Welsh women whose 150-mile march began a world-famous protest against nuclear weapons
It was in 1981 that a group of people, mostly women, set off from Cardiff to protest against the siting of cruise missiles at Greenham Common. Ruth Mosalski looks back at that historic day, ahead of an event recreating the original march being held on Mon
ON AUGUST 27, 1981, about 40 people started a march from Cardiff to RAF Greenham Common, near Newbury in Berkshire.
The group, almost totally made up of women, was against the storing of American cruise missiles on British land.
The camp they formed when they arrived became Greenham Peace Camp. That camp, their legacy, remained there until it was disbanded in 2000, and even outlasted the missiles which were removed in 1991.
On Monday, part of the historic march will be recreated and some of the original walkers will take part once again.
The march was planned by four women, all living in Wales. After not getting the attention they wanted for their cause, they took more direct action.
The night before arriving at Greenham Common, they made a diversion and bought chains and padlocks, and four of the women chained themselves to the fence at the base.
For years to come different women took their places at Greenham in a nuclear protest none of the original members could have imagined.
It all started in a cottage in Bettws, Ammanford, in 1980.
Karmen Thomas had got to know Ann Pettitt beforehand, but it was the dedication of the four organisers who meticulously planned the walk that gained it its place in history.
In an era without mobile phones or social media, it took up to nine months to organise. Fed up of being asked “and who are you calling on behalf of?” their group was known as Women for Life on Earth.
From that cottage, they decided the route, stopping points and arranged the van to carry luggage, and the car carrying supplies.
They set up a telephone tree – now a thing consigned to history – where each woman was given a message to pass on to three others, each of those with three others to call and tell.
Although their initial plans were vague, the protesters say what they really wanted was a debate with the Government.
Their original plan was to complete the walk to the then littleknown US camp in 10 days. The march was a protest against storing cruise missiles, controlled by the US Government, on British land.
The base was eventually home to 96 nuclear cruise missiles, bombs 15 times as powerful as the one which destroyed Hiroshima.
It was no coincidence, they say, that a number of those involved were young mums. Sue Lent, now a Cardiff councillor, pushed her baby son Chris the whole walk. She says her involvement was as a young mum concerned about the world her son would grow up in.
It was a women’s initiative, with women of all ages, teenagers up to elderly women all taking part.
They left from Cardiff on August 27, 1981, seen off by supporters.
Some, like Sue, only intended to take the first few steps with them but ended up completing much more.
The night before, as they gathered in Cardiff, Karmen remembers being concerned if anyone would turn up.
“People didn’t have phones then so you couldn’t just phone them up. I remember saying to Ann, if no-one else turns up, we’ll walk on our own.”
They would walk 10 to 12 miles a day, and were hosted at stops en route, sometimes at rallies or events.
Sue remembers only planning to complete the first day to Newport.
She had read about the event months before, but a friend reminded her the night before and she decided to go along.
She knew no-one on the walk before she arrived and had son Chris, who had turned one the month before, in his pushchair.
“By the end of the first day I did feel it would be possible to do the whole thing because the women were very supportive. There were three others who did it with a baby in their pushchair,” she remembers.
She got the bus back from Newport that night and packed belongings for her and Chris and rejoined the other women.
“It was quite hard work some of the time as we walked 10 to 12 miles a day, I’m not sure I could do that now but there were women there who are my age now doing it.
“Having a child, I didn’t just have myself to think about,” she said.
She remembers being at the back with Chris, and other walkers coming back to help her, to carry him or take the pushchair for a while.
Karmen remembers the women getting on exceptionally well.
“It was an amazing group really because we all got on. Even though most of us hadn’t met before, we gelled and we were very equal in what we did.”
But as they neared the site, they weren’t getting the attention they wanted. They went to Fleet Street to try get coverage from the UK press but failed so stepped up their action.
“We decided we would have to do something a bit more drastic and that was quite a big decision for most of us who weren’t activists as such,”
said Karmen.
“The idea was some of us would chain ourselves to the fences – it was a big decision. There was a worry about the reaction because it was an American base and we didn’t know if we would be arrested.
“Despite the worry, I thought it was the right thing to do.”
The walkers reached the Greenham Common air base on September 5, having gone through Newport, Chepstow, passing the American arms depot at Caerwent, where stocks of chemical weapons were held. The route then took them through Bristol, Bath, Melksham, Devizes, Marlborough and Hungerford to Newbury. A detour was made to the US base and tactical nuclear weapons store at Welford.
Sue remembers getting there and it being unclear what would happen next. It was a hot summer, and some decided to spend the night there, hoping the camp commander would speak to them.
Their letter read: “Some of us have brought our babies with us our entire distance. We fear for the future of these children. We fear for the future of all our children, and for the future of the living world which is the basis of all life”.
They described the nuclear arms race as “the greatest threat ever faced by the human race and our living planet”.
The camp grew and remained but both Sue and Karmen had to return to their other lives, at least temporarily.
Some of the original women had taken holiday from work for the walk but had to return. Others had their children to take home.
But both returned regularly over the years. In the October of the first year, both marched from Greenham to London to a CND rally.
Ann spoke on stage and that, Sue says, was a key moment as in the days before social media, the internet or mobile phones, it was a way to get the message out to a wider audience.
Never did it have a continuous campaign group or leaders.
Karmen said: “We didn’t own it, other women came in and they from all over the country, even internationally.
“The march was very important and over the years, the history of Greenham Common has taken away from the fact that it was ordinary women who put this together in an amateur way.
“We weren’t Welsh, we were incomers but we were involved in our communities. The support we had from women in Wales was amazing.
“It was something that sparked people. Sometimes something comes along and you don’t know why it connected with people, this was that.
“Yes there were CND marches everywhere but why this connected, I don’t know. But it connected with a part of society and it continued to do that for the whole time it was up there.”
Karmen has no doubt that the founders being young mothers was a key part of their motivation.
At the time, she says the Government was handing out a pamphlet called “Protect and Survive” advising people what to do in the wake of a nuclear attack. It included chapters like “choosing a fall-out room” and “life under fall-out conditions”.
“The whole thing was ridiculous,” said Karmen. “As mothers, there was the worry, what would you do if your children were in school? Or out?”
Sue agrees, it was becoming a mother which had changed her mindset.
“The women who planned it were young mothers who were concerned about their children. I had been involved in politics and then the Labour party but there was a sort of change having had my own child. On one hand it was harder to get out to political meetings and you felt the political world was quite male but at the same time, this was very much something for women. There were grandmothers, young mothers and young women and people were very fearful.
“A lot of women thought ‘what sort of world am I bringing a child into?’. And the older women thought while they may not be around, ‘what kind of legacy we are leaving?’.”
Through mutual friends Sue stayed involved, taking trips to Greenham over the years and was there on its last day.
The journey for those who stayed wasn’t easy.
“In later years, it became very dangerous for the women up there, baliffs would come and take their staff and throw it in skips. At one point they started removing the barriers and making the area much smaller,” said Sue.
“They didn’t know when somebody was going to come and physically remove them. There was examples of direct action when cruise missiles came there would be barricades and they would be manhandles to get the lorries through.”
She remembers women sleeping in the road on nights they thought the missiles may arrive. Their campaign worked, they got their publicity.
In September 1981, Embrace the Base saw 30,000 women held hands around the perimeter fence and two years later the Greenham women and their supporters created a 14-mile human chain.
Parts of the fences were cut and it meant visits from bailiffs or attempts to close the camp down.
“Who would have thought within a year or two it would have been a household name? We got a mention on the Archers and Eastenders. Greenham Common became a thing everyone knew about and part of public consciousness,” says Sue.
Both women say they were proud of their role.
Sue said: “It is definitely one of the things I am proudest of. Obviously I have done a lot in politics in terms of being a councillor and deputy leader of Cardiff but that’s the thing I am most proud of.”