Endeavour To Contain The Field
This work centres around an event in recent British social history that became known as the Battle of The Beanfield. On June 1st 1985 a convoy of up to 140 vehicles carrying new age travellers began making their way through Wiltshire to Stonehenge for the annual free Summer Solstice festival.
The ruling political climate of the day was particularly hostile to ideas and behaviours not aligned with the 80’s capitalist thrust and the travellers had become public enemy number one in the media. Margaret Thatcher’s government had recently ‘defeated’ the miners’ strike and had employed corralling military tactics to disperse the picket lines, using unchecked violence in many battles to ‘break the miners’. Orgreave in June 1984 was seen as ‘a defining, ghastly moment’, when the police emphasis on force was given licence to replace the notional face of the friendly local British bobby. The coercive military tactics used at Orgreave were employed a year later in the confrontation at the beanfield.
1600 policemen were assembled 5 miles outside of Stonehenge armed with an injunction order and permission to use brutal force and violence to exact it. The operation served as part of a 'decommissioning exercise', ruining their homes so their lifestyle became impossible. Most independent eyewitness accounts of the events relate that the police used violent tactics against men, women and children, including pregnant women; and purposely damaged the vehicles used by the convoy.
I began to walk and photograph the route the convoy took on its journey that day, from the camp at Savernake Forest to the site of the beanfield. I made lots of trips and each one contributed to my understanding of the route, the diversions and the geography of the battle. Each visit gave me a head full of questions too.
Further research of press coverage at the British Library, Andy Worthington’s documentary book The Battle of the Beanfield and online groups led me to a small number of survivors of the day’s trauma willing to be photographed and interviewed. These encounters revealed an emotional landscape of memories and their effects upon the lives concerned were still raw and powerfully audible in the accounts they gave to me. Many more survivors responded to my requests for participation in the work, but, citing experiences of mis-representation, chose not to do so.
As I returned to the landscape journeys, my mind was full of moments from my interviews; vivid accounts of the heat and the pace of the day’s unfolding events. Boundary demarcation, barrier apparatus, the natural fauna, the architecture of old money, they all became charged with layered meaning, new ways to scrutinise the fabric of the sites.
Much of my work aims to illustrate our entangled difficulties with memory and its slippery relationship with truth, both of which we hold dear to our sense of self-knowing and human identity. As such, my photographic inquiry here is explored through a combination of approaches: allegorical, environmental, conceptual and portraiture. This work would ideally be viewed in an exhibition form with audio from the interviews accompanying the images, supported by the available video and press articles as reported at the time.