SATURDAY June 1 in 1985 was carnival day in Marlborough and also the day of the bloodiest battle in Wiltshire in living memory.

While the carnival revellers were dancing through the streets of Marlborough, hardly 20 miles away police fought a pitched battle with a convoy of travellers.

The clash between hundreds of new age travellers and a thousand police officers has gone down in history as the Battle of the Beanfield.

It all started in Savernake Forest whose sylvan glades on the edge of Marlborough had became a makeshift camp for dozens of hippy caravans and converted vans and coaches.

Two decades and more ago what was then termed The Convoy roamed the roads of England, a motley collection of untaxed old vans and buses that were home to a nomadic group of hippies.

Every year in mid-June the convoy converged on Stonehenge for a free festival around the summer solstice.

The festival was little more than a free for all for illegal drugs that were advertised with makeshift cardboard notices outside of tents and caravans reading: "Get The Best Red Leb Here" and "Cheapest Grass".

Police and politicians became increasingly concerned at the growing size of the festival in the late 70s and early 80s.

It has always been believed that the order to break up The Convoy came from No 10 Downing Street where Margaret Thatcher was the incumbent.

Nationally the police had already developed a no nonsense stance the previous year of the miners' strike, with the never to be forgotten televised scenes of officers battling with strikers and their supporters.

If the question had been asked in 1984, could similar scenes of police battling with civilians ever be seen in Wiltshire, the answer would have been a resounding negative.

However the events leading up to the summer solstice of 1985 were to prove otherwise.

The convoy had been roaming around in groups of a dozen or so vehicles until the travellers found their way into Savernake Forest towards the end of May 1985.

Dozen upon dozen of hippy vans and coaches moved onto the picnic site at Postern Hill. Those that didn't have vehicles made makeshift tents, known as benders, from supple branches covered with tarpaulins.

To start with there was a good natured mood among the campers who enjoyed the woodland environment even if there was permanent police sentry outside the camp.

But tension began to build as members of the convoy began getting the message that there would be no free festival at Stonehenge that year or ever again as it turned out.

The National Trust, English Heritage and local farmers had been successful in getting an injunction banning the free festival from going ahead.

On the morning of June 1 dozens of hippy vans and coaches some with front bumpers replaced with steel girders turning them into fearsome battering rams broke out of the forest.

They headed south en masse in a convoy stretching for several miles heading in the direction of Stonehenge.

They met head on with hundreds of police officers wearing riot dress at the Parkhouse roundabout at Cholderton where the hippies burst through a hedge into a field of beans.

There was fierce hand-to-hand fighting as officers attempted to arrest convoy members. Hippy coaches were driven at speed at officers while police smashed windows of locked coaches and vans to drag the occupants out.

Officers from Wiltshire were reinforced by colleagues from Hampshire, Dorset, Gloucestershire and Thames Valley forces and, it was understood, by some elitist special patrol groups from the Metropolitan force.

Twenty four people were injured in the battle and there were 520 arrests although not one charge subsequently ended up in court.

The tattered remains of the convoy limped back to Savernake Forest where some of the woman and children had stayed behind fearing there would be a confrontation to lick their wounds.

Many of the impounded hippy vans and coaches were taken to the council tip at Everleigh where they were later found to have been trashed.

The remnants of the convoy stayed in the forest for several days before drifting off to wherever they had come from, bloodied but saying the free festival at Stonehenge would go on.

But it never has.