Jenny Lloyd

‘We were very embedded in Exeter Labour Party and there were obviously these big national rallies, so we went up and then Kate… Becca was in a pushchair. When I was in the Labour party, I organised… I was a very good organiser, so I organised our area deliveries, um… was I… I think I must have been secretary of the ward at one point, um… I did go to the big general committee meetings and… oh we collect… we… in the minors strike we collected… we were collection point for food and provisions and we drove those to Maerdy in Wales and then in… I went to Greenham three times. Once when it was a women’s only joining… we linked hands round the base . Um… that was just women cus I remember meeting  Peggy Seager cus she’s come and sung in Exeter. I think she stayed in our house with Ewan MacColl… the bed is since scrapped (laughs)… take it to a museum… Peggy Seager slept here! Um, and then there was a big (inaudible) with the labour party… that was mixed, huge rally but particularly… what I think it must have been mid 80’s… might have a look at the… ah yes it was ’85. The Greenham women… I don’t know what group… what organisation… must have been next to CND… they invited a group of us to go up to the base of the day because they were all going off to a conference, um… we went up Kate must have been 10. Yeah, Kate came and there was a group of women and we took our daughters although there is one boy in that picture, and we had a picnic, we sang… and young soldiers came to the fence and talked to us and one of them put his rainbow CND badge on his leg and… I’ve got a photo of that (laughs). And we talked to them, so it was completely different, um… feeling of being there because, um… we felt quite proud that we’d been invited to do this job for the day, so this place wasn’t empty, so that felt quite significant somehow. Although… what was it, we just… whether we drove in cars or a minibus I can’t even remember that… but there we were. But it was always trying to……. follow things through from how you lived… what you did in public, the… the… the sort of… symbolic acts but actually then you… you live… you lived your domestic life according to those principles as well.

Notes:
Find out more about the Welsh Minors Strikes – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-68205379

The Greenham Women
From 1981 for almost 20 years, Greenham Common became home to thousands of women acting in political resistance to the nuclear arms race, to patriarchy and violence in all its forms and to the claiming of British common land to store US missiles.

Find out more at https://greenhamwomeneverywhere.co.uk