clamp down on criminal behaviour in the name of justice, which, in the light of its name, was what I took the contents of the bill to be. But as the protests continued and the debate about the road intensified, the scales began to fall from my eyes.