Pete Roche

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:Pete Roche: in the September of 1978 construction was about to start. So we went and occupied a cottage on the site which we called Half Moon Cottage. So that was, I was kind of the SCRAM representative living in this cottage for a few weeks. And then there were people from around the country representing the different wings of the Torness Alliance there as well. Some of them were able to stay longer than I was. I think originally we were only going to do it for two weeks but we decided I had to go back to work, I had a full time job by then cutting grass I think in, for the parks department.Chris Church: So when did you start work?Pete Roche: So I just took two weeks off. And then the bulldozers arrived. And Mary Scott would have been there I think. So there’s a picture here of the day the- So the people in the the SSEB, the South of Scotland Electricity Board had decided to leave us alone for the time being whilst they started work up on the main A1 road. They had to build a big pit for the sewage I think. But then the people at Half Moon Cottage went up and harassed the bulldozers. So they weren’t going to put up with that. So they came the next day and demolished the cottage. And we got a call from the people in the cottage to come and help. So I rushed out but I was too late. I actually got there just as the bulldozer went into the front door of Half Moon Cottage.Chris Church: Right. And that was September ’78.Pete Roche: Yes.Chris Church: Right. So this, I mean to some extent this was the first kind of confrontational direct action of a modern environmental movement.Pete Roche: Yes. Before that it had only been trespass really.Chris Church: Yes. Mmm. And there was-Pete Roche: So and there was an interesting little indication of where my skills were going to take me later on at Greenpeace probably, because we’d found these, there were some scout huts further along the beach on the Torness site. And they had this wonderful, these wonderful marble slabs for the path up from the beach up to the scout hut. And we thought that would make a great kitchen floor. So we carted them off, it took at least two of us to cart them along the beach. Brought about eight of them where the kitchen floor would have been.Chris Church: This was in one of these scout huts.Pete Roche: We moved them from the scout huts to Half Moon Cottage.Chris Church: Right, oh I see.Pete Roche: Because it was getting muddy and it was a nightmare to cook any food or anything. And then one day this guy turned up and said, ‘I bought those. They’re mine.’ And then later on when we said, ‘Get lost’ we said, ‘We don’t believe you.’ He said ‘I’m a policeman.’ And showed us his badge and he said, ‘I’m an off duty policeman. So if you don’t give them back to me I’m going to report you and come and arrest you all,’ or something. And I said, ‘What do you want to use them for?’ And he said, he was renovating a cottage and he wanted them for the fireplace. They would have made a perfect hearth. And I said, ‘How many hearths do you need?’ He said ‘Two.’ I said, ‘Have you thought how about a) you’re going to transport them from the scout huts to your renovated cottage?’ He says, ‘No I haven’t got that far yet.’ I said, ‘Well we’ve got all these farmers at our beck and call here, we could just stick them on the back of a farm truck and drive them round. If you have two can we keep the rest?’ And he said, ‘Oh that’s a good plan.’ [laughing]Chris Church: So that was negotiation.Pete Roche: That diffused the whole, well the rest of them were already for a big row.Chris Church: Right. Mmm. So that autumn ’78 SCRAM is starting to kind of go national.Pete Roche: Yes.Chris Church: I mean most of the people who came to the May ’78 rally were from Edinburgh.Pete Roche: Well probably a good few Torness Alliance people as well.Chris Church: Right okay.Pete Roche: What we, because what we had done, like I said earlier I think we were inventing the anti-nuclear movement, we got hold a Peace News Diary. And in the back of that there’s groups, names and addresses and lists of wholefood shops, anything that’s sort of vaguely alternative. They still do it actually. But and then of course we had the odd Friends of the Earth. There weren’t that many in those days. How many would there have been, about twenty?Chris Church: Oh no, it was 100 by then.Pete Roche: Were there?Chris Church: Mmm.Pete Roche: So we would have written to all of them as well. But we wrote to all the wholefood shops and groups, peace groups, anything that was vaguely connected.Chris Church: Because this would have been before Thatcher and cruise missiles.Pete Roche: Yes. And most of the wholefood shops put a poster up. So you’d go to the wholefood shop in Stafford, somebody would phone you up and say, ‘We’re bringing a bus.’Chris Church: Right okay.Pete Roche: Tommy Sheppard who became, who’s just lost his seat. Yes, SNP MP. He brought several buses from Aberdeen. He was running the Aberdeen Students Association at the time. Senior President he was. So I’ve lost my train of thought now.Chris Church: So this is the big demo in May ’78.Pete Roche: Yes.Chris Church: Yes. But after that it seemed to go national.Pete Roche: So then, that was, that demo was to set up the Torness Alliance.Chris Church: Yes, yes.Pete Roche: So I had a big board at the entrance. There was lots of non-violent direct action training. In fact there was funny story about how they were all off down the beach doing this non-violent direct action training. And the police had spotted somebody smoking an illegal substance in the campsite. So they had to drag him right across the festival site, and you’ve got the camp-Chris Church: So hand on this is May ’78.Pete Roche: This is May ’78.Chris Church: So this was at, this was at the campsite.Pete Roche: Yes, you’ve got the campsite here. The festival site here. And then road here and the caravan site here. So there’s a little car park at the end of the road because it doesn’t go anywhere after, it’s, because that’s the sea. So they had to drag him right across the festival site.Chris Church: So all this is at the site of Torness which is about twelve miles from Edinburgh.Pete Roche: Yes.Chris Church: Just for the record, yes.Pete Roche: No it’s a bit further than that.Chris Church: Is it, okay. Sorry.Pete Roche: More like thirty actually.Chris Church: Oh really? Okay.Pete Roche: Yes. So there’s a police van in the car park and they’re dragging this guy. So everybody on the festival site that hasn’t been interested enough to go and have a non-violent direct action workshop sat around the police van to try and stop this guy being arrested for smoking cannabis. [laughing] I just always thought that was very funny. So the non- The first non-violent direct action was done by people who weren’t interested in non-violent direct action to get somebody off.Chris Church: Yes. Okay. So you were, by this time you were still living with Steve but you’d got a job.Pete Roche: Yes.Chris Church: Was that just to make money or were you pushed?Pete Roche: Yes. Bit of both.Chris Church: Right.Pete Roche: Bit of both. I was burnt out as well so I was, after 1978. So I think I must have taken two weeks off work to go to live at Half Moon Cottage. Because the original plan was just to do it for two weeks. And then the rest of them wanted to stay. Which was probably the best idea anyway. Because they were there when the South of Scotland Electricity Board started work. So they started work. And then the next, we’d set up a phone tree to get people to come to the site.Chris Church: Do you want to explain a phone tree.Pete Roche: As soon as work started. Well everybody was given several phone numbers so that it would sort of, you’d start with one person who would phone three and then each of those three people would phone another three. So you could organise something pretty quick that way. So then we managed to get 400 people to come to the site a week after the, well it would have been six days after the SSEB had demolished Half Moon Cottage. And the bulldozers were still digging this pit for, I think it was for sewage. So they kept their equipment on one side of the A1. The pit is the other side of the A1 which was quite a main road going south. So these 400 people turned up and decided they were going to stop the bulldozers getting across the A1 to this pit which is what- And it was mainly the people that were non-violent direct action trained that were involved in doing that. The police were arresting people one by one but as soon as the cells in Dunbar were full up, which didn’t take long because there’s only about six cells I think, they would just drive people into the Lammermuir Hills and dump them. But we were following the police vans, somebody in SCRAM was driving a minibus sort of following them, following the police vans and picking them up and taking them straight back again. Which all this had started about four o’clock in the morning I think. So that was a fun day.British Library catalogue number: C2037/70 Proje