1985

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June 1st. Battle of the Beanfield

Click here for a contempory report and photographs 
by Alan Lodge on his own excellent website

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Savernake Forest

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June 21st. Summer solstice.
Stonehenge free festival settles at the iron age hill fort of Westbury Hill.

A FEW REMINISCENCESFROM WESTBURY / BRATTON HILL-FORT: Interestingly this is hard to remember as a whole, but I'll try for a few fleeting recollections.....I know it pissed down extensively but being on a hill top the mud wasn't too bad. Just down the road Glastonbury - a weird affair of which we knew little, was turning to what soon became legendary has a horrendous quagmire (yet to be beaten, so they say). At the time it was just "that other do" that was on while we went to The Plain over midsummer. Like I say, we didn't pick up on too much about it but word filtered through that it was a shithole with people up to their knees, getting trenchfoot, amd all the rest. We met a chap from Scotland - fairly out of the way in Scotland I think. He just had some vague notion about there being something on in that part of the country at that time of year - knew nothing about the trouble that had gone on, but he was having a good time - sid it was like a giant tinker's fair - and soon found himself a nice warm bus to hang out in. We didn't see much of him in our family sized house-tent after that. AS some of you may know, the "festival" / gathering / whatever was above the White Horse of Westbury, so you could scramble down the slope out onto the surface of the horse, and pretty darn steep it was at that. The eye, which is about fifteen feet across is raised a bit , with a kind of kerbstone to mark out it's edges so you can perch on that, so we had a go at that. Blimey, what a time we did have. One night when every had gone to sleep out of our little group of people I went looking for life. The only action was a big bonfire, courtesy of the Wessex Hells Angels who had a load of doors from somewhere which they were hurling on. Mostly they looked like Vikings and were having a good old chuckle, but I didn't really fancy getting round their fire for the night in case people got funny. One of them was, I think, a bloke called John Mikkelson, reputed to be England's only black Hell's Angel at the time. I remember he had his colours on the back of a camoflage jacket. A couple of years later he was killed in a barney with the Police somewhere. Actually he wasn't in the Wessex chapter - he was from Windsor HA because they had a huge funeral procession through Windsor for him. Anyway, I digress. The whole time we were there we did all right for dope, which was a good job in the circumstances. We saw a lot of the inside of our tent. At one point this lad from Leicester turned up - someone we knew, up for a party. I just remember him picking his tent up and pouring gallons of water out of it. Poor sod - he was gutted. But his spirit was good. I do remember leaving the site at one point, and we picked up this bloke hitching of the site. He was one the out to lunch weirdos, really, who hung out with the convoy at that time - many of whom disappeared from the scene after that tumultuous 12 months or so (Beanfield in '85 to Stony Cross in '86). I don't think they were together enough to stay with it after that. He had no shoes, feet covered with sores, no pants, no arse in his trousers. A fucking state, all in all. Told us he was sure he was going to get a girlfriend. We weren't so sure. Anyway, we got back onto the site in time to get rained on again so all was well. Some geezer turned up at night with these flares - big dangerous ones. He said he had army maps of the plain as well - can't remember if we saw them or not. The sort of maps where you can see everything basically - super OS maps but OS maps have all the stuff like arms dumps, jails, training camps etc. removed from them - quite a bit in fact. Anyway, he said his brother was a squaddie and he had these military type flares which he was trying to get us to fire off at the helicopters which were coming over low quite a lot. It looked quite Viet Naam -y in a way - choppers, floodlights, mud,horribles-ness etc. We told him he could shoot them off from beside his own car if he fancied it, being as they were flying really low, with searchlights and cameras and all that ( did they have cameras? I dunno now - probably) Anyway, we reckoned him for a stooge of some sort. After we'd been basically sitting in a tent in the pissing rain for about two days, getting smashed on squidgy black a band played. Bloody hell, we'd have sat through anything by then. It was something about tentacles - that's all we knew. Osric's Tentacles, it was, followed by Hawkwind. The lighting was a car with it's headlights turned on. Can't remember much about the music. Can't remember anything about the Solstice - it was grey and the weather didn't clear at all- that much I do know. At some point in the proceedings I saw Sid Rawle - the News of the World's public enemy number one at the time, with a huge pile of dole claim forms handing them out to all and sundry. The buses up there were a terrible mess of course, and later that year in Wales (Llandysul) they looked fearsome still, and the bitterness had really set in by then. They kept going though, for another year until Stony Cross in Hampshire, when they were nearly all impounded and , I believe, destroyed away from the gaze of their owners. After that, the feral elements of the convoy had disappeared to be replaced by a politer, shinier version for a while, although maybe that's changed. I can't remember leaving Westbury, how I got home, anything. I think there was a lot of change from that point really. The next year was the first year that Stonehenge got added on to the side of Glastonbury. Westbury was the wettest, greyest festival I've been to but we had a laugh and I'm glad I went. Cheers. Bob.