At last month’s Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow, the cabinet minister and conference president, Alok Sharma, made an extraordinary claim. Sharma reminisced about the early days of climate concern, reminding his audience of the Nineties eco-warrior Swampy who “spent his time occupying trees and tunnels”. He sounded wistful and told his audience of global financiers and power brokers that it was now people in boardrooms, banks and on trading floors who embodied the spirit of the smiley, dreadlocked environmentalist.
“You, my friends, are the new Swampys, so be proud,” he told them.
I am sitting in Swampy’s front room. The original Swampy that is, 47-year-old Daniel Hooper. Actually it’s not the front room; there doesn’t seem to be one. I’d say it’s the central portion of a medieval “roundhouse” made of wood, straw, lime and horse hair situated in a valley in the wilds of west Wales. There’s a kitchen area and a couple of bedrooms leading off from the centre, which is dominated by a wood burner. I am trying to get near the wood burner but there are two large cats in the way.
“We need Tubby and Alvin [the cats] because with this lifestyle there is a danger of rats,” says Swampy. “They’re a pretty good defence.”
We have established some ground rules. I should take my muddy boots off. Second, I should stop calling him Swampy.
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“People tend to use Dan,” he says. “But yeah, the fact that Swampy as a concept still means something to people I suppose is good.”
Hooper didn’t hear the Sharma speech. He was on his 20th day in a tunnel in Wendover, Bucks, protesting against the HS2 high-speed rail project. However, his 17-year-old son, Rory, heard every word. Rory was in Glasgow campaigning. He couldn’t believe it.
“It was darkly funny for a minute. I mean, Swampy is my dad. But then I realised it was blatant ‘greenwashing’, taking credit for activism which you have been against all along,” he says.
Perhaps Sharma was right. There are new Swampys out there. But not in banks or on trading floors. This one is a callow teenager sitting on a battered sofa playing on his phone.
But what should we call him? Swampy 2.0? I ask him if he has a cool protester name like his dad’s.
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“No, just Rory,” he says.
“Well, he did have one, but no one used it,” says his dad.
I ask him what this protester name was.
“Names don’t really matter, do they? It’s action that counts,” says Hooper fils tartly. He’s dead right of course. Swampy and son are back in business and this time we should probably take them a bit more seriously.
Dan and his partner, Clare, and, I think (I hope) Rory, have welcomed me into their snug eco-home to discuss their life in protest. But it is a bugger to find. You drive to the western end of the M4, up some A-roads, down some B-roads, down a track before parking, then stumbling down a muddy valley into a Hobbit landscape. A hippy called Chris started Tipi Valley in 1976. Not without reason his founding principle is said to have been, “They won’t be able to arrest us because they won’t be able to f***ing find us.”
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“He’s buried over there,” says Clare, waving in the direction of a forbidding hillside.
The Hoopers moved here 18 years ago, and spent 10 years living under canvas with three small children before building their roundhouse 7 years ago.
“You need five years under canvas to really decide if you can live here,” says Clare.
I can’t believe what she’s saying. I’ve done three days at a festival with children and longed for death.
“No, it’s beautiful. You’re connected to nature. In winter all the tipis huddle by the stream for a sense of community. It’s amazing.”
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There are currently about 80 people living at Tipi Valley. Chez Hooper is a solid structure. The roof is wood, cardboard, then a plastic damp-proof layer topped with turf. They have solar-powered electricity and water filtered from the stream. Rory has his own roundhouse next door.
“He likes his own space,” says Clare as Rory thumbs away on his phone.
They grow vegetables, there’s no TV and no fridge (food chills in a metal bin in a shed or in the stream). Nor is there internet, though they do get a bit of phone signal.
I drank a lot of coffee on the drive down and I badly need a loo. I can’t see one of those either.
“Just wee outside,” says Clare.
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“But away from the house if you can, not against the door,” adds Hooper.
Do you remember 1997? Liam and Patsy were on the Vanity Fair Cool Britannia cover. Tony Blair became prime minister. Princess Diana died and JK Rowling published her first Harry Potter novel. But in January that year “Swampy” was the tabloid joke, the last eco-warrior yanked out of a 30ft-deep tunnel at a road protest at Fairmile in Devon. His smiley elfin face accessorised by a single dreadlock, he was part New Age hippy, part woodland sprite. Swampy ate a Bourbon biscuit, called his mother and then went to court accompanied by a jester, another guy playing a recorder and several dogs. He caught the public imagination. But why? The son of Jill, a Buckinghamshire council worker, and Peter, a computer programmer, he was gentle, polite. He was solidly middle class.
“A lot of people contribute to building a tunnel,” he says. “But the media need a face. I was their face.”
For a short while he made the most of it. Hooper got paid £500 to appear on Have I Got News for You and used the money to pay his court fines. He did a fashion photoshoot. However, he did decline an offer to record a single called I Am a Mole and I Live in a Hole.
“I’m not saying some of the attention wasn’t positive, but the media turned me into a curiosity, this silly thing, and ignored the issues,” he says. “On a bigger scale they’re doing it now to Greta Thunberg, although much worse. They won’t take what she’s saying seriously; they just denigrate her personally. The difference is, she has the internet. She can speak directly to a whole new generation.”
When the Noughties arrived, Hooper went about his protesting quietly. In 2004 he met Clare at the Nine Ladies Stone Circle protest camp in the Peak District (they stopped plans to open a quarry on a Bronze Age site).
“That’s where Rory was conceived,” she says.
Rory looks up from his phone.
“Oh my God, Mum,” he mutters.
The couple moved to the Welsh valley and had two more sons, aged 11 and 15. (They’ve asked me not to name them. Hooper also has another son from a previous relationship.)
These days Hooper works in forestry and Clare is a part-time counsellor at a school. And they might have kept their life low-key except that the world is interested in Swampy again. Greta Thunberg and the campaign group Extinction Rebellion have raised the stakes of climate activism.
“People who would never previously have been interested in protesting are waking up,” says Hooper.
One of those people was his son Rory. A year ago he was due to start an apprenticeship at a local college but it was closed due to Covid. When Clare saw how bored he was, she made a classic parental suggestion.
“I said to Dan, ‘Why don’t you take Rory out and show him what you do?’ ” she says. “Some parents take their kids to the office. Well, he went down a tunnel.”
Rory first visited an anti-HS2 protest camp at Harvil Road in Uxbridge, 20 miles west of London. He liked what he saw. And so earlier this year, he helped his dad dig a 100ft-tunnel network at another HS2 protest site near Euston station in central London.
“He rang me from underground and he sounded so happy,” says Clare.
“The people were cool and I like fighting for something,” adds Rory.
But tunnelling is precarious. Under Euston, Rory, his father and seven others dug passages with a “brickie’s hammer” and a small pickaxe through nine feet of chalk and earth, all the while being “chased” by HS2 bailiffs. The bailiffs worked in shifts 24 hours a day using “kangos” – handheld jackhammers.
“We dug one way and they’d tunnel in behind us,” says Hooper. “Or they’d use new ground-penetrating radar to spot our sleeping chambers and drop a downshaft in and we’d have to move again.”
The excavated soil was cleared by lines of “bucketers”, and passages made safe by shoring. They ate pre-cooked packet rice or cold tinned food. For energy, they shook up instant coffee granules and cold oat milk in a bottle.
“My first night in there it was pretty wet because we had a leak,” says Rory. “Plus, you inhale a fair bit of chalk dust.”
But, you know, he realised how good his dad was at tunnelling and respected the cause he has devoted his life to. At night they played cards and read books or named the tunnels.
“One of them was called Andy War-hole,” says Rory proudly.
“Another was called ‘Societal Collapse’,” says Hooper with a laugh. “Because that’s all that Larch [a protester] ever talks about.”
Sleep, though, sounds terrifying. It was pitch black and dead silent under London.
There was an odd sort of camaraderie with the bailiffs. Many were former Parachute Regiment and though the pursuit was real, there was a mutual respect.
“We’d be right next to each other sometimes,” says Hooper. “They’d compliment us on our shoring-up work or we’d chat about safety. I think it’s important to recognise the humanity in other people. And I think some of them had a grudging respect for us.”
After 30 days the bailiffs caught them all. When it was obvious they’d be evicted, Rory rang his mother and asked for permission to stay until the end.
“I was so proud when he got arrested,” she says. “I was worried too, as any mum would be, but his dad kept him safe and, for this generation, they believe it’s their fight.”
The Tory MP Andrew Mitchell didn’t agree. He said, “Swampy’s son should be studying for his next exam, not down the end of a dangerous tunnel,” and called Rory’s father “reckless and irresponsible”.
Rory looks up from his phone when I recount this.
“How stupid can you get? I left school last year, so I really don’t need to be getting ready for my next exam,” he says. “These people are so ignorant.”
Anyway, the college course Rory hoped to begin was environmental conservation.
“I think he has sort of started it,” says Clare.
Rory is certainly in the family business. He shows me a photo of him standing on top of a police van. It was taken while he was protesting at an arms fair at ExCel London last September, another in a long list of Hooper causes. I note they have fought against quarries, new roads, high-speed trains, nuclear submarines (Hooper Sr has demonstrated at the Faslane nuclear submarine base in Scotland), Heathrow Terminal 5, GM foods (that was Clare’s first protest), oil refineries (Hooper was arrested at one in Haverfordwest in 2019), not to mention open cast mining in Merthyr Tydfil.
Four days before we meet, Rory was arrested at an Amazon centre in Co Durham.
“We built a ‘beacon’, a bamboo structure to block the entrance but Storm Arwen came and we had to get down,” he says sadly.
I feel a pang of guilt. I am making notes in a pad, writing with a pen and recording on a device all ordered from Amazon.
“We all buy things, don’t we?” says Hooper. “But the level that we consume is ridiculous.”
How do they hear about all the “actions” and decide which ones to attend? “You just hear about stuff or get a call.”
To get a phone signal, you have to swipe through the laundry hanging over the wood burner, climb over the bed and hang out by the window. That’s where you get a call about an “action”.
“Of course it’s exciting,” says Hooper. “You feel you are doing something that matters.”
But is protesting addictive? I mean, apart from tunnelling or hanging out of trees, Hooper does other things. In Merthyr Tydfil, he hung himself under a bridge so that lorries couldn’t pass underneath.
Does he get a buzz from the action-man stuff? “No. It’s my belief in saving our planet,” Hooper says. “But of course it’s also about meeting brilliant people on the journey.”
He talks with affection about protesters from his Swampy days 25 years ago. There were Muppet, Jester and Disco Dave. He was recently in touch with Animal, a girl who was 16 when they burrowed underground at Fairmile.
“Animal’s got kids now,” he says. So, it’s exhilarating and friendships are forged. But, you know, do they ever win?
“I think there’s a chance we will stop HS2,” he says. “The government estimates it will cost £97 billion, but it’ll be double that. You could make public transport free for that sort of money.”
When Dan Hooper was Rory’s age he was working at a toy shop called the Entertainer in the leafy town of Amersham, in Buckinghamshire. Then he fell in love with a girl from Exeter and went down there to join the hunt saboteurs. By 1994 he was involved in the road protest at Solsbury Hill in Somerset. The Newbury bypass and Fairmile protests followed. His mother and father were a bit put off by his left-wing anarchist politics after reading in the Daily Mail what he was up to.
“What’s the official line?” Hooper asks Clare.
“They worried,” she says. “They got anxious.”
But things have come full circle. Hooper’s parents still live in Buckinghamshire where HS2 is a highly emotive issue. They get it.
“My mum worries about me and Rory going underground, but she also knows people who have lost homes and jobs due to HS2. They see the devastation to wildlife. I think they are typical of people who didn’t quite get the threat to our environment but are listening now.”
It’s a tough life, protesting. People might occasionally honk their horns in support or buy you a coffee, but the Hoopers live a parsimonious life. Clare works one day a week counselling and then looks after the children and her elderly dad. Hooper plants trees or he and Rory pick berries and acorns for money.
“The farmers let us onto the land to collect berries or acorns to sell and they get a cut,” he says. “But if you’re not consuming too much, you don’t need much, do you?”
On Fridays, residents convene at Jim Jams, a party in Jim’s tipi. And when there is a new moon residents heat rocks and put them in a tipi to create a sauna. Then they take off their clothes, enter the tent and dance or bang drums. Afterwards they jump in the stream.
“There’s all sorts going on,” says Hooper. “You don’t have to do any of it. There was a Rainbow Gathering [an international hippy movement] near here recently and Clare took them vegetables. It’s not for me. I don’t see the point of sitting round in a field doing nothing.”
Tonight they are going to have leftover curry and then they might continue playing the board game Risk, which is laid out on the table. They are also partial to the medieval fantasy game called Warhammer.
Then they’ll get a call. There’ll be a new “action”. Hooper is ready with his brickie’s hammer and pickaxe already in the car.
“Protest works,” he says. “It’s what changes things. That’s what I don’t understand about the Alok Sharma speech. Is he saying that protesting is OK? If he is, the government has got a funny way of showing it.”
Hooper is worried by the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which he says will give the police increased powers to stifle legitimate protest.
I point out that police treatment of Insulate Britain protesters who recently blocked the M25 angered many. People couldn’t get to work or visit loved ones in hospital and the police seemed to stand by and watch.
“I must admit I was a bit surprised by that too,” says Hooper. “I’m not going to knock the police, because that’s not fair, but at Euston they were more heavy-handed. They didn’t have enough bailiffs so they climbed into the trees. Police should not be up in the trees.”
I recycle. I use my bike. I try not to buy too much crap. But I found weeing outside in a stiff wind hard. And I’m sorry, but I’m not gathering acorns for a living.
“We do have a car,” Hooper says.
Clare tells me that they used to boil the kids’ nappies and put them through a mangle.
“We did. Now we share a communal washing machine,” Hooper says, then shows me a cucumber he bought at a Co-op 13 miles away.
“See? We do need shops. We can’t grow everything all year round.”
It’s totally unfair, but I find myself wanting to know how many other luxuries they enjoy.
“I haven’t been on a plane in 20 years and the children have never flown,” says Hooper.
“We do buy underwear from Marks & Spencer,” admits Clare.
What about kids? Surely, simply having them is as big an issue as high-speed trains or a new bypass? I have five and I know every one of them is like running a Range Rover.
“It’s a bit late now but, yes, we have talked about it,” he says. “Each child will consume more stuff. All I can say is we are trying to raise them to be responsible about the planet.”
“I’m definitely not having children,” says Rory.
“I think all children say that at 17,” says Clare. “You don’t need to decide now, do you?”
“No, I’m not having them,” he insists.
The Hoopers are welcoming and never self-righteous about the way they live. In fact, it’s heart-warming how they squabble about ordinary things. Clare teases Hooper about the way he has been grinding his teeth in his sleep since coming home from tunnelling.
“For weeks, he’s still in there,” she says. “His nervous system is still totally wired.”
And they can laugh about their middle son, who isn’t interested in protesting. He wants to be a Premier League footballer.
Sometimes he even threatens to work for HS2.
“He’s good at making things and could well be an engineer. If he wants to wind us up he says he might go help build it,” laughs Clare.
“I hadn’t heard that,” says Rory. “That is such a wind-up.”
“Everyone rebels, don’t they?” she insists. “As long as they are kind and happy, I don’t mind what my children do in life.”
Dan Hooper certainly rebelled. And when he climbed out of that Devon tunnel in 1997 and became Swampy, the secretary of state for the environment was Tory MP John Selwyn Gummer. After that it was Labour’s John Prescott, then Margaret Beckett and on through Labour to George Eustice today.
Do you remember any of them? It’s an important question, because when he needed to exemplify a globally recognisable eco-warrior, Alok Sharma didn’t choose politicians. He chose the skinny guy in front of me drinking tea from a Mr Man mug in a Welsh hut.
“Being Swampy did mess with my head,” he says. “I never wanted the attention. But I feel the stakes are now so high I’ll do whatever it takes. Twenty-five years ago I was a hippy up a tree. I was a bit of a laugh. But what has happened since? A pandemic, forest fires, deforestation, floods. I think for a lot of people the laughing has stopped. It’s getting pretty serious now.”
