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This DVD tells in remarkable
film sequences the story of the campaign forty
years ago to prevent the destruction of local
villages and communities to make way for what was
planned as Britain's largest airport. The proposal
to build London's Third Airport here came after the
most detailed and costly planning exercise ever
undertaken in Britain and would have meant the
biggest eviction of people from their homes in
Britain since the Highland Clearances of the 19th
century.
 A
Government-appointed commission, named after its
Chairman, a High Court judge called Roskill,
selected a site it named as Wing, or Cublington. It
signalled the annihilation of Stewkley, Cublington,
Hoggeston and Dunton, and the villages of Aston
Abbotts, Drayton Parslow, Soulbury, Stoke Hammond,
Swanbourne, Whitchurch, Weedon, Wingrave and Wing
would have had trouble surviving in any
recognisable form.
In land area, the airport
would have been more than three times the size of
Heathrow, and would have had four runways -- as
many as Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted put
together.
The two and a half year
campaign to oppose the proposal was headed by Wing
Airport Resistance Association (WARA), led by
Desmond Fennell, a barrister living in Winslow, and
Bill Manning, an Aston Abbotts farmer. At its
height, the Association claimed 61,000 signed-up
members and raised £50,000 (nearly
£300,000 at to-day's prices), with activities
co-ordinated from an office in Leighton Buzzard.
The battle was later acknowledged as the first
major campaign for the environment.
The DVD is entitled
"OVER
OUR
DEAD
BODIES"
after slogans that appeared in huge placards all
over the area. It features the work of three local
amateur filmmakers, backed by material from the BBC
and other sources. It is the work of Stewkley
resident John Flewin, a former journalist who was
Press Officer for WARA. He later became News Editor
at ITN, and head of the news organisation's
fifty-year archive of film and videotape. In
retirement he has formed the Stewkley Film Archive,
dedicated to finding and preserving the content of
local historic film and videotape.
He says: "The airport
campaign was, perhaps, the most momentous happening
in the history of our local villages. The story
demanded national newspaper headlines day after day
and watching the DVD you can see why. It is quite
remarkable, and gratifying, that so much film
material has survived from that time.
"The films depict a battle
fought by a community of people whose whole
livelihood and way of life was threatened -- people
who previously had never been involved in any kind
of public protest.
"Some will want to own the
DVD to vividly recall a campaign they can remember,
or even took part in. For others, it is a
remarkable insight into local history, and
something that their children, and their children's
children, should know about. This is a DVD to keep
in the family, and hand down through the
generations."
It had already been decided
that the airport was essential when The Roskill
Commission was set up by the Labour Government in
1968. Its task was to find a site. A year later the
Commission issued a shortlist of four sites -- one
in North Bedfordshire, one in Hertfordshire, a
third at Foulness, off the Essex coast, and the
local site which it called Wing (Cublington).
The Commission made its final
decision after five public inquiries and the
biggest cost benefit analysis in history --
weighing the price of everything, not just the
building and infrastructure costs, but the indirect
costs too. With one exception, nothing was
impossible to cost for Roskill. Chop down a tree,
it put a value on the wood in it. Chop down 20
trees, it simply multiplied the first number by 20.
Demolish Stewkley's Norman Church, it weighed its
insurance value against its perceived historical
value, and inked in a figure of
£50,000.
Where the Commission failed
was in its inability to put a cost on community,
family and village life. One of the most telling
exercises carried out by the campaigners was
research into family relationships in one village
taken as an example of them all. In Drayton Parslow
it was revealed that of the 362 people living in
the village, 202 were inter-related by birth, or
marriage. And more were related to people living in
neighbouring villages.
A picture of the threatened
community of families of Drayton Parslow, sitting
en-mass outside the Three Horseshoes public house,
appeared across a whole page in the Sunday Times
and became an iconic image of the campaign.
Luckily, Drayton Parslow filmmaker Jerry
Smith-Cresswell took his cine camera along when the
whole village turned out for the photographer and
Jerry's work now features in the DVD.
Other contents include events
that made newspaper and television headlines -- the
lighting of bonfires on all hilltops to warn of the
approaching threat, a giant "Roll-On" of 300 farm
vehicles through the threatened villages, a rally
of 12,000 people on the airport site, a pancake
race, ladies' soccer matches involving folk from
all the villages, a mass lobby of Parliament, and
the final torchlight victory procession through
Stewkley which went out live on BBC television.
The DVD also touches on the
activities of an underground movement that
threatened trouble if the airport plan went
through. It shows how villagers were briefed on
arming themselves, and making petrol bombs, and how
a fake bomb stopped a ministerial motorcade.
In addition to the work of
the late Jerry Smith-Cresswell, the DVD features
material from Cublington cameraman Bernard Osborn,
and of the late Tony Greenslade, well known in
Stewkley for filming local events and holding film
shows in the Village Hall. There is also content
from local photo-journalist the late Ivor Leonard.
Contributions from BBC presenters Bob Wellings and
the late Rene Cutforth are also featured.
The DVD, published by the
Stewkley Film Archive,is is now sold out. A shortened version can be viewed here.
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