Jill Phipps :: Lost their lives helping animals

Neil Lea 1958 - 2007

Neil died at 6.08 on Tuesday July 10th 2007.

Neil is well known for his many campaigns, magazines and websites ... but few realise he was one of the few people at the Coventry Airport camps who was there from the beginning until the very end.

Farewell to Gari Allen

A tribute from the Animal Liberation Front Supporters Group magazine.

Last year the movement was shocked to learn of the unexpected and untimely death of Gari Allen who passed away on June 18 2006 after a short illness.

Gari had been very active in the animal rights movement for over 25 years, involved at all levels, from street stalls to hunt sabotage, from protests to sanctuary work, and including a long career as a leading ALF activist. Indeed he appeared in many editions of the ALF SG magazine in the 80’s and 90’s when he served two prison sentences, including a 3 year sentence alongside his close friend Barry Horne, who died in prison following hunger strikes against vivisection.

As a teenager when Gari first learned about factory farming he went vegan overnight and within a few weeks was out raiding battery farms and liberating hens.This was to be a lifetime of dedication and commitment. Gari was an anarchist at heart and always a great believer in taking direct action as a first resort. For many years he bravely took part in countless ALF actions from raiding factory farms and laboratories to acts of economic sabotage against the meat and fur trade.

He was always a familiar face on demos and at meetings, he ran information stalls and spent a lot of time raising funds for sanctuaries. He also worked at various animal rescue centres and for the last ten years was very busy with feral cat rescue and neutering. Just a few days before his death Gari rescued an injured baby magpie. Basically he did whatever he felt he could not only for the animals but for people too, he was always going out of his way to help people.

Gari was also a keen follower of natural healing. A trained Reiki Master, he organised the Healing Area at the recent International Gatherings at Friend Animal Sanctuary in Kent. He died just a week before the AR2006 gathering, and the Healing Area became a shrine dedicated to his memory.

Gari’s death was yet another tragic blow for the Phipps family. His partner and soul mate of over 20 years was Lesley Phipps, whose sister Jill was killed by a lorry carrying calves to Coventry Airport in 1995. Lesley and the rest of the Phipps family were left distraught by Gari’s death.

He was a genuine rough diamond and very down to earth. With his cheeky sense of humour he always seemed to get away with saying exactly what he thought. His kind heart and his compassionate generous nature were an inspiration to many. He was a truly unique and special person who will never be forgotten, and will always be missed.

This celebrated scene has been shown in many animal rights documentaries and films, and shows activists breaking into Oxford University's Park Farm animal breeding and holding centre in 1984.

Now that Gari has passed on some of his exploits can be revealed for the first time. Gari is the activist with the sledgehammer.

It was just another day in the life of a brave warrior who dedicated his life to helping others and fighting injustice.

From AlfSG http://www.alfsg.org.uk/

Gari Allen

An Obituary

by John Curtin

Gari Allen is dead. How weird is that? I wish I was writing an obituary for some animal abuser and could have started off with the opening line - “Brian ____ is dead” but alas here I am writing about my old friend Gari. We go back a long time together – right back to the crazy anarcho days of the early 80’s when we first teamed up together to wage war on animal abuse. Our friendship was initially based on a mutual addiction to taking action against butcher shop windows – it got so “bad” that I remember there was even one night when we tape recorded the sound of our activity. Eventually we came to the conclusion that to be addicted to butchers windows was rather sad and obsessional and was hardly going to lead to Animal Liberation and so we extended it to become addicted to stopping other forms of animal abuse. In later years he served two lengthy prison sentences for his part in campaigns to burn down animal hell-holes.

I will miss Gari. We are all unique in our ways but Gari was a proper one-off. If you didn’t know him and are wondering if you ever met him – if you have been to any national demos then you will have met Gari. He was the big 6 ½ foot tall geezer going round with a bucket and grunting – either collecting for prisoner support or for sanctuaries. “C’mon, woooaaaarrrghhh put your money in there, wooarggoooreear fight the bastard’s, wooarrgh, woarrghhughhhughugh” “pardon?” “UGH!”

On the day of Gari’s funeral the word that kept cropping up to describe him was a teddy bear – and indeed he was a gruff teddy bear with a soft inside. On the outside he could be coarse, imposing, harsh sounding but beneath it all he was just a little softie as can be testified by all the hundreds of friends who turned up for his funeral – all of whom he’d have helped out at some time when they truly needed it. A constant feature of Gari was that when a true crisis or emergency cropped up he could be relied on to be there to offer practical support.

He had quite a troubled childhood and fled from his home as soon as he hit his teens. He found himself alone and struggling in the big wide uncaring world – those early experiences left their mark on him and were obviously a factor in his lifelong exterior gruffness. He detested the system with all his heart, he didn’t trust human beings at their face value, he often couldn’t be bothered with surface level social pleasantries and he eagerly awaited the self-inflicted wipe-out of our so called “civilisation”. I couldn’t adequately sum up Gari’s attitude towards the human race except to say that he unconditionally and absolutely loved, with all his heart, all of non-human life!

As far as his 22 year long relationship with his soul-mate Leslie goes …..well what can I say? A few words would be meaningless. Their love and friendship speaks for itself. Our thoughts go out to Leslie. Gari left home as a kid but was welcomed into the Phipps family with open arms when he went out with Les. He went through the tragedy of Jill Phipps’ death as a blood relative. The animal liberation movement is one big family and Gari will always be there as one of the family – the big geezer in the corner, having a smoke, grunting and grumbling about some aspect of the ugliness of modern humanity or chuckling about some tabloid headline of a duck shooter accidentally blasting his best friends off or of a butcher chopping his own hand off – he used to compile anthologies of tabloid stories dedicated to the self inflicted or accidental woes of the animal abusers – oh how we laughed – and what about the one where the pig farmer drowned in his own slurry pit, the fisherman getting eaten by a shark and let’s not forget Barrett-Jolley - responsible for bringing the export trade of calves to Coventry Airport, getting 20 years for cocaine smuggling.

Gari was a healer – a healer who lived amidst the slaughter of his brothers and sisters. He healed the sanitised hypocrisy of the High Street by smashing their windows and giving consumers the opportunity to think that maybe everything is not alright in shopper’s heaven. He healed the land where dark animal torture facilities stood by burning them to the ground. He healed abused, caged animals by giving them the sweetest gift on earth – LOVE and LIBERATION. In the past few years he worked tirelessly with Leslie helping feral cats and last, but not least, he became a rather good Reiki healer. If you have any “funky” spiritual beliefs then try by all means to contact Gari. He believed that there is a spirit world so if you, or anyone else, ever needs help or just want a cosmic chat then see if you can get hold of him out there in the ether somewhere. He had big shoes, to match his big presence, and no-one else is gonna come along and fill them, but who knows where he is floating around now!

A fitting epitaph for Gari would be a primeval scream of …“kick it ’til it fu__ing breaks”. He was a fighter – just like his friend Barry Horne, whom he went to prison with. He was a warrior and he was also a big softie. Do something for animals in his memory. We miss you Gari – UGH!!!

From the Arkangel website

Keivan at his happiest having a laugh with friends

Kevan "Keivan" Hickey 1972 - 2006

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Keivan Hickey

Keivan was a charismatic firebrand, a natural comedian and an old style ranter. No one who ever met him, will ever forget him.

From an early age Keivan had been passionate about fighting for justice and truth, he read about the Spanish Civil War and became inspired to take action himself.

His activist career began in his home town of Coventry in the early 90's where he became involved with several Anti-facist groups and was a very active member ... getting involved in many campaigns and actions ... including a trip to West Germany to an International Anti-facist camp.

But it was when the deadly live export trade came to Coventry and Jill Phipps was killed under the wheels of a lorry carrying young calves that Keivan became involved in the world of Animal Rights and Animal Liberation.

From the first day he threw himself into action wholeheartedly and became a regular at the demos and at the camp. Keivan had just got a job at Walkers crisps, but one day he came to the camp during his lunchtime and just never went back.

Keivan rapidly became one of the family of Coventry Animal Alliance and became a committed animal rights activist. He went on to be involved in many campaigns including: live exports, anti-circus demos, hunt sabotage, Consort Beagles Campaign, Close Hillgrove Cat Farm campaign, Stop Huntingdon Life Sciences and Close Shamrock Monkey farm campaigns.

In 1997 he was sent to prison for a combination of "offences" including attempting to liberate a cat from Hillgrove farm (a breeder of cats for vivisection ... which was closed by mass demos and actions by the animal rights movement) and actions against the live export trade.

Like so many others he traded his freedom to try and help those who had no-one else to help them ... the calves destined for a short agonising life, the cats, beagles and monkeys waiting to be tortured to death in vivisection laboratories and the foxes and hares who were about to be ripped apart by the huntsman's hounds.

On his release Keivan moved down south and became involved with Celia Hammond's cat sanctuary near Hastings where he lived and worked hard day to day helping animals.

In the last few years of his life Keivan moved to Nottingham where he worked helping people with alcohol and drugs problems.

In 2006 Keivan tragically died in a fire at his flat In Nottingham. Until the end he was still helping others.

Keivan was a special person whose like is very rare. He was unruly, compassionate and always a good laugh. Whatever the situation, no matter how grim, he could always be counted on to keep people's spirits up and when things weren't so bad ... to get the party started.

Like a comet blazing across the sky ... Keivan burned brightly but for much too brief a moment.

We miss you brother!

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