by Andy Beckett
… The dispossessed people of this country need Land – for diverse needs, permanent free festival sites, collectives, and cities of Life and Love, maybe one every fifty miles or so, manned and womaned by people freed from dead-end jobs and from slavery in factories mass-producing non-essential consumer items …
WE more or less ADVOCATE:
… [The] takeover of waste land, waste buildings … The ‘true levellers’ in 1649 grew corn by taking over common land … Regular weekly festivals … Festivals are for turning the world on its head … [for] a taste of music, dancing, love and anarchy … Community headquarters for conspiracies and radical activities and family festivities … Neighbourhood and workers’ control of local factories, businesses, banks and supermarkets … The end result being a network (which already exists in embryo) of independent collectives and communities, federated together to form the Albion Free State …
There were pages more, of varying punctuation and coherence, concluding with the announcement that ‘at the spring equinox, March 21st 1975, from rush hour (5pm) to sunset’, the Albion Free State would orchestrate ‘sheep grazing and people strolling naked down Piccadilly’.
It was not hard to dismiss the entire document as the wishful thinking of some hippy with a spare evening. Except that, by the mid-seventies, the Albion Free State was not just a phrase; it was one of several labels attached to a large and growing underground movement. And this movement was now coming into the open.
The British counter-culture, as was clear from the activities of the Gay Liberation Front, had not died with the sixties. Instead, it had spread and entrenched itself, often in the empty spaces that economic change or decline had opened up in the run-down inner cities. Ladbroke Grove, Notting Hill, Camden, Hackney, Islington: parts of London in particular in the mid-seventies contained whole dayglo streets of squats – obsolete industrial premises, houses unsold after the 1973–4 property crash – and it was from this milieu that the Albion Free State manifesto emerged. Yet, for some counter-culture activists and would-be visionaries, a city, with its hassle and many policemen, its claustrophobia and commercial pressures – as early as 1972, derelict buildings around Camden Lock, for example, were being converted into antique shops – was not the ideal place to build a new society. What was needed was more of a blank canvas. The revolution would be sown in the countryside.
There had been semi-autonomous, sometimes anarchic ‘free festivals’ of a sort in rural England – horse fairs, gypsy fairs – since the Middle Ages. From the late fifties, English crowds had assembled and camped in fields to hear trad jazz; from the early sixties, to hear the Rolling Stones and other rock bands. In 1970, these commercial but occasionally lawless events, with their press-baiting scuffles, drug-taking and particular dress codes, began to take on a more radical quality. At that year’s Isle of Wight festival, the fences separating ticket-holders from non-payers camping nearby were torn down and the crowd became one. The same summer saw the first large, intentionally free festival, held outside the not very anarchic Sussex town of Worthing. As well as free music, there was free food and, in the festival’s latter stages, free drugs. A whole rebellious subculture was forming which established its own temporary utopias – the Worthing festival was called Phun City – and rejected the norms of capitalism and the existing legal limits to pleasure.
In 1971, 10,000 people attended the first free festival at Glastonbury. In 1972, the free-festival movement selected a more politically charged site: Windsor Great Park, right below Windsor Castle, once common land but long since part of the Crown Estate. Led by William Ubique (or ‘Ubi’) Dwyer, a former civil servant who had become a formidable counter-culture activist and LSD enthusiast, a ‘Rent Strike People’s Festival’ was planned for the August Bank Holiday weekend. No permission was sought from the Crown Estate commissioners, who promptly issued a banning order. Regardless, Dwyer had 100,000 promotional leaflets printed. ‘The festival will finish,’ the leaflets promised, or threatened, ‘when those attending so decide.’
In the event, only 700 people turned up and were almost outnumbered by policemen. The festival ended quickly and without trouble. The following year, Dwyer tried again. Again the Crown Estate forbade a Windsor festival. Again Dwyer sought to provoke: ‘The festival … is a revolution,’ he told the Windsor Express. ‘We want a new society … We want to replace the family with the commune. We want to stop all rent paying. It is a feudal relic from William the Conqueror …’ This time, between 10,000 and 20,000 people came, and stayed for nine days. The policing was more aggressive, as was the response to it. Almost 300 people were arrested for drugs offences, officers were abused and threatened, and a police van was attacked. Only a shortage of policemen stopped the site being cleared by force.
In 1974, the apocalyptic year of the British seventies, the Windsor situation slipped from a tense stalemate into outright confrontation. That August, the police, the Crown Estate and the Director of Public Prosecutions responded to Dwyer’s plan for a ‘People’s Free Festival’ in the Great Park by considering closing off the site with barbed wire or flooding it with sewage. In the end, they erected a metal barrier to keep out vehicles. Dwyer, in turn, saw the festival as a vital opportunity to undermine the police and the drug laws. As one of his publicity leaflets put it, ‘If two people, smoking dope, are approached by the police, they may well piss in their pants from fright … In a crowd of 1,000 all smoking dope together, you can tell the police to piss off.’
The August Bank Holiday arrived. A similar festival crowd to the previous year’s gathered in the sunshine. There were Hell’s Angels and ice-cream vans, bad trippers and children, free food stalls and no toilets. For five days the police kept their distance, maintaining a heavy-handed cordon around the Great Park and searching people as they came and went. A few officers disguised as hippies allegedly infiltrated the crowd to look for dealers. Newspapers and broadcasters, sniffing a story during a traditional lull for news, gave the festival, which like its Windsor predecessors was illegal, increasingly high-profile coverage. Then, the chief constable in charge of policing the event, David Holdsworth, decided he had had enough. ‘The 1974 Windsor Free Festival was nothing more than a gigantic drug-inspired breach of the peace,’ he told an official inquiry the following year, ‘so I changed my mind about containing it and decided to bring it to an end.’
Blearily early on the sixth morning, his officers moved in. A representative of the welfare and civil-liberties group Release, who was on duty at the festival, gave an account in a Release newsletter of what followed:
At 7.30 [we] were rudely awakened by a hammering on and a rocking of our van. I leaned over to open the door, only to be greeted by about eight policemen who ordered me out of bed … Various reports were coming in concerning violence and arrests at the far end of the park, so [we] headed off to investigate … When we arrived at the middle-park stage, large quantities of policemen were accumulating … There were people on stage encouraging the crowd to enact a policy of non-provocation and non-violence … The police literally ploughed into the crowd … The front line of police had truncheons drawn and were swinging them viciously at anyone who got in their way … Bottles and cans were thrown [at them] … I immediately witnessed the police grab a man who climbed off the stage. He was carrying a guitar … As he was pulled round, his guitar brushed against a policeman who promptly wrenched it from him and hit it against the scaffolding …
[Later that morning] I could see that the cordon of police at the top of the hill had moved down slowly, making a clean sweep of the park … There were about 15 people on top of the scaffolding at the end, a token final protest … While these people were clinging on to the remnants of the stage … police encircled it and began to rock it. The structure was flimsy and I was surprised that it did not immediately collapse. I would not have rated the chances of the people on that scaffolding if they had fallen that forty odd feet. Eventually the people climbed down … The police succeeded in coll
apsing the stage by rocking it shortly after.
Some interpreters of the British seventies see the closing down of the 1974 Windsor festival as a turning point, the day when the ‘permissive society’ created in the sixties reached its limits and the coming moral counter-revolution first showed its teeth. In fact, there had been hostility in Westminster to disorderly pop festivals from the beginning. In 1970, the Conservative MP for the Isle of Wight, Mark Woodnutt, spent two days incognito at the island’s festival, dressed, he later told the Commons, in a ‘hippy outfit’. He was appalled at what he found. The following year, he secured legislation from the Heath government that required large-scale overnight festivals on the island to first obtain official licences. Other Tory MPs with robust views on law and order and pastoral constituencies that were vulnerable to hippy gatherings were impressed. Later that year, eight of them helped introduce a private member’s bill to make the Isle of Wight restrictions apply nationally.
But then their Night Assemblies Bill ran into trouble. Its title, with its whiff of authoritarianism and moral panic, upset civil libertarians inside and outside the Commons, who considered the British right of assembly ancient and inviolable. The Times wondered out loud whether the bill might have made the Jarrow and Aldermaston marches illegal. The Heath government, which had initially been supportive of the bill, grew more ambivalent, designating the socially liberal Peter Walker as the minister considering the legislation. The TUC expressed its reservations and, in May 1972, Labour MPs blocked the bill’s progress through the Commons for good. Three months later, Ubi Dwyer launched his first straggly-haired invasion of Windsor Great Park. Despite the escalating unruliness of the free festivals there, a significant residue of mainstream political sympathy for such events remained. ‘Were the Police Too Tough?’ asked the front page of the Sun after the crude clampdown of 1974. The Times also questioned the police tactics, and rosily summarized the business of the festival as ‘the languid pursuit of music and sunshine’. The paper concluded: ‘Festivals do tend to leave a mess … But they are basically amiable gatherings, which with a degree of tolerance it should be possible to accommodate.’
Starting in late 1974, a rather startling Whitehall experiment in liberal thinking and coalition-building took place. Faced with the prospect of another Windsor festival in 1975 – Dwyer was more determined than ever to stage one – the government slowly, haltingly, arrived at a bold conclusion: the state would have to join forces with the hippies and organize a rival free festival. One of the supporters of the plan was the home secretary, Roy Jenkins. By the mid-seventies, faced with IRA bombs and other worsening forms of public disorder, he was no longer as confidently libertarian as he had been in the sixties. But he remained a liberal where possible – and a political pragmatist. ‘A mass pop festival’, he wrote of Windsor in his memoirs, ‘had been building up for a number of years into an annual semi-riot … and causing Prince Philip near-apoplexy.’ To avoid a recurrence, the government would provide an alternative, less controversial site and whatever other assistance the free-festival movement might need. Over the winter of 1974–5 and the spring and early summer of 1975, this unlikely, unprecedented scheme gradually solidified. Its backers besides Jenkins included Release, the environment secretary and other notable Labour libertarian Anthony Crosland, and Stephen Verney, canon of the Royal Chapel at Windsor Castle, who combined Establishment contacts with a belief that young people could not and should not be prevented from going to free festivals.
However, for all this lobby group’s liberalism and political leverage, it was not clear how it could do business with the slightly bug-eyed utopian visionaries calling for an Albion Free State. Dwyer utterly rejected the notion of a state-sponsored free festival: to him and many others in the counter-culture it was a contradiction in terms. In early 1975, he was jailed for promoting his next Windsor gathering in defiance of a legal injunction. But others in the free-festival movement were beginning to think more flexibly. Of these, the most prominent, and the most crucial to what would follow, was Sid Rawle.
Rawle was thirty, a big, bossy man from the West Country. He had already done a decade and a half in the counter-culture. He had been a Young Communist, an anarchist, a CND activist and a beatnik in Soho. He had been a founder of Tipi Valley in Wales, a famous settlement of hippies living in Native American tents. He had taken part in an even more famous commune on an Irish island owned by John Lennon. In 1974, ‘The King of the Hippies’, as Rawle liked to call himself, and as others sometimes called him, had helped Dwyer publicize that year’s Windsor festival. In 1975, he had been jailed shortly after Dwyer for helping to advertise the next one.
But while in Pentonville prison, he had come to the conclusion that the free-festival movement might not survive further head-on confrontations with the government. He agreed to join a committee set up by Canon Verney to find an alternative to Windsor. He was released from Pentonville and went to see Dwyer in Oxford jail, but failed to persuade him of the radical value of a state-backed festival.
Rawle now found himself, only partly to his surprise, the most powerful hippy in the country, perhaps the most powerful there had ever been. ‘At Windsor, Ubi Dwyer was the king of the hill,’ he told me on the phone thirty years later, tiny prickles of competitiveness still detectable beneath his easy West Country burr. ‘I didn’t realize it at the time, but I ran a sort of coup.’ A minute later, he added with more obvious relish: ‘In 1975, we had the government by the balls.’
He was living in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire now, one of the few corners of southern England still remote and cheap enough for an uncompromised old hippy. One November morning, I drove there from London. After Cheltenham, the familiar Gloucestershire of sweet hills and prime properties receded. The road began to rise and twist back on itself and the forest closed in. There were huge, primeval beech trees and clearings full of rusted bracken; grey little ex-mining towns and dripping curtains of fir trees. There was a maze of brown lanes; at the top of one, guided by Rawle’s precise instructions, I saw an old green hippy caravan, and then another, and then half a dozen other vehicles, some of them without wheels. Beyond them, half screened by trees, was a purple-painted bungalow with plants tangling on every windowsill.
Rawle came striding out of the doorway. He was tall and red-faced, with fierce eyes and an unkempt ginger beard. He wore wellington boots, blue mechanic’s overalls from which a great prow of a stomach confidently protruded, and a small multicoloured ethnic cap of the kind favoured by very elderly British bohemians and jazz musicians. He spoke in a near-bellow, like a potentially belligerent hippy farmer. ‘I tend to tell the story of the free festivals very self-centredly,’ he began immediately. ‘I tend to think I was in the middle of everything and leading it.’ Then he ushered me off on a tour of his property. We squelched through his orchard with its medieval fruit varieties, paused at his standing stones and homemade pagan temple, and admired his three acres of winding paths and earthworks. Rawle told me he had once been ‘the high priest of the hippies’. Then we went indoors to a long dim sitting room full of rugs and drapes and Celtic knick-knacks. He sat in a deep armchair at one end and pointed me to another.
‘In 1975,’ he said, ‘I was trying to find an acceptable way to do the festival. Bill [Dwyer] wasn’t into negotiating. But it’s my gut feeling that the government cannot be seen to be beaten by us. Bill said, “You’re a traitor, blah blah blah.” But I thought, “If we lose this festival, we’ve lost the free-festival movement.” I thought a festival was a way of getting the message over … a meeting place for a new culture. I thought it could propagate ideas.’ He reached for a strikingly capitalist metaphor: ‘I’ve always seen these things as trade fairs for alternative lifestyles.’
He found the Verney committee a welcoming environment. ‘It wanted to find a solution. The civil servants on the committee became habituated to me. My drug-taking and drinking always was minute – I never was that interested. It gives me an advant
age in the free-festival context. And I can sway a big crowd. One day, I’m sitting there on the committee, and someone said, “They want to offer you an old wartime airfield.”’
Watchfield in Oxfordshire was a windy plateau near Swindon where RAF bomber pilots had learned bad-weather landing during the Second World War. It had been disused and left to vandals since 1946, but it still had a control tower and a huddle of other buildings, and tarmac strips that were suitable for vehicles. It was close to a village of the same name and was still owned by the Department of the Environment – and it was not in a Labour constituency. For Rawle and the large part of the free-festival movement who went along with the government plan, there was an additional draw: ‘What we really liked was that [from there] we could see the white horse at Uffington. We said, “That’s a sign.”’
In late July, the government announced that a festival would be held at Watchfield. It would take place in less than four weeks – not long for any opposition to the event to organize itself – and would last from Saturday 23 to Sunday 31 August, three times as long as more conventional commercial rock festivals. The Albion Free State had been given a generous showcase for its wares. But getting the gathering organized was still a frantic, ideologically compromised undertaking. ‘The government fought shy of giving us any money,’ Rawle remembered. ‘A big catering company got hold of us and said they were prepared to give us a few grand for the exclusive right to the commercial food stand.’ Rawle agreed. ‘Then we got turned down for the alcohol licence by Faringdon magistrates’ court. We had sold the [alcohol] licence to another big catering firm for 2.5 or 5K. I said to my government minder, “If we don’t get the licence, we ain’t going to have a penny. I’m going to walk away.” We got back in front of the same bench of magistrates within twenty-four hours and were given our licence.’ In the meantime, the government arranged a temporary water supply and toilets for the festival. ‘They provided huge amounts too much of everything,’ said Rawle. ‘When we got to the site, there were huge great water pipes all around.’