HAZELPITS FARM. CRED: NICK BAINES
24 Scene
to get me relatively decent with a few safety pins and God knows what else. “I’ve got this skin-tight shirt, you know with some huge great collar on it. A very tight denim waistcoat, light blue. And I had an afro and of course the moustache. I had the Tom Selleck moustache. “What I remember is arriving there, not having seen this many gay people in one place. It seemed hundreds but it probably was only about 50. “The disco itself was in a barn building. There’s all this farm equipment around and the DJ is set up in the corner. The music was great... and current, and you know from America. Never Can Say Goodbye I think was a big one of hers [Gloria Gaynor], you used to get up there and just throw yourself around like there’s no tomorrow. Spinning with gay abandon for want of a better phrase.
THE ‘MAGIC’ FARM Alf Le Flohic heads back to the Eighties to uncover the story behind an unusual rural Kentish hangout ) Just to be clear, this wasn’t a farm where the
cows performed magic tricks. No, stop thinking about the cows. This was just your average fruit farm in Kent. Except of course it wasn’t. The farmer in question was Tim Day, and it was his farm, Hazelpits, nestled on the edge of the quiet village of Headcorn in the Kent countryside, that became the stuff of legend from the late 1970s to the mid 1980s. Literally hundreds of people would flock there from June to September, mainly from London and the south coast, but “at their peak, there were even people flying in from Canada and South Africa” (Rob Flood). The MAGIC in this instance refers to the Medway Area Gay Independent Community, an organisation that grew out of Medway CHE (Campaign for Homosexual Equality) around 1977. But back to Tim. His lover at this time, because I’m sure you’re wondering, was 25-year-old Bombardier John Bruce of the 94th Locating Regiment, Royal Artillery. Tim began to hold a disco or two at the farm and soon MAGIC was helping him run them. Before we go there, we need to remember that this was still early days for the UK’s lesbian and gay community (using the terminology of the
period). There was obviously no internet or apps to help you meet people, so every community newspaper, every switchboard phoneline or gay night in a straight pub, was a lifeline to isolated individuals.
“So I’m wandering around at this disco, round these bloody darkened outhouses, hearing all manner of groans and moans and slaps and screams and stuff like that, and thinking what the hell is going on. I thought people were being murdered! All in the name of gratification.”
“I’m wandering around at this disco, round these bloody darkened outhouses, hearing all manner of groans and moans and slaps and screams and stuff like that, and thinking what the hell is going on”
A couple of years later, 28-year-old Trevor Winter became rather a regular at the farm. “Well, that was before I came to Brighton. I had a boyfriend, Dennis, and we moved to Sevenoaks and had friends in Kent.
A 19-year-old “dreadfully single” Aleck Dalrymple had been in the RAF for three years, but found himself “unceremoniously removed having admitted to my homosexuality”. He and a couple of friends made their way to Hazelpits around 1978 when they were living in Margate.
“Hazelpits Farm was brilliant. It was very mixed. It was like a big event, Saturday night, everyone excited about it, dressed up. It was quite unusual ‘cause it was a few hundred people there sometimes.
“One girl was a policewoman and the other girl was a bus driver for East Kent Buses. They were together, they were already in a relationship. And they had a vehicle so they drove us. You couldn’t get a bus or a train ‘cause it was seemingly in the middle of nowhere.
“We parked in a big field, walked across the farm and the big barn was the disco. A disco and a bar there, then there was the hayloft that you could walk across to, things were going on in there, and then you could go around the corner and there was a gate that you could climb over, and you could go to the fields beyond where more things were going on…
“I had these jeans that were so tight it was just ridiculous, and I went commando. On our way to the event we went to this pub and I went to the loo and my zip burst. So then we had to try TIM DAY (LEFT) WITH JOHN BRUCE (RIGHT). CRED: NICK BAINES
“I had a few little rough and tumbles in the hayloft, which were quite fun. I do remember quite a few lesbian fights there. You know, jealous rivalry of girlfriends sort of things. “It was so nice the way it was set out. People walked around in the summer, people would be outside drinking and smoking and that. Really, really nice sociable thing to do, because there wasn’t a lot else to do at those times.” Unfortunately, things were not so rosy for Tim’s army lover, John Bruce, at this point. He found himself being questioned about being gay and he bravely refused to deny it. So, he was imprisoned where he was stationed in Germany, before being court-martialled and dismissed from the forces. John’s later partner in Brighton, Alan Spink, remembers seeing his warrant book: “They got
