Kitabı oku: «Ban the Bomb!», sayfa 4
Of course, many older people at this time would have associated Peace News with appeasement and the failures of the 1930s. Did that issue ever come up?
I don’t think it did, at least I don’t remember people associating me with appeasement. The truth is that probably most people just weren’t interested either way.
Getting back to Brock again, when, later on, he wrote up the Operation Gandhi story for Peace News he noted that although the War Office sit-down was hardly a success, it did have three enormous benefits. Not only did it bring David Hoggett and Roger Rawlinson into the organisation—I think Hoggett was some sort of ‘observer’ on the occasion—, but it brought you into it as well. About you, he was particularly flattering. He quotes a letter you wrote to him in May 1952, which, quote, ‘shows something of the mettle of the man who nearly ten years later was to organise the sit-down outside the Ministry of Defence for the Committee of 100 of which he is now the secretary.’ Basically, Brock was having second thoughts about one of Operation Gandhi’s projects, and you were urging him not to lose courage.
I’ll have to look that one up [laughs].
Would you agree that part of your appeal to Brock would have been your relative youth and the fact that like other young people you were full of new ideas and energies?
That seems likely. People like Kathleen Rawlins were a bit older. Other young people who were also conscientious objectors were coming into the movement. You’ve mentioned David Hoggett, but there was also David Graham and Ian Dixon. Later on, those two went off to India together and met up with Vinoba Bhave of the Bhoodan Movement, though they were not all that impressed by him. They were also among the people who volunteered to go with Harold Steele to the site of the first British H-Bomb tests in the Pacific.
When I looked through the minutes of Operation Gandhi I was struck by the extensive planning that went into your actions. On every occasion you and other committee members spent hours poring over bus timetables and maps, organising food deliveries and so on. And then another thing that struck me: you were very candid with the authorities.
Well, that was part of the Gandhi tradition, at least as far as we understood it. You acted quite openly, so you informed the police of what you were planning to do. But, then of course, we also wanted the publicity. If you didn’t tell the police and the press what you were going to do, then they possibly wouldn’t have turned up. And that went on through the Direct Action Committee and even, to some extent, through the Committee of 100 period. If you were having a sit-down or you were planning a demonstration, you let the authorities know about it.
And you’d engage the police in conversation. You’d ask them what they were doing and why they were doing it. That must have been pretty difficult, I imagine. Policemen can be pretty bloody-minded. Did it work?
I think it did. It certainly meant that our relations in general with the police at that point were quite good, even when they were arresting us. We didn’t express any hostility towards the police. The attitude then was very much you do what you do and we do what we do. And if you happen to arrest us, well, that’s the law.
As for the planning, after a while I really learned to enjoy it. I was always very thorough, partly because I felt responsible for people and partly, I suppose, because it was an opportunity to do something that I was good at. However, during most of the early period the lion’s share was done centrally, from London by Hugh or one of the other people, though I do remember organising a demonstration in Reigate or Redhill. I guess I did that one because I was local!
Looking back now at the platform of Operation Gandhi, at least to the very early months, there isn’t the emphasis on the nuclear issue that I would have expected. Take one of the early leaflets, the platform is this: the withdrawal of American forces; the withdrawal of Britain from NATO; the disbanding of Britain’s armed forces; and the stopping of the manufacture of atom bombs in Britain. So, you weren’t then calling for unilateral disarmament.
It was implied; it was implied in the whole disarmament programme. But, yes, I’m quite interested to be reminded of these early emphases. Maybe under J. Allen Skinner and Hugh Brock the word ‘unilateralism’ didn’t figure much, but it was implicit. The Whitehall War Office demo may have been against the military in general. But think of the places that we went to after that. Mildenhall was not just any big military base; it was also strongly suspected of carrying nuclear weapons. Then we also went to Aldermaston, to Porton Down and to Harwell. These were all places related to weapons of mass destruction.
By the way, was Aldermaston the first action you took part in? That would have been the one in April 1952.
Yes, I think it was. Following the picket, we held an open-air meeting in Aldermaston village, at which Stuart Morris, a big figure in the PPU, was one of the speakers. We set up a stand in the village and preached to a few people, though really the main audience for our demonstration was a herd of cows in the adjoining field. They took fright as we walked past and stampeded into another field [laughs].
Fig 5: Stuart Morris addressing the public meeting organised by Operation Gandhi in Aldermaston village on 19 April 1952. The man on Morris’ right is Francis Deutsch. The woman holding the banner with the words, ‘His hope for the future’ is Doris Wheeler. University of Bradford, Special Collections, Cwl HBP 1/5.
Why didn’t you go to the second demonstration?
You mean the one at Mildenhall? I didn’t go to that for the simple reason that my dad blew his top over it. I was still working for him on the farm, and he said, ‘No, you can’t have the time off.’ The fact was, I suppose, he saw the Operation Gandhi type of activity as provocative. I think he actually said, ‘It’s waving a red rag at a bull.’ And then the idea of one of his sons going out and courting arrest or being fined and imprisoned was way outside his comfort zone.
You mentioned in our first interview that Aldermaston wasn’t very far from Douai. Did any members of the school come along? There must have been some curiosity about what you were doing.
No, I don’t think so. But Pat Chambers, the person I mentioned earlier, did write something jokey for the school magazine mentioning that, ‘Michael Randle was last seen on his way to Aldermaston.’
Later on, you changed Operation Gandhi’s name to the Non-Violent Resistance Group (NVRG). Why was that?
I think that partly came out of discussions with some of our Indian friends, who were unhappy about linking Gandhi’s name to something that sounded so military. They were certainly a bit uneasy. But, yes, we didn’t stay with the Operation Gandhi name for very long. By early 1953 we’d changed it.
Moving forwards to the middle fifties now, do you remember some of the other people involved in the NVRG and its type of activism, say Norman Iles, Olwen Battersby, Jack Salkind, Lady Clare Annesley, Irene Jacoby or Dorothy Morton? You’ve already mentioned Tom Wardle.
Lady Clare Annesley was a dedicated pacifist and someone else who used to help out at Peace News on a Wednesday evening. She had been a suffragette. I think that she stayed with us into the Direct Action Committee period as well. She certainly stayed with the peace movement anyway.
Then I remember Irene Jacoby as well. She was a very forceful and outspoken woman. Much later, following the NVRG period, we met again, in 1967, at a conference in Sweden to do with the Vietnam war. We even had a couple of people from the National Liberation Front, the NFL, at that one.
Dorothy Morton, I think, was a Quaker. She and a young woman, Connie Jones, lay down on the road in front of the gates of the American air base at RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk, in June 1952. A week or so earlier, Hugh and myself had gone up and done a reccy of the base. Both Connie and Dorothy were brave, principled and gutsy women.
Did the national papers report this and the other demonstrations?
Yes, but not in a big way. They certainly didn’t make the headlines. Reynolds News would usually carry something. And then there would often be reports in the local newspapers.
During the summer of 1953, I think it was, you left Little Gatton for another house, this time in Fletching, near Uckfield. Was this also to do with your father’s farming interests?
Yes, he wanted to move on to a proper farm, so he bought Church Farm, at Fletching, in Sussex, a mixed diary and arable farm of 200 acres.
This is about the time when you started your ‘Farmer’s Log Book’ articles for Peace News. They really come out of the blue. At least there’s nothing in Peace News like them.
Yes, Hugh encouraged me to do that. After all, if I hadn’t been taken up with the whole peace issue I could happily have stayed at the farm. I really enjoyed working there, and Hugh’s offer gave me the opportunity to write about my experiences.
But then by the end of the year, you left the farm for a house in Limpsfield, near Oxted. Do you remember why you moved? Reading between the lines, I wonder if you’d had fallen out with your father?
No, I didn’t leave as a result of falling out with dad. It was rather the other way around. We fell out to some extent because I decided to leave the farm. By that point I simply felt happier growing vegetables than working with animals, and here we’re back to Dr Kerr and vegetarianism again. My dad was certainly angry and upset when I decided to leave, and actually I was upset too to see how much distress my decision was causing him. I remember writing a letter to my mother saying this.
In Limpsfield I took lodgings with a woman and worked at a nearby market garden for a short period, then came home at Christmas. My dad was so keen to get me back that he said that I could plough up a field and do what I liked with it and not have anything to do with the animals. I agreed to that and came back to the farm for a time. But that arrangement didn’t really work because I was still part of the farm team, and the idea of cultivating and growing stuff separate from the others just wasn’t practical. Anyway, I still had my peace work to think about. In fact, it was about that time that I became involved with the Pacifist Youth Action Group.
Oh, tell me about that?
This was a group I joined with other young conscientious objectors, including David Graham and Ian Dixon, both of whom I’ve already mentioned, and Chris Farley. I don’t know whether it was formally affiliated to the PPU, but it was certainly in line with their policies. We used to have regular pickets outside the prisons where they were holding conscientious objectors, and I travelled by train to London on one or two occasions to join in. And then some of these same people were involved in speaking at Speaker’s Corner at Hyde Park. There was a young woman too, Carol Taylor from Manchester, who died I think recently. She became Carol Fitz-Gibbon and a very well-known educationalist. She was a brilliant speaker. A small woman and very feisty. She would get a big crowd. There was one occasion: a heckler there was really getting us down, saying things like, ‘Warfare? It’s just cannibalism.’ And she said, ‘It’s not cannibalism. Because they don’t eat the bodies!’
Talking of oratory, were there any other speakers who particularly impressed you at this time? The Methodist churchman Donald Soper, for instance?
Soper had the reputation of being an outstanding orator. He spoke regularly at Tower Hill as well as at Speakers’ Corner, though I don’t think he ever spoke from our platform and I didn’t myself hear him speak in public. He appeared frequently on the radio programme, ‘Question Time’. He also joined the Direct Action Committee. Most of us then were virtually unknown and he was one of the ‘names’. He even came and sat down with us at Aldermaston at the end of the first Aldermaston march, in 1958, though we weren’t causing an obstruction and so didn’t risk arrest.
Can you tell me something about the background of the people you’ve mentioned in the Pacifist Youth Action Group? For some reason, I imagine that most of them were a bit Oxbridge.
Well, certainly neither Ian Dixon nor David Graham were Oxbridge. Ian was born and brought up here in Yorkshire, in Hipperholme I think. I don’t know what Chris Farley’s background was. He may have been public school; I don’t know.
3. The Direct Action Committee and the first Aldermaston March
Michael, let’s begin today by talking about the Suez Crisis of Autumn 1956. Can you say something about its impact upon you?
It was a real shock when the bombing started, and the more facts that came out the more disgraceful it seemed. It was so obviously a war of aggression, an act of imperialist folly. It emerged that there had been collusion between Israel, France and Britain before the war started. There was a division within my family about it. My brother Arthur, who was in the army at the time, took a very pro-British line as did my father initially. I remember going to Haywards Heath railway station to pick my brother up and having a fierce argument over Suez on the drive home. Then, later on, I overheard my dad and Arthur joking about how they’d seen some tanks being loaded up. I was absolutely livid. Then a cousin of my father, an Anglican clergyman, ‘Uncle Howard’, who lived up Manchester way, also took their side when he was visiting us. Anyway, when I was preparing to go up to London to demonstrate with the Pacifist Youth Action Group and some other organisations, Howard, who was a decent man actually, said, ‘Oh, well. Anthony Eden has always been a man of peace’, and I was incensed. I shouted, ‘No. He’s a warmonger!’ I went up to London on a couple of occasions to join with others in distributing a leaflet that Donald Soper had written calling for civil disobedience to halt the Anglo-French-Israeli aggression. But, to my shame, I missed the big demonstration in Trafalgar Square, the one addressed by Aneurin Bevan for the trivial reason that I was committed to playing in a rugby match with the Old Dowegians. I didn’t realise that Nye’s speech was going to be the big one, the key event. I also sent a telegram from our local post office calling upon Eden to resign and to desist from this act of aggression. I mean, it was appalling what they were actually prepared to do.
Which would you say was worse? The aggression or the subterfuge?
Well, it was the military aggression that cost lives, including the lives of civilians, but the subterfuge that facilitated the aggression. We weren’t fully aware of the subterfuge until later. Michael Foot wrote a book about it called Guilty Men, 1957, which was based on a lot of research. I saw Suez as very much a recrudescence of imperialism.
What were your feelings about Nasser?
Well, it’s hard to think back and be sure, but my feeling as far as I remember was that the canal was in his country, so why shouldn’t he nationalise it?
What about your father’s view? I wonder if, like many people at the time, he compared Nasser to Hitler?
No, I don’t think that he went that far. From his point of view, it was more a matter of the canal being British property. But the odd thing is that when Peace News published some very graphic photographs of the effects of the bombing, he switched completely and said that the bombing was a war crime. He was emotionally affected.
And then following Suez you had the uprising in Hungary.
Yes, exactly. And, of course, again there were protests. Like many towns and villages, our village held an event to raise money for Hungarian refugees. In fact, I was the one who took the initiative in getting a committee together to work on the issue. The irony is that some of the people who supported the Suez aggression opposed the Soviet intervention in Hungary [laughs].
So, then you decided to take your own action?
That’s right. In consultation with Hugh Brock and Gene Sharp and some of the other people at Peace News I decided to get a group together to walk from Austria to the Hungarian border in order to express our support for the non-violent resistance to the Russian invasion. The newspaper headlines in this country were all about the violent resistance: the Molotov cocktails, the bombs, the bullets and so on. But there was a women’s march in Hungary and quite a lot of other non-violent forms of protest.
Am I right in thinking that Hungary had a tradition of non-violent protest?
Absolutely. There was a man called Ferenc Deák. I’ll have to check out the details, but yes, Hungary had had a sort of autonomous status within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and there was an attempt by Austria during the nineteenth century to close that down or to incorporate it. The protests lasted ten or twelve years, and they did get some concessions eventually. You can read about them in the writings of people like Richard Gregg and Aldous Huxley. Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Féin, also wrote a book about it called The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland, which urged Sinn Féin, which was initially a non-violent party, to follow the example of Hungary. Eventually, of course, the more violent wing took over or became more prominent, but that’s another story.
So, you got a group together.
Well, I got one or two people interested. But, in the end, I went on my own. I felt I had to go; I was so passionate about the issue. Gene Sharp, who had recently come to England to take over from Hugh Brock as assistant editor of Peace News, helped me put a leaflet together. Then some of the people in the Non-Violent Resistance Group helped out in other ways. Dorothy Glaister was particularly good in that respect. She had had quite a lot of experience of the weather conditions in Central Europe and she gave me advice about clothing and so on.
You left London when? In December?
That’s right. Just before Christmas. I stayed overnight with Terence Chivers, who worked for Peace News. Then I took the train to Vienna, where I spent some time with a Hungarian who was a supporter of Peace News. He knew a bit about the situation.
Francis Rona?
Yes, Francis Rona. And then I also got help from a woman, another Quaker. She got the leaflet translated into German and printed by a sympathetic publisher. Then someone else printed it in Hungarian. So, I had it in English, German and Hungarian. But not in Russian, which was a big gap in a way [laughs] because I was appealing to Russian troops not to fire on unarmed demonstrators.
Anyway, as soon as I got to Vienna I told the police precisely what I was planning to do and made a poster to wear which said in English, German and Hungarian, ‘Freedom—Not through war but through non-violent means!’ ‘Freiheit—Nicht durch Krieg, sondern durch gewaltlase (sic) Mittel!‘ I remember I had some quite detailed negotiations with the police. I told them that when I got to the border I wanted to fast and hold a vigil. They didn’t want me to distribute the leaflets in the towns, but they said that I could go through the villages and into the countryside. You see, the situation in Austria was still very sensitive at that point, because of Austria’s role in the Second World War and because it had a policy of strict neutrality. They certainly didn’t want a foreigner like me rocking the boat with Moscow!
On the second day, it snowed heavily. There’s a picture of me in Peace News with flat cap and poster, and I have others which show the landscape covered in snow. When I got to the border the communication from Vienna still hadn’t arrived, so the border police stopped me and rang through to Vienna. Then some other police officers came from Vienna and drove me back to police headquarters there. I explained what I’d been doing and that it had all been cleared with the relevant authorities. But they couldn’t find the person I’d spoken to, so there was a lot of confusion. The police got in touch with someone at the British Embassy, who was totally unsympathetic to my position. When he came into the police headquarters to speak to me, he said ‘Oh, so you’re the person who has caused all the trouble.’
Eventually I agreed to leave Austria within, I think, three days.
Fig 6: Michael on his walk to the Hungarian border. University of Bradford, Special Collections, Cwl PN 11/19.
What about Francis Rona? Was he any help at that point?
Not at all. In fact, like most of the Quakers he’d introduced me to in Vienna he hadn’t been keen on the project in the first place. Their view was that I should have been at home protesting at what the British had done in Egypt. But I said, ‘I’ve already done that.’
Indeed, when I got back to Vienna, he was quite unsympathetic. He compared my agreeing to the police demands to a former Austrian President who had stumbled and fallen while climbing a stairway.
Well, I felt that I’d made my protest despite his opposition. Yet here he was telling me I should not have agreed to leave Austria.
I’ve read in one of the archives at Bradford University that Kathleen Rawlins was also against the project. She thought that you were putting yourself at unnecessary risk and for, potentially, very small gain.
I can’t remember the details of what she said. She was always very friendly and sympathetic. But I think she did feel that it was risky, and that though she had a lot of admiration for my enthusiasm the action I was proposing was foolhardy.
You could have been shot!
Oh, yes [laughs]. Which would have been just the sort of incident that the Austrians certainly didn’t want!
That said, and this may seem a strange question, I wonder if at some level that’s what you did want, that you would have welcomed martyrdom?
I certainly felt the need to bear witness, if that’s what you mean. I was so impressed by what I understood as Gandhi’s methods. Having read Richard Gregg and Bart de Ligt and others, I had become totally convinced of the efficacy of non-violent resistance. And, yes, that did involve sacrifice.
Did you fast in Austria?
Not to the extent that I wanted to. I needed all my energy to do that walk. After all, it was about fifty miles in the depths of winter. It was bitterly cold. I certainly fasted during the Suez crisis. But that was just an individual gesture.
Why? As an act of penitence for British imperialism?
I suppose it was that, yes.
Let’s talk now about the next major organisation with which you were involved: The Direct Action Committee or the DAC. I think that emerged out of Harold Steele’s attempt to reach the British H-Bomb test site at Christmas Island in 1957.
Yes. As you say, it was very much an outgrowth of Harold Steele’s attempt to sail to Christmas Island. About fifty people volunteered to go with him, including Reginald Reynolds, Ian Dixon, David Graham and Pat Arrowsmith. Harold Steele went to Japan first and got a boat which he intended to sail into the test area, but the tests took place before he arrived. Anyway, in March 1957, Hugh Brock called a meeting to offer him support. Now, I didn’t attend that meeting for the same disgraceful reason that I missed Aneurin Bevan’s famous speech on Suez [laughs]: I was committed to playing rugby.
There’s a pattern forming here.
After that, it gets a bit confusing. The group formed to support Harold Steele called itself the Emergency Committee for Direct Action Against Nuclear War. The one that was set up after Harold Steele came back was called the Group or Committee for Direct Action Against Nuclear War, which after the first Aldermaston march, changed its name to the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War or DAC for short. I was a member of the sub-group which organised the first Aldermaston march. The other members of that group were Hugh Brock, Walter Wolfgang and Frank Allaun, with Pat Arrowsmith as organiser secretary. The four of us used to meet once a week in a room in the House of Commons to plan the actual march.
Frank Allaun was a Labour MP.
That’s right. He was MP for Salford East.
A Bevanite?
I’m not sure if he would have identified himself as a Bevanite, though he certainly wasn’t from the Gaitskellite wing of the party. We still had hopes then that Bevan would lead an anti-nuclear campaign. But then he made that famous speech at the 1957 Brighton conference, the one about sending a future Labour Foreign Secretary ‘naked into the conference chamber.’ He wasn’t actually unsympathetic to the aspirations of the people who were calling for unconditional unilateral nuclear disarmament. He was saying that this wasn’t the way to go about it. Nuclear disarmament, he argued, could only be achieved through international agreements.
I remember that Brighton Conference very well. I met up with Gene Sharp there. The whole thing was a big disappointment. It was held at about the same time as J.B. Priestley wrote his famous article on the H-Bomb for the New Statesman, the one that led to the founding of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Tribune too was banging on about nuclear disarmament. So, there was all this fermentation. But, yes, the conference was a big disappointment.
Would you say that it was about that time that you lost your faith in party political politics as a way of dealing with the nuclear issue?
Well, even before that I had been influenced by anarcho-pacifist ideas, so I don’t think that it was just that. I certainly didn’t want to reject the support of parliamentarians like Frank Allaun, for example. But I saw the way forward as something much more revolutionary. Revolution by non-violent means; that was the idea.
In some of your Peace News articles of 1956 you talk about employing the anarcho-syndicalist tactic of the general strike. On reflection, how realistic do you think that was?
It wasn’t realistic at all. I was reading all these ideas about the forms that non-violent resistance could take, and that was one of the possibilities. But, of course, there was no chance that the trade unions at that point would back a general strike for nuclear disarmament.
However, Frank Cousins came out very strongly against the bomb. One of our Direct Action Committee leaflets cited the occasion in May 1920 when dockers refused to load British weapons onto a ship, The Jolly George, bound for Poland to be used by Russian White armies against the Bolsheviks.
Just to be clear: there was the Labour Party and there were the unions and you had hopes from elements in both of them?
Yes, but I think that we were looking more to the grassroots. But, having said that, we were also divided amongst ourselves. I think that Hugh had his feet more firmly on the ground than some of us. On the one hand, he had this great millennial vision of a Britain without weapons. But, on the other, he was a very practical man, with a realistic grasp of the steps you had to take to move towards that. He was a Labour County Councillor, after all! So, he was meeting MPs like Frank Allaun and being very persuasive. But I don’t think that he expected a non-violent revolution during his lifetime.
Was it at the November meeting of the DAC that the first Aldermaston march was suggested?
Yes. Two people suggested it: Laurence Brown and Hugh himself. Laurence lived in the Aldermaston area and was the person who alerted Hugh Brock to the activities going on at Aldermaston back in 1952, which led to the first protest at the base by Operation Gandhi. Then when the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War was formed after Harold Steele’s return from Japan, Hugh and Laurence proposed a two- or three-day march from London to Aldermaston. I remember Terence Chivers saying to me, ‘Oh, it’s Hugh going on about Aldermaston again’, suggesting I suppose that he was reliving something in the past. But this was something different, a march as against a day trip by coach and a protest lasting at most two or three hours. But the atmosphere in the country too was very different. Why? Because you’d had Hungary, with communists and communist sympathisers, people like Edward Thompson, saying that what the Russians had been doing was imperialism under another name. And you’d had Suez, and all the demonstrations against that. And then also journals like the Universities and Left Review and, up in this part of the world The New Reasoner had come out. So, the context had changed utterly.
So, the idea of a march caught on very quickly?
The reaction was absolutely staggering and somewhat daunting. We quickly came to realise what a huge venture it was going to be. But, fortunately, we had an excellent Chief Marshall in Michael Howard who played a vital role in the practical organisation of the march. Also, a number of voluntary organisations stepped in to help. For instance, the Quakers agreed to open up their meeting houses for people to stay in en route. Then the London Cooperative Society said that they’d provide some catering.
How did the people at the CND take to it? I’ve read somewhere that the bigwigs didn’t approve of direct action of any kind.
Ücretsiz ön izlemeyi tamamladınız.
