On a very special Feminist Duration reading group session on 12 February 2020, Sasha Roseneil spoke about her experiences as a Greenham woman and then Greenham scholar, pursuing a transdisciplinary PhD on the peace camp some years letter. Her PhD thesis became the book from which we read that day, Disarming Patriarchy: Feminism and Political Action at Greenham (Open University Press, 1995; out of print but available to buy second-hand or download for free). From Sasha's insights, the ones that resonated with me most at that moment had to do with time ('time had a different meaning' at the camp) and recollection. It's difficult to determine when the camp ended, she said: it was assumed to have closed a few times since the mid-1990s (which was often wishful thinking on behalf of those prematurely reporting it), but a core of stayers persisted until 2000, long after the cruise missiles were removed (1989-1991) and the airbase had closed (1992).
I had just spent some time looking at Sarah Hipperson's correspondence at the Women's Library, LSE, which also confirms the diffuse nature of the peace camp's dissolution. Hipperson and the women of the Yellow Gate spent the last few years at the camp actively fundraising and planning for a ‘Commemorative and Historic Site’ (7JAN/1/1, Women's Library) in discussion with local authorities. I found minutes of meetings between Soundabout LTD (107 Main Street, Greenham Common Airbase) and the peace camp, in which ‘The offer of a building in exchange for closing the Camp’ (item no. 1 on the agenda) was debated as early as 1994 (2 Nov to be exact; 5GCW/I Box 13, Women's Library). That proposal wasn't accepted but it is clear that any negotiations about the closure of the camp had already become contingent on the development of an infrastructure for the preservation of its legacy and commemoration, which included a website (the now defunct http://www.web13.co.uk/greenham) and various art commissions. Hipperson's fundraising efforts were successful and by the time the camp officially closed in 2000, three sculptural momuments had been installed on the site: Peace Campfire and Spiral Water Stone (the latter in memory of Helen Thomas, killed by a police horse box in 1989) by Michael Marriott FRSS; and Broken Symmetry by Michael Kenny. Kenny's sculpture was unveiled in 1999 after the artist's death by his friend Ringo Starr. More sculptures were since installed, including Changes by Gudrun Nielsen (2010), prompting the Greenham Business Park newsletter Touching Base, no. 10 (Autumn 2018) to bill their sites as 'The Greenham Sculpture Trail' (p. 4 of the newsletter).
Helen Thomas Memorial Peace Garden, with Spiral Water Stone by Michael Marriott. Photograph by Pam Brophy, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9125405
As Hipperson took care to explain in her fundraising correspondence and press releases, the 'commemorative and historic site' towards which she was working wasn't the only nor the first attempt at a Greenham monument. Women for Life on Earth, the original group who marched from Cardiff to Greenham Common in August 1981, commissioned Maltese sculptor Anton Agius to make a work representing a woman marcher holding a baby, with the initiative of banner artist and Greenham veteran Thalia Campbell, who had come across Agius's work on her travels. The work was officially unveiled in its now permanent location in Cardiff City Hall in 2003, with what Campbell describes as a inclusive event, attended by Greenham women, peace activists, as well as military personnel and politicians.
Women for Life on Earth press release, 1991, http://www.birdchildsandgoldsmith.com/acatalog/Greenham_Page_Three.html
Colour postcard of 'Greenham Common Sculpture by Anton Agius'. National Museum Wales Online Collections, F2019.20.42, https://museum.wales/collections/online/object/19b77e5a-e479-3f1d-82e7-27c7f0fabc2d/Postcard/?field0=agent_uuid&value0=a29a32a1-59a9-34e7-8bff-ac67568ddab6&index=3
I've long wondered about the choices of these monuments, so removed from the experimental aesthetics of visual and material activism at the peace camp, thoroughly post-modern (principally in the sense of anti-modernist), DIY, often performative, and precociously craftivist. In papers donated to the Women Artists' Library (Goldsmiths), Campbell refers to some of the selection criteria for Agius's commission, including durability and, reading between the lines, the need to be immediately and unproblematically recognisable by all as a monument more than a work of art. The distinction between the two is slight, perhaps questionable, but important: both create meaning and stage an experience, but the meaning of a monument is first and foremost commemoration and the experience is remembrance.
I also can't help wondering what Sarah Hipperson, who died at the age of 90 in 2018, would have made of the following sculptural addition to the site of the former airbase and its arguably more famous peace camp.
American War Memorials Overseas, Inc. RAF Greenham Crash Memorial, https://www.uswarmemorials.org/html/monument_details.php?SiteID=482&MemID=753
The RAF Greenham Crash Memorial, designed and hand-carved by Newbury artist Joss Nankoo and funded by the Royal British Legion of Newbury and the Greenham Common Trust, was originally placed by Webster Road in the Greenham Business Park, and formally dedicated in 2012 by Princess Anne HRH. According to American War Memorials Overseas, it commemorated 'the American soldiers who were killed on site in two plane accidents which occurred three days apart. The first was the crash of a Horsa glider which killed 33, and the second was the collision of two B-17 Bombers which resulted in the deaths of 16 American crew members. A memorial was already at the site to commemorate the first crash, but it was moved to a different location within the park. The new memorial was dedicated to all Americans killed while serving at the airbase.' Since the 2018 opening of the Greenham Common Control Tower as 'a visitor centre and community hub with the aim to preserve and share the historical legacy of one of the few remaining airfield buildings', the move of that monument to the more prominent location of the Tower grounds was explored and finally realised in December 2019, with the support of the Newbury Royal British Legion (RBL) and Greenham Parish Council. 'The council said that the move to the recently refurbished control tower “could help to attract visitors to the visitor centre and café, improving tourism for this part of Greenham Common"' (Newbury Today, 6 June 2019).
The re-opened Control Tower plays a key role in the shaping of the site's heritage and its negotiation between military history and the history of protest. Despite hosting exhibitions and events in celebration of the peace camp, including You Can't Kill the Spirit, prints and drawings by Pam Hardman (2019), Common People, photographs from the Blue Gate by Wendy Carrig (2018), and Nina Wakeford's performance “an apprenticeship in queer I believe it was” (riffing on Sasha Roseneil's writing) for Reading International 2019, the placement of the USAF Crash Memorial on its grounds makes me worry that the delicate balance maintained so far is tipping to the military side. Twenty years after the peace camp's closure, its place in history -- local history at least -- seems less certain than Hipperson hoped and anticipated.
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