Special report by PEOPLE’S WORLD
In 1982 Peggy Seeger wrote a song called Carry Greenham Home in tribute to the Greenham Common women who for 19 years camped around the nine-mile perimeter of the RAF base where the US stored cruise missiles.
Seeger wrote the song sitting in a caravan installed outside the base. The caravan was the protest headquarters of peace campaigner Helen John — the first full-time peace camper at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire.
Helen, who died on Sunday aged 80, was one of the four women who first chained themselves to the fences surrounding the base, inspiring a mass protest involving thousands of women, which was to last 19 years.
Maggie Bowden was a trailblazing campaigning lawyer at Birnberg and Thompsons, women’s organiser of the Communist Party, and general secretary of Liberation
At 80, Elizabeth Morley wished she could join Palestine Action’s ladder-climbing but found her perfect protest at Defend Our Juries, proving Britain’s elders won’t be silenced despite government crackdowns, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
SOLOMON HUGHES explains how the PM is channelling the spirit of Reagan and Thatcher with a ‘two-tier’ nuclear deterrent, whose Greenham Common predecessor was eventually fought off by a bunch of ‘punks and crazies’


