Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (41 page)

As the date drew nearer, the campaign to oppose the cruise missile deployment intensified. Polaris, Britain’s own nuclear deterrent, was carried in submarines under the sea and, unlike
land-based nuclear missiles, was almost invulnerable to a Soviet first strike – and equally inaccessible to protesters (even to those who turned up outside the submarines’ base on the
Gare Loch). In contrast, the cruise missiles had a wholly landlocked base, Greenham Common, in the extremely accessible home county of Berkshire. What’s more, they were American missiles,
operated by the American armed forces, and therefore a focus for anti-American sentiment which had strengthened markedly since the election of Ronald Reagan, whose critics depicted him as a
gun-toting cowboy (a role he had played in his days as a Hollywood actor). Those who feared the worst from him were not reassured by his description in March 1983 of the Soviet Union as the
‘evil empire’,
nor by the ill-judged joke he made during an off-air soundcheck for his weekly radio address in August the following year: ‘My fellow
Americans, I am pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.’

While the British government welcomed cruise as a sign that, if the Warsaw Pact attacked Western Europe, the continent would not be left to its fate by a United States seeking to save itself,
opponents turned the argument on its head. They maintained that the deployment of cruise meant that for the United States a nuclear war would not mean mutually assured destruction, because a
Republican administration in Washington might be prepared to respond to Soviet aggression by turning Europe into a nuclear wasteland in an intermediate-range missile exchange, while the air that
Americans breathed remained uncontaminated. Reagan could prove careless with European lives if he did not have to worry about those of his own citizens. Might he even use Greenham Common to launch
a pre-emptive first strike on the Soviet Union?

This concern could easily have been addressed by the British government insisting upon a ‘dual key’, which would prevent the United States from launching the cruise missiles without
British authority. Washington had offered Britain a dual-key arrangement if it agreed to pay for the missiles.
¹⁰
But if they remained under American
ownership, then the owner alone would have the sole right to fire them. To Thatcher, this seemed perfectly reasonable. Always one for a saving, she did not want the additional cost of buying the
missiles – she trusted US intentions and, additionally, did not want to create an awkward situation for West Germany’s incoming Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, who was insistent that West
Germany should not have a dual key on the Pershing II missiles, precisely because his country had renounced its own nuclear ambitions (while being happy to host America’s nuclear
arsenal).
¹¹
Her desire to help Kohl and, more especially, her unclouded faith in Reagan put her at odds with her own electorate. She was embarrassed
when Reagan repaid her faith in October 1983 by launching an invasion of the troubled Commonwealth Caribbean island of Grenada without properly forewarning her, in an operation the United Nations
General Assembly condemned as a ‘fragrant violation of international law and of the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of that state’.
¹²
Privately, Thatcher was furious with Reagan.
¹³
Nevertheless, she still insisted that Britain did not need a finger on the
cruise trigger. Unimpressed, an opinion poll in November 1983 suggested 94 per cent of Britons wanted a dual key.
¹⁴

It was in that month that the cruise missiles arrived at Greenham Common airbase, two miles from Newbury, where for the past two years a women’s ‘peace camp’ had sprawled along
the perimeter fence. The idea had all but
come accidentally. Led by Ann Pettitt and Helen John, a group of thirty-six women (and four men) from South Wales calling themselves
‘Women for Life on Earth’ had organized a Cardiff to Greenham Common march in August 1981 and on reaching the base ten days later, on 5 September, had chained themselves to the
perimeter fence. Having made their suffragette-style point, the original intention had been to go home again. But, infuriated by the derisive attitude of the airbase’s commander, some of them
opted to stay. As weeks passed into months and publicity for their vigil developed, they attracted followers and assistance from a broadening pool of well-wishers. Indeed, the breadth of support
risked undermining their parallel commitment to feminism. To defend this, they announced that they preferred to communicate only with female journalists and officials and, when it came to legal
action, engaged only female lawyers. In February 1982, they expelled the small number of men who had joined them. Partly, this was the ultimate expression of the feminist ethos uniting the women,
but it was also out of a desire to ensure the protest stayed peaceful – to limit the targets for police brutality, as well as in anticipation of the innate aggressiveness of the Y-chromosome.
Tellingly, the peace camp’s two rules were ‘non-violence’ and ‘no men overnight’.
¹⁵

The dilemma for hostile newspaper reporting was whether to portray the peace women as lesbians or as truant wives and mothers. In reality, the two positions were not necessarily contradictory
– as was shown by Helen John, who left a husband and five children in South Wales in order to remain at Greenham, where she began an affair with another woman. While the same-sex arrangements
put many women off, the reality was later expressed by another mainstay of the camp, Rebecca Johnson, who pointed out that ‘Greenham wouldn’t have existed much beyond the first couple
of years if it hadn’t been for the lesbians’, because it was they who, being less likely to have dependents to care for, were most able to commit to years of on-site
protest.
¹⁶
They were also more likely to be at ease in a women-only commune.

As a foil to the increasingly bold make-up and power-dressing that was defining mainstream women’s fashion at the time, the hippy demeanour of the Greenham women provided the
decade’s most startling aesthetic contrast. To its admirers, their peace camp was a symbol of female empowerment and an energizing example of civil activism over supine political apathy
– an apathy that appeared to sedate millions even when the future of the planet was at stake. But while the camp attracted women from grandmothers to housewives to students, the face it
offered to the outside world was too narrowly drawn, in its woolly-hatted, make-up-free apotheosis, to appeal to the sex as a whole, let alone to blokes. Heseltine’s subsequent assessment
was: ‘The Greenham women were their own worst enemies, in that no matter
how much people sympathized with parts of their message, they found no inclination to identify
with the messengers.’
¹⁷
Equally, the sacrifice of creature comforts attracted both admiration and repulsion. Abuse from drunken local youths
was accompanied by animosity from local residents who resented having their common turned into a squalid shanty town. Besides tents, the women lived in makeshift ‘benders’ of
transparent plastic sheeting propped up by poles and branches. Some local pubs and shops began refusing to serve the women, who, often having gone for weeks without washing facilities and proper
sanitation, were accused of nauseating regular customers. Newbury was treated to protest marches festooned with banners declaiming ‘“Peace Women” You Disgust Us’ and
‘Clean Up and Get Out’. From May 1982, Newbury District Council began trying to evict the women from the land it owned, but found itself unable to prevent them from moving to other
stretches around the base. Indeed, the eviction attempts proved propaganda coups for the women, who were seen peacefully resisting the bulldozers employed to raze their encampments. They also
realized that taking repeated legal actions against their tormentors bought valuable time while their lawyers argued that they were legitimately disporting themselves on common ground.

Given the conditions and the provocations, the women’s staying power was remarkable. Spirits were kept up by huddling around the camp fire to sing such numbers as ‘I Am a Witness to
Your War Crimes’, ‘Take the Toys from the Boys’ and, a particular favourite, ‘You Can’t Kill the Spirit / She is Like a Mountain, Old and Strong’. The various
camps constructed around the airbase’s exit gates quickly developed their own traditions. One was strictly vegan and some were militantly lesbian, while others welcomed the women’s
children or catered for religious groups like the Quakers. The protesters ranged from those who stayed for a day to those who stayed for nineteen years. This, too, was both a strength and a
weakness. Resisting hierarchical power structures, the women tried to make their decisions in as egalitarian a way as possible, which inevitably led to resentment when those who had been there for
years were contradicted by those who were just staying for the weekend. Arguments raged over whether anyone should be allowed to smoke a joint in the comfort of their own bender, with Helen John
arguing that it was just the sort of illegal activity that threatened the credibility of the protest.
¹⁸
Breaking the law was not done lightly and
months passed before the women cut through the fence and trespassed where the missile silos were being built, on New Year’s Day 1983. Without apparent irony, the women were charged with
‘breaching the peace’. When, in August 1982, a group of them attempted to occupy a sentry-box and were bound over to keep the peace for a year by Newbury magistrates, they refused to
agree to do so and found themselves spending a fortnight in Holloway prison.

The frequent bolt-cutter attacks on the fence and the attempted break-ins that followed proved to be no more than an irritant to those charged with keeping the base
secure, though they were potentially dangerous antics: the missile silos had armed guards and the prospect of a moving target – potentially unidentifiable in the dark as a woman, a saboteur
or a spy – risked unintentionally creating an Emily Davison-style martyr for the cause. Perhaps this was one reason why the guards had the sense not to shoot. Far more successful from the
perspective of gaining publicity were the mass protests. The most spectacular of these came on Sunday, 12 December 1982, when between thirty and fifty thousand women held hands to enclose the
entire nine-mile perimeter in an ‘Embrace the Base’ demonstration. Many carried candles and torches and festooned the wire fencing with flowers and teddy bears. The press coverage of
this intensely symbolic act varied according to the stance of the newspaper. The
Daily Express
’s line was ‘Russian TV cameras roll as 30,000 women ring missile base in
anti-nuclear protest’.
¹⁹

Publicity of whatever kind was one thing, either changing the mind of the government or, failing that, simply changing the government was quite another. The reality was that the women’s
appeal was entirely lost on the Cabinet and the alternative, the Labour Party, remained in the electoral doldrums, many of its more ‘moderate’ supporters actually regarding its
commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament as a cause of its distress. When, in May 1983, the polling company NOP asked respondents whether ‘Britain should give up its nuclear arms even if
other countries do not give them up’, only 16 per cent answered in the affirmative. Among Conservative and Alliance voters, opposition to unilateralism was overwhelming. Even almost 60 per
cent of Labour voters opposed it.
²⁰

Meanwhile, the optimistic hope among the women campaigners that they could physically prevent the cruise missiles from arriving exemplified the amateurishness of their approach. The planned date
and arrangements for the missiles’ arrival were leaked to the
Guardian
by Sarah Tisdall, a clerical worker at the Foreign Office. The
Guardian
printed its scoop and Tisdall was
subsequently identified and ended up serving four months in jail for breaching the Official Secrets Act. Yet even such disclosures failed to halt the weapons’ delivery. The government merely
changed the date. On 14 November 1983, having spent months planning for the moment when they would prevent the deadly arsenal’s arrival, the peace women were obliviously sitting round a
carrot and broccoli stew when they heard on the radio that the missiles were in place behind them.

Rather than pack up and go home, the women switched tactics. They may not have prevented the weapons from coming but they were determined to disrupt their deployment on manoeuvres (like the
SS-20s, cruise missiles could be mounted on lorries and, if need be, fired from untargeted
locations). By making life difficult in this way, the protesters hoped to persuade
potentially less resolute European governments to renege on their own commitment to accept the missiles for fear of encouraging similar unrest. Military convoys taking the missile launchers on
practice manoeuvres out on Salisbury Plain had to run the gauntlet of women trying to block the gates. When the convoys invariably got out of the base – the women often omitted to block side
exits – they found their every movement being monitored by ‘Cruisewatch’ volunteers who lay in wait, morning, noon and night, trying to follow them, disrupt their passage and
announce that they had discovered where the ‘secret’ launch sites were located. The Cruisewatchers kept in contact by Citizens’ Band radio, alerting each other to a convoy with
the signal ‘Calling all herbs, calling all herbs!’
²¹
Their success was not in preventing the practice deployments but in causing
irritation to their organizers, keeping the authorities alert to the danger of road accidents, and encouraging the fear that if the Cruisewatch monitors kept lists of the missile launchers’
destinations, the information could be leaked – potentially even to the Soviets.

No such obstruction was attempted – not least because it would not have been tolerated – in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, in May 1983, a deputation of the Greenham women arrived in
Moscow. They hoped to impress upon the Soviet authorities how passionately they desired to end the arms race. The result, however, was a propaganda coup neither for the women nor for the Kremlin.
By turning up with Olga Medvedkova, a Russian dissident well known to the KGB, the women demonstrated in equal measure their courage and their naivety about the regime’s attitude to dissent.
Far from being treated as serious players in search of a solution to the arms race, they received instead a distinctly cool reception from the wary, state-appointed, vice chairman of the Soviet
Peace Committee.
²²
Long subjected to the trite jibe that they should go and take their protest to Russia, the women had finally done so – and
come back perplexed.