Protest pensioner closes weapons’ base

Date published: 02/03/2010

Gutsy Gran Jean Johnson, formerly from Bacup, held a sit-down protest, which forced the country’s leading atomic weapons establishment to be shut down for a morning.

Protesting pensioner Jean was locked into a tube with fellow CND supporter Pat Sanchez, from Littleborough, and several other campaigners at the entrances to the base in Aldermaston, Berkshire, where the nuclear missile Trident is manufactured.
The cardboard tube bore the message ‘Trident Costs the Earth’ and inside the two were linked together by a chain.

Defiant Jean, 68, said: “I would do it all again tomorrow. We had CND protestors at each of the seven gates into the base and there were around 800 supporters.

“There were four or five grouped at each gate and it took about four hours to move us all on. We succeeded in causing the disruption we intended but I have never been as cold in all my life.”

She said they were protesting because the Government has agreed to replace the Trident nuclear missile and the warheads will be built at Aldermaston.

“You can never stop wars, but you can stop nuclear wars,” said Jean. “The world is in such an awful state what we need to do is get nuclear weapons out of the equation.”
The grandmother of two used to live on the Pennine Estate in Bacup, until retiring to Fleetwood in 2006. She stood several times as a Green Party candidate in Rossendale elections and was also a campaigner at Greenham Common in the 1980s.

In 2006 Jean and her husband Alan, 73, were arrested in a protest outside the nuclear submarine base at Faslane, Clydebank, when they blockaded the South Gate for 15 minutes.

And Alan, a member of Rossendale Ramblers for many years, ended up in a police cell after a similar protest at the same site in July 2007 – he was given a warning by the Procurator Fiscal to desist or face prosecution.

Jean added: “The Scottish Parliament has now said no to Trident being based at Faslane, so our action can make a difference.”

Although there were a handful of arrests at the Aldermaston protest on 15 February, Jean and Pat were not among them.