Ban the Bomb!

Another person I remember from the discussions was Rufus de Pinto, an artist, always a bit scruffy and unkempt, but a big walker and a very interesting man. A few years after the Mildenhall demo, he died while walking on the hills somewhere. Hugh Brock wrote an excellent obituary of him in Peace News.

Can you tell me something about Hugh now? Some of the meetings, I believe, took place at his house, in Lordship Road, Stoke Newington.

That’s right. Hugh’s house was at number 79 and that was where we held most of our meetings. I’d come up at weekends from Reigate or wherever it was on the train and we’d sit and drink tea—it was all very English—and talk about Gandhi and his ideas, ideas that would lead to the possibility of arrest and imprisonment, so in that sense moving us away from that totally respectable middle-class environment that many of us, I suppose, had grown up in. Usually, Hugh would take the lead. All in all, he was a very genuine, thoughtful man, a Quaker and very self-effacing, though his contribution to the peace movement was huge. He had a background in publishing and was assistant editor of Peace News, before taking over from J. Allen Skinner as editor in 1955. His house, incidentally, was also the headquarters of the Direct Action Committee for a while. Hugh was married to Eileen and they had a daughter named Carolyn and a son, Jeremy. In fact, I have a picture of our Porton Down demonstration with Jeremy in it as a teenager. We all got on well. Hugh and Eileen were lovely people. When I came back to England, after a year in Ghana, towards the end of 1960, Hugh and Eileen put me up; I had a room with them. That, I should add, was a very busy time. It was the start of the Committee of 100 and we were building up to our first demonstration.

Was it via Peace News that you first heard about Operation Gandhi?

Indeed, it was. Which would have been in January 1952, so a couple of months or so after I’d registered as a conscientious objector and then a couple of months again before I went before the tribunal. Peace News carried an account of Operation Gandhi’s first demonstration, which took the form of a sit-down protest in front of the War Office. Anyway, after that I subscribed to the newspaper and became a distributor. I used to be sent several copies from Blackstock Road in London and go from house to house in Reigate selling them, knocking on doors, trying to interest people in the issues. I didn’t get many takers, but I remember one man who invited me in. He was really supportive, but that was probably because he was in the Communist Party. Then there was another man who was also welcoming and sympathetic, who turned out to be a Quaker. So, he was probably already a subscriber. Of course, my whole approach was so random [laughs]. I must have been crazy.

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.

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