Jeremy J. Beadle
Ethel Alice Woolley
My clearest memories of Peg are associated with her garden. She lived
with her husband Frank in a beautiful cottage just off the A34 south of Newbury,
with a marvellous view of Beacon Hill. There was a not-so-marvellous view of
something else too, which we'll come to in a moment.
But Peg's garden was always a joy. She kept chickens who would, during the
day, peck interestedly round my motorbike when I arrived, weary after the run
down from Oxford. And Peg was always welcoming and ready to offer cups of tea
and coffee to the myriad people who would be dropping in. Beds and baths too,
for those who needed it.
And in the eighties, there were plenty of those, frequently Greenham
women. Peg was one of the few people in Newbury who stood out against the siting
of nuclear Cruise missiles just up the road at Greenham Common. When the Rainbow
Marches (the foundation of the Greenham Common women) arrived at the gates of
Greenham Common to protest, Peg was rapidly on the scene to make them feel
welcome. Over the years, her unstinting support for the campaign never faltered
- despite varying set-backs and the hostility of many local people.
The idea behind the GLCMs (Ground Launched Cruise Missiles) was that they
would be stationed at Greenham Common, and then, in times of emergency, slip out
of the gates and - in Michael Heseltine's notorious phrase - "melt into the
countryside". Peg was one of the people who decided that this was not going
to happen.
Peg's key role was as the organiser of the Cruisewatch "telephone
tree" - a vast and complex network that stretched over half Southern
England (with links as far away as Manchester). Whenever the cruise convoy left
Greenham Common - almost invariably in the dead of night, people from Oxford,
Stroud, Bristol, Southampton, London, Basingstoke and many, many towns and
villages in between would leap out of their beds in answer to a telephone call
and prepare to spend the next five days in a twilight world, tracking the
movements of the nuclear convoy and alerting the world to its existence.
But Peg was so much more than a voice on the telephone. She was decisive
in shaping the whole way Cruisewatch worked, with its total commitment to
non-violent protest, involving the people through whose villages the Cruise
convoy thundered at dead of night. These people, many not involved in political
activity before, gave their energies to the campaign that raised public
awareness of the nuclear threat in the 1980s.
And after each Cruise outing, there were the A4 meetings, where Peg was a
guiding force. The meetings got their name from people's habits of making their
reports, "Well, I was on the A4 and I saw ... " In long days of
meetings and long nights of watching, Peg never lost her innate fairness, her
tolerance and her sense of humour.
And she was tolerant. Despite considerable harassment from "the
authorities" who tapped and cut off her phone, or the Special Branch
officers who hid in her bushes late at night, her Quaker beliefs made certain
that she was always able to distinguish between the individual and the action,
to oppose the action yet retain sympathy for the individual who might be forced
into patterns of behaviour they did not really agree with.
Cruise missiles left Greenham Common six years ago now. They were never
able to "melt into the countryside". As Di McDonald, another veteran
Cruisewatcher said, in her obituary of Peg in the Guardian (Saturday April 27th,
1996):
"Little did he (Michael Heseltine) know that the whole cruise
strategy in Britain would be undermined by a network of protesters, at whose hub
was Peg Ridge, a retired nursery-school teacher, in her cottage in the woods."