Fifty years ago this year the last Windsor Free Festival took place at Windsor Great Park. This annual festival would run for 9 days and attracted thousands of music goers from all over the country much to the annoyance of some local residents and businesses with No Hippies signs on doors of many of the shops and pubs in the town. The Festival attracted a lot of interest in the local and national media, primarily as it took place in the Queen’s back garden, which included a piece on page three of The Sun newspaper with a picture of topless female festival goers and the headline Royal Sex Olympics, presumably as the real Olympics were taking place at the same time.
I was fourteen years old at the time and my parents said I was too young to go but as the Festival was so close to where we lived, I would open the bedroom windows and listen to the early hours of the morning. Bizarrely on a Sunday afternoon of the week of the Festival my parents put me, my two younger brothers and my sister in the back of the car and drove us the mile or so down the road. It was like going to a Safari Park, my Mum made a packed lunch and thermos flask of tea and we parked on the edge of the Great Park along with other local residents who had the same idea, so we could watch the Hippies in their natural environment from the safety of our car with the strict instructions not to unwind the windows and under no circumstances open the doors. As we looked out through the large windscreen the only thing missing was a David Attenborough wildlife commentary.
A few days later the media coverage escalated from page 3 of the National newspapers to the front page when hundreds of Police Officers raided the Festival in the early hours of the morning to physically remove them from the site. The aggressive nature of this approach prompted the Home Secretary at the time to ask for a National enquiry. This followed a sit in by hundreds of Festival goers by Queen Victories statue outside the main entrance of Windsor Castle.
Many years later when I was working at Windsor Arts Centre I was involved in a Community Play called Don’t Stop the Music which looked at the relationship between music and the town. Not only was the Free Festival stopped due to public pressure but also the Windsor Jazz and Blues Festival which later went on to be Reading Festival, the second Ricky Tik Club which played host some of the biggest names of the 60’s including Stevie Wonder, The Rolling Stones, The who and many more and The Old Trout that played host to Oasis, Blur, Faith No More and the Pixies and several other events.
January 1975 saw me go to my first live music event which I will talk about next time.
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