"In 1970, John Lennon invited Rawle to establish a commune on Dorinish, a small island in Clew Bay, Ireland, which Lennon had owned since 1967. After surviving Atlantic storms, the commune eventually disbanded in 1972 after a fire destroyed their main stores tent. Lennon did contribute money towards Rawle's communes and other projects, and was reputed to have financed the film Winstanley, about Gerrard Winstanley, a charismatic leader of the Diggers movement, and in which Rawle had a role as a Ranter, which suited him admirably.
Sidney William "Sid" Rawle (1 October 1945 – 31 August 2010) was a British campaigner for peace and land rights, free festival organiser, and a former leader of the London squatters movement. Rawle was known to British tabloid journalists as 'The King of the Hippies', not a title he ever claimed for himself, but one that he did eventually co-opt for his unpublished autobiography.
He was also involved in the free festival movement, as an organiser of the Windsor Free Festivals,[17] and the 1974 Stonehenge Free Festival. After re-printing, as publisher of International Times, an article similar[18] to the leaflet which had led to the imprisonment of Windsor Free Festival organiser Bill 'Ubi' Dwyer, Rawle was himself jailed for three months in 1975 to prevent him publicising that year's festival.
In 1976, he became one of the original residents of Tipi Valley, a tent commune near Llandeilo in Wales. During this period he joined the Ecology (later Green) Party, and used his festival experience to help set up the first Green Gathering at Worthy Farm, Glastonbury. The years of travelling to festivals and events had turned an ad hoc collection of people and vehicles into what became known as the Peace Convoy. He stayed at Tipi Valley until 1982 when he began to live permanently on the road and at convoy-associated communities. In 1983 he set up the Rainbow Village at a disused US air base at Molesworth, Cambridgeshire, a proposed cruise missile site, which was broken up by police in February 1985. The key event during all these years was the Stonehenge Free Festival. In 1985 the Peace Convoy was routed by violent police action at what became known as the Battle of the Beanfield; Sid had not yet moved on from the previous night's camp at Savernake Forest.
He had at least seven children, by different mothers."
(Wikipedia)
