The Archive.
View this site at 800 x 600 resolution or higher for best results. Last updated 1-29-2009
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For
the
third year running, Windsor Great Park was taken over by thousands of
hippies for a free festival of pop music, theatre (some of it in the nude),
and communal living. In keeping with its previous record, it was a scene
of drugs, litter, lots of booze and food venders, and most of all disagreement
and lack of understanding between police and organisers, the local council
and organisers, and in many cases the organisers and organisers. This
year, however, the disagreements ended in violence with the police invading
the site on Thursday, the sixth day in an attempt to drive everybody off
the site. It
all started last Saturday amid threats by the local council to spread
acid (the type that burns) on the ground to deter barefooted hippies.
The organisers, led by veteran festival men UBI Dwyer and Sid Rawle ,
restricted their organisation to a few essentials and from then on it
was a free-for-all with nightly meetings to deal with the current problems His fellow organiser, Ubi Dwyer, 42 year old and a civil servant in Her Majesty's Stationary office, was not available for comment as he had been arrested on Wednesday. After two weeks of no sleep, according to the Festival's own "Free Press" which is produced each day, he "has flipped his lid". According to one organiser, he spent Tuesday marching around the site wrapped in a Union Jack, proclaiming himself King of England and demanding absolute obedience from his 'subjects.' It
was a little difficult to pin things down at the festival since nobody
was running It. But Release, the drug-help organisation was there, and
reported a lot of hassles with police. Free
meals Journalist escapes angry crowd. Last Tuesday a journalist form the Divine Times came close to injury when an angry crowd of over 500 hippies at the Windsor Free Festival mistook him for a plain clothes policeman. He was only able to free himself when a hippie who had known him two years previously arrived on the scene and identified him . It was about 5,30 pm on Tuesday when somebody announced from one of the stages that two plain clothes polciemen were on the site and advised anybody who spotted them to walk behind them with a pig sign, get as manay people to follow and to drive them off the site because the police were taking liberies.What happened to our reporter, Matthew Conlin, is as much an indictment of the police's underhand methods as the uncontrolled emotions of the hippies. He was dressed in jeans and an orange open necked shirt, had short hair and a beard of five days growth . ' I was walking back from the main stage when unknown to me a group of people assumed I was a policeman because of my conventional dress, said Conlin.They were lead by a few people with two big signs reading PIG . I noticed people were grunting behind me but continued walking. I was still walking but those at the next stage along saw the crowd, realised that a pig had been spotted and came rushing toward me . I was trapped by over 500 people , many of them under the infulence of highly potent drugs and in various stages of fear, paranoia and anger. |