Alison Williams

Transcript by Jayde Stevenson

From Dartington… um… I’d joined Dartington College Women’s Group and… we… basically organised buses to go up to Greenham Common… and we’d stay there, umm… we’d stay there in a little caravan, sort of four of five of us, or sometimes we were sort of loaned houses nearby, umm… I had two children by then, umm… and then there were various projects… art projects going on… umm… at… that Dartington College students participated in. And at that time Totness had a women’s centre, so… and there was a peace group and… so… there were regular buses and huge groups of women used to go up and umm… join in on certain dates. We had a Reflect the Base date which I think was 1981 and the idea was that women would hold up mirrors to reflect back the sort of vibes or evil back into the base.

And then I remember about a year later there was an Embrace the Base, and women joined hands and entirely encircled the base and there was singing and keening – they used to do keening, the ancient sort of wailing. They’d taken the decision by then that it was going to be a completely women’s only, umm… uh demonstration, although in the early days I remember going with my husband and of course there were boy children, I took my children. Umm… so on that occasion there were thirty thous… that was 1982, um… I think it was the 12^th November 1982 or it might have been December, um, there were thirty thousand women there and this was back in the days when you know, pre-internet, pre-social media, no one I knew had a phone… I didn’t even have a landline, so it was all word of mouth and written messages, you know, snail mail basically so it was quite a phenomenal achievement. 

And there was a kind of thread… I’ll say the word thread – it’s a bit of a pun – running through the demonstrations because spiders’ webs figured quite largely in that they are individually the strands are quite weak, but when they come together, they have very high, umm tensile strength I think. So that was the idea – that if women came together and linked together, we could show that it wasn’t acceptable, umm to have missiles based on UK soil.

 Notes:

Greenham Women’s Peace Camp
Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp was a series of protest camps established to protest against nuclear weapons being placed at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire, England.

In 1981 at Reflect the Base, 50,000 women at Greenham encircled the base holding up mirrors to “reflect back the military to themselves.

In December 1982 more than 30,000 women gathered at Greenham to join hands around the base at the ‘Embrace the Base’ event. Find out more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenham_Common_Women%27s_Peace_Camp

https://womenslibrary.org.uk/2021/08/18/the-greenham-common-womens-peace-camp/