The Battle of the Beanfield took place over several hours , 30 years ago today on the afternoom of Saturday 1 June 1985. When Wiltshire police prevented a vehicle convoy of several hundred New Age Travelers, known as the 'Convoy' and referred to as the ' Peace Convoy' by the media, from setting up at the 11th Stonehenge Free Festival in Wiltshire, England.
It resulted in innocent people, women and children being violently beaten up in their own homes, after 12 years of gathering in the same place of celebration, by the combined forces of the state, who armed with shields and batons ran savagely amok. There was carnage and mayham as the marginalised and dispossessed were brutally targeted by a police forces under the auspices of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Government, were allowed to get seriously out of control, trying to suppress a peoples thirst for freedom, this quasi military force carried out serious abuses of their power with an unrelenting frenzied brutality following similar attacks in the year on the miners.
A horrible time, like today, when people who live on societies edges are attacked simply for being different. Women and their babies were left showered with glass after the police had smashed up their vehicles. It would leave over 116 travelers hospitalised. and 420 of their number arrested ( few arrested were ever prosecuted) as their homes were systematically looted, smashed and burnt with their possessions stolen..
A dark day for British justice and civil liberties. 30 years later people still suffering the consequences , and bearing the scars of this dark passage in history. But the stones remain.
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