Buoyant blog of septuagenarian Kanadian poet and lifelong haikuist Chris Faiers/cricket. Poetry, esp. People's Poetry in the tradition of Milton Acorn, haiku/haibun, progressive politikal rants, engaged Buddhism and meditation, updates on the revitalizing of Callaghan's Rapids Conservation Area, memories of ZenRiver Gardens retreat near Marmora and annual Purdy Country LitFests (PurdyFests), events literary and politikal, and pics, amid swirling currents of earth magick and shamanism.
Yesterday afternoon I drove to the Timmy's in the east end of Belleville on Highway #2 and picked up a 50 pack of Timbits (for non Canadians, these are mini donuts - donut holes I guess, sweet and very surgary).
I then drove another 15 minutes to the site of the Mohawk "blockade" at the CN railroad crossing to deliver my tasty support to the protesters who've been camped there for over two weeks in icy sub zero weather in support of the Wet'suwet'en First Nations pipeline opposition in British Columbia.
I turned onto a narrow one lane dirt concession road when I spotted the line-up of rental cars parked against the ditch. A white settler couple parked ahead of me, and they were carrying a pizza box to the demonstrators. We ambled past the line-up of compact cars which seemed full of media types, sitting in their little cars with the engines running and their heaters overworking.
As I'm not a journalist, I didn't stop at the sign reading Media Checkpoint. My pizza friends must have been stopped there, but I continued to the railcrossing, where a Tyendinaga policeman (I assume from the uniform) took my fancy lunchbox stuffed with Timbits.
I wandered over the tracks and looked around. A young and handsome black kerchief masked Mohawk Warrior intercepted me, as I must have inadvertently missed earlier security checks. He demanded my name, where I lived, was I "community" (Mohawk) and what was I doing there? I said I'm a settler ally, and he instantly saw I was OK, altho a bit foolish and disoriented. He shook my hand, gave me a big hug, thanked me for my support, but suggested I leave as it was a very tense situation at present. He invited me to return to the camp when things were calmer so we could have a conversation.
Back in my little subaru I shed some tears on the trip back to Belleville at our country's history of the brutal and inhumane treatment of our First Nations people which has led to confrontations like this blockade.
Today the Prime Minister of Kanada tried to speak out of both sides of his mouth to end the blockade. Hearing his weasel words I kept thinking of the threatening but cowardly lines from the poem "My Last Duchess" - orders were given!
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The following is an excerpt from a recent email from "Dogwood" Land, money and markets: three things every pipeline needs
Indigenous solidarity is part of a powerful three-pronged strategy to stop fossil fuel expansion
Long after the last pipeline has been dug up and recycled, Wet’suwet’en people will decide what happens on their lands through their own chosen system of governance. Chiefs’ names like Na’moks, Lho'imggin and Gisday'wa will be handed down in the feast hall to future leaders.
Indigenous peoples’ inherent right to self-determination, their collective ownership of land and their right to live in peace and safety: these are all things we must recognize and support as British Columbians, regardless of what projects are proposed on a given territory.
But in this moment, it’s obvious why youth and others terrified by the climate crisis have chosen to stand in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs. Indigenous law and land defence are powerful components of the overall strategy to stop deadly fossil fuel expansion.
Indigenous land, public money and decades of continued oil and gas consumption: these are the three things pipeline projects need to be viable in 2020. Like a stool with three legs, if any one of those things is removed, the project topples.
The land question It’s less and less of a question. Land belongs to Indigenous peoples until that collective title is extinguished. In most of B.C., that never happened. So governments and industry negotiate ad-hoc access to land through money, coercion or force.
Most extractive industries in Canada rely on access to Indigenous land and resources, but pipelines are particularly vulnerable. That’s because they are long and linear. They cannot function unless they connect across hundreds of kilometres of land.
Until recently, governments could provide certainty to oil and gas companies of that access. But as Indigenous peoples rebuild their systems of governance and assert control of their land, it’s harder to guarantee consent from every nation affected by these megaprojects. That wouldn’t matter if our energy systems were more localized, but we’ll get to that.
Hundreds called the long-abandoned mansion home for a week – it was ended by police in just three minutes (Picture: Getty/Shutterstock)
It was the summer of ’69, and just like the Bryan Adams song, Richie Garnder, 17, thought the summer would last forever.
Richie was a hippy. That counter-culture of mushroom-munching, ‘peace not war’, shower-avoiding people – at least, to the tabloids.
The busker and musician spent the summer squatting at derelict buildings on Endell Street and Broad Court in central London. He and his fellow occupiers were among the founding members of the London Street Commune.
But Richie, now 72, way prefers being called a ‘freak’, a word not too far off from what he was called when he and hundreds more hunkered at the long-empty mansion, 144 Piccadilly, on Hyde Park Corner for nearly a week that September.
‘Life in 144 was busy for us,’ Richie said of the six-day occupation that ended within minutes after dozens of officers raided it on September 21, 1969.
‘We had daily supplies delivered from the one film company we let inside. Many newspaper interviews, although we refused to speak to The Sun, News of The World or The People.
144 Piccadilly, a sprawling 100-room mansion, became the unofficial home for hundreds in 1969 (Picture: Bill Zygmant/REX/Shutterstock)
The occupation only ended after hundreds of police stormed the building (Picture: Getty Images/Hulton Archive)
Piccadilly Circus in the West End was, at the time, home to several empty, well, homes (Picture: Mirrorpix/Getty Images)
‘Planning meetings too, usually around breakfast time. Also dealing with an increasing number of runaways who had heard of our squat. Also, for us who actually lived on “the Dilly”, the need to make our daily living. In my case busking.’
A squatter is someone who occupies an uninhabited building unlawfully. For years after World War Two, it was one of the few options some people had to have a roof over their heads. Many homes had been damaged during the war, while some parts of London were ghost towns. Flats, estates and hotels sat empty as owners waited for their value to spike, even as homelessness rates rose.
Enter the London Street Commune. Looking at the post-war squatters’ playbook for inspiration, a 20-strong group started squatting around Piccadilly Circus, London’s well-heeled business district, in 1967.
‘We formed the London Street Commune to initially empower ourselves against what we saw as police harassment and tabloid accusations,’ Richie said.
The commune was less a movement than a loose network of, hippies, misfits, ‘freaks’, unsheltered people, revolutionaries, anarchists, fed-up youth, young offenders, runaways, sex workers and sympathisers or all of the above who believed that homelessness, funnily enough, is not a good thing, especially in a place like Piccadilly. And a gigantic mansion standing empty captured that.
Richie Garnder, pictured last year, now lives in the Welsh Black Mountains (Picture: Richie Garnder)
Dr John Moffatt was the commune’s self-styled leader (Picture: Mirrorpix)
The London Street Commune was behind the squatting (Picture: Getty Images/Hulton Archive)
Hundreds moved into 114 Piccadilly after the commune broke in, barricaded the doors and jerry-rigged a bridge over the dry moat around the building.
Chris Faiers, a now 76-year-old poet who wrote about his day-long stay in 144 for his memoir, Eel Pie Island Dharma, said that ‘the Squat’ had some rather unlikely members; the Hell’s Angels (HA), the club of leather-clad, Harley-Davidson motorcycle-riding outlaws and bike enthusiasts.
‘There were bikers wearing HA patches in the 144 Squat, and over the years I’ve bragged once or twice that I fought alongside the UK Angels in the Squat,’ Chris, a Canadian living in the rural Ontario village Marmora, said. ‘I don’t think anyone considers the HA a progressive force decades later – more the pity! ‘
John Bernard, a 72-year-old now living in Spain, was an 18-year-old messenger boy working for the Sunday People newspaper during the 144 squat. While in the office, he spotted a journalist trying to ‘disguise himself as a hippy’, so he let his friend, also called John, staying in 114 know.
Commune members often took shifts to grab food from nearby restaurants and grocers (Picture: Getty Images/Hulton Archive)
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The occupation began as a protest to draw attention to London’s spiralling rates of homelessness (Picture: Hart/ANL/REX/Shutterstock)
Half an hour later, the ‘p****d-off looking’ journalist was back in the office; the commune had chucked him out.
Up to 500 people occupied 144 yet only 200 remained when officers ransacked. Most squatters had remained at the property even after the High Court ordered them to leave four days prior, forcing the police to evict them.
When the police came, squatters lobbed, among other things, plastic balls, stones, iron bars, wooden planks and roof tiles. About 50 officers stormed the janky drawbridge before a second wave followed – 200 officers were involved.
Scotland Yard said that there was little resistance from the squatters. Most arrested were released, with some sneaking into other abandoned homes in Endell Street, Covent Garden.
‘The police raid was inevitable. It was unfortunate it happened so soon but none of us who were the original members of the London Street Commune were surprised,’ recalled Richie.
Some historians say that the 144 Piccadilly occupation ignited the squatters movement of the next two decades. ‘Houses (indeed streets and communities) once earmarked for demolition to make way for roads or blocks of flats are still standing today because squatters occupied them in the 1960s and 1970s,’ wrote one.
John Bernard warned the 144 occupiers that a journalist was going to sneak into the building (Picture: John Bernard)
Squatting became a last resort for countless people after World War Two led to a housing shortage (Picture: Hart/ANL/REX/Shutterstock)
A squatter from 144 Piccadilly is evicted by police (Picture: Getty Images/Hulton Archive)
But John doubts such an occupation could ever happen again, even if all the reasons London Street Commune occupied abandoned buildings to begin with are still relevant today.
‘Sadly some 55 years on from 144 Piccadilly, the UK appears to be in a much more dangerous place and could not to my mind be further removed from the more tolerant Britain of the “post-war consensus” I grew up in,’ he said.
Nearly 88,000 houses stood empty across London in 2023, according toEstate Agent Today. One-hundred-fourteen Piccadilly is no longer one of them – the block was demolished three years later.
‘Central London no longer has those kind of derelict properties, but also because the political landscape is so very different,’ John added. ‘I doubt very much that 144 Piccadilly could happen now precisely because of how much economic conditions have changed.’
Daniel Stern, partner in dispute resolution at the firm Slater Heelis, says that squatters’ rights have changed a lot since 1969.
This is mainly down to the Criminal Law Act 1977, Stern says, which strengthened tenant protections.
For one, ‘it created an arrestable offence where someone “without lawful authority” uses violence in an attempt to secure entry to premises where someone on the premises opposes the entry’, Stern says.
‘It was enhanced by the Protection from Eviction Act 1977 which states is intended to stop landlords harassing tenants to obtain possession. They must obtain a possession order first.’
But laws hoping to squash squatting came into force in 2012, with occupying residential buildings becoming an offence that could land someone with a £5,000 fine and six months behind bars
‘However, my experience is that the police will not interfere with residential squatters and will assert that it is a civil matter and should be pursued through the civil courts by a possession claim,’ Stern adds.
This may be because they are under-resourced and over-stretched.
Chris feels the same. ‘I don’t know if another culture-changing epoch like the late sixties will happen again in my lifetime,’ he said, ‘but I’m sure glad I was a part of the one back then!
‘So many societal changes were internationally birthed in the ’60s: feminism, gay rights, Aboriginal rights, even seemingly unimportant things like clothing and hairstyles. Too bad the music and revolutionary fervour have faded.’
Like London, life has changed a fair bit for those who once called Hippydilly home. Chris wound up back in Canada, having lived in Marmora for 35 years while clocking hours at a library the next town over.
John never saw his friend John again. ‘We were both from lower middle-class families, both went to the same private school and both of us were into the hippy counterculture including at that time lots of hashish,’ he recalled, adding: ‘I suspect like a lot of that generation, he thrived later in some entrepreneurial capacity.’
Christopher Faires says he doubts another decade will quite match the 1960s (Picture: Christopher Faires)
Squatters were defiant before being evicted by the police (Picture: Getty Images/Hulton Archive)
Richie, meanwhile, said the police raid was a a ‘catalyst’ that some commune members needed to ‘actually leave the Dilly’ – himself included. ‘After several adventures, I found myself in west Wales where I learned the value of decent work,’ he recalled.
‘I worked on several local projects which in ’77 led me to Kerry Eire where my partner and I raised a family of four kids, worked hard and purchased several acres of land where one of my daughters now resides.’
