There once was a camp
An insightful portrait shows ordinary women forcing extraordinary change.
New Zealand film-maker Briar March’s documentary about a British feminist protest movement, which boldly credits its participants with helping to end the Cold War, is an insightful and often moving portrait of ordinary women forcing extraordinary change.
In September 1981, a group of Welsh housewives and mothers trekked 190km in 10 days to rally at RAF Greenham Common airbase, west of London, in protest at the Nato decision to station US nuclear cruise missiles on British soil.
They were frustrated that news of the weapons’ arrival was being drowned out by a royal wedding and the birth of a panda. But when the march failed to generate much attention, these 1980s suffragettes chained themselves to the gates. The plan to “Embrace the base on Sunday, close it down on Monday” then became the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, a live-in protest that spanned two decades – lasting longer than the missiles, the last of which were removed in 1991 after a treaty signed in 1987 – and a cornerstone of the international anti-nuclear movement.
It’s striking how underestimated women were even 40 years ago – so unexpected is the Welsh party’s approach that an airbase guard mistakes them for cleaners. As more joined the female-only camp that unfurled around the perimeter of the military base, posh residents in the area branded them “malingerers and vagrants”, and local pubs refused them service. Archive footage of police violence against this peaceful corps is particularly galling.
But these humble, strongwilled women were impressively plucky. Beleaguered but undeterred, the campers stayed through all seasons (“consider post-nuclear winter – that’s much worse”), and a small contingent got caught up in proper Cold War espionage when a delegation took their views to Moscow.
Aptly narrated by actress, former British Labour MP and stern anti-Thatcherite Glenda Jackson, the film mixes dramatised reconstructions (starring some familiar New Zealand TV faces) with interviews with key players. Among them are then-single-parent millworker Chris Drake, who was motivated to attend her first-ever protest in order to protect her children’s future, and who is visibly moved as she recounts the toll this decision took on her personal life.
Rebecca Johnson, who lived in the camp for five years, discovered a talent for communication, which led to a lifelong commitment to nuclear disarmament and a Nobel Peace Prize.
March’s film, which follows her Pacific-set climate-change doco, There Once Was an Island: Te Henua e Nnoho, is in-depth and enormously informative. The interviewees’ heartfelt stories are sufficiently affecting to render the dramatisations largely superfluous. But it is a fascinating account of how a threat to life on Earth spawned a grassroots movement – the Extinction Rebellion of its era.