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:Saskia Papadakis: How did it feel being in court and defending yourself?Emma Must: It felt very empowering. It felt very empowering and we- We read out statements. I, so I read, yes, I had written a statement beforehand and I- Okay so I can’t actually- I can’t remember if we’d had the sentence at that point and then we read the statements, or if I read the statement and then he gave his judgment. It’s a judgment it’s not a sentence. Well it is a sentence. But he made his judgment. And I can’t remember what the order was. But yes it was great up until the point where I had to read my statement. And by that point I think we’d realised that this judge was not at all sympathetic. And he was going to go for the maximum that he could. So it was likely we were going to be sent to prison like there and then. And so I couldn’t read my statement. I was, I was, I just cried and I really- I was really upset. And one of the men, so Bob Bear who was another campaigner, he read it for me. He read my statement. But I’d, we were so savvy by this time and I had already- I had photocopied it and I had distributed it all to the- Or I had given it to some of the campaigners who were there and they had them ready to hand these statements out if we got sentenced to prison. And we made our statements. And we all held hands. [laughing] Yes and that must- Then he must have made his judgment at that point. And we were sentenced to a month. We were sentenced to twenty-eight days in prison.Saskia Papadakis: How had you prepared for that possibility?Emma Must: To, yes. We’d, so we had prepared for it. And we had, I got a prisoner’s information pack from, I can’t even think which organisation it was, might have been the Prison Reform Trust actually or one of the prison campaign groups. And we’d read through it and we knew what to expect and we were ready and prepared. Except that you’re not. We were like, I was really, really upset. I think I’d like- And like a lot of us were really- Well yes we were just upset. We just, I think I thought, oh yes, we have bitten off quite a lot here. But then we were sentenced and so we were led away. We were led down into the, the court was in uproar. Like it was, this was quite a big deal. This was quite a big deal. So there’d not been any- There’d been nobody imprisoned in the UK for environmental protests since 1932 which, so that was the Kinder Scout Trespassers who breached an injunction in 1932. And this was 1993, so sixty years. So it was, nobody really quite believed it. Nobody expected that to happen. We were prepared for it because we were savvy. But we didn’t think it was going to happen. And then we realised it was. Yes so there was- So the place was, yes, the place was in uproar actually. There was a lot of noise, a lot of noise. And we were led down into the back into the cells, into the cells under the court. And then so the men were then taken off in one direction. So this point me and Becca and a woman called Raga Woods, so there was literally three women imprisoned. And we were taken to Holloway prison. And the men were taken to Pentonville. So all north London prisons. As you know Victorian prisons. And yes and we got down into the holding pen underneath the court and yes by that time I had stopped being upset actually. I had kind of got my shit together a bit. [laughing] I’d stopped crying anyway. And then we were taken by prison van to Holloway, yes. Through London, we were driven through London.British Library catalogue number: C2037/28 Project clip number: 70