Remembering The Hippies Movement

I was just a young kid when the hippie movement was the rage worldwide. Being brought up by conservative parents, I used to look at hippies with disdain.  I guess it was also because the mainstream press portrayed the hippies as undesirable elements of our society.

I can still remember my dad asking me go to the barber to take a haircut every time my hair grew slightly below my ears. And each time after the visit to the barber, my hair looked like it had been mowed by a lawnmower. As a youngster, I always felt so embarrassed with my haircut. I really looked like a nerd then!

I can still remember one year when my third brother and I went to a tailor to have a pair of jeans made. The jeans was fashioned on the then very popular Amco brand. When we wore the jeans on a Chinese New Year, my dad wore a very angry expression. In those days, the older folks seemed to associate long hair and jeans with hippies.

I don’t blame my dad at all. It was just a case of generation gap. I know my dad meant well. He did not want us to blindly follow what he perceived as negative western influences.

Looking back now, I know my view of hippies when I was a kid was biased and prejudiced.

The hippie subculture started as a youth movement by mostly rich middle class people  in the United States during the early 1960s and spread around the world. Its origins can be traced back to classical culture, and to European social movements in the early 20th century. From around 1967, its fundamental ethos — including harmony with nature, communal living, artistic experimentation particularly in music, and the widespread use of recreational drugs — spread around the world.

This movement was for promoting the idea of peace, love, unity and freedom and for growing your consciousness to a whole new level, where mere materialistic concepts of life do not affect the way you perceive the world anymore. Trying to make the world a better place where there are no wars no violence was the main motive.

The early hippies created their own communities, listened to psychedelic rock, embraced the sexual revolution, and used drugs such as cannabis, LSD and magic mushrooms to explore altered states of consciousness.

In January 1967, the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco popularized hippie culture, leading to the legendary Summer of Love on the West Coast of the United States, and the 1969 Woodstock Festival on the East Coast.

The hippie movement was not as much about having long hair, as it was about the attitude, and not trusting the government. It was during the Vietnam War, when mostly poor American men were being drafted and sent to fight a war, based on a lie. At the time, many of them were coming home in boxes. Being a hippy meant questioning authority, and its power. It was about peace, and not wanting to hurt others. The long hair was out of rebellion. It was used to send a statement that you won’t be told how to look, or live.

Besides the peace movement, being a hippie was also about rejecting middle-class materialism and the whole military-industrial complex in favor of a more spiritual, more environmentally conscious approach. Sometimes hippies signaled that rejection of middle America’s money-grubbing ways by not bathing for weeks on end, or using illegal drugs, especially marijuana.

It was a peaceful moment in history when a lot of people felt the need to come together with thoughts, ideas, and emotions. It was particularly in the music where the beauty of it all joined together millions of people who needed to free themselves from the everyday repetition that seemed to be misdirected.

Jennifer Wilson, originally from Exeter, became an iconic image thanks to this old rock festival photograph that epitomised the free spirited summer of love and the hippy movement.

The picture was taken at a music festival in 1978 shortly after Wilson, now 67, moved away from her home city of Exeter in Devon to London.

The photo shows the young, long-haired Wilson standing topless amid her friends, playing air guitar, lost in the music at an open-air festival.

But now more than three decades on the woman in the shot has revealed she wasn’t a drug-taking hippie chick of easy virtue, but a straight-laced married woman looking for something to do.

‘I seemed to be photographed at pop concerts every time I went,’ she said.

‘I used to wear unusual clothing with lots of colours – I still do but I’m trying to tone it down now I’m older.

‘I think it was at Reading Festival while dancing to a band like Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, Deep Purple, Genesis – it could have been any band like that.

‘I used to love music when I was at school.

‘The teacher used to tell us to close our eyes when listening to a piece of music so you can hear it properly and not get distracted by what’s going on around you.

‘I still close my eyes now when listening to a new record.

‘Sometimes the photo is used with the wrong story, like drugs or promiscuity, that insinuates all sorts of things I don’t like.

‘I didn’t take drugs, I was too naive. And I wasn’t even promiscuous.

‘I had been married for a few years at that time. I was very straight. I went to pop concerts for something to do.’

Ms Wilson was the eldest of eight children, five girls and three boys, and grew up in Alphington, Exeter.

She got married to an Exeter man and moved to London after her divorce aged 25, where she made a living as a dress maker.

Today she lives in East Acton with her partner of 12 years and has raised three daughters.

She regularly visits Exeter, where her mother and two sisters still live, and can recall the times her dad used to take her and her brothers and sisters to watch Exeter City.

‘When I divorced I started going to rock concerts as a way of trying to pick myself up off the floor,’ she said.

‘It was a kind of freedom after being brought up strictly and convent educated.

‘I used to go to Reading and Knebworth a lot to listen to various bands.

‘I can’t remember them all. I remember it was a really hot day and people started to sunbathe topless.

‘I looked like the odd ball with my clothes on. All the girls were going round with their tops off so I did the same.

‘I couldn’t believe I was the one who was photographed. It was the happiest time of my life. I met lovely people. It was all love and peace.

‘There was no violence like there is now.’

Ms Wilson said she worked for a time as a Go Go dancer in London.

She also spent a year living in a bus in Morocco sitting on the side of the road selling beaded headbands.

‘I used to get recognised in and around Earls Court near where I lived,’ she said. ‘Even the bread delivery man noticed me.

‘I seemed to get photographed all the time. Every time anyone sees a photo of me I try to get a copy. And a friend’s son found quite a few pictures of me on a hippie website.’

She added: ‘I’m shocked that the photo has been used this long.’