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d20 Modern - Knightley Blues - First Update!
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<blockquote data-quote="wedgeski" data-source="post: 2337021" data-attributes="member: 16212"><p><strong>First Handout - The Geddes Report</strong></p><p></p><p><strong>Putting Up Walls</strong></p><p> <strong>The Knightley Quarantine: 20 Years On</strong></p><p></p><p><em>Margaret Geddes, one-time political correspondent for this magazine, takes a break from retirement to recall the events that shook the nation two decades ago, and which are now almost forgotten.</em></p><p></p><p>On June 2 1983, at five minutes past five on a sweltering summer afternoon, a small and unassuming press release filtered out of the governmental press office and landed on my desk. I ignored it at first, as I think most other journalists did in the accelerating madness of the approaching General Election. At about eight o'clock that night, however, as I took a coffee break and contemplated just how late I would be getting home to my husband, it rose at last to the top of the in-tray and demanded a little attention.</p><p></p><p>It quickly became clear to me, as I read those 150-some words, that I wouldn't, in fact, be going home that night at all.</p><p></p><p>This sensational story, that the small and uninteresting city of Knightley Walls had been quarantined by military police pending investigation into an "unidentified contagion", broke on front pages all across the country early the next morning. For myself, I put in no fewer than a dozen calls to government and military agencies to confirm its veracity, thinking that it must be a ploy to distract attention from the latest scandal to rock the election polls. Those calls, however, returned the same abrupt, no-nonsense answer: Knightly under quarantine, no-one in or out until further notice, emergency powers in place.</p><p></p><p>I recall the frenzy of the next few days with no little fondness. Of course, my primary business was Margaret Thatcher's impending landslide victory in the polls, but along with everyone else in the office, I pestered the Knightley crew for gossip every chance I got. It must be said that the sheer novelty of the story, at that time, got the better of our consideration for the poor 100,000 or so souls who had overnight became prisoners in their own homes, and these days I'm sure a more professional veneer would have descended on the office, but with the only news for so long being the election I'm not at all surprised that the story engendered so much energy in the hundreds of reporters across the country who investigated it.</p><p></p><p>I say 'investigated', but with equal surety I can say that never in this nation's history, before or since, has such an effective block to investigative journalism been erected by the government. Little-known (or I would warrant, believed) emergency measures gave the military police around Knightley supreme authority over both its populace and the security of the quarantine. Lengthy statements delivered to the press spelled out, in intricate detail, the consequences to life and limb should anyone try to enter or leave the city. (It was several months after the quarantine was imposed that the letter of these dictates would be tested, but I will come to that tragic episode later.) Suffice it to say that, for the first few months at least, long after the election was over and I had been handed responsibility for 'The Knightley Thing', as it became known in the office, we were reduced to publishing only the most superficial and speculative of articles. The story was gradually relegated down to somewhere in the dirty corner of page 14, left of the cricket scores and just underneath the latest celebrity marriage.</p><p></p><p>It's inevitable, I suppose, that as something evolves from the shocking to familiar, interest wanes. We were as guilty of that as our readership. Soon, the Knightley Quarantine was a fact of life, a fleeting thought on the way to the shops or a brief pause as one read the news, wondering whatever happened to 'that' city and 'those people' who lived there. Well I can tell you now, with the benefit of hindsight and the storm of interviews which followed, that life was hard for those people. Not third-world or war-torn hard, but hard nonetheless. Food and water were immediately rationed (I still recall the endless procession of homogenous green trucks which passed in and out of the military gate demarcating the end of the A303 and the start of the Knightley Quarantine Zone); a blanket 5pm curfew was imposed; and at first, even the television cables were cut. (In an uncharacteristic show of humanity for those left without Emmerdale Farm, they were, however, restored a few weeks later.) Inside, a person could hear of their plight on the Six O'Clock News, and look out of their window to see military scientists in stark white suits walking the street. One resident told me afterwards: "I'm not sure what was more frightening, the HASMAT men drilling into my rose garden, or the fact that no-one outside seemed to be talking about us any more." Initial unrest, demonstrations, and civil disobedience gave way almost preternaturally quickly to a siege mentality; in time, the residents' demands for information and news dissolved into a sullen wait for the fences to be lifted. I have even heard stories of the military police sitting down to ration-pack dinners with the folks they were guarding; the Helsinki Syndrome in full tilt, no doubt.</p><p></p><p>All that changed in October '83, when the first and only effort (to the best of this reporter's knowledge) to break the quarantine zone was staged. Three youths attempted to slip through the patrols in the boggy ground east of Knightley and make a bee-line for the nearby motorway. Amazingly, they passed unnoticed through three cordons (prompting speculation of military aid, though no news of any related arrests within the organization was ever released), and were only eventually stopped when one of them, the now-famous television pundit Brad Shoemaker, tripped and fell on the treacherous ground, fracturing his leg in three places. Giving up their escape attempt to help their friend (an act which has solidified the trio as heroes in the public consciousness), the two other youths, Matthew Cox and Mark Wensburgh, retraced their steps to the nearest military patrol. At that point, details become hazy. In what was claimed to be a terrible accident, both Mr. Cox and Mr. Wensburgh were shot and killed as they approached the guardhouse. The incident was quietly covered up at the time, but has become public knowledge in the aftermath, and the only statement released to explain the situation has been an excerpt of a transcript taken at a subsequent military hearing. </p><p></p><p>When asked why she opened fire, Corporal Denise Coombs stated that she ordered the approaching men to halt and identify themselves, but they did not. After brandishing in her direction something which looked like a firearm, and ignoring both her orders to stop and a single warning shot fired over their heads, she fired once at Mr. Cox. The bullet passed through his heart, killing him instantly. A private under her command, whose name has never been released, and who was also pointing his weapon at the two men, claimed to have fired reflexively at that point, a shot which hit Mr. Wensburgh in the left cheek. Mr. Wensburgh was reported to have died later in a mobile surgical hospital.</p><p></p><p>Many disputed facts render these accounts troubling. First, Mr. Shoemaker has strenuously denied, in many subsequent interviews, that any of them were carrying any weapons, and a sidearm entered into evidence at the military tribunal and supposedly found at the scene is, as far as he is concerned, an "egregious fabrication" (as he will tell you at length in the three best-sellers he has released on the matter). Secondly, the question of why his two friends ignored multiple warnings to stand down is also worrying, though it is possible that the adrenalin of the moment could have clouded their judgment. Thirdly, the fact that a low-ranking private under Corporal Coombs' command was given an automatic rifle, a weapon with which he would not have been familiar under normal military protocol, also raises suspicions. Mr. Wensburgh, at least, may have survived the confrontation if such lethal force had not been put in the hands of an obviously inexperienced soldier. As well as this, the bodies of both Mr. Cox and Mr. Wensburgh were never released to their families. Officially, they were destroyed in a later - accidental - fire at the on-site morgue.</p><p></p><p>It should come as no surprise that conspiracy theorists already attracted to the lingering mystery of the Knightley Quarantine fixate on this incident as 'proof' that there is far more to the story than the public has been told. Of course, at that time, as the winter of 1984 gave way to the burgeoning warmth of spring, we knew none of this. On the 2nd of May, 1984, a press release as unassuming as the one which had started the whole affair arrived on my desk declaring that the quarantine would be lifted in twenty-four hours. I have a copy of that press release in the clippings album which is the mausoleum of my forty years in journalism, and the impenetrable simplicity of its words still amazes me: <em>After extensive investigation into the existence of a potentially hazardous natural emission in and around the location of Knightley Walls, Herefordshire, agents of the Environmental Protection Agency (UK 10657) have declared the site unconditionally safe and have given consent for the military quarantine, imposed June 2nd 1983, to be immediately lifted. The EPA and the Office of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom express their deepest regrets at the severity of the actions taken, and wish the citizens of Knightley a safe and prosperous future.</em></p><p></p><p>Like that, the curtain was raised. A flurry of interviews and investigations exploded across the media in the next few weeks. Calls to official agencies were bounced back in our faces; no information was disseminated on the exact nature of the 'natural contagion' which may or may not have been on the site, though a few highly-placed spokespersons were heard to mutter the word 'radon' under their breath. This was, of course, the official explanation released a few months later, at the conclusion of the public enquiry. (I'm not lightly given to hyperbole, but this explanation has been soundly debunked by about seventeen million reputable scientists in the meantime.) However, whether it is due to the sheer thoroughness of the cover-up operation, or the simple fact that there is nothing else there to find, the failure of anyone to come up with a convincing alternative explanation for the events in Knightley has ensured that the official explanation is now the generally accepted one.</p><p></p><p>At first, like everyone else, I fancied that there must be a greater plot to these events and was given considerable mandate by my venerable (and now, unfortunately, deceased) editor to investigate the matter. You may have seen my three-part series later that year. I conclude now as I did then: 100,000 people were needlessly terrified for a whole year of their lives by the then-Government's panicked and knee-jerk reaction to a threat that turned out to be false. Several reputable Government agencies were equally guilty of abuse of power and breach of mandate, although it seems to me that in several instances it was simply a case of 'give them the muscle and they will use it'. That there were many, many thoroughly unpleasant politicians and civil servants at the heart of the whole mess only serves to infuriate me further. That road, however, leads to many phone calls from my editor in which the word 'libelous' would feature very prominently, so I won't go there. What became of far more interest to me in the aftermath, and which I now rather smugly claim to have played a significant part in changing, were the absurd and inscrutable powers wielded by the military to section off a portion of our nation due to a simple, perceived, and unproven threat. It is difficult to believe that today's culture of accountability would ever allow a display of such unilateral power to happen again, and for this I'm glad.</p><p></p><p>And what of Knightley? What at first seemed likely to be the ruin of the city (who would visit a place that had been quarantined for almost an entire year, no matter what the official reports said?), instead turned into a boon. A strange and unexpected political guilt seemed to manifest in Downing Street which resulted in millions of pounds of civic aid being pumped into the city over the next ten years. Now, with the quarantine mostly forgotten, folks around the country (and indeed around the world) know Knightley Walls as a center of contemporary culture, architecture, and business, a thriving metropolis which today nips at the heels of Manchester and Edinburgh in the race for the title of the United Kingdom's number two city.</p><p></p><p>I've been there a dozen times in the last few years, and I will be going again this summer for the rock festival which shakes the town's foundations one weekend out of every year. It's a lively and charming place.</p><p></p><p>I recommend you visit.</p><p></p><p>Margaret Geddes</p><p>15th June 2003</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="wedgeski, post: 2337021, member: 16212"] [b]First Handout - The Geddes Report[/b] [b]Putting Up Walls The Knightley Quarantine: 20 Years On[/b] [i]Margaret Geddes, one-time political correspondent for this magazine, takes a break from retirement to recall the events that shook the nation two decades ago, and which are now almost forgotten.[/i] On June 2 1983, at five minutes past five on a sweltering summer afternoon, a small and unassuming press release filtered out of the governmental press office and landed on my desk. I ignored it at first, as I think most other journalists did in the accelerating madness of the approaching General Election. At about eight o'clock that night, however, as I took a coffee break and contemplated just how late I would be getting home to my husband, it rose at last to the top of the in-tray and demanded a little attention. It quickly became clear to me, as I read those 150-some words, that I wouldn't, in fact, be going home that night at all. This sensational story, that the small and uninteresting city of Knightley Walls had been quarantined by military police pending investigation into an "unidentified contagion", broke on front pages all across the country early the next morning. For myself, I put in no fewer than a dozen calls to government and military agencies to confirm its veracity, thinking that it must be a ploy to distract attention from the latest scandal to rock the election polls. Those calls, however, returned the same abrupt, no-nonsense answer: Knightly under quarantine, no-one in or out until further notice, emergency powers in place. I recall the frenzy of the next few days with no little fondness. Of course, my primary business was Margaret Thatcher's impending landslide victory in the polls, but along with everyone else in the office, I pestered the Knightley crew for gossip every chance I got. It must be said that the sheer novelty of the story, at that time, got the better of our consideration for the poor 100,000 or so souls who had overnight became prisoners in their own homes, and these days I'm sure a more professional veneer would have descended on the office, but with the only news for so long being the election I'm not at all surprised that the story engendered so much energy in the hundreds of reporters across the country who investigated it. I say 'investigated', but with equal surety I can say that never in this nation's history, before or since, has such an effective block to investigative journalism been erected by the government. Little-known (or I would warrant, believed) emergency measures gave the military police around Knightley supreme authority over both its populace and the security of the quarantine. Lengthy statements delivered to the press spelled out, in intricate detail, the consequences to life and limb should anyone try to enter or leave the city. (It was several months after the quarantine was imposed that the letter of these dictates would be tested, but I will come to that tragic episode later.) Suffice it to say that, for the first few months at least, long after the election was over and I had been handed responsibility for 'The Knightley Thing', as it became known in the office, we were reduced to publishing only the most superficial and speculative of articles. The story was gradually relegated down to somewhere in the dirty corner of page 14, left of the cricket scores and just underneath the latest celebrity marriage. It's inevitable, I suppose, that as something evolves from the shocking to familiar, interest wanes. We were as guilty of that as our readership. Soon, the Knightley Quarantine was a fact of life, a fleeting thought on the way to the shops or a brief pause as one read the news, wondering whatever happened to 'that' city and 'those people' who lived there. Well I can tell you now, with the benefit of hindsight and the storm of interviews which followed, that life was hard for those people. Not third-world or war-torn hard, but hard nonetheless. Food and water were immediately rationed (I still recall the endless procession of homogenous green trucks which passed in and out of the military gate demarcating the end of the A303 and the start of the Knightley Quarantine Zone); a blanket 5pm curfew was imposed; and at first, even the television cables were cut. (In an uncharacteristic show of humanity for those left without Emmerdale Farm, they were, however, restored a few weeks later.) Inside, a person could hear of their plight on the Six O'Clock News, and look out of their window to see military scientists in stark white suits walking the street. One resident told me afterwards: "I'm not sure what was more frightening, the HASMAT men drilling into my rose garden, or the fact that no-one outside seemed to be talking about us any more." Initial unrest, demonstrations, and civil disobedience gave way almost preternaturally quickly to a siege mentality; in time, the residents' demands for information and news dissolved into a sullen wait for the fences to be lifted. I have even heard stories of the military police sitting down to ration-pack dinners with the folks they were guarding; the Helsinki Syndrome in full tilt, no doubt. All that changed in October '83, when the first and only effort (to the best of this reporter's knowledge) to break the quarantine zone was staged. Three youths attempted to slip through the patrols in the boggy ground east of Knightley and make a bee-line for the nearby motorway. Amazingly, they passed unnoticed through three cordons (prompting speculation of military aid, though no news of any related arrests within the organization was ever released), and were only eventually stopped when one of them, the now-famous television pundit Brad Shoemaker, tripped and fell on the treacherous ground, fracturing his leg in three places. Giving up their escape attempt to help their friend (an act which has solidified the trio as heroes in the public consciousness), the two other youths, Matthew Cox and Mark Wensburgh, retraced their steps to the nearest military patrol. At that point, details become hazy. In what was claimed to be a terrible accident, both Mr. Cox and Mr. Wensburgh were shot and killed as they approached the guardhouse. The incident was quietly covered up at the time, but has become public knowledge in the aftermath, and the only statement released to explain the situation has been an excerpt of a transcript taken at a subsequent military hearing. When asked why she opened fire, Corporal Denise Coombs stated that she ordered the approaching men to halt and identify themselves, but they did not. After brandishing in her direction something which looked like a firearm, and ignoring both her orders to stop and a single warning shot fired over their heads, she fired once at Mr. Cox. The bullet passed through his heart, killing him instantly. A private under her command, whose name has never been released, and who was also pointing his weapon at the two men, claimed to have fired reflexively at that point, a shot which hit Mr. Wensburgh in the left cheek. Mr. Wensburgh was reported to have died later in a mobile surgical hospital. Many disputed facts render these accounts troubling. First, Mr. Shoemaker has strenuously denied, in many subsequent interviews, that any of them were carrying any weapons, and a sidearm entered into evidence at the military tribunal and supposedly found at the scene is, as far as he is concerned, an "egregious fabrication" (as he will tell you at length in the three best-sellers he has released on the matter). Secondly, the question of why his two friends ignored multiple warnings to stand down is also worrying, though it is possible that the adrenalin of the moment could have clouded their judgment. Thirdly, the fact that a low-ranking private under Corporal Coombs' command was given an automatic rifle, a weapon with which he would not have been familiar under normal military protocol, also raises suspicions. Mr. Wensburgh, at least, may have survived the confrontation if such lethal force had not been put in the hands of an obviously inexperienced soldier. As well as this, the bodies of both Mr. Cox and Mr. Wensburgh were never released to their families. Officially, they were destroyed in a later - accidental - fire at the on-site morgue. It should come as no surprise that conspiracy theorists already attracted to the lingering mystery of the Knightley Quarantine fixate on this incident as 'proof' that there is far more to the story than the public has been told. Of course, at that time, as the winter of 1984 gave way to the burgeoning warmth of spring, we knew none of this. On the 2nd of May, 1984, a press release as unassuming as the one which had started the whole affair arrived on my desk declaring that the quarantine would be lifted in twenty-four hours. I have a copy of that press release in the clippings album which is the mausoleum of my forty years in journalism, and the impenetrable simplicity of its words still amazes me: [i]After extensive investigation into the existence of a potentially hazardous natural emission in and around the location of Knightley Walls, Herefordshire, agents of the Environmental Protection Agency (UK 10657) have declared the site unconditionally safe and have given consent for the military quarantine, imposed June 2nd 1983, to be immediately lifted. The EPA and the Office of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom express their deepest regrets at the severity of the actions taken, and wish the citizens of Knightley a safe and prosperous future.[/i] Like that, the curtain was raised. A flurry of interviews and investigations exploded across the media in the next few weeks. Calls to official agencies were bounced back in our faces; no information was disseminated on the exact nature of the 'natural contagion' which may or may not have been on the site, though a few highly-placed spokespersons were heard to mutter the word 'radon' under their breath. This was, of course, the official explanation released a few months later, at the conclusion of the public enquiry. (I'm not lightly given to hyperbole, but this explanation has been soundly debunked by about seventeen million reputable scientists in the meantime.) However, whether it is due to the sheer thoroughness of the cover-up operation, or the simple fact that there is nothing else there to find, the failure of anyone to come up with a convincing alternative explanation for the events in Knightley has ensured that the official explanation is now the generally accepted one. At first, like everyone else, I fancied that there must be a greater plot to these events and was given considerable mandate by my venerable (and now, unfortunately, deceased) editor to investigate the matter. You may have seen my three-part series later that year. I conclude now as I did then: 100,000 people were needlessly terrified for a whole year of their lives by the then-Government's panicked and knee-jerk reaction to a threat that turned out to be false. Several reputable Government agencies were equally guilty of abuse of power and breach of mandate, although it seems to me that in several instances it was simply a case of 'give them the muscle and they will use it'. That there were many, many thoroughly unpleasant politicians and civil servants at the heart of the whole mess only serves to infuriate me further. That road, however, leads to many phone calls from my editor in which the word 'libelous' would feature very prominently, so I won't go there. What became of far more interest to me in the aftermath, and which I now rather smugly claim to have played a significant part in changing, were the absurd and inscrutable powers wielded by the military to section off a portion of our nation due to a simple, perceived, and unproven threat. It is difficult to believe that today's culture of accountability would ever allow a display of such unilateral power to happen again, and for this I'm glad. And what of Knightley? What at first seemed likely to be the ruin of the city (who would visit a place that had been quarantined for almost an entire year, no matter what the official reports said?), instead turned into a boon. A strange and unexpected political guilt seemed to manifest in Downing Street which resulted in millions of pounds of civic aid being pumped into the city over the next ten years. Now, with the quarantine mostly forgotten, folks around the country (and indeed around the world) know Knightley Walls as a center of contemporary culture, architecture, and business, a thriving metropolis which today nips at the heels of Manchester and Edinburgh in the race for the title of the United Kingdom's number two city. I've been there a dozen times in the last few years, and I will be going again this summer for the rock festival which shakes the town's foundations one weekend out of every year. It's a lively and charming place. I recommend you visit. Margaret Geddes 15th June 2003 [/QUOTE]
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