Albion Dreaming (34 page)

For all Wally’s psychedelic dreams, the camp was a drab affair,
with people sitting around doing very little. His followers were very keen on LSD and much time was spent talking about it, having discussions about such ludicrous questions as whether children should be given LSD. Nor was this a theoretical discussion. A couple at the site was actually giving their children LSD on a daily basis, believing it to be the “religious thing to do”.

Giving any non prescribed drug to children is an unwise thing to do; giving them acid is totally irresponsible. Yet it’s a measure of just how committed to the psychedelic lifestyle some LSD users were. In November 1974 Leonard Burkes, a squatter and LSD dealer from Kentish Town pleaded guilty to giving acid to his nine-year-old son. It was also suggested in court that he had given the drug to his four- and six-year-old children. Under questioning Burkes told the police he had been giving LSD to his children since they were four, giving the nine-year-old half a microdot twice a week. The boy was interviewed and said he had been taking LSD for a long time and it made him “happy”.
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Wally and his tribe spent some time at the 1974 Windsor free festival before returning to their Stonehenge camp until the winter. His foot soldiers wintered in a squatted house in nearby Amesbury and Wally retired to Cyprus for the winter. On his return he threw himself headlong into the preparations for the 1975 Stonehenge festival. But it wasn’t to be. In May 1975 he called in at the Amesbury squat and was caught up in a police raid. They said they were looking for an army deserter but instead found Wally with some LSD in his pocket.

Bruce Garrard, in his unpublished
Legacy of Wally Hope
suggests the LSD didn’t even belong to Wally: “The theory goes that there was this young kid, run away from school, who had some acid, and Wally Hope took the rap for him. He was arrested and brought before Amesbury magistrates where he not only didn’t deny possession of LSD, he enthused about it, told them it was wonderful stuff which opened the mind to all kinds of visions ...”
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Eulogizing about LSD in a court of law is a bad idea for anyone. For Wally, dressed outlandishly, with a reputation as a fervent anarchist, festival organiser and thorn in the establishment’s side, it was positively suicidal. The magistrates thought Wally was
suffering from a mental disorder and had him detained under the Mental Health Act and committed to the Old Manor psychiatric hospital in Salisbury.

Wally was held until two days after the 1975 Stonehenge festival had finished. He was medicated to such an extent that it took him two days to return to his guardian’s home in Epping. LSD was Wally’s sacrament, the chemical that drove his dreams, but the fire had been burned out of Wally with chemicals forced into him by the establishment.

Wally managed to get to the Watchfield festival in late August where he was cared for in a tipi. The Tipi People wanted him to return with them to Tipi Valley in Wales but he refused and returned home. Shortly afterwards he was found dead, choked on his own vomit. The coroner’s inquest was adjourned twice before it took place and when it did much of the evidence was missing. Conspiracy theories abound concerning Wally. Was he targeted and destroyed because of his desire to hold free festivals at Stonehenge? Author Chris Stone received a letter from a solicitor, Trevor Helm, who had been hired to investigate Wally’s death. Helm was of the opinion that Wally had been deceived by the authorities who told him if he didn’t plead guilty to the possession of LSD charge, he would be remanded until after the 1975 Stonehenge festival had taken place. But the plea of guilty played into the court’s hands and they were then able to section him under the Mental Health Act.
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Stonehenge 1975 went ahead without Wally and was a huge success. Between two and three thousand people attended and hundreds sat in cross-legged meditation to welcome the sun’s rays on the summer solstice. One of Wally’s friends, Sid Rawle, the media styled “King of the Hippies”, had taken up the Stonehenge cause and for the next decade was the prime mover in organizing free festivals there. Though Rawle had stopped taking LSD, he was aware that the vast majority of his constituents did and needed somewhere to party and celebrate. Rawle was also heavily influenced by the native spirituality of Britain, and many of the free festivals he organised were focused on prehistoric sites. In 1978 he wrote to
The Times
, arguing: “The evidence is indisputable that Stonehenge and the surrounding area is one of
the most powerful spiritual areas in Europe. It is right that we should meekly stand in the presence of God, but it is proper that we should sing and dance and shout for joy and love and mercy that He shows us ... Holy land is Holy land and our right to be upon it cannot be denied.”
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The rout by police at Windsor in 1974 meant there was no chance of another People’s Free Festival being held there in 1975. But the free festival movement now numbered tens of thousands and Sid Rawle negotiated a deal with the Labour government for land on which to hold one. The Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, was involved and eventually an old airfield at Watchfield in Oxfordshire was offered. Rawle has made the point that part of the deal not to attempt another Windsor festival included the government promising not to break up festivals held at Stonehenge. For the first time this gave the new breed of hippie traveller a central focus, both physically and spiritually, in the seasonal round of free festivals.
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The Watchfield festival began on Saturday 23 August 1975 and ran for nine days. More people flocked to Watchfield than to any of the Windsor festivals, and with the increase in numbers came more instances of trouble. Several people were selling counterfeit LSD, in one case pieces of spaghetti dyed black, and it initially seemed that Watchfield was going to suffer an acute shortage of the drug. On Saturday, issue one of the Watchfield Freek Press put an urgent message on its front page: “Serious acid shortage – send urgent messages out – the acid must get through.” This was an unequivocal statement from the festival organisers about just how important LSD was to free festival culture. Sunday’s issue of the festival newsletter quoted Release as saying there weren’t many drugs on site and LSD was the least available. But their information was wrong and the organisers’ panic unfounded. LSD in several forms was available throughout the festival: blue blotter, blotter with the image of a strawberry, orange blotter and red and green microdot were all available. One festival attendee fondly remembered: “Window panes, red, white and blue blotters, mountains of microdot.” The Freek Press’s mention of LSD in blotter form, marked with an image, is almost certainly the first written reference to this type of LSD in Britain. Within a few years
blotter LSD would overtake microdot as the preferred vehicle of LSD delivery.
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The Watchfield Free Festival was notable for having the largest contingent of undercover drug squad officers at a free festival to date. Martyn Pritchard’s memoir of his time as an undercover policeman,
Busted
, notes the amount of LSD at Watchfield and also his frustrations at not being able to arrest any of the dealers. Numerous undercover officers, posing as hippies, infiltrated the festival. Others were more covert, engaged in secretly filming drug deals from a stationary van. Some undercover police had even managed to get themselves involved in the festival’s organization and the production of the festival newsletter.
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The frustrations of the undercover police were understandable. But the decision not to arrest anyone at Watchfield for selling or possessing LSD had not been taken lightly. In November 1974, Detective Inspector Dick Lee of the Thames Valley Drug Squad had been analyzing the amounts of LSD seized at various festivals, both free and commercial. What he found surprised him. Although around 20,000 units of LSD were being seized each year, the evidence gleaned from festivals indicated the amount actually being used was several times that number, contradicting the general police opinion that LSD use in the UK was confined to a relatively small number of people.

In April 1975 Martyn Pritchard, the undercover police officer, was offered a thousand microdots for £250 with the promise of more, as much as he could handle, up to 10,000 dots per week. This was a staggering amount of LSD, evidence that the manufacture, sale and distribution of the drug in the UK were much more organised and widespread than previously thought. This realization was the first glimmer of what quickly developed into the largest drug operation ever mounted in the UK, Operation Julie. The Watchfield free festival was D.I. Lee’s first opportunity to closely monitor the grass roots LSD culture. Lee’s ghost-written account of Operation Julie noted: “Lee assembled a large team of men and women detectives to work undercover on the site. Their brief was to extract as much evidence and intelligence as possible regarding drugs, including LSD.”
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As the decade progressed, the numbers of free festivals increased. Besides the large events like Windsor, Watchfield and Stonehenge, several smaller, low key affairs took place deep in the countryside. Rural property was inexpensive in the Seventies and numerous free festival organisers had moved to the country to live a back-to-the-land existence. Large numbers of hippies were now living in remote rural areas of Wales and the South West and it was a natural progression that localised festivals would be held.

These festivals, often developing from large parties also served the growing numbers of hippie travellers who made their living by trading at festivals. The further away from urban conurbations the events were, the less chance there was of police interference or of attracting unruly elements. And judging by the recollections of those present at these rural festivals, bad LSD experiences were rare. This is probably because of a combination of factors; smaller audiences, an idyllic environment (setting) and because the hard core of free festival attendees was, by and large, very experienced LSD users.

Of the minor free festivals held in the Seventies, the Meigan and Trentishoe Fairs stand out as exemplars of the LSD-fuelled counter cultural lifestyle. The first three Trentishoe free festivals, in 1972, 1973 and 1975 were held on top of the high cliffs overlooking the Bristol Channel in North Devon. For over three weeks a small alternative community was created, offering free organic food, alternative energy sources and a wide variety of metaphysical groups. Around 1500 hippies grooved to the sounds of Hawkwind, Here & Now and the cream of Britain’s free festival bands. Drugs were plentiful; a vast amount of cannabis had been donated to the festival by local dealers and LSD was freely available and indeed often given away. Boss Goodman recalls “Everyone was eating pink micro dots by the handful.” Bristol record store owner Nasher remembers “... the Chemists giving away bags of acid”.
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By 1976, the Trentishoe site had moved inland and grown in size. But it was still untainted by the problems that plagued Watchfield, Windsor and Stonehenge. The only people prepared to make the trek to the moorlands of the West Country to live simply and communally were those within the counter culture who genuinely
wanted to create their own society. Tipis and geodesic domes were the favoured accommodation, LSD the preferred drug. In the words of one happy attendee: “It was a hell of a show, everybody in the whole cell block (field) was playing with Lucy’s Diamonds or Sam’s Dice apparently, except me as I’d given up this hobby some months before. But I can still remember the utter madness of it now. It felt great.”
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The local press concurred that the hippies had, for a short time at least, realised their acid fuelled dreams: “There may well be Marijuana at Pinkery Field and there is squalor in the conventional sense, but those present have contrived, in the face of middle-class pressure, to maybe create a culture of their own.”
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The Meigan Fair was held in several years, notably 1974, 1975 and 1976 in the Preseli Mountains of west Wales. Originally a traditional hiring fair, in 1974 people involved with the Cwm Meigan commune decided to hold a free festival. The accent was on expanding the free festival ethos and providing multi-cultural events, from electric and acoustic music to meditation, theatre and games. By 1975 up to 8000 people, the majority of them being hard core members of the counter culture, attended the Meigan Fair. The Tipi People were out in force and the festival site saw a wide variety of tents, benders, live-in buses and vans and tipis, foreshadowing the travelling hippie convoys of later years.

Meigan’s organisers announced: “We do hereby proclaim to artists, poets, craftsmen, musicians, storytellers that the third Meigan Faire will take place on the days of 25th, 26th and 27th July 1975, to entertain or to amuse.”
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Local people were friendly to the festival, a farmer loaning the land for the 1974 and 1975 Fairs in exchange for help with the harvest. Even the press were favourably disposed to the festival, though it was obvious they realised the LSD focus of the event, the local paper opening its report with: “Naked she danced in the warm morning sun. Her hips swayed suggestively to the beat of the music. On her back was scrawled in ballpoint: ‘Got any Acid?’ On a rock nearby were chalked the words, ‘Reality is an illusion caused by lack of LSD. Please, where can I score?’”
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