Emma Must

This audio clip is from a series of 100 life history interviews with environmental campaigners in the UK, 1970-2020. A quotation from this recording features in the book Voices for Change, published by UCL Press in November 2026 (available in print as well as a free PDF download). The full interview, along with the summaries, transcripts and recordings for this and the rest of the interview collection, is available at the British Library (Sound and Moving Image Collection, under the shelf-mark C2037). For more information, including educational materials and other resources, visit the Oral History of the Environmental Movement project website at www.royalholloway.ac.uk/ohemQuotation:Emma Must: But so but money is a thing, right. So the one thing to say about that time, we were all really young. So I was in my twenties. And so we were all- But we signed on, we were all- I was then signing on once I wasn’t working in the library. And we were, but we lived on thin air. We lived on absolutely thin air. And we lived hand to mouth. And we were really irresponsible about all sorts of things to do with conventional life because we were just so frenetically involved in this campaign. And it’s a thing that you can do when you’re young I think, when you’re young and just focused on something. But it’s something that you- I mean I can’t imagine being like that now. But things like, but people, people started- Like, when something clearly dreadful, something clearly wrong is going on, and people start wading in and helping, so The Ecologist magazine, so we met Simon Fairlie. He turned up on one demo. He was one of the editors of The Ecologist magazine at the time. And he said, ‘Come and use The Ecologist.’ He said, ‘The boss is away,’ he said, ‘The boss is going to be away for a bit. I’m sure he won’t mind.’ He did check it with him and he didn’t mind. And we went, they were in Dorset so we went down, we went up and down by train and Simon had a van, we used to use his van. And we used that as a networking centre, once we were all committed to this full time, which we were. And we were using that as the networking centre, the hub to organise phone trees and flyers and faxing and press releases. And, so the Friends of Twyford Down would meet every Friday in Winchester. We would then go off an execute all this stuff from The Ecologist magazine during the week and then come back up and report back on the Friday. They’d have all been doing their thing as well. And so it was basically month after month after month of small direct action during the week. So locking ourselves by the neck to bulldozers. So I remember one action, me and Becca, so Becca locked herself onto this bulldozer between, in the bit between the front wheels, and I locked myself onto the footplate on the side. Just the two of us, very early in the morning one day. And between us we just stopped work on the whole site for, I don’t know, best part of the morning. And they came and, yes, I’ve written about it in the book actually. The, so these workmen kind of showed up and then the police and they kind of ambled around, ‘What on earth are we going to do about these two?’ [laughing] And what they actually did was they unscrewed the footplate. So they just basically dismantled this footplate on the bulldozer. And they moved me off to the side. So I was like locked inside the middle of this footplate. Well they held up this very, very heavy bit of metal. And then they hacksawed my D-lock off. And Becca was locked on still between the front wheels. And then they had to figure out what to do about her. And then eventually hacksawed her off as well. But we stopped work for a good few hours the two of us.Saskia Papadakis: How does it feel when you’re D-locked to a piece of machinery like that? And knowing that they’re going to try and cut you out of it somehow?Emma Must: Yes. I don’t know we just did it. You’d think it would be like stupidly terrifying but it- We just like, I don’t remember any fear about that at all. I just, there was definitely fear about if they started the machinery. And Jason has a, Jason has an extraordinary story, Jason Torrance who I know someone else is going to interview but I mean and there’s video of him, there’s video of him being D-locked to a machine that is being started. And him thinking, and he goes, ‘Fuck’ in the video, and you’re like, oh my God. So clearly it’s quite high stakes. That particular action wasn’t. Yes so the short answer is absolutely frenetic activity literally everything we could think of every day for months to try to stop the road going ahead.British Library catalogue number: C2037/28 Project clip number: 69