Helen John
Peace campaigner and veteran Greenham Common protester
HELEN JOHN, who has died aged 80, was a peace campaigner and one of the first to camp out overnight at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire in protest at plans to site US cruise missiles there.
In late August 1981, Helen John joined a group of around 40 women on a march that took them over 100 miles from Cardiff to the Berkshire airbase. Married with five children, she was then in her forties and had never previously taken a close interest in political movements. “I went through life like a pudding,” she later recalled. “I didn’t know what feminism was.” As the nuclear arms race gathered speed, however, she had been jolted into action.
The group arrived at RAF Greenham Common in the early morning of September 5, and Helen John volunteered to chain herself to the perimeter fence with three other women. As the night fell, the American base commander came over. “As far as I’m concerned, you can stay there as long as you like,” he said.
The group took him at his word. Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, as it became, was to last for 19 years. By the time it disbanded in September 2000 it had morphed into a campaigning ground for broader women’s rights issues, and the missiles that had sparked the original protest had come and gone.
Helen John, too, had moved on. After a failed attempt to bring a legal case against the US government and the chief of staff of the US Armed Forces, in 1994 she decamped to Menwith Hill, another air station near Harrogate, North Yorkshire.
With its white radar domes nestling like giant golf balls in the middle of the countryside, the station served as an intelligencegathering base – or “the eyes and ears of American warfare”, as Helen John put it. Yet the base’s remoteness and the obscurity of its work made it hard for her to generate support for her position.
Whereas around 30,000 people had once rallied to Berkshire, the crowds at Menwith Hill – which she referred to as “Womenwith Hill” – were never so impressive. Quite often Helen John was the sole protester, ensconced in a caravan on the moors. She faced repeated arrest for criminal damage and by the turn of the century had over 30 convictions.
In 2001 she stood as an independent candidate against Tony Blair in Sedgefield. Her campaigning efforts were hampered, however, when she was jailed for three months by Harrogate Magistrates’ Court after breaching a high-security fence at Menwith Hill. In the event, she won 260 votes.
She was born Helen Doyle in Romford on September 30 1937, and worked as a community midwife while her husband, Douglas, worked on oil rigs. In 1981 she set out from Cardiff with her son in a pushchair, leaving the other four children in her husband’s care (after two days, one of the older children met them and collected the baby).
The atmosphere was festive, and Helen John put her nursing skills to good use by conducting regular inspections of the marchers’ feet for blisters. As their protest at the airbase dragged on into winter, however, the weather turned. Many protesters drifted away, and others squabbled over the running of the new camp. By the end of the first year Helen John had ceased to live at Greenham full-time.
Helen John’s marriage to Douglas was dissolved in 1983. While acknowledging the strain that her work had placed on family life, she refused to see herself as a martyr to the cause, observing: “I really do not think the word ‘sacrifice’ is a good one. Because I haven’t sacrificed anything. I’m safeguarding a lot.”
In 2005 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Helen John, born September 30 1937, died November 5 2017