Protesting Nuclear Weapons: Greenham Common

Warfare

History Hit

History

4.5 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 11 October 2021

⏱️ 30 minutes

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Summary

In September 1981 a small group of 36 Welsh women marched 120 miles from Cardiff to RAF Greenham Common and chained themselves to the gates. They were protesting against the storage of not only British, but possibly American nuclear weapons being stored on the supposedly public land at Greenham Common. Over the next 19 years, 70,000 women were involved in history’s most famous feminist protest. In this episode, Rebecca Morden and Jill ‘Ray’ Raymond share their personal stories of protesting nuclear weapons in Britain.

Transcript

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0:16.1	Hello everyone welcome back to the history hit warfare podcast I'm your host James Rogers and in this episode we are marking quite a remarkable anniversary back in 1981 a group of women marched from Cardiff in Wales to Greenham Common R.E. England, over a hundred miles to protest the holding of US nuclear missiles on British soil.
0:22.2	Gradually joined by women from all over the world, they formed
0:26.2	what became the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp. They stayed there for almost 20 years in what would become the largest most effective women-led
0:36.8	protest since the suffragette campaign. Now to mark the 40th anniversary of that March,
0:42.1	I'm joined by Jill Raymond, aka Ray, who lived at
0:46.1	Greenham Common for 16 years and author Rebecca Morden, herself a Greenham child, to discuss this remarkable history.
0:55.0	Enjoy. Hi Rebecca and Ray, and Ray, thanks for coming on the history hit Warfare podcast. How are you both doing?
1:14.0	Fine, thanks, yeah. Yeah, good, slightly frazzled by exciting event prep, but yes, very good.
1:21.2	Yeah, so it is great to have you on because we're marking the 40th anniversary of the
1:27.6	start of the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, which began as a group of women marched from Cardiff in Wales to Greenham
1:35.5	R.E. I've done my calculations. I've gone on to my Google Maps and I've seen that that
1:41.4	is over a hundred miles away. am I right in thinking that you are going to be doing this all over again?
1:48.0	Yeah, yeah we are well some of it anyway.
1:53.0	Yeah, we've got about at least 200,
1:55.6	probably more than that now women signed up
1:58.0	to do either the whole walk,
2:00.6	probably about 50 women doing the whole walk
2:02.4	like all the way, and then about 50 women doing the whole walk all the way, and then about
2:04.3	two or three hundred other women who are doing different sections, particularly busy
2:08.8	leaving Cardiff and entering Greenham Commons. The beginning in the the end really lively, but hundreds of women
2:13.8	signed up overall to be with us on and off all the way through, so it's going to be, yeah, really interesting.
2:18.6	That's going to be amazing. Have you both been able to put much training into this?
	...

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