Probably most women in the UK know the fear of walking alone, both at night and in the day. For me, the profound, almost humiliating fear first found its way into my brain when I came across to England from the Isle of Man in 1978, as a naive 18 year old. I’d travelled from a rural island of familiar faces and low crime to a world where women were shockingly vulnerable and denigrated. Within a few short years I would travel a journey through fear of the Yorkshire Ripper, a Reclaim The Night march, Greenham Common and miners’ strike galas. And two evenings ago my daughter was at Clapham Common.
Police chase women to make arrests, Greenham Common c.1982 (Photo: Eleanor Scott)
Yorkshire Ripper
In the late 1970s women and girls were facing the reign of terror - that’s how it felt - of the Yorkshire Ripper. We were also facing an incompetent police force that was intent, it seemed, on making the Yorkshire Ripper’s victims take a significant part of the blame.
The message to women was clear - stay in, be good, and keep quiet. I still vividly remember the dark evenings of Newcastle upon Tyne in the winter of 1980, when daylight faded shortly after 4pm. The walk from my bus-stop to my university flat was down a not especially well lit side-road, and I recall at times feeling viscerally exposed and scared. Peter Sutcliffe had yet to be caught and the Ripper was thought then (wrongly, as it turns out) to be from the north-east. We knew by late 1980 that he killed women, and only women, indiscriminately.
Reclaim the Night
I went on my first march - ‘Reclaim the Night’. It would have been around 1979, not too long after Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister. A large crowd of women marched peacefully though noisily through the streets of Newcastle city centre with brightly coloured banners and ribbons and clothes. It felt good. And it felt safe. The police in Newcastle stewarded us sensibly and all was well.
Recent march (Photo: Reclaim The Night)
But there had already been signs of over-zealous policing emerging around these gatherings of women elsewhere. In London in 1978, a ‘Reclaim the Night’ march saw casualties among the women attending after a ‘clash’ with police officers.
Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, was finally apprehended in January 1981, more by good fortune than detective work; but women didn’t suddenly and miraculously feel safe. And many of us felt insulted by the feting of the Police at the time of the arrest - especially as the Police were now becoming, more and more it seemed, part of the problem.
Miners’ Strike
My awareness of antagonistic policing in England began in the 1980s as a witness to both Greenham Common and the miners’ strike. I helped out in 1984 at a couple of benefit galas in Newcastle for the miners and their families in the north-east, and these gigs themselves were uneventful in terms of Police presence, although one was particularly memorable for the juxtaposition on the programme of a colliery brass band and the Poison Girls. It must have been fun backstage.
We were all acutely aware of the footage of what was happening at the picket lines up at the collieries. The Police had become strikingly aggressive, against their own communities, their own fathers and brothers. Who was giving the orders? How had the culture of policing changed so rapidly and catastrophically? Many pointed to the Thatcher Government which had come to power in 1979 - and admiringly. The ‘Iron Lady’ was born.
Greenham Common
Women from Newcastle upon Tyne at Greenham Common (photo: Eleanor Scott)
By then I had been down to visit the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common for a weekend vigil and protest. This would have been in about 1982. I’ve written about it here, from the perspective that not all the masculinity there was in-your-face toxic, with the exception of the Police, ie the local Constabulary who seemed to be shipped in en masse from Newbury and that area of Berkshire. I didn’t personally pick up any aggressive vibes from the US airforce personnel or their families, or from the RAF Regiment, or even the MOD Police. It was the regular ‘local’ Police who were heavy-handed, arrest-happy, and far too physical, towards women and in front of small children - often women whose only ‘crime’ was to tie coloured ribbons onto the imposing fences surrounding the bunkers containing American cruise missiles and nuclear warheads, or simply to be there. Again, it seems that the Police had their Thatcher-era orders from on high - and now declassified papers show that Thatcher authorised ‘shoot to kill’ tactics against women peace protesters at Faslane.
The Prime Minister and her Home Secretaries were pulling the strings. The Police were no longer ‘policing by consent’ except as a catch-phrase. They were policing according to the wishes of the Prime Minister, and spun by a right-wing press intent on making the public think that the over-policed were themselves the perpetrators of crime, including and especially vulnerable woman.
That this cultural paradigm shift was tied in with the ascendancy of the first female PM of the UK is arguably a testament to the power of internalised misogyny and the nature of women’s available paths to authority: ‘I must not look weak’. (See also: Cressida Dick; Priti Patel.) It’s a complex and, for women, a painful dynamic, with its twin consequences of causing discomfort around feminist discussion and letting male decision-makers and male agency off the hook. (See: William Whitelaw; Leon Brittan; Douglas Hurd; Boris Johnson; Sadiq Khan.)
Clapham Common
Clapham Common 13th March 2021, Sarah Everard shrine before Police behaviour changed (Photo: Mads Street @StreetMaddy)
I went on to have a daughter and a son, who have both been interested in my history of vigils and protests, especially my Greenham photographs. I became a city councillor in Portsmouth, elected four times running, and participated in many campaigns, vigils and protests in this role. My daughter grew up with this as her normality, in tandem with my being a single parent from when she was five years old. She says I’m ‘strong’; but I think she’s the stronger one, to live as energetically and vociferously as she does in this world where nothing has changed and governments continue to surreptitiously and blatantly dismantle our rights - notably the rights of women to gather in female companionship, for female association, and to peacefully protest about women’s safety and safeguarding.
And I’m proud that my daughter was at Clapham Common on Saturday evening, a short walk from where she lives, to pay her own tribute to Sarah Everard; and to experience at such a bleak time for women the power and strength of that female association there, and to bear witness to the events as they actually happened. She, like many others, saw and recorded the Police’s wildly inappropriate switching of tactics first-hand. Why the sudden change of tactics which soured the atmosphere? Who gave those orders and why? This echoes so much what used to happen at Greenham - one minute women were singing and happy and peaceful, with the Police watching on; the next the Police were charging in for indiscriminate arrests and women (and children) were scattering, screaming, and scared. Have we learned nothing?
In my opinion, if, at Clapham Common, there were (?male) disruptors - which the BBC reports that there were - the Police should have dealt with them, and kept them well away from the women’s peaceful vigil. But to manhandle so very many peaceful women, quietly sitting and standing appropriately distanced in vigil, who were only wanting a brief period of contemplation, just screams to the world that women will always have their voices silenced by male aggression, especially when women are protesting male aggression in the first place.
This quote is from the BBC report:
“Pictures obtained by the Press Association clearly show three instances of officers being forcibly pushed and a van’s wing mirror being deliberately vandalised. Guess what? All three instances involved men, not women.”
It will be a hideous irony if, as was strongly hinted at today in the House of Commons by MPs such as Ian Duncan Smith, female police officers were assaulted by some of these males.
Greenham women with children at Red Gate (photo: Eleanor Scott)
At least what happened at Clapham Common was recorded in detail by hundreds of women and the media. These women’s history already lies before us in full colour footage, complete with audio, and analyses continue at pace.
Greenham sadly was only partially recorded and received relatively little contemporary media interest, and such coverage as there was tended to witch-hunt and denigrate the women with slurs (‘dirty’) and lies (‘bad wives and mothers’). The real and honest Greenham archive has only relatively recently begun to be assembled and collated, and made public.
Clapham Common on the other hand has huge media interest and a vast online archive already exists. The analyses are necessarily complex but they rightly involve looking at the roles not only of police officers on the ground but specifically Police Command, their political bosses, and the culture(s) operating within society, media and politics.
Future history is already made, if we write it with honesty. At least, that is my hope. We hold it in our hands.
Clapham Common women’s vigil for Sarah Everard 13th March 2021 (Photo: Mads Street @StreetMaddy)
Acknowledgements and Sources
Photos: Mads Street @StreetMaddy; and Eleanor Scott’s personal archive
Dominic Casciani 14th March 2021 ‘Sarah Everard: What went wrong at the Clapham vigil?’ BBC News report (quote correct as at 13.00 on 15th March 2021)
Eleanor Scott 2017 Greenham Common Peace Camp - Women's History And Competing Masculinities (this website, Archaeology Blog)
Reclaim The Night website