28/06/2004
A world away from today’s money-spinning Glastonbury, the Windsor Free Festival of 1974 was illegal, drug-happy and absurdly idealistic, recalls Mark Hudson
Staggering across Windsor Great Park with my rucksack, I caught sight of a great encampment of tents, teepees, branch-and-polythene shelters and many thousands of dazed-looking long-haired people.
And in the glade beyond was gathered a great Babel of bizarre alternative groups – from ultra-Leftist White Panthers to the Divine Light Mission and
the notorious Children of God – everyone there with the intention of creating a perfect society, right there, spontaneously, illegally. And nobody was in control.
Something gets into Britain’s air every festival season. There’s a prickling under the skin of the nation’s youth – the feeling that, whether through burning sun or lakes of mud, you simply have to be there. But at today’s Glastonbury and Reading festivals, this yearning for generational togetherness has been safely corporatised. The world-changing agendas that powered Woodstock and Monterey have been replaced by a super-organised but anodyne bill of, well, rock music.
As one 17-year-old put it to me, that epoch-making sense of seizing the time is long gone: “If you miss it one year, you can see it all again the next.”
Perhaps that’s why the hippy era – after so long in the cultural dustbin – has become a subject of such fascination. From Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests and Allen Ginsberg at the Albert Hall to the Woodstock and Isle of Wight festivals, every last manifestation of countercultural utopianism has been the subject of some breathless article or TV documentary.
But of an event that was arguably more outrageous than all of these – an event that dared to take on the established order on the Queen’s own private land, while offering free LSD to all who couldn’t afford it – almost nothing has been heard.
I’m talking about the Windsor Free Festival of 1974 – the last stand of the psychedelic underground. While Glastonbury, that other legendary early-’70s free festival, has gone on to become Britain’s biggest rock event and a super-efficient capitalist money-spinner, Windsor is now little more than a bedraggled and rather bitter folk memory. Yet for weeks before and after its sudden and violent conclusion, Windsor dominated the headlines more than any British rock event before or since.
I was there: an idealistic 17-year-old who got up to read his poetry. But what I regret most is not the smashing of an ideal, nor the fact that I managed to miss the climactic battle, nor even the no doubt appalling quality of my poetry, but the fact that I didn’t get off with the dervish-dancing girl in the kimono.
“Free festivals were something that was in the air at the time,” says photographer John “Hoppy” Hopkins, a veteran of Britain’s “underground” from its origins in the early 1960s Beat scene. “They were about participating, rather than just sitting waiting for things to happen. To an extent, it grew out of squatting. Historically all these Crown Lands have been ripped off from the people. So the idea of putting Windsor Great Park to constructive use seemed very interesting.”
The three Windsor festivals were the brainchild of Bill “Ubi” Dwyer, a clerk at Her Majesty’s Stationery Office then in his forties, who – no doubt unbeknown to his employers – had been deported from Australia for dealing in LSD. While walking in the parkland around Windsor Castle, he had a Blakean vision of a psychedelic New Jerusalem, in which he would hold a free festival on that very spot.
A mere 700 showed up for the first festival in 1972, a figure that only doubled the following year. But, by 1974, an aura of excitement and danger had built up around the event, for which more than half a million flyers were distributed.
One of these, showing a photograph of a policeman being followed by what looked like a huge papier-mâché dinosaur, found its way into the sixth-form common room at my Surrey grammar school. By this time, much of the idealism and experimentalism of the 1960s had evaporated. “Progressive” mega-bands such as Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin led a life of mansions, private planes and bombastic concept albums. Reading, Britain’s biggest festival, was a staid, regimented affair of beer-drinking and hard rock.
But Windsor promised an event in the spirit of the great ’60s happenings – where spontaneity and audience involvement were encouraged, where anything might happen. And, best of all, it would be completely illegal. I wrote to Dwyer, offering to read my poetry, and received a polite card advising me to be at Stage C at 1pm on the Tuesday of the festival.
In the build-up to the start of the festival on August Bank Holiday Saturday, there was speculation in the media as to whether the event would or should be allowed to go ahead. “Sensible young people will show what they think by staying away,” boomed the Sun, while devoting page three of the same edition to a trio of scantily-clad “hippy chicks”.
Under a heavy police presence, a large crowd gathered in the park. At first, camping was permitted only in a small copse, but soon a great encampment of over 15,000 had spread over the flat expanse of the Cavalry Exercise Ground.
There were no toilets, no water, no provision of food. The atmosphere was, as one audience member later put it, “boy scout plus acid. That first night it felt as though everyone was tripping.” The drugs welfare organisation Release ran a tent which was, as their doctor wrote, “like a scene from Hieronymus Bosch”. Yet gradually a semblance of organisation emerged.
Meetings of festival-goers set “unexploitative” prices for ice cream vans and hot dog stalls – any that didn’t comply were chased from the site or had their wares “liberated” and distributed to the crowd. Daily newsletters appeared, encouraging the flashing of cans and mirrors to “fuck up” the police helicopters that hovered overhead.
Arriving in Windsor on the Sunday evening, I was confronted by the bizarre spectacle of an English small town apparently under martial law – the streets deserted except for screeching police vans, the verges around the park heaped with cars taken to pieces in drug searches. In the glade around the main stage, there were the usual elements of a pop festival – stages, people’s intimate living arrangements, semi-comatose bodies – but not separate, ordered, as at a commercial event.
Everything was happening on top of everything else, with nothing hidden. At first, I was horrified by the grunginess and insanitariness of it all: those trees on the other side of the glade were presumably the toilets. But I had wanted a festival that that invented itself as it went along, with no security guards or barriers, and this was it.
The beautiful people had long since moved on from freakdom (nobody used the word hippy at this time). What was left at Windsor was the hardcore – those who were too convinced or too stoned to move on. I had imagined myself reading my poetry to the crowd, a Ginsberg-like figure, standing – if only momentarily – at the centre of my generation’s history.
In fact there were only a dozen or so bombed-out people slumped in the sun before the small stage. I was very nervous, though no one knew or cared that I was there. The band that played after me seemed not only indifferent to my performance, but to their own. It seemed that in stoned freakdom, to be cool meant to be indifferent to most things most of the time.
Yet, despite 300 arrests and a near riot when a festival-goer was injured by a police van, the atmosphere was amazingly benign. Lying out on the grass and surrendering to the flow, you realised that in a strange way it did all work. Latrines had been dug, there was surprisingly little litter, and there were moments of idyllic beauty. Dancing in the central glade as night fell, Windsor seemed the best venue on earth.
Everyone danced without caring what anyone thought. Nobody had paid anything, nobody owed anything. Crazy people, naked people, straight people – everyone was absorbed by that mood of enchanted togetherness that is the purpose of the true festival. And just below the stage was a girl in a kimono with long frizzy blonde hair, a fairy amazon leaping in a kind of wild kinetic semaphore, dancing with a fierce unrelenting energy till at one point she looked round into the crowd to where I stood staring at her. And I’m sorry to admit it, but I looked away.
After three days, I returned, filthy and exhausted, to my suburban comforts, to be woken by my mother the next morning with the news that “my festival” had been routed. Early on Thursday, two days before its appointed end, 600 members of the Thames Valley Police had swept over the festival site, giving the remaining participants just 10 minutes to move on.
Things became tense: truncheons were drawn, women and children kicked, hundreds more arrested. In comparison with the civil strife we’ve seen since – during the miners’ strike and the Poll Tax riots – it was piffling. But in 1974, the sight of the police marching with truncheons drawn against a group who presented no threat to anyone drew wide condemnation. The Home Secretary demanded a full report from the police, and the Daily Telegraph was among seven national newspapers that joined calls for a full public enquiry.
Ubi Dwyer, who had been arrested for threatening behaviour, after “flipping his lid” and declaring himself “King of Albion”, was later sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for trying to organise a fourth Windsor festival. To avert further problems, the then Labour government provided a designated site for free festivals at Watchfield in Wiltshire, and a successful and peaceful event was held the following year.
Yet Windsor marked the end of something. Whether or not “flower power” died that Thursday morning, as has often been claimed, Windsor was the last time the psychedelic alternative society could claim to represent any sort of youth-cultural mainstream. Some of the fringe elements represented there, such as feminism, gay liberation and environmentalism, have become massively influential parts of the mainstream. Yet hippydom itself slipped into theshadows, until many of its strategies and ideals were revived by late-1980s rave culture.
Much as I wanted to get involved, I never really felt part of what Windsor represented. Like many of my generation, I felt I’d missed the best of love and peace. Our moment came a couple of years later with punk, and for the Johnny Rottens of this world there was little to choose between the “complacent” indifference I had observed among the hippies and the small-mindedness that destroyed their festival.
Now that I’m a father and property owner myself, notions of “freedom” defined almost entirely around drug-taking seem relevant only in a negative sense. If I’d examined myself seriously, I’d have found many of the assumptions on which Windsor was based – that all property is theft, that it is the existence of the police that creates crime – atently ludicrous even then.
Yet there’s something in the idealism of the festival that remains immensely attractive. From the perspective of our ever more money-obsessed society, where nothing seems possible without the collusion of financial interests or celebrity ego gratification, the idea that people without power would organise an event on that scale, for nothing, seems not only almost unbelievable, but still beautiful and admirable.
