On an unusually balmy autumn day in 2013, a small group of women gathered outside the nuclear base at Aldermaston and began to sing. All of them had wide smiles and the words came easily.
She goes on and on and on,
You can’t kill the Spirit
She is like a mountain
Old and strong
She goes on and on and on
You can’t kill the spirit
The song was in memory of Jean Kaye. Jean was a protestor, a campaigner for social justice. When she reached retirement age, her convictions took her to the heart of the most intense of peace protests. She died aged 87 last September. By all accounts she was indefatigable, inspirational and extraordinary. She wasn’t the only one.
Thirty years before this little memorial, a much larger group of women gathered outside a US nuclear airbase in the British countryside. They stayed until the American soldiers and the bombs left. It took ten years as the women waged a long campaign for peace and the end of nuclear weapons. The land was Greenham Common; and they would become known as peace women.
The peace women maintained a constant presence at Greenham Common, a patch of grassland in Berkshire, for nineteen years in total. Once the Americans left and the bombs were gone, women stayed until the land was formally returned from the military to the people.
http://lacuna.org.uk/protest/memories-of-a-protest/
and another article:
The Greenham Common peace camp and its legacy
Jean Stead, a former assistant editor of the Guardian, covered nuclear disarmament from Germany, the US and the Soviet Union. Here, she reflects on the peace camp and its significance.