Hello and thank you for downloading the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service.

The Miss World beauty pageant took place in London in 1970. It was a site of a high profile

protest at the Royal Albert Hall. Sally Alexander was one of the women who stormed the stage

that night. She spoke to Andrew Whitehead in 2014.

We were nervous and we dressed up. We wanted to fit into the audience.

So we went in with our handbags looking good and inside our handbags we had little flower

bombs and little things like that to throw at the stage.

Sally Alexander is in her mid-twenties, a feminist, a student and a mother. It's a time of protest

against the Vietnam War, against apartheid South Africa and the women's liberation movement

is fighting on issues from equal pay to the sexism of beauty contests.

Miss World, you know, women being judged by their looks and their bodies and their

bodies. And when we heard it was Bob Hope comparing and he'd just come back from Vietnam

and we were all anti-Vietnam or a lot of us were and it was television spectacle, family viewing.

So we knew that if we could disrupt the visual spectacle of television programme going into

everyone's homes, it would make an impact. It did a huge impact. Groups of activists who'd got

access to the event simply by going along and buying tickets were spread around the auditorium.

As the lights went down the protesters all smartly dressed so they didn't stand out from the crowd

waited for the signal to rush the stage. And we thought when all the candidates were lined up on

the stage that we would, you know, a football rattle would go, we'd blow whistles, we'd throw

flower bombs and so on and so forth and we'd rush towards the stage and then we thought we'd

be thrown out. So that's how we planned it. What were you worrying? I think I wore a black

crepe dress or something like that, probably wore a B-badress, I didn't know. Did you have a B-badress?

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