by Andy Beckett
The approach of the festival was not greeted with universal delight locally. The nearby village was part of a safe Conservative seat. Watchfield had thatched houses, a stone church and 600 inhabitants, including a pub landlord who told the tabloids about his dislike of ‘longhaired yobboes’ and his plans to ‘board up the windows and sit tight until they’re gone’. A protest meeting against the festival attracted half the village, and a petition was delivered to the Home Office. The weekend before the event, the News of the World reported that Watchfield children were being ‘evacuated’ to stay with relations, and that pensioners in the village were ‘leaving for reluctant holidays’. An Oxfordshire county councillor, Eric Bond, was also quoted: ‘Lock up your daughters.’
The most high-profile opponent of the festival, though, was the local MP, Airey Neave. He was a war hero who had escaped from Colditz; a Machiavellian Tory close to the military and the intelligence services; and a member of many of the new right-wing groups and networks, some parliamentary and some not, beginning to form across Britain, from the Clermont Club in Mayfair to Norman Tebbit’s Essex suburbs, which were fundamentally against Heath and Wilson and the whole liberal-leaning seventies consensus. In short, Neave was everything that the festival scheme – state-sponsored, almost Scandinavian in its symbolism and permissiveness: a Second World War airfield given over to pacifist hippies – was not. ‘The conduct of the government in offering this site … is scandalous,’ he told the News of the World. ‘The taxpayer is going to pay and I am asking the [parliamentary] Ombudsman to investigate.’
But the time for Neave’s sort of politics to shape British life had not yet come. The same edition of the paper noted that festival-goers had already started arriving in Watchfield, a week early. ‘Two girls from Raynes Park, Surrey’ had ‘set up base in a derelict nissen hut’ on the airstrip. Their manner and background suggested that the free-festival movement was both broader and less threatening than the likes of Neave imagined. ‘Telephonist Vicki Scorpio, aged 20,’ told the tabloid: ‘I just hope there will be no trouble. I’ve come to listen to music.’
By 23 August, the dry grass and shadeless runway tarmac had been turned into a rudimentary town with room for 20,000 people. It had a nursery and an ecumenical chapel; its own radio station and newspaper, the Watchfield Freek Press; drinking water and on-site welfare services; camper van and car parks; a covered sleeping area in an old hangar; a giant sandpit, theatre and cinema; piles of firewood provided by the county council; and a ‘Polytantric Stage’, a ‘Rent a Loony Stage’ and a kids’ play area. Around the perimeter and a short walk away in the village, 450 policemen and a droning police helicopter had been deployed. Seemingly almost as many bands were on the Watchfield bill: Hawkwind, Gong, Henry Cow, Human Abstract, Poltergeist, Wooden Lion, Solar Ben, Arthur Brown, Zorch, Tibet – the whole hairy spectrum of free-festival regulars, from the famous to the esoteric, from sixties-rooted psychedelic explorers to brow-furrowing left-wing improvisers. All these musicians would be providing their services to the Albion Free State for nothing.
At first, the utopian promise of it all proved less of a draw than expected. On the opening day, only 5,000 people turned up, to the derision of the many waiting journalists. The weather was unseasonably cold, with a frost forecast for the first night. The counter-culture grapevine was soon full of mutterings about the concessions that had made the festival possible. ‘Almost a year of hassle, barter and disappointment’, commented the underground paper the International Times, had produced ‘a gloriously British compromise … A social democratic government has provided a site that can, in many ways, be regarded as liberated territory … within the terrain of dominant hostile culture. In some people’s eyes, we have supped with the devil.’ The New Musical Express was ruder and more concise: Rawle had been ‘nobbled’.
But as the nine days of Watchfield passed, the unbuttoned norms of a long free festival gradually asserted themselves. The weather got much warmer. Men and women took their shirts off. The encampment thickened with vans and tepees, modern tents and caravans, shelters made out of corrugated iron or opened umbrellas or sheets of polythene. Zorch played a set that lasted from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. Poltergeist played as a couple had sex under the stage to cheers from the audience. A dog fell into the toilets, and volunteers struggled to pull it out. Someone painted a huge smiley face on the control tower. The Bishop of Reading, Eric Wild, held a service of Holy Communion on the main stage and ‘gained a generous round of applause’, The Times reported, ‘for his rendering of “The Lord Is My Shepherd”’. The commercial caterers were accused of overcharging. Chewy free bread was baked in an oil drum. Black-painted spaghetti was offered for sale as acid. Real LSD was in short supply, but a building was put aside for those having problems with it. ‘In those days,’ Rawle told me with an exasperated look, ‘you put all the bad trippers together and created an even worse situation.’ Every morning, there were public meetings for people to discuss the festival with him and the other organizers. A unanimous vote at one banned the Daily Express from the site for publishing a scare article headlined ‘The Festival of Darkness’. There were a few muggings, tent robberies and drug busts. Hell’s Angels, as they tended to at festivals, took over site ‘security’. The police mostly kept their distance.
On the far side of the village from the airfield, there was a military training college which it was feared the hippies might invade. ‘I was a squaddie there,’ a man at the bar in the village pub told me thirty years later. He was still trim and correct, an ex-Ministry of Defence policeman, but he remembered the festival with an indulgent smile. ‘The civilian police guarded the army houses,’ he said. ‘Everybody in the village was thinking there was going to be veg nicked out of their gardens. But it wasn’t a rowdy pop festival. You could hear the music in the village. There was a bit of wacky baccy, but what’s wacky baccy nowadays? We never heard of any hard-drug dealing. The police just slept in the army houses and drank in the mess.’
Meanwhile, he and some other soldiers went to have a look at the festival. ‘We walked across the fields and walked in. I suppose we must have stood out. I’d never really been to a pop festival. We said hello to people and they spoke back. They were friendly people, a friendly crowd.’ Did the villagers themselves go and have a look? His smile turned knowing: ‘Oh yeah. Everybody went. They had to – they’re nosy. One lad went to have a look, stayed over. And he ended up going off with the hippies for a few weeks.’ He chuckled: ‘Good old Arthur. He was a bit of a gullible sort of a bloke …’
During the second weekend of the festival, the News of the World ran a page of photos of women sunbathing topless on the airfield: ‘Lanes near the site have been crowded with people in cars trying to see the bare girls.’ Feminism or no feminism, in Britain in the seventies the sight of female flesh in public still turned a lot of people into Benny Hill. The News of the World interviewed ‘four schoolgirls’ from Swindon: ‘15 year-old Carol said, “We heard they were all taking their clothes off so we hitched a lift to have a look. Our parents don’t know we’re here. We’ve never seen anything like it.”’ The International Times’ coverage also switched from grudging to excitable: ‘Looking out on the swelling encampment … all seems worthwhile. Watchfield and its successors … will extend the psychological boundaries of our liberated territory as each day passes. One day the whole country will be a free festival, and a permanent one too!’
Even Neave’s view of the event underwent an abrupt thaw. On 25 August, a stout fifty-nine-year-old man with a Brylcreemed gentlemen’s-club haircut was improbably spotted among the festival crowd. The following day, The Times reported:
Mr Neave strolled round the site with his family, watching the bands and chatting to one or two rather bemused festival-goers. ‘It is very orderly,’ he commented … He [also] said … that he would like to see a permanent site [for free festivals] … so long as it was self-financing, and not an imposition on local villagers, ratepayers or taxpayers …
His views echoed those of Mr Sidney Rawle as stated earlier in the day.
Civil servants also visited the site and held daily meetings there with Rawle. Lord Peter Melchett, a Labour junior minister who had helped conceive the Watchfield scheme and had now been commissioned to produce a government report on free festivals, camped on the airfield incognito. Eight months later, his working group, which included police and local-council representatives as well as more obviously pro-festival figures such as Melchett himself, published its conclusions. ‘Pop festivals’, the report began, ‘are a reasonable and acceptable form of recreation.’ Watchfield had ‘passed off peacefully, with little trouble and relatively few arrests’. In fact, far from being a law-and-order problem, such events were of social benefit:
We think that festivals can offer useful experience to young people in living away, even if only for a short time, from the facilities of modern society …People come together from different parts of the country and varied social backgrounds, and free festivals offer a valuable opportunity for broadening personal experience. In particular free festivals give people from inner city areas the incentive to get out into the countryside … It is [also] the experience of some members of the Working Group that some of the people who attend free festivals are disturbed or distressed – people who would not normally seek help from conventional sources but many find sympathetic help readily available at free festivals. We think that this ability to provide the right surroundings for such people is a useful function …
The report also saw free festivals as valuable cultural events, particularly for the poor: ‘People who cannot afford to go to commercial festivals should have the opportunity of attending free festivals.’ As for the allegation – for which there was considerable evidence – that much of the daily life of such gatherings was conducted outside the law, the working group shrugged its shoulders: ‘Criminal offences, particularly drug offences, will inevitably be committed at free festivals … But we think that Government support for an event need not necessarily imply that the Government condones any crimes that individuals may commit while attending …’ For those in any doubt by the end of the report about where the working group’s thinking was leading, an appendix was included: ‘What to take to a pop festival’. The advice included ‘Wear a good pair of shoes’ and ‘If you intend to take a baby and/or young child make sure you have all the things that you will need. It may be difficult to buy them on, or near, the site.’ The Albion Free State, it seemed, was virtually becoming an arm of the welfare state.
In fact, Melchett’s May 1976 report and the idealism-tinged improvisation that was Watchfield marked the peak of Whitehall’s enthusiasm for free festivals. ‘At the end of Watchfield,’ Rawle remembered, ‘one of the government people there said to me, “This has been too embarrassing for the government. We are not going to be able to do this next year.”’ In his memoirs, Roy Jenkins portrays the 1975 gathering as no more than an awkward one-off: ‘All passed off calmly. The disused airfield appeared to bore the pop fans and that festival was never heard of again.’ In early 1976, before the Melchett report came out, the government announced that it would not provide funding or a site for a free festival that summer, in Watchfield or anywhere else. An uncharacteristically chilly sentence in the Melchett report acknowledged the government’s rationale: ‘Public expenditure on essential services is under severe restraint.’
In the more conventional Britain beyond the sun-struck hilltops the free-festival movement inhabited, the mid-seventies crisis was tightening. All the Melchett report could offer Rawle and his fellow hippy entrepreneurs was the vaguest prospect of official support: ‘There is still scope for considering limited public assistance to free festivals … We propose to give further thought to how this might be done.’ By the time the report came out, Melchett had been transferred from the Department of the Environment to the Department of Industry, which had no responsibility for festivals.
In August 1976, 1977 and 1978, a People’s Free Festival was staged somewhere in southern England, but without government backing and with increasingly effective opposition from local councils, landowners and the police. Attendances dwindled: to 1,000, then 500, then 300 people. Rawle became less involved. ‘The government missed a huge opportunity to use the energy of the hippies,’ he said, getting up from his armchair and pacing his darkening living room. ‘Why didn’t bloody Roy Jenkins call me in and talk to me?’
In Watchfield a few weeks earlier, before I visited the pub, I walked out to the festival site. It was late August, thirty years exactly since the last day of the festival. But a business park had been built between the village and the airfield, full of high-tech companies unimaginable in the Britain of 1975. When I got to the festival site, there was nothing but ploughed-up stubble. The buildings had all gone. The closest I came to a relic of the festival was a bleached old wooden box with hippyish lettering that I found in a clump of weeds. The same corner of the site had been leased to a mobile-phone company for a fat humming aerial.
Yet the festival had left more than memories. ‘There used to be a lot of hippy travellers on the airfield in the eighties,’ said the first person I approached in the business park. He shrugged and pointed beyond the airfield: ‘There’s still a hippy festival at West Mill Farm.’
The farm was at the bottom of a lane of dusty nettles. The sign by the entrance was also in hippyish letters. Beside the farmyard two small wind turbines turned in the hot breeze. In one of the farm buildings I found a middle-aged man with a ponytail. ‘We do horticultural therapy here for people who’ve had mental-health problems,’ he said. I asked about the hippy festival I’d been told about. ‘There’s a gathering for Druids behind the farm every year,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘It lasts for three or four days. It’s been going on for years. They never cause any trouble.’ I mentioned the 1975 festival and suggested it had established a local hippy tradition. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘’75 was the first of the big green gatherings.’
He gave me a phone number for the owner of the farm, Adam Twine. Twine remembered only a little about the event – ‘I was fourteen then’ – but he explained that his family had leased the old airfield site for farming, on and off, for decades. His father had been running the farm at the time of the 1975 festival. ‘I’m sure he was really fed up with it,’ Twine said. ‘Dad certainly wasn’t sympathetic to those ideals.’ Yet Twine himself had followed a different political path. He had become an anti-nuclear activist in the late seventies and early eighties. More recently, he had run for Parliament as a Green Party candidate. Now he was planning to turn the gusty old festival site into a wind farm. There had been opposition from some of the villagers, but he said he was undeterred. The local press had reported that he ‘proposed painting the turbines in rainbow hues’. In a stony field in Oxfordshire some essence of the Albion Free State lived on.
11
Margaret and the Austrians
In 1975, Airey Neave had more success with another campaign he organized. This time, it was not against a hippy festival in his constituency; it was one that offered a bigger prize – the Conservative Party leadership.
Despite his general election defeat in October 1974, his second in a year and his third in four such contests, Ted Heath had not resigned. Labour’s tiny majority, the ongoing economic crisis and the imminent referendum on EEC membership all helped convince him to continue as party leader, in the belief that the country would soon need him again as prime minister. His stubbornness and self-belief did the rest. But Neave and many other Conservatives were less persuaded. Four days after the election, the executive of the 1922 Committee, the party’s most powerful internal body, voted unanimously that there should be a leadership contest.
Neave was a long-standing enemy of Heath: they had fallen out in the fifties, depending on which account you believe, either over Heath’s lack of sympathy for Neave’s sometimes delicate health or over Heath’s poor estimation of Neave’s political ethics and a
bilities. Neave was also a member of the 1922 executive. So was Edward du Cann, another Heath enemy and Neave’s first choice as the next party leader, but he was a merchant banker with a problematic City reputation, and he eventually decided not to stand.
Neave’s next preference for leader was Keith Joseph. Heath’s former secretary of state for health and social security was now an increasingly outspoken critic of the economic policies of the Heath government and its post-war predecessors. Dark-eyed and nervily handsome, Joseph was an intense, brilliant speaker and thinker. He had taken over from Enoch Powell as the public face of the anti-Keynesian, pro-market movement that was building on the fringes of British Conservative politics. But, like Powell, Joseph was an iconoclast who did not know when to stop. Nine days after the October 1974 election, with his potential as a Tory leader beginning to be seriously discussed in Westminster and the media, Joseph gave a speech in Birmingham, where Powell had made his ‘rivers of blood’ speech six years earlier. ‘The balance of our population, our human stock, is threatened,’ Joseph warned with similar portentousness. ‘Single parents from [the relatively poor] classes four and five are now producing a third of all live births.’ The pro-eugenics implications of the speech caused uproar in the press. Joseph was accused, not entirely accurately, of advocating compulsory contraception, even sterilization for the working class. For a month afterwards, he alternated between trying to explain his position and trying to apologize. All the while, his reputation for poor political judgement and intellectual contortions grew. On 21 November, he withdrew from the leadership contest.