'If someone tries to get me down I will pull on this fuse box and be electrocuted.'
One was reminded of Just William's six-year-old friend Violet Elizabeth Bott threatening to 'scream and scream 'til I'm sick'.
'Shame on you, shame on you,' his comrades shouted at the assembled police officers, who seemed not the slightest bit interested in whether the youth was up the pole or not.
Yesterday was a lovely day in rural Essex - or it should have been. The autumnal hues and bright sunshine were marred somewhat by the clatter of helicopters, the yells of combat and the whiff of hypocrisy.
What will be immortalised as the Battle of Dale Farm was in reality an ugly if highly choreographed skirmish. One which will eventually cost the taxpayer more than ￡20million.
As dawn broke, hundreds of police, bailiffs and security guards converged on the illegal travellers’ site to begin the process of their eviction, the culmination of a ten-year legal battle. But as the day unfolded, violently and full of bile, what struck one most was that the event was now hardly about the travellers at all.
The band of anarchists, anti-capitalist activists and other largely middle-class urban warriors who had seized upon the travellers’ cause were there to take on the police and other establishment flunkeys.
What travellers there were present to witness the clash mostly wore an air of resignation. They knew when a battle was lost. For the activists, the battle was the thing they were there for.
Many of today’s headlines will no doubt focus on the Taser fired by officers when scores of police in riot gear stormed into the site before breakfast time.
The officers say they were under ‘direct threat’ of serious violence. Certainly bricks and other heavy objects were thrown at the police by activists in the early stages of their clashes. Other missiles had been hoarded for use elsewhere.
Predictably, the internet was soon alive with accusations of police brutality. Officers are equipped and trained to face potentially fatal missiles, was the gist of one choice remark. It’s their job.
An early PR victory for the anarchists. Once the police had infiltrated the site, bypassing a caravan which had been deliberately set on fire to delay them, the action largely took place on, above and around the 30ft scaffolding tower which the protesters had erected across the main gate.
At least a dozen had made their home on a precarious wooden platform near the top. Most seemed to have chained themselves to the structure. The police and bailiffs would have to remove them before the scaffold could be removed, the gate opened and the site clearance begun in earnest.
This was pure theatre of confrontation. The police – some of whom had been bussed in from as far away as Wales – wore yellow and black. The bailiffs were in blue overalls; the security guards wore orange. Most spent an idle day developing a crick in their necks as they stood and watched the struggle high among the scaffold poles.
One of the more colourful and noisy of the players on the activists’ side was Marina Pepper, a former glamour model turned white witch who, in another life, long ago, once bedded James Bond actor Daniel Craig. Or so she had later claimed.
Manning the barricades in a fake fur, Miss Pepper told the bailiffs: ‘You are evicting them for money. Why is there money for your cruel jobs when there is nothing for schools and hospitals? I don’t know how you will sleep well tonight.’
Some of the other anarchists were sporting freshly shaved heads with a Mohawk strip of hair down the middle. One explained that they had the haircuts because they knew they would be appearing on national TV all day.
Above them all, the sky was full of helicopters. More than I’ve ever seen over an Afghan battlefield. They were not here to find Bubbles the lost African grey parrot, whose forlorn image peered beadily from wanted posters attached to the neighbourhood’s lampposts. It was comforting to know there were other concerns in this corner of Essex.
By lunchtime three large cranes – the police and council officials’ siege engines – had been moved into place. At 1.46pm, a yellow cherrypicker containing the police’s ‘forlorn hope’ advance party was placed alongside the scaffold and the first officer stepped across to be met a volley of abuse. More followed.
The protesters joined hands and the wooden platform – made only of pallets and aged planks – began to sag a little alarmingly under the combined weights of the plucky freedom fighters and their brutal capitalist oppressors. A number of breeze blocks, loose scaffolding poles and other potential missiles were dropped to the ground from the scaffold top by the police spearhead. A ragged chant of ‘We won’t go’ was raised from the top platform, supported by the protesters on terra firma.
‘Endemic racism of this government ... ethnic cleansing,’ roared one of the young men from on high, though it was hard to hear him because of the helicopters.
A white crane delivered two bailiffs in a cage. ‘Get your f***ing hands off her,’ someone screamed.
‘They are deliberately finding places which hurt the most and putting their fingers there,’ one of the scaffold protesters yelled bathetically to the audience below.
But even rough tickling would not move them. Soon, a concerted police effort to grapple the scaffold and engage the defenders began. At 2.50, the first two protesters, both secured in plastic manacles, were removed via the cherrypicker.
One, who appeared to be chained by the neck to a scaffolding pole, was released by a policeman wielding an angle grinder. Other officers or bailiffs in the cherrypicker or dangling from slings on the end of a crane were busy with tools, dismantling the scaffolding frame from the top down.
The activists did not like this, chanting: ‘It’s not safe and sound/get the pigs back on the ground!’
‘Health and safety!’ someone even yelled, accusingly and in all earnestness, at the police who were trying to remove those who had made their homes atop the scaffolding. ‘Where were you when London was burning?’ sneered a female traveller, as yet another platoon of bored riot police filed past. ‘I’ll tell you,’ she added helpfully. ‘Peeing your pants.’
As the afternoon wore on, more protesters were removed from the scaffolding. Unwilling to be detained, some began to abandon the top of their own accord, once the police had cut the chains that shackled them to the poles. ‘Aaargh, you are strangling me,’ yelled another as he was being transferred from the scaffold to the cherrypicker. Was he being strangled? It was hard to say from below.
But it made great theatre for the world’s TV crews. And that was the job done as far as the Dale Farm activists were concerned.
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