Ban the Bomb!

No, I don’t think either of them ever did that. Neither of them were really joiners. But on the matter of conscientious objection my father certainly had strong views as he had registered as a conscientious objector himself. I would say that my mother was anti-war on moral and humanitarian grounds.

I used to think that your pacifism stemmed from your feelings about the bomb.

Well, yes, that was a central consideration. In fact, in the first draft of my statement applying for recognition as a conscientious objector I did not take a totally pacifist position but argued that nuclear weapons were indiscriminate and contravened just war principles. But, really, I think it was discussing the matter with Dr Kerr that was the tipping point on the issue. When the A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki I was in Ireland and I was hardly aware of what had occurred. On my return to England I did speak about it to one of my aunts, my father’s sister, Margery, who told me how it had destroyed a whole city. But only later on did I think, ‘Oh, my God’. And then, of course, I had another reason to think a lot more deeply about pacifism and conscientious objection. The Cold War had begun and there was a lot of talk of war with Russia.

Let’s go back a bit now. Surely there must have been some discussion of conscription at school?

No, I can’t say there was. We knew, of course, that at a certain age you were expected to go into the army or into one of the other services for eighteen months or two years or whatever it was. But, really, I was very naive. In fact, one of the other boys told me he didn’t think it was possible to be a conscientious objector in peacetime.

You discussed political and moral issues more generally though?

Of course, we were Catholics after all. Morals were a very important part of the curriculum. I remember when the 1950 elections came up—this is about politics now—, I took part in a school debate with a boy called Pat Chambers, who went on to work for The Daily Telegraph. He spoke from the top table and I spoke from the floor, but both of us for the Labour Party. As was the custom, there was a vote both before and after the debate and the only boy to vote with us at the beginning changed his vote at the end! Then I remember one master saying to me, ‘You, Michael, could argue the hind legs off a donkey’, because I was always getting into these long discussions. Another teacher, a priest, Father Dean, ‘Dixie Dean’, used to call me Karl Marx, so you could say that I had quite a reputation.

Do you have any regrets now that you didn’t join up? After all, it wasn’t all bull and the real possibility of fighting in Korea or somewhere in the empire. I’ve spoken to others of your generation who have described their National Service as amongst the best years of their lives, not least for exposing them to people from different backgrounds.

Not in the least. Arthur did his National Service though. He was deferred whilst studying at the London Polytechnic, and then joined the army. I remember receiving a very friendly letter from him in which he said that he was finding the life that I’d rejected very interesting and how amused he was at all the nonsense of shouting sergeant majors and so on and at how the tears would well up in the young lads’ eyes. But, of course, he’d been to public school, so he’d been well prepared! If I remember rightly, he reached the rank of sergeant himself.

You did join the PPU didn’t you? Was that before or after you registered as an objector?

I don’t know for certain, but I think that it was probably a little earlier. I registered, I think, sometime late in 1951. Yes, I think it would have been before that.

What about the Central Board for Conscientious Objectors, Fenner Brockway’s outfit? Did you receive any advice from that?

Yes, I did. I wrote to them and I received some indications of the sorts of questions that objectors were asked. In fact, maybe it was through them that I learned about the Peace Pledge Union in the first place.

You’ve said elsewhere that much of your application to the tribunal was ‘pure Huxley’, not meaning the novels, of course, but his various writings on pacifism.

Yes. I was very much influenced by one of Huxley’s essays, in particular. Actually, it was more of a pamphlet than an essay. What are you going to do about it? The Case for Constructive Peace. In fact, I still have a copy of it somewhere. And then there was another book that I think I read about that time, Richard Gregg’s The Power of Non-Violence. That book, by the way, was very influential not just on my generation but also on the generation before mine. Then I read it again, a bit later as well, at about the same time as I got involved in direct action.

I should say that I did a sneaky compare-and-contrast sort of thing between the Huxley text and your application for C.O. status before talking to you today, and it really is, as you’ve described it, ‘pure Huxley’. You’ve taken entire sentences and hardly bothered to re-write them. Which makes me think that the tribunal was … . How can I put this? A bit remiss? I would have thought they would have been more tuned in to what young people were reading.

I’d forgotten just how much influence he had upon me.

For instance, in the application you raise some of the common objections to pacifism, and then you dismiss them using Huxley’s arguments. I also have a further observation: the nuclear issue is hardly mentioned. There’s a line, but that’s about it. It doesn’t seem to have been much on your mind, which isn’t the impression I get from some of your later writings.

That’s interesting. You know, when I did the first draft of the application, I didn’t take a completely pacifist point of view. As I said earlier, I said then that nuclear weapons were indiscriminate and that it was on those grounds that I wasn’t prepared to be part of the military. But then I read Huxley and was influenced by Dr Kerr, so I went down the completely pacifist route. And then I also discovered Gandhi, though without learning much about the whole history of what he had been doing. I had, I think, a rather simplified view of how Gandhi had operated. But yes, your observation is interesting, the fact that I hadn’t emphasised the nuclear issue.

One, I think, very valid point you make, again it’s very Huxleyan, is about the connection between ends and means. You use the example of the Russian Revolution.

Well, Catholic teaching insists that the ends do not justify the means. I concluded from that that killing even for a just cause was wrong. Huxley I think goes further and concludes that the means determine the ends. For instance, if you use lethal violence to achieve a revolution the result will be a violent and unjust society. As another writer on non-violence and revolution, Bart de Ligt, puts it, ‘The more violence, the less revolution.’

By the way, on the subject of communism were you drawn to any of its variants?

Certainly not to any of the authoritarian forms. The idea of equality did appeal to me. But the top-down, Stalinist, style of leadership? No, I’ve always hated that.

Would that have had anything to do with reading Orwell, say, his Nineteen Eighty-Four, for instance?

It may have done. I did read Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, but I can’t remember at what age exactly. Nineteen Eighty-Four had a big influence on me when I did read it, but that may have been a bit later, probably sometime in the late fifties.

What about one of the other very influential anti-communist books of the period, The God that Failed, with the striking essays by Koestler and others?

Yes, that had a profound impact upon me. I forget which of the essays it was. It may have been the one by Gide or Spender. But it contained an account of one of the great leader’s speeches. Apparently, everyone had to clap. And they were frightened of what could happen to them if they were among the first to stop clapping. And then there was another thing that stayed with me from that book—this one may have been in the essay by Koestler. Anyway, it described a meeting somewhere where people were discussing policy, and an English communist said, ‘We can’t say that. It would be a lie.’ And they all burst out in cynical laughter, as if to say, what’s the problem with that?

Following your application for C.O. status you were interviewed at Fulham, in March 1952. You appeared before a certain Sir G.P. Hargreaves. and one or two others, including the Reverend Professor Edwin O. James. They sound like a pretty formidable bunch.

I don’t remember feeling particularly nervous. I was so definite about it all. But I do remember that they asked me about my qualifications, and it came out that I had a distinction in School Certificate English. One of them said, ‘So that’s what this is about!’, meaning that’s what had fed into my lengthy statement as to why I was a conscientious objector. My mother gave evidence in support of me. She told them how I’d lain awake night after night, thinking about it all. And that probably had an effect as well. Anyway, my application was accepted.

Now, Michael, by this time the family had moved out of Cheam to a much larger house in Reigate. Tell me a bit about that if you would.

The house we moved to was called Little Gatton and, you’re right, it was in Reigate, which was about ten miles further south, not far from the Surrey Hills and Betchworth. It was quite an interesting building. This wasn’t because it was an old historic building; I think it was built in the thirties. It was interesting because of the people who’d lived there: first, the author Sax Rohmer, creator of the wicked Dr Fu Manchu, and then Sir Malcolm Campbell, the famous racing driver. My father bought it from Sir Malcolm’s estate—Sir Malcolm, I believe had died there. That said, I didn’t give two hoots about that aspect. From my point of view, it was simply a nice house. One of the reasons why my father was attracted to it was that there was a small farm attached to it. You see, the farming bug hadn’t left him.

And what about you? Were you interested in farming too?

Oh, yes. I really took to it. I started making compost heaps and so on. I remember we had three cows, which I hand-milked. I can still do that by the way. So, come the nuclear holocaust I might well be self-sufficient [laughs].

How was the farm run? On idealistic lines?

Not in the least as far as my father was concerned; it simply tied in with his lifelong interest in the land and in growing things. After all, he was still a businessman. Indeed, when he bought a 200-acre farm in Sussex in 1953, like a lot of farmers at that period he grubbed up most of the hedgerows to make what he called his prairies. I’m pleased to say my brother, John, put them back in again.

I might also add that he was quite keen for me to take over the farm. So, I suppose that had it not been for Peace News and the whole direct action thing, that’s where I would have ended up, as a farmer I mean!

I suppose you still discussed politics with your father.

Yes, I did. We particularly discussed war and peace issues. He was still a decided pacifist, which was a bit of a contradiction in a way with his conservatism. But then, as I said before, he was a pacifist on moral grounds. Of course, at Douai I’d been taught the just war approach to international relations. But he’d have none of that: all wars were wrong and that was simply the end of the matter. Then I suppose that like most of us he’d been brought up to believe that lying was a sin and that warfare involved spying, and therefore deception and lying. He used to ask me, ‘How can you justify all of that?’ In fact, he hated every form of violence.

You never saw him lose his temper then?

Oh, Jesus. Of course, I did. On one occasion when we were still living in Burdon Lane he ripped up all the flowers in the front garden because he thought that one of the priests was having an affair with my mother, which was the last thing that would have happened. And then I remember another occasion: he got himself into such a rage that my mum actually left and spent the night with one of our Irish friends in the area.

But I don’t want to end on a negative note regarding my relationship with my dad. I was hugely influenced by him, not only on the issue of peace and conscientious objection, but on a range of issues and interests. It was from him that I imbibed a love of classical music, and of J.S. Bach in particular. Dad was an excellent pianist and spent many hours at a time playing and practicing Bach’s preludes and fugues. He said that it was his ambition to be able to play all forty-eight of them before he died. Well, he didn’t quite manage that. But he had quite a few of them under his belt by the end, though in later years when his health was failing, he wasn’t able to play as much.

He also had an extensive library, with quite a few first editions, some signed by the authors. They included books by G.K. Chesterton, James Stephens and Henry Williamson amongst others. Then he had many slim, limited edition books of poetry, printed on English hand-made paper with a single poem and illustration in each. Mostly they too were signed. I suppose they must be worth something now, but I wouldn’t part with them.

Finally, he was also a great walker. When I was a teenager, I used to go on long walks with him of up to twenty miles in the Surrey countryside. We would discuss all sorts of topics.

Let’s talk about Operation Gandhi now, the first non-violent direct action group with which you were associated. Am I right in saying that the group emerged out of the PPU’s decision in 1949 to set up a commission with the brief of looking into the relevance of Gandhi’s ideas to Britain?

That’s right. The Commission met for a couple of years. Then a number of people, including Hugh Brock and Kathleen Rawlins, both Quakers, decided it was time to put some of the ideas into action. Hugh was then deputy editor of Peace News, becoming its editor in 1955.

Gandhi’s ideas being what?

Well, it’s not easy to describe them succinctly. At least it wasn’t then! But, in essence, Gandhi argued that war and violence were not inevitable; that there was an alternative method of struggle, of non-cooperation and non-violent direct action, which he called satyagraha, or truth force.

How much did you know about Gandhi at that point?

I certainly hadn’t any in-depth knowledge. But then, I suppose, neither did some of the others in Operation Gandhi. What I did have, however, was the enthusiasm of a convert, so I read as much about him as I could and talked to those who knew more about him than I did. I’ve already mentioned Richard Gregg’s book The Power of Non-Violence. Well, I read a lot about Gandhi in that and also in a book by Bart de Ligt called The Conquest of Violence, which has a short preface by Huxley. In fact, if you were to ask me which books influenced the members of Operation Gandhi the most, then I’d have to say that it was probably those two. Those two and another book, Krishnalal Shridharani’s War without Violence, were usually in the background to our discussions.

Incidentally, while we’re on the subject of Gandhi, I remember one day at school being in the refectory with a boy who we nicknamed Gandhi because of his light brown skin, and the priest who was in charge saying, ‘Oh, Gandhi’s just been killed.’ Not surprisingly, we were both a bit shocked because he was such a well-known figure, even though we knew little about him.

There’s a phrase which Gregg uses in his book when discussing non-violent direct action: moral jiu-jitsu. Can you say something about that?

The idea in jiu-jitsu is that you use the force that your opponent is directing against you to throw them off balance by not reacting as they expect. In other words, he was saying that if someone attacks you, they’ll expect a certain sort of violent response, and if you don’t give them that then it will psychologically and morally throw them.

After all, most people when they attack someone expect physical resistance. But the satyagrahi, to use Gandhi’s terminology, doesn’t respond with that. He or she accepts the blows. Not because they can’t fight back. But because they choose not to. That’s a different sort of resistance altogether.

Near the front of his book, Gregg quotes a newspaper account of an incident during Gandhi’s campaign against the salt tax. The police beat up hundreds of unresisting demonstrators. But, finally, it was the police who backed down. Can you think of any times from your own experience when the technique of moral jui-jitsu worked for you like that?

I don’t think that I was ever quite in that situation. But certainly, the way that we responded to the use of force at demonstrations was very much part and parcel of that general philosophy. Probably, many policemen in those days would have expected someone they were arresting in the context of a political demonstration to offer some form of physical resistance; whereas the essence of our approach was not to do that, so we offered them resistance of a different kind. We didn’t threaten or abuse them, and that made some kind of rapport possible.

I get the sense that Gregg’s is a very practical book?

Oh yes. We took it and other literature on non-violence as a guide to how we should react and to how we should campaign. We went to it for inspiration and for examples. The very interesting thing to me now is that Gregg was looking at the whole psychology of non-violent resistance. But then Gene Sharp came along and changed the terminology from moral to political jui-jitsu, so it wasn’t just the individual reaction; it was how it would affect the politics if you didn’t comply, but you didn’t violently resist. And that was a very interesting shift.

Tell me more about that.

Okay, I’ll give you an example. In India, it wasn’t that the opponent was necessarily converted, though of course some people may have been. The real difficulty for the colonial power was enforcing laws when there was mass non-compliance. You had a large population who were simply defying the laws, that is the ones they considered unjust or unreasonable. And what did the authorities do about it? They couldn’t put millions of people in jail [laughs]. If a small number of people had used force, okay they could have dealt with that. But in India the resistance was widespread. I think that Richard Gregg, although he uses the term moral jui-jitsu, was also pointing to the political difficulties of dealing with that kind of resistance.

I was so taken with the idea of non-violent resistance and the power of it, that I even began to think of it as something that you could use on almost every occasion. Once, following a meeting in Redhill, I took a shortcut home, and saw this big man, swaying from side to side, coming directly towards me. Then he came right up to me and grabbed my wrist. And I thought to myself, what the hell am I going to do about this? I could have resisted violently or at least struggled to free myself from his grasp as, I suppose, most people in that situation would have done. But, instead, I didn’t make any attempt to escape his grasp, but simply stood there and spoke to him very calmly and very rationally, telling him where I had been and where I was going. And as I did so, I felt his grip loosening. Then he let go of me. It turned out that he owned a house nearby which had just been burgled and that he thought that I was the burglar! I remember afterwards thinking to myself: this is non-violent resistance work. But, of course, it had taken place in a particular context.

What about the other book you mentioned: Bart de Ligt’s The Conquest of Violence?

Like Gregg’s book, that was also from the 1930s. He too was very much in the Gandhian tradition but at the same time he also looked towards other methods of struggle, notably those employed by the anarcho-syndicalists. He gave examples not only of Gandhi’s methods, but also of those of many others, including Abdul Ghaffar Khan. He may even have mentioned Shelley and William Morris; I’m not sure. He certainly has a few pages on Ruskin and Tolstoy. But, all that said, I didn't see the books as having a very different approach, but as sort of backing one another up. De Ligt does make some criticisms of Gandhi. Of course, he was writing at a time when India hadn’t yet got its independence. But de Ligt was long dead by then; he died in September1939.

There’s a line in the book which I find particularly compelling. In fact, you’ve already quoted part of it: ‘The more there is of real revolution, the less there is of violence: the more of violence, the less of revolution.’

That’s right. Yes, that did influence us profoundly.

The book also has this huge appendix called ‘Plan of Campaign against all War and all Preparation for War’. Can you tell me what you remember of that?

What I remember is that we discussed it and, though we never did so, we planned to reprint it as a pamphlet because it showed the politics and many of the facets of the kinds of resistance that we were interested in and promoting. It gave lots of examples showing how you could work at both the individual and at the collective level. It was very influential.

Before we get onto Hugh Brock and the policies and the activities of Operation Gandhi, do you remember much about the other people involved in the organisation? Hilda von Klenze, for instance?

Yes. She was very much involved. She may have come over before the war. She had quite a distinct German accent. Later on, she married Stuart Morris, the head of the PPU. So, from Hilda von Klenze she became Hilda Morris.

Then I remember a disabled lady called Mazella Newman, who was closer to communism than the majority of us. In fact, if you got her onto the subject of the Soviet Union, she used to become quite defensive. I don’t think that she was a member of the party though; it was probably more a matter of sympathy. She also worshiped Gandhi and the other leaders of the liberation movement in India, to the extent that she used to get quite emotional whenever any Indian people came to see us or Gandhi was mentioned. The other thing I remember about her was that she was a regular at Peace News on Wednesday evenings when the paper was packed to go out for arrival at people’s houses on Friday. That was her big thing, in fact. She was a very nice woman.

What about Kathleen Rawlins? Any recollections of her? I mention her particularly because Brock in one article I’ve seen describes her as an ‘ideological’ influence on Operation Gandhi.

That’s true. She was a major contributor to our discussions. I don’t think that she published a great deal. But she was someone we looked to for her knowledge of Gandhi and of Gandhi’s methods. She was very close to Hugh and Eileen Brock and a very significant presence.

A Quaker? I suppose that some of these ladies were. There was certainly a preponderance of women. Another one I might mention is Doris Wheeler.

Yes, several of the meetings were held at her house. The daughter of Tom Wardle, who was another prominent member of Operation Gandhi, was in touch with me about her recently. Tom, by the way, was a clergyman, who had worked in South Africa with Gandhi’s son, Manilal Gandhi, and so was able to give personal examples of his involvement in the campaigns there. I remember having discussions with him during our demonstrations. He was an impressive man who founded something called the Congress of England, which looked at the constructive side of Gandhi’s teaching. Then he also wrote quite a lot for Peace News. Anyway, his daughter sent me some photos that were taken in Doris Wheeler’s house. Her name is Shanti, which means Peace in Hindi. Tom and his wife brought Shanti, who was then a baby, to one of our meetings.