26 The Times Magazinesmiley 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-tunnelnetwork 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”‘I never wanted the
attention. But I feel the
stakes are now so high
I’ll do whatever it takes’
Hooper at the HS2 protest at Denham, Bucks, last DecemberSHUTTERSTOCK