Forbear, mortals, to pollute your bodies with the flesh of animals. There is corn; there are the apples that bear down the branches by their weight; and there are the grapes, nuts, and vegetables. These shall be our food.  Pythagoras, 582 B.C.

With the closing down of routes for the traffic of livestock, new ones were sought by dairy farmers. Justice Department parcel bombs had sent them, and protesters, to Baginton Airport in Coventry. The enforced decision by shipping companies to bar live animal exports from their ferries caused exporters to try flying the animals out instead. It was here that the most significant human tragedy occurred.

The Phipps family, whom you may remember from the chapter dealing with the Unilever raid in the 1980s, were passionate about many issues, and were regularly to be seen at protests around the country, so it wouldn’t have taken a degree to figure out they’d be out in numbers at the airport just around the corner from home. The youngest, Leslie, was there with her sister Jill and her 68-year-old mum Nancy, whose catch phrase to the bad guys was: ‘You lot ought to be ashamed of yourselves!’ They would usually be accompanied by anyone whom they could persuade to come along, like Gurjeet, usually, a family friend and a stalwart of the local group who‘d unfortunately been imprisoned for doing his bit to force the exporters from the ferries so wouldn’t be there this time.

Jill Phipps had been spared a prison sentence ten years earlier at the Unilever trial because she was pregnant at the time with her son Luke. She was devoted to him and he’d taken up much of her time in the intervening years. But she was there on the front line again, just like they’d been in the old days at Cocksparrow and other places. Flying baby cows out of their hometown was incitement to act.

A permanent camp sprang up at the main entrance to the airfield. The exporters thought the calves could be flown out, but what they hadn’t bargained for was they still had to be driven to the airport through a small group of those who’d stopped their progress to the docks.

Jill—one of the bravest of the group—was at the remote airport every night for six weeks, braving the elements and the police. She was a pretty woman, with a natural ability to disarm men, which she used in diffusing confrontations with the police, but she was no pushover. As the mother of a young son, perhaps she felt the plight of the motherless calves more passionately than some—in any event, it was her empathy with them that spurred her on.

It was 1 February, 1995. If anyone could wriggle a way through the police lines to intercept the wagons, it was always Jill. The police knew her well and so did the drivers, who’d stop for her or whoever while the police cleared a path and gave the go-ahead to continue. They were there primarily to see the wagons through but also supposedly to stop them should anyone be at risk.

In a way, it was perhaps predictable to all who knew Jill that it was her at the centre of unfolding events that winter night on that barren airfield. There was no great motion to the wagons as they approached the airfield—that was why she’d been able to stand before them a thousand times, arms raised, pleading for them to stop. There were a hundred officers on duty that cold February, supposedly keeping three dozen protesters from obstructing the flow of wagons carrying a thousand calves a day. Outmanoeuvring the police, Jill and a small group of friends did their usual protest, but the driver just didn’t stop for her this time. He had plenty of time to see her and it wasn’t as if he was moving too fast to stop, but he did exactly the opposite and slammed into her, forcing her under the wheels.

Jill Phipps died cradled in the arms of her mother Nancy on the tarmac at Coventry Airport. She was 31 years old.

No more poignant destiny could have befallen this gentle, loving family, and the irony of their loss could not have been lost on many, given that the Phipps women—both of them mothers—were fighting to protect the lives of orphaned calves severed from their mothers at a few days’ old. They believed—as all right-thinking people should—that it is a travesty to deny generation after generation of mother cows their natural right to fulfil their maternal bond with their new born.

As she lay on the tarmac the police worked really hard to keep the other protesters from the scene, and they kept the wagons rolling. Two days later, as the movement struggled to come to terms with this latest tragedy, the inquest into Jill’s death was opened and adjourned and her 70-year old father, Bob, her partner, Justin and younger sister, Leslie, were arrested at the airport with 45 others as they tried to stop the flights. Justin had locked himself to the wheel of the plane on the runway and succeeded in preventing it from taking off, causing it to be grounded for safety tests. That night, ALF activists broke into a Cambridge University lab and rescued a number of cats that were being prepared for spinal injury experiments and dedicated the raid to the memory of Jill.

As has become the norm, the gutter press rounded on the activists. The gentle Jill Phipps was blamed for what had happened; she was called a ‘law breaker’ and an ‘obsessive’ who should’ve been at home tending to her son, not out getting herself killed over animals. Only a few journalists honestly reported on the very real tragedy that had happened here. The final insult was saved for the inquest. It had clearly been the duty of the police to ensure no one got hurt at the protests (and presumably to tell the truth about the events later). But the version of events presented at the actual inquest left witnesses to the facts reeling. Staggeringly, police claimed that Jill had placed herself under the wheel of the moving truck with the intention of getting herself crushed! One PC David Toms said that having moved one protester from the path of the lorry, his ‘intention was to go back and do the same with Miss Phipps. She turned and lay on her back and shuffled under the lorry with her stomach directly underneath the wheel. It was my opinion from what I recall that it was a purposeful motion.’ This presentation of the story exonerated both them and the driver and put the onus on Jill Phipps for committing an act of reckless stupidity; but although the word of other witnesses who had seen the unfolding tragedy contradicted this, the outcome, it seemed was a closed book from the outset. The inquest verdict returned was one of accidental death. This made a mockery of the killing of a young mother.

It wasn’t the first time the police had confused the facts when dealing with Jill Phipps. Four years earlier, during a trawl of Special Branch dossiers, they had somehow concluded she had been in Cheshire, protesting at the kennels of the Cheshire Beagles two days after the killing of Mike Hill, when in fact she was collecting her son from school in Coventry 200 miles away at the time. Yet she found herself targeted by detectives, arrested and held at a police station near home for the day, before being taken to Cheshire to be questioned and later charged with riot! She was then held in custody for two days pending the clearance of a bail surety before she was released to find her own way home. She spent eight months on bail before the charges were dropped due to a lack of evidence and the police and CPS apologised for the way they had treated her. Sorry, I made the last bit up. They didn’t at all. Perhaps one day they‘ll acknowledge the wrong done to this gentle soul who was never able to collect the compensation she was eventually awarded years later for the wrongs done in Cheshire.

Those who had turned on Jill Phipps had condemned the idea that her funeral service was to be held at Coventry city cathedral, claiming that her memorial service should have been held in a back street with little fuss and that the cathedral was the preserve of those who had died for their cause in wars, not for the likes of an animal protester. Clearly, many disagreed as over 1000 mourners packed the historic cathedral and crowded outside to pay their respects.

As for Phoenix Aviation—the company responsible for the flights out of Coventry—well they struggled on for another five months of intense pressure before being forced into liquidation. It had cost the taxpayer another half a million quid to keep the runways clear, and over 200 people were arrested trying to block them. Company boss Christopher Barrett-Jolley insisted: ‘This is not a victory for the protesters. They have not influenced our decision one bit. The cessation of our animal flights operations was on purely economic reasons.’ (Same thing, dummy!) He added: ‘Although the company is owed a lot more money than it owes, the situation with the animal flights has become impossible, absolutely impossible to continue.’ There were guards at the home of Barret-Jolley 24/7 after it was repeatedly attacked, but the problems were only just beginning for the delightful Mr Not So-Jolley.