Struck by new vehicle
Socialist Organiser1983 1983-06-23Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 10 →
Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: expect misread words, and now and then a caption or a line from a neighbouring story. For anything you quote, read the scan.
Scan page 10
•fighting in the Labour movement for lesbiar IN YOUR report of Upper Heyford you don't mention the one thing that struck me. The police moved us from Heyford to Banbury in curious new vans nothing like the old Black Marias or the simpler transit vans they had available. These were arranged with five miniscule cells on each side of a corridor, one person locked in each cell and the five bolted by an iron bar going right across.
I've been arrested on a large number of non-violent direct actions (not far short of 100 as far as I can recall) and I have never seen such vans used before - not even in Northern Ireland.
If anyone had a tendency to claustrophobia, the cells, which are the very minimum in which people could be got, would set off a reaction; and if there were a car accident, it would ensure that prisoners so carried would be killed.
Terrify The use of these - explicable I suppose, when transporting people between maximum security gaols, for bank robbers and so forth, - on this demo, raises two possible expianations, both rather unpleasant:
Either they were trying to terrify the demonstrators and this obviously unsafe means of transport was meant to a hint as to what could happen in custody;
Or they use these transports generally for any offence, in which case it is quite possible that an absent-minded elderly person, picked up for shop lifting, might be so transported -which could easily cause a heartattack.
Fraternally, LAURENS OTTER