Imperial War Museum Research Room, 5 March 2020
[PHOTOS: GB62 IWM Documents (G A Meyer), Box 1 of 4, folder 08/83/1:12, dated 4 January 1985. Christopher Moores (2014, p. 204) writes that copies of these photographs of Greenham women fetching water were sent by Anthony Meyer to the local police, fire service, and water supply companies, with demands for investigation and prosecution.]
The physical and mental toll that spending a day immersed in a far-right archive takes should not be under-estimated. And it's not what I expected to be doing when I set out to look at the art and visual activism of Greenham Common. But as a wise friend pointed out, the view from the other side of the fence, both spatially and ideologically, has to be part of the picture (cf. this Greenham song; there was a song for everything).
R.A.G.E. (Ratepayers Against Greenham Encampments), a far-right grassroots organisation set up by George Anthony Meyer in 1984 and essentially dissolved by 1986, was not merely from the other side of the fence but quite a lot further to the right of that. In his article 'Opposition to the Greenham Women's Peace Camps in 1980s Britain: RAGE Against the "Obsence"' (History Workshop Journal, Issue 78, Autumn 2014, pp. 204-227), Christopher Moores identifies in RAGE a great example of local grassroots 'New Right' campaigning, which despite proving divisive and short-lived was much more politically significant than 'provincial "not-in-my-backyard" anxiety' (p. 204). As an object of study, RAGE provides 'a micro-history of a version of the "new right"' (Moores, 2014, p. 220). In the BBC Radio 4 programme The Reunion, 13 Apr 2012, hosted by Sue MacGregor, Conservative Councillor for Greenham Mick Eathorne-Gibbons refers to RAGE as 'extremely right-wing’ and expresses regret about supporting the organisation's key objective of getting the women struck off the electoral register. (RAGE failed in that objective when Meyer brought a series of doomed court cases against the women in 1986-1987.) On the other hand, Eathorne-Gibbons, alongside Greenham USAF commander Mick Marsh take the opportunity of the radio programme to shame the Greenham veterans who took part, Helen John, Katherine Jones (aka Katrina Howse) and Rebecca Johnson, for their rudeness and impropriety, both now and then: they continue to refuse to use euphemisms for shit pits; they interject. Greenham women are no ladies and in this episode of R4's The Reunion there was no rapprochement.
How right is right? Meyer's correspondence with nominal allies (Conservative councillors, MPs, and local authorities), likewise invested in the dissolution of the peace camp, speak of his great frustration with the inability or unwillingness of his addressees to take swift and effective action against the women. He threatens legal action, he emasculates his nearly-allies-but-soon-turned-opponents for lack of courage and vigour, he assures them of a growing popular movement behind him even while using his personal letterhead. RAGE's complaints circle around issues of property and (gender) impropriety: the camp lowers property values and Greenham women befoul the ideals of femininity and maternity, as well as Berkshire's beautiful countryside.
Anthony Meyer's papers, donated to the Imperial War Museum by himself on 7 November 2007, are well-organised and neatly presented, not having seen much use perhaps to date but also clearly representing to the donor his life's work. While I find this oddly moving, the motivations and visual discourse of his organisation (which I'm technically not allowed to reproduce here) are profoundly repellent, and as Moores also argues, illustrative of the British 'New Right' in late 20th-century Britain. The contents' list of Meyer's papers eloquently summarise the key causes and methods of the so-called 'new right', and pinpoint areas where biopolitics devolves into necropolitics:
1. Items 17-27: “papers relating to the inclusion of women protestors on the electoral register”: TAKE AWAY THEIR VOTING RIGHTS. What makes one elligible to vote, in other words, what qualifies one as a full citizen? Meyer's angry letters and the minutes of RAGE meetings sketch out a new right utopia, not yet realised in the 1980s, of suffrage at the price of respectability and productivity, of (rate-)pay-per-vote.
2. Items 35-36: ‘papers relating to the water standpipe issues’: CUT OFF THEIR WATER AND CALL THEM ‘SMELLIES’. The shaming regimes of RAGE are already documented by Moores (2014) and Caroline Blackwood in her book On the Perimeter (Heinemann, 1984). Meyer's vigilantiism saw the procurement of drinking water (photographed above) as evidence of a criminal offence and actively tried to stop it through a variety of means, legal and other.
[I have written on the link between class, poverty, dissmell and shame here in reference to the work of Catherine Hoffmann; and Bong Joon-ho's Parasite spells it all out with devastating clarity.]
3. Item 42: correspondence with Newbury education officials regarding concern over influence of encampment on school children: THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!! This fitted quite well with Clause 28 and extended to insinuations of sexual impropriety by Greenham lesbian women.
4. Item 43: correspondence with home secretary Leon Brittan about the possibility of Spanish women arriving to join the Greenham protestors. The movements of visitors to Greenham from overseas were closely monitored and gave rise to at least one racist cartoon: ALIEN INVASION/INFILTRATION.
I was almost grateful for the 4.30pm fire alarm which cut the working day short. It also seemed quite fitting that in these days of pandemic apocalypse, archival contemplation, however visceral, should be punctuated by actual emergencies.
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