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Updated July 2021
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This site is dedicated in the memory of who inspired me to delve deep into the magic of the free festival and who passed away Sept 3rd 2010. R.I.P. Roger ..... |
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Green Gathering. RAF Molesworth Cambridgeshire 1984
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Phil
Hudson writes Held within the boundaries of USAF Molesworth, a (then) disused WWIIairbase in Cambridgeshire on the Northamptonshire border, designated to be the second ground-launched cruise missile base in the UK (after Greenham Common), in the constituency of (then) unknown local dumbfuckMP John Major. Started as the Green Gathering in ?June?July?August?.Some of the Peace Convoy, who had just been harshly evicted from Nostell (sp?) Priory in Yorkshire, joined shortly thereafter. The Convoy folk weren't all comfortable with being labelled "Greens", and so was born the Rainbow Gathering, which quickly took on more of the free festival aspect (always present to some extent in the Green Gatherings anyway). The Rainbow gathering soon became the Rainbow Village, with every kind of "alternative" freak, dissident and outcast inhabiting the converted buses, trucks, ambulances, horse boxes, tipis, geodesic domes, and the most splendid benders I've ever seen. There was a village shop (a double-decker bus), a postman, a freaky chapel ("Eirene", Greek for peace), a peace garden (largely built by a former RAF man who was badly irradiated at Christmas Island in the '50s), a small plantation of wheat for Ethiopia (planted weeks before Michael Buerk "broke" the famine story in the mainstream media), and the legendary Free Food Kitchen. Acts I particularly remember from the free festival time, August ?, were the unutterably marvelous and protean Wystic Mankers, only some of whom I've ever seen any other time, at Pilton later in the '80s, and the Flying Patrol Group, who were local (well, one of them was American, but they lived in St. Ives, Cambs.) The Tibetan Ukrainian Mountain Troupe were there too, also amazing. I see you have a link to them on your site. Other highlights of the time were "Yes" blotters and the guy with the enormous nose who just sat by a fire all day and all night rolling the longest spliffs I've ever seen for anyone who cared to chip in a "half a mix". Our lives were changed forever and for good, all of us who lived there (even if only part-time, like me) and who travelled on as the Rainbow Village Trucking Company after the 85 eviction. |
