Nostell Priory was actually a commercial festival which had, like Glastonbury, acquired a large ' Free Festival' component in the form of a travellers field adjacent to the main festival. Unlike Glastonbury however , the local authorities decided to behave in an extremely hostile way to "deal with " the free festival element . As Paul describes below, this was a dry run for the Beanfield action of 1985, travellers vehicles were done over , possessions thrown out onto the ground, ransacked and left open and their owners had no option but to leave them as they were as they had all been carted off to the clink !

    As regards Nostell Priory - fortunately I left the site the day before Yorkshire Police moved in, as I had a van borrowed from Scotch Tommy (anybody remember him) and had agreed to meet him at The Elephant Fayre in Cornwall at a certain date/time.  I remember that The Convoy were in a separate field from the 'organised site', sponsored by Theakston's brewery, but it was no problem walking across the 'boundary' to go to the sponsors tent and buy 'Old Peculiar' on draught.  As it happened, most of the best action was to be found on 'our' side, and the locals who visited seemed to agree.  The Police kept a high profile at the gates of the site throughout and surveillance was maintained.  Unfortunately, there was also a significant amphetamine and coke influence on site, to a large degree I suspect/remember coming from local dealers and this obviously didn't help matters as regards the attitude of the authorities.

 
    The day after I left, the police steamed in en masse, in a way described that was exactly like the Beanfield the following summer.  Everyone was arrested and most people were charged with Possession, if not directly, then with 'internal possession' on the basis that they had obviously swallowed substances!  Have you ever heard the like of this before (or since)?  The choices were: plead guilty, do a couple of days and get a fine at the magistrates or, protest your innoncence on the basis that no court could convict you of possession on such a notion.  The snag with that was you were liable to do about 6 weeks on remand in Armley Jail before the charges were finally dropped.  This is exactly what happened to a couple of lads I knew.  Five or six to a cell as well if I remember rightly what they told me.
 
Paul

( eds note : remand could go on for months , I knew a couple who spent six months in remand in the late 70s before their case was dropped due to lack of evidence, there was no compensation for the time and income these people lost, they just happened to live in a house where the other occupants were involved in dealing , they were innocent as the police well knew at the time)

"The first hint of trouble came at a festival at Nostell Priory, West Yorkshire in 1984. Riot police, fresh from disturbances at the Orgreave coking plant, ransacked travellers' homes and mass arrested 360 people. At the same time English Heritage began compiling a list of names for a civil injunction that would form the legal basis for a Stonehenge festival ban the following year."

The Commercial Festival

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