Ban the Bomb!

How did your parents meet?

They met at a New Year’s Eve party. I think at a Conservative Club. But neither of them was active in the party and I don’t think that my mother was ever a member. I’m not sure about my father.

I know that you were brought up as a Catholic. Were both your parents Catholics?

My father was brought up in the Church of England and it was only after meeting my mother that he decided to change. But it was very much a gradual thing. My mother told me that he asked her so many questions while they were courting about the Catholic faith that she finally asked him, ‘Well, are you thinking of becoming a Catholic, Arthur?’ And he replied, ‘No, no. I’m just interested in finding out a bit more.’ This was at a period when there was a revival of interest in that whole Cardinal Newman wing of Catholicism. But then he did convert to Catholicism.

Fig 1: Michael’s parents at their wedding in April 1931. Photographer unknown. Private Collection.

So, I would imagine you attended mass as a youngster.

You bet. Mass and Benediction [laughs]. It was coming from both sides at that point!

Bearing in mind your father’s business interests, you obviously had quite a posh upbringing. Did that include servants?

We always had at least one maid, who was nearly always Irish and usually someone my mother got through contacts in Ireland. I remember one young woman called Moira, whom we all liked and got along well with. Then I also remember an Englishwoman called Rose, who came and helped as well.

Would you say that your parents were happily married?

On the whole, yes. The only cause of serious tension between them stemmed from the fact that during the late ‘forties dad changed back to the C of E. Why was that? He had become critical of the whole Catholic ethos and the clericalism. Then there was another reason: he got the idea that there was something going on between my mother and an Irish priest, who used to visit. But that I’m sure was nonsense.

Were you a sociable child?

Well, I had my school friends and other children. The first school I went to was St. Cecilia’s in North Cheam and one of my best friends there was a boy named Jimmy Seymour, whose parents ran a greengrocer’s shop not far from where we lived in Cheam village. But then the war came and my family moved around a bit. In fact, initially, all of us except probably my dad moved to Merthyr Tydfil, in Wales, to a house which belonged to a Cheam couple. Then, when the Blitz started, my brother, Arthur, my sister, Margaret, and I were sent to Ireland, to a Catholic boarding school, St Dominic’s College, in Cabra, West Dublin.

Did you miss your parents?

Of course, but probably no more than any other child in that situation. In any case, during the school holidays I stayed with my mother’s parents and my aunt, Nan, who had a house in Inchicore on the west side of Dublin, and who all made sure that I was very well looked after. And I wasn’t on my own. Although Margaret stayed with cousins during the holidays, I always had my older brother, Arthur, for company. Then, during the latter part of the war, another sister, Terry, arrived, who, incidentally, was very intelligent and quick witted. Then, there was a cousin on my mother’s side, a Catholic priest, Uncle Tom, who used to come and play rebel songs on the piano like ‘Kevin Barry’ and ‘Kelly, the Boy from Killane’. So, yes, I did miss them. But not quite as badly as I could have done.

Fig 2: Michael’s maternal grandmother, Esther Treacy, and his Aunt Nan, with child. Early 1940s. Photographer unknown. Private Collection.

Did you return to England during the war?

No, but my parents used to come over at least once a year, bringing with them a growing number of younger siblings to meet me.

Let’s rewind a bit back to St. Cecilia’s, to 1939. People knew that war was coming. Do you remember gas drill, for instance?

I do remember having a gas mask and learning how to put it on and the smell of rubber that came from it. I don’t remember organised drill, but at school when there was an air raid warning, we’d put them on and go down to the main shelter in the playground and have our lessons there. I have a vivid memory of the smell of concrete. We used to have little hand-held blackboards to write things on.

Slates?

That’s right. The first time I ever got smacked at school was when I annoyed the teacher by slapping the thing on my knee [laughs]. But at that point the war for me was just an adventure. I had no understanding of the danger. We used to pray for peace, but I remember thinking, I don’t want this thing to end too soon; it’s too exciting. Not that I wanted to be a soldier. But the air raid warnings and the shelters were thrilling. At home I slept under the stairs, which was supposed to be the safest place. Then at some point we also had an air raid shelter in the garden.

What was your parents’ attitude to the war?

Well, my father was against it, not on political grounds as far as I know, but on moral grounds. Early on he registered as a conscientious objector, but his application was rejected. However, because he was in a vital industry, the clothing industry, he was exempted from military service, anyway.

Can you tell me something about the experience of being at St. Dominic’s?

For starters, it was run by Dominican nuns. Three of us went there: Arthur, Margaret and me, while Terry went to a local day-school in Inchicore. I remember our excitement at the prospect of being at a school where you slept in. We thought that was terrific. But when we got there it was very strict and oddly puritanical.

Fig 3: Michael (on the right) with his older brother, Arthur, on Killiney Hill, County Wicklow. Early 1940s. Photograph by Arthur Randle senior. Private Collection.

How so?

Well, I remember one kid who was very young, probably just three or four. One day he got up in the dormitory. His pyjama bottoms fell down, and he was beaten with the thick leather strap that was used for administering punishment. Then I remember other examples of the nuns’ severity. In the school grounds there was an institute for the deaf and dumb, some of whose inmates worked as servants at the school. One day, one of them came in to clean out the fireplace in the classroom, and the nun in charge got upset because the boys smiled and nodded to her. Heaven knows what she thought that they’d done, but she reported the matter to Sister Mary Imelda Joseph, and, my God, there were absolute ructions over it. She beat the boys’ hands with a leather strap. In fact, the only boy amongst us who did not get beaten was my brother, Arthur. He stuck to his guns and said, ‘I don’t see what we’ve done wrong.’ I suppose that Sister Mary Imelda Joseph must have respected that.

Incidentally, we learned quite a few signs from the servants, one of which was, ‘I’m going to sneak on you.’ We thought of them as fellow sufferers!

Did the war impinge much on your life at the college?

Not really, but I do remember very clearly the occasion when the Germans bombed the North Strand district of Dublin, whether by accident or as a warning I don’t know. I was asleep in bed at the time and had a nightmare that bombs were falling from the sky and exploding behind me as I tried to run away. Then I woke up and realised that they were real explosions. One of the nuns dashed in and we recited the prayer we always said last thing at night, ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph. I give you my heart and my soul. Jesus, Mary and Joseph assist me now and in my last agony. Jesus, Mary and Joseph may I breathe out my soul in peace with you. Amen.’

Something to cheer you up then.

Yes, I suppose so [laughs]. Afterwards, we were all bundled into a sort of basement in the girls’ part of the college, where the resident priest led us in reciting The Rosary.

Did you experience any bullying from other children at the convent, coming as you did from a mixed Anglo-Irish background?

Well, there was certainly quite a bit of hostility towards Britain, but, no, I wouldn’t say that I was bullied. Possibly I was helped in that respect by the fact that my mother was Irish and that the priest who came to examine the pupils’ knowledge of catechism and Catholic teaching was none other than my mother’s cousin, Uncle Tom, from Ballsbridge! However, things in one period did get tense. That was when Churchill demanded the use of the Irish ports, in accordance with a clause in the 1922 Anglo-Irish Agreement guaranteeing the British access to them in an emergency. Such an action would have compromised Irish neutrality and possibly brought the country into the war, so De Valera refused. So, there was a bit of a scare as to whether Churchill’s demand was going to lead to hostilities with Britain. I remember a boy called George Harris and some of his mates sitting in a huddle and saying that if it did come to war that they would kill me and all the other English boys.

You must have felt quite threatened.

Not really. Actually, I think it just made me feel more English!

Any republicans on your mother’s side?

Yes, indeed. A first cousin of my grandfather, Seán (or ‘Johnny’) Tracey, from Ballsbridge, took part in the 1916 uprising and was among those interned for a period in an army camp in North Wales after the uprising was suppressed. One family story was that when the insurgents were defending the General Post Office against the British attempt to recapture it, Johnny swapped positions with another man because one of them, I can’t remember which, was left-handed. The man he swapped places with was killed in the fighting. However, I didn’t discover all that until some years after returning to England. It would have stood me in good stead had I known about it while at school in Cabra.

My mother also recounted to me the story of how her father had hidden some sensitive republican documents at the back of a framed picture in the front room. Soon afterwards the house was raided by the British army, which had been tipped off by one of the neighbours that known rebels had been seen visiting it. My mother told of how she struggled not to look at the picture while the raid was going on. I made a video recording of my mother in 1998 talking about her life, and she gives a vivid account of her experience as a child of 10 of the 1916 uprising, and of afterwards hearing the shots from Kilmainham Gaol as the leaders of the uprising were executed. The man, who’d brought the documents, by the way, was Peadar Doyle. He later became the Lord Mayor of Dublin.

Then there was another republican connection with the family in that my mother’s sister, Peg, was engaged to, and eventually married, a Peter Sorahan, who took part in the guerrilla war during the 1918-1921 period and, afterwards, fought on the Republican side in the tragic civil war that followed it. ‘Uncle Peter’ was eventually taken prisoner during the civil war and served time in Kilmainham Gaol. He and Peg went to live in New York, after his release, though they returned in the 1960s to live with Nan in her home in Inchicore.

I learnt more about all this bit by bit, but certainly knew the essential facts by the time I was myself sentenced to 18 months in prison in 1962. By then the family had moved to a farm in Fletching, a small village near Uckfield, East Sussex. I don’t know what it’s like now, but then it was a very conservative village. One of the adjoining farms was owned by a retired colonel, and you’d see men and women in redcoats riding to hounds. In other words, it was all very English and traditional. Anyway, the colonel’s wife spoke to my mother on one occasion and said, ‘Don’t you feel ashamed that your son is in prison?’ ‘No!’, my mother replied. ‘Where I grew up, we were proud of people who went to prison for their convictions.’

Following the war, Michael, did you return to England immediately?

No, not immediately. My father’s great ambition at this time was to have a farm—he was already a keen allotment holder—, and we spent some time looking at farms in Ireland. There was talk then of the whole family moving there. But that didn’t work out. We returned to England in August 1945, just a couple of days before VJ Day. I remember we went up to London and watched the King and Queen come out onto the balcony of Buckingham Palace and wave.

Did you move back to your old house?

No, my father had bought a much larger house by then and we lived in that. Again, in Cheam, but halfway up the hill on a road called Burdon Lane, leading to Banstead Heath.

Was your mother happy remaining in England?

I think so. She had two brothers, Bill and Michael and an adopted brother, John. Michael at some time in the 1930s had gone to live in Australia and lost touch with the family. But Bill and John moved to England. We all loved Uncle Bill because he was great fun to be with and had a quick and mischievous sense of humour. He was, in the words of the popular song, one of ‘McAlpine’s fusiliers’, which is to say, a labourer working for the firm, MacAlpine & Sons, which built many of Britain’s roads and airfields in the 1940s and 1950s. Bill was also a keen Labour supporter and had a big influence on my political thinking as a youngster.

Fig 4: ‘Uncle Bill’ with Michael’s maternal grandmother, Esther. Photographer unknown. Private Collection.

After St. Dominic’s you attended Douai School in Woolhampton, Berkshire, which says to me a couple of things: firstly, that the family had had a ‘good war’, at least in financial terms; and secondly, that your parents had high personal and social ambitions for you. Can you tell me a little bit about that experience?

After St. Dominic’s, Douai was very relaxed. The first thing that struck me, oddly enough, was to do with bath-time. The individual bathtubs were partitioned off from one another by wooden cubicles, where perhaps half a dozen boys or so took baths at the same time. The priest in charge on this occasion, Father Alphonsus Tierney—or Alf as we called him amongst ourselves—, said, ‘If you’re not out in five minutes, you’ll get the stick.’ And one boy said, ‘Where?’ And the priest said, ‘On your bottoms.’ And I thought, Oh my God [laughs]. You can use a word like that. It was a much freer atmosphere.

The person who had the biggest influence on me at Douai was a lay teacher, Oliver Welch, a very good historian and teacher. He and the headmaster, Father Ignatius Rice, were part of a Catholic intellectual circle, which included G.K. Chesterton and Ronald Knox. He injected a lot of common sense into our understanding of religion and politics. On one occasion we were studying the medieval popes’ habit of excommunicating their political and religious rivals, when one boy put a question which, I think, was troubling many in the class. What effect, he asked, did the excommunication have on the individual concerned? Welch looked puzzled for a moment, then, realising what the boy was driving at, replied ‘You mean on the future of his immortal soul? Oh, none whatsoever!’

Another history teacher whom I liked a lot was a very genial monk called Father Dunstan. He was very partial to betting on the horses!

I once asked another priest, the man in charge of the junior school, Father Norbert Bill, if people who had been Catholic but lost their faith would be destined to go to hell. It was an important question for me as it wasn’t long since my father had ceased to be a Catholic. ‘We always have to trust in the mercy of Almighty God,’ he replied. ‘But it is a grim outlook!’

By the way, one of Welch’s books was about Mirabeau and the French Revolution. But the history lessons I remember best were about the English Revolution. That said, by the time that I was about fourteen or fifteen, I was most absorbed in Irish history. I even had an argument in class with Father Ignatius Rice on the subject. He put forward an English point of view about the Ulster settlement. I think his line was that the north of Ireland was underpopulated, so it was reasonable for Scots and English people to settle there. I put forward an Irish republican position. But then, later that day, when I was walking in one of the cloisters, he tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Some day you should talk to Mr Welch about Ireland. He’s just been destroying all my theories.’ This conversation took place at about the same time as I was in the habit of teasing some of the boys with the Irish nationalist ballads, some of which I’d learned from Uncle Tom. You could probably say that I had become a bit of a rebel! I remember upsetting one boy by reciting the opening lines of one very anti-British ballad, which I’d come across in an Irish songbook. It began:

God’s curse be on you, England,

God strike your London Town,

And cursed be every Irishman

Alive or yet to live,

Who’ll e’er forget the death they died

Who’ll ever dare forgive.

Were there any other subjects that you enjoyed besides history?

English. I’ve always read a lot. But at that stage it became a bit of a passion. One Christmas, while we were still living in Ireland, I was given a copy of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe as a present and I absolutely loved it. Then I read Scott’s other books, none of which, by the way, lived up to that first one. Another writer who was very popular with the boys at Douai was G.A. Henty, despite his being an old-school imperialist. I remember, in particular, his novel St George for England about the war in France during the reign of Edward III. It celebrated the English victories at Crécy and Poitiers.

What about activities outside of school? Were you taken to the pictures, for instance?

Oh, better than that. Once a week during the winter and spring terms we had our own film shows. These were another one of Father Dunstan’s responsibilities. He used to operate the projector. It was great when it worked, not so great when it broke down which was fairly regularly Then, occasionally, some American airmen from the nearby Aldermaston air base would drop by with some of their films, which, bearing in mind my later activities, seems a bit ironic. At Cabra we’d also had film shows, but much less frequently. I remember my sister, Margaret, telling me about one film which included a scene in which a woman was undressing. The nun in charge put a card in front of the lens so the pupils wouldn’t see it.

Before we leave your schooling, what exams did you take? I think children took the School Certificate in those days.

That’s right. At Douai, I took the School Certificate when I was sixteen and just scraped through. I got a distinction in English and did well too in history. Then I also passed the French exam.

Actually, I was keen to stay on at school for another year or two, partly because I wanted to play regularly in the rugby first team. But my father did not think that was sufficient reason to spend more on school fees!

So, what then? You found a job?

My dad apprenticed me, as it were, to a City firm called Sharp, Perrin and Company, which carried on a wholesale business in clothing and which dealt with dad’s factory. It was situated bang opposite the Old Bailey. I worked there in a couple of departments, the idea being that they’d train me to take over my father’s business. But I hated it there; I got increasingly fed up and only lasted about a year. However, to avoid a confrontation I didn’t tell my dad. I just gave in my notice and left. Then I took on another job as an orderly in a children’s hospital in the Banstead Heath area.

Every morning I would go through this pantomime of leaving the house for the London train at the usual time, but walk instead to the hospital. But then, eventually, he found out. Talk about the shit hitting the fan. My God!

Then, when that one finished, I applied for a job at Tribune and then for another one with a local newspaper. But I was very naive. In the latter case, I didn’t even sign the letter. I remember receiving this very snotty reply, something along the lines of thank you for your unsigned letter, but we’re sorry to tell you that there’s no vacancy here [laughs].

But, anyway, I suppose that what I really wanted to be was a writer. I used to go home in the evenings and write a bit. I even published an article in a magazine for young people. But then other things took over.

2. The Birth of a Satyagrahi

Michael, you mentioned in our last conversation that like many young people you wanted to be a writer. Any favourite authors after Sir Walter Scott and Henty?

Aldous Huxley. I read several of his books and really liked them.

Why?

Well, for starters I liked Huxley’s style. Then, he put forward a quite radical view of politics and life which I found sympathetic.

Did any particular books appeal to you? One title that I have in mind is Ape and Essence, his post-nuclear apocalypse novel of 1948.

I don’t remember reading that. I did, however, read Brave New World, but some time later. No, the Huxley book that I read then and which stuck with me wasn’t a novel at all, but an anthology of readings from the mystics. It was called The Perennial Philosophy. I was profoundly influenced by it.

On the subject of religion, were you still a Catholic at this point? I take it that you’d been confirmed.

I’ve mentioned already my father’s return to Anglicanism. Well, as time went by I too became very critical, not just of the clericalism, but also of the hierarchical side of Catholicism. In part I came to these opinions myself, but then I was also hugely influenced by a very good friend of my father’s, a Dr Errington Kerr, who came from somewhere in the West Indies and practiced as a GP in North Cheam. Dr Kerr had also had a Catholic upbringing, but he had become a convinced atheist. I remember him saying that though he was still attracted to the ritual and to the music, he didn’t believe in God. And I think that that was more or less where I ended up. Even today, I’m moved by plainchant and other choral religious music. So, I suppose, at that level only, once a Catholic always a Catholic!

Anyway, yes, I was confirmed, and at that time and for some time after leaving school I remained a Catholic.

What made you decide to be a conscientious objector?

There were a number of things. But certainly talking to Dr Kerr was one of them. Kerr was a conscientious objector himself. He was also a vegetarian.

What about your father’s influence? Wasn’t that also important?

Yes indeed. In fact, it was my father who encouraged me to talk to Dr Kerr in the first place. And then my mother too played a role. I particularly remember having a conversation with her about the use of flamethrowers that set your enemy on fire. She said, ‘You can’t possibly agree to that.’ But it was Dr Kerr who was the main influence.

Did your parents join the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) or any of the other pacifist organisations?