Sid Rawle obituary (original) (raw)

A big burly man with a mane of ginger and a powerful voice to match, Sid Rawle, who has died aged 64 of a heart attack, achieved tabloid infamy as the "King of the Hippies". Rawle – an unmistakable and charismatic figure who often dressed in long robes or monk outfits – played a prominent role in the squatting and commune movement of the 1960s, in the free festivals at Windsor and Stonehenge in the 70s, and in the birth of the Peace Convoy and the new age travellers movement.

He was a solitary child, born in Exford, Somerset, to a farmer whose family had lived on Exmoor for generations, and his Romany wife. The young Sid roamed the hills, checking the sheep, observing the deer herds and absorbing the wilderness around him so intensely that he would later describe himself as being "very strongly a creature of Exmoor and those hills".

When he was six, his mother left and his father remarried. Sid's difficult relationship with his stepmother made for an unhappy home, and he spent as much time as possible at his uncle Sam's farm, which he always talked about in idyllic terms. At school he was a slow learner (dyslexia was not recognised at that time), and he emerged at the age of 15, able to read but not to write.

His prospects looked grim. The family farm had been sold as the result of a squabble over an inheritance, forcing his father to seek work as a shepherd. Sid recalled later: "I have somewhere deep within me a resentment of my elders because they did not make a space for me in that community."

Forced by his father to leave home, he tracked down his mother in Slough, Berkshire, and moved in with her. Here he worked as a park attendant, as a shop steward for the National Union of Public Employees, and had a leading role with the town branch of the Communist party, organising a strike in a factory and a love-in in the municipal gardens.

After spending some time in St Ives, Cornwall, hanging out with beatniks, he moved to London in the mid-60s and set up what the writer Richard Neville called an "ultra-hippy cult" known as the Hyde Park Diggers. By the spring of 1968, the Diggers had more than 200 members, who played a prominent role in the squatting movement and, in September 1969, participated in the six-day occupation by the London Street Commune of 144 Piccadilly, a neglected 100-room mansion.

Sid was soon summoned to the Beatles' headquarters to meet John Lennon, who offered him custodianship of an island he had bought in 1967 in Clew Bay, off the coast of County Mayo. In 1971 Sid recruited a motley group of some 30 people to start a new life there. The tiny island of Dorinish was, it turned out, virtually uninhabitable and plagued by powerful storms. Yet somehow they survived there for almost two years, living in tents before abandoning the project.

Sid travelled frequently back to Britain. He and the Diggers gave away free food at the 1971 Glastonbury fayre and, more significantly, worked alongside Bill "Ubi" Dwyer to establish a free festival in Windsor Great Park in 1972. Attendance rose from 700 in the first year to around 7,000 the next. In 1974 the police cleared the site, arresting 200 people. The police tactics were heavily criticised and Sid played a major role in persuading the government to provide a new site at an abandoned airbase at Watchfield, Oxfordshire, where he staged a nine-day people's free festival, which attracted a large, peaceable crowd in 1975.

By then, Wally Hope had established a free festival at Stonehenge. After Wally's death in 1975, Sid became a key figure in the summer solstice celebrations there from 1976 to 1984, performing an almost priestly role. During this period, he also established himself as a resident in the Tipi Valley community in Carmarthenshire, Wales, before creating the Peace Convoy which, in 1981, travelled from Stonehenge to Greenham Common in Berkshire to support the women's peace camp.

In 1982 Sid established the first Green Gathering at Worthy Farm, Glastonbury, which attracted more than 5,000 people. The following year he set up the Rainbow Village at the disused US airbase at Molesworth, Cambridgeshire, a proposed cruise missile site. The camp was broken up by police on 6 February 1985. These anti-war activities, and the growing size of the Stonehenge festival and the convoy, prompted the Battle of the Beanfield on 1 June 1985, when around 1,300 police officers ambushed the convoy in Wiltshire and more than 500 people were arrested.

Sid retired from the fray to the Forest of Dean, where he continued his work through numerous smaller camps and festivals. His heart attack occurred as he sat in a chair by the campfire at the end of his annual SuperSpirit summer camp.

In his manifesto The Vision of Albion, Sid wrote: "In the end it all gets back to land. Looking back, I see a link that runs through my life [that] concerns the right to land and property on it." He believed that the land in Britain should be shared equitably, so that all could own a couple of acres in order to be able to sustain themselves.

Sid lived communally for more than 30 years and is known to have fathered seven children by various mothers.