At exactly 11am, as the traffic lights turned red, the group threw themselves on to the street.<\/p>\n
“The girl [with the pram] set off across the road and two heavies grabbed the padlocks and launched themselves at the traffic light poles to lock the chain across the highway,” John wrote.<\/p>\n
Lizzie says she was “delighted” when the chain suddenly appeared from the pram.<\/p>\n
But the attempt lasted only moments.<\/p>\n
“Policemen rugby-tackled everyone in sight,” John wrote. “The chain was hauled away, the lights went back to green and it was all over.”<\/p>\n
John was marched to a waiting police bus. “I was to face a charge of obstruction, based on my having waved a pole with balloons attached to the danger of passers-by,” he recalled.<\/p>\n
He described the charge as something of an “over description,” but he didn’t contest it and he was fined \u00a32 with an additional \u00a32 in costs.<\/p>\n
Lizzie admits the protest was short-lived, but says “the success, I think, came with the amount of publicity we got”. <\/p>\n
“The publicity that went on about Santa Claus getting arrested at Christmastime was just brilliant.”<\/p>\n
Lizzie avoided arrest but watched as her husband was taken away. Looking on from outside the police bus, she told a passer-by: “I’d love to go with them but Helen’s at home teething.”<\/p>\n
More than half a century later, the moment still raises a smile. <\/p>\n
Helen, who was being looked after by her grandmother during the demonstration, says if her dad was walking down the street today he would be surprised at how much has changed.<\/p>\n
“Things have got better in London, with the clean-air tax and electric vehicles, it’s just so different. He would be pleased it has been pedestrianised after everything that happened.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At exactly 11am, as the traffic lights turned red, the group threw themselves on to the street. “The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":819674,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-819673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=819673"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819673\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/819674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=819673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=819673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=819673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}