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ibidem-Press, Stuttgart
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
1. Family and Schooling
2. The Birth of a Satyagrahi
3. The Direct Action Committee and the first Aldermaston March
4. Peace News and Ghana
5. The Committee of 100
6. Marriage, The ‘Official Secrets’ Trial and Prison
7. Greece, Vietnam, and George Blake
8. The Greek Embassy ‘Invasion’ and Czechoslovakia
9. Peace Studies and the Alternative Defence Commission
10. The Blake Trial
11. Bradford University and Final Thoughts
Chronology
Acknowledgements
Further Reading
This book is a delight on many levels. First, Martin Levy gives us a history of a remarkable man in a thoroughly absorbing way. Through many discussions with Michael, as well as some with Anne, he takes us through a life well lived, with many illustrations that help to give us an idea of where Michael came from and what helped make him. Through a series of interviews stretching over many months, we build a picture not just of Michael but of the history of nonviolent action in Britain over seven decades. It is a thoroughly unusual approach to biography, but it works a treat.
Then there is Michael himself, peace-campaigner, activist, scholar and much more, ready to go to prison for his beliefs yet gentle and patient in his determination to do the right thing. Most of his life’s work has been in Britain, but the span of his contacts is global and through the interviews we come in contact with many of the leading campaigners and thinkers on nonviolence over all of those decades. That alone gives us a unique perspective on an informal yet resolute belief system that is always there and comes to the fore in unexpected ways, whether in peace campaigning, civil rights movements, the collapse of the Soviet system, or in other contexts.
There are also interludes when the unexpected suddenly intrudes, not least the astonishing and successful attempt to spring the spy George Blake from Wormwood Scrubs Prison and to keep him hidden at various locations in London. The hair-raising story of how Blake’s cover was almost blown by Michael’s encounter with a friend’s wife outside a tube station in London is remarkable enough, but to add to this we have the trial of Michael and Pat Pottle, a co-conspirator, at the Old Bailey many years later. Their acquittal was unexpected and so the powers-that-be inevitably termed it the action of a ‘perverse jury’, but it would still make a marvellous film.
There is also Michael the scholar, not just his core role in the Alternative Defence Commission’s pioneering work on non-nuclear defence back in the 1980s, but his own work on nonviolence and civilian resistance and his wider contributions to the Bradford School of Peace Studies.
I have been fortunate to have known Michael for forty years and have been lucky to work with him on several occasions. In his own quiet way, and with no fuss, he persists in his optimism against the odds and serves as a remarkable inspiration to many. This book is a fitting tribute to a remarkable person.
Paul Rogers, June 2020.
Introduction
The Judge asked if there was any justification for breaking the law?
‘An individual has to make a decision where millions of lives are concerned.’
‘Does that mean you and other members of the Committee of 100?’
‘Every individual must decide ... . Every individual has to decide between the law and his own morality.’
Mr Justice Havers ‘in dialogue’ with Michael Randle.1
Anyone who has ever read a book about civil rights or taken part in an illegal demonstration will recognise the above distinction between law and personal morality, state power and the promptings of the individual conscience. It was some such distinction that inspired the Biblical Daniel to defy a decree of the Babylonian King Darius, and which led to the execution of Socrates for impiety and demoralising the young people of Athens in 399 BCE.
The issue that confronted the jury in Court No.1 of the Old Bailey during February 1962 was the morality of bombing civilians with nuclear weapons. The state in the person of its chief witness, Air Commodore Graham Magill, said that should circumstances so demand it, it was moral. Michael Randle and his co-defendants, to their credit, took the contrary view.
The proximate cause that brought Michael to the Old Bailey trial was a blockade and mass trespass of the NATO air base at RAF Wethersfield, in Essex, a little over three months earlier. On trial were Michael and his five co-defendants: Terry Chandler, Ian Dixon, Pat Pottle, Trevor Hatton and Helen Allegranza, all senior officers in the Committee of 100, an organisation set up to campaign by non-violent means for nuclear disarmament.
They were charged on two counts under section one of the Official Secrets Act of 1911: first, conspiring together to commit a breach of the Act by entering the air base for a ‘purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the State’ and second, conspiring to ‘incite others to do likewise.’ 2
As for the distant causes which led to the prosecution, I’ll say a bit more about those later on.
Here it is enough to state that Michael and his co-defendants were anything but political or legal innocents. They knew their rights. No wonder they got up the nose of the haughty and contemptuous chief prosecuting council, the Attorney-General, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller.
‘Now Randle’, Sir Reginald began on one occasion at about halfway through the trial. ‘I am Mr Randle,’ Michael shot back. 3 He simply could not be intimidated.
I first met Michael during the late summer of 2017. Though ‘met’ probably isn’t the right word as I didn’t meet him, I met his archive.
Back then I had a part-time job assisting the special collections librarian at Bradford University, where one of my responsibilities was to retrieve the documents that researchers had ordered from the storerooms.
One day someone asked to see Michael’s archive and, following my usual custom, I looked into it myself and was intrigued. It was packed with remarkable documents on anti-nuclear protest and letters from such notables as Bertrand Russell, Albert Schweitzer and Noam Chomsky.
A few weeks after that, I was sitting in the staffroom and I had an idea: ‘Why don’t I interview Michael?’ I knew by then that he had been interviewed before, but maybe I could get the whole story, not just the bits that people already knew or thought they knew about.
The next day I sent him an email. Was he up for it? He was.
Michael lives a few miles outside of Bradford, in Shipley, in a turning off the Bingley Road as you proceed towards Cottingley; and I remember thinking as I got off the bus, this is a neighbourhood where I would like to live.
It is suburban with a bit of bling. There are cafes and lots of charity shops and the great, hulking mass of the Victorian Salts Mill not more than a few minutes’ walk away.
Michael’s a smallish man in his mid-eighties, his head is full of white hair and yet he’s surprisingly good on his feet. I liked him as soon as I set eyes on him.
Usually, you can tell a lot about someone from their living room. Michael’s is comfortable and unpretentious. There are paintings and family photographs on the walls, two large sofas, a rectangular wooden coffee table, an ancient television in one of the far corners and a well-stocked bookcase near the door, containing volumes by Yeats, Chesterton, Keats and some of the better-known ‘sixties poets.
After I’d set the voice recorder up and we’d chatted for about forty minutes, he asked me if I wanted coffee. It was then that Anne appeared. Anne is Michael’s wife. She’s younger than Michael by ten years or so.
She’s also, I soon discovered, the practical one. Michael sees things as they should be, Anne sees them mostly as they are. They could be antagonists, but instead they complement each other.
I could have improvised the interviews, flown by the seat of my pants. But there’s more to a proper interview than turning up at the right time and asking a few questions. You need to prepare yourself with a bit of reading, prove to the interviewee that, though you may not be an expert, you do at least know what you’re talking about.
Fortunately, from the point of view of preparation, I could not have been better placed. Not only did I have Michael’s archive back in Special Collections, but I had a number of other relevant archives too, not to mention the university library itself, which is stocked with all sorts of important-looking books on anti-nuclear protest and social movements more generally.
People who work in special collections departments often talk about the archives ‘speaking’ to each other, which sounds poetic if not downright fey—the proximity to all that paper must rot the brain. But, in an important sense, it’s true. They do speak to each other, even though the order in which they are arranged on the shelves sometimes suggests otherwise.
Michael’s archive speaks most to the Hugh Brock Papers and to the archives of the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War, the Committee of 100 (collected by Derry Hannam) and Peace News.
These five archives therefore provided much of the information behind the questions I asked him.
And then it also speaks to books, pamphlets, magazines and newspapers, including the newspaper that gave rise to the Peace News archive in the first place—which, luckily, the university has a full set of. Indeed, it is one of the jewels of the University library’s Commonweal Collection.
As for Peace News, how many people on the left read it nowadays? Hundreds? Thousands? I know that Michael does. I know that because he is still an occasional contributor.
When Michael joined Peace News as a sales organiser in the late 1950s, it was about to enter its golden age. Under the editorship of Hugh Brock, a generation of new and younger activist-writers and writer-activists made their mark: Chris Farley, Alan Lovell, Albert Hunt, Pat Arrowsmith, April Carter, John Arden, Michael himself and many others.
Most of them were anarchists. They brought with them powerful ideas, some of which originated in the New Left, writing about film, theatre, art, music and literature with sharper eyes and ears.
But, most importantly, they brought new thinking on non-violent direct action, specifically in relation to nuclear weapons, turning the paper into what can fairly be described as the most interesting and exciting radical newspaper of the 1960s.
Indeed, it was Peace News that drew Michael to non-violent direct action in the first place.
In 1952, just a few weeks after he’d registered as a conscientious objector, he read an account of a sit-down outside the War Office (now the Ministry of Defence) by a tiny group called Operation Gandhi.
The article appeared on the front page on 18 January under the headline ‘Pacifists told Police and War Office: “We are coming to Squat”’.
I know they are the exact words, because I’m sitting in the library and holding the paper now.
The article fills about a third of the space and is illustrated with a photograph of two policemen, plus two other men and two women: Geoffrey Plummer, Harry Mister, Dorothy Wheeler and Kathleen Rawlins. Both of the women are smiling.
It describes what inspired the sit-down: opposition to NATO and the facts that Britain was rearming and being ‘converted into one of the chief atomic bomb bases of the world’; and explains what happened to the demonstrators when they refused the police request to depart: their arrest and removal to Bow Street Police Court, where they were charged with obstruction.
If it is true that a single newspaper article can change a life, then reading this article changed Michael’s. Not that he would put it that way—Michael isn’t melodramatic. But, quite simply, it launched him on a lifetime of non-violent anti-nuclear activism.
But why Operation Gandhi? In other words, why the name? What did Gandhi have to do with nuclear weapons, anyway? The answer to the third question is not a lot. But he had a method of non-violent resistance that the little group adopted, as did Michael in his turn.
The method was called Satyagraha or Truth Force—‘satya’ in Gujarati meaning ‘truth’ and ‘agraha’ meaning ‘force’ or ‘firmness’; and it was a complete method of non-violent resistance, emphasising courage, discipline, self-sacrifice, love and, as the headline makes clear, openness and fair-dealing with opponents.
That makes it sound vague, quasi-religious, and not particularly exciting. In some senses it was vague. Unexciting it was not. In any case, it was the method that inspired them, first to the War Office sit-down, then shortly afterwards to other demonstrations, first at a little known atomic research establishment at Aldermaston, in the Berkshire countryside, then a few months later at a NATO missile base, near Chippenham in Suffolk.
Operation Gandhi then was the organisation that put non-violent anti-nuclear protest on the map, and which drew Michael into non-violent anti-nuclear activism into the first place. But it was the Direct Action Committee (DAC) which followed it, that turned Michael into a national figure.
Operation Gandhi was small-scale. The number of activists never amounted to more than thirty. It hardly bothered anyone, whereas the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War (to use its full name) was larger, better organised, more focused, and determined from the outset to be a major thorn in the government’s nuclear weapons programme.
Michael was its second chairman, taking over from Hugh Brock during the summer of 1958.
Its purpose? It’s there in the title: direct action against nuclear war.
In practical terms this meant that it had less patience than Operation Gandhi with moral exhortation. Not that it didn’t try it. It did. On numerous occasions. But nuclear weapons were a national emergency. It wanted the unilateral nuclear disarmament of Britain and it wanted it now. Thus, it was much more willing to raise the ante as far as civil disobedience was concerned, while nonetheless remaining firmly within the tradition of satyagraha.
But first, it organised the first Aldermaston march. Or rather Hugh Brock and Pat Arrowsmith organised it, with help from Michael and Labourites Frank Allaun, MP, and Walter Wolfgang.
You’ll read more about Pat Arrowsmith in the interviews that follow this introduction. Next to Hugh Brock and April Carter, she was probably Michael’s closest DAC colleague.
As for the march, it took place over Easter 1958 and was a huge success. Nothing was able to stop it. Neither the anti-direct action leadership of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Nor the Communist Party of Great Britain, which tried to co-opt it. Nor the once-famous McWhirter twins with their Mercedes car and megaphone, who called the marchers communist dupes. Not even the weather, which was atrocious.
Thousands of people walked at least part of the route: London via Hounslow and Reading to Aldermaston.
Thereafter, delegates from the marchers carried a resolution to the British, American and Russian governments calling upon them to desist from testing, manufacturing or storing nuclear weapons. All, however, remained unmoved—though the Russian embassy, scenting a propaganda coup, did at least agree to meet and parley with the delegates, amongst whom was Michael.
Indeed, it was this frustration with the government’s inaction which partly explains the DAC’s next major success in terms of media impact: a series of attempts to obstruct the building of one of NATO’s new nuclear missile bases at RAF North Pickenham, near Swaffham, Norfolk, during December 1958—just as it partly explains the formation of the anti-nuclear organisation that Michael was next involved in: the much bigger, more combative, more politically diffuse and thus inevitably much less Gandhian Committee of 100.
Again, something had to be done. If one method of countering the Nuclear Behemoth didn’t work, then the demonstrators would try another one.
But let Michael describe the Committee of 100, of which he was secretary. Here I only want to say that it tested his and the other leaders’ resolution to the utmost and that it did indeed, as the beginning of this introduction suggests, lead to increasingly draconian government action.
For his part in organising the blockade and mass trespass of RAF Wethersfield, Michael received a prison sentence of eighteen months, of which he served twelve. At the time, this was the longest sentence imposed by a British court for opposition to nuclear weapons.
That, in a very small nutshell, is the story of the direct action phase of Michael’s anti-nuclear activism. But, of course, he wasn’t—isn’t—just against nuclear weapons. Hating nuclear weapons is the easy bit. He also had a positive vision of what a nuclear disarmed Britain and indeed a nuclear disarmed world might look like.
It’s important for me to say something about this as well. For Michael has been an activist on many fronts, not least in association with War Resisters’ International, of which he has been a council and an executive member.
Underpinning his position on nuclear weapons was a particular view of politics: deeply respectful of human rights, democratic, but not party-political. But, on the contrary, profoundly convinced of the power of civil disobedience to keep our democracies ‘honest’ and to hold the dictatorships to account for their many offences.
Here too, Gandhi was—and again is—a central influence. Another was the Dutch anarcho-syndicalist Bart de Ligt, whose book The Conquest of Violence, he first read in the edition with an introduction by Aldous Huxley.
As for the other notable organisations and important events that Michael has been involved in: the so-called ‘springing’ of his former prison mate, the Russian spy George Blake, from Wormwood Scrubs; a further long stretch in prison for ‘invading’ the Greek Embassy in London; a campaign to support Czechoslovakian independence in the face of a real, Russian, invasion; another major trial at the Old Bailey, this time for helping Blake escape—those too, I’ll leave him to describe himself. Needless to say, as even this short list suggests, his life post the 1962 highpoint of his anti-nuclear activism has been anything but short of incident or complications.
Instead I want to say something about the other Michael, the man who Paul Rogers in his foreword to this book calls ‘Michael the scholar’. For this is the Michael that I met.
It is the Michael of our interviews, the amusing and unfailingly gracious host, the former rugby player (for Brighton Town, if you’re interested), the man who loves literature and music, who laughs a lot and who isn’t afraid of showing his emotions.
I’ve already mentioned how I prepared the questions. This is how the interviews worked.
Following that first morning in 2017, I’d usually arrive for our interviews at about 10 o’clock. We’d then spend two hours or so, working through a portion of my questions.
Sometimes I’d focus my questions on a particular person or organisation, say Ralph Schoenman or Operation Gandhi, but more usually I’d concentrate on a period, perhaps of two to three years, and we’d work through that, week by week or month by month, depending on how busy Michael’s schedule had been—and sometimes he had been very busy.
That said, if Michael wanted to take the conversation in a different direction or something interesting cropped up that I hadn’t thought about, all to the good. We’d talk about that and then return to the prepared questions afterwards.
Sometimes Anne would join us, sometimes not. Anne’s memories are often different to Michael’s. Michael is best at public events: the demonstrations, the marches, the big speeches. Anne at the domestic angle. Then she’s also good at filling in details. So, if, as occasionally happened, Michael forgot a name, she could usually be relied upon to supply it.
After copying up an interview, I would take it to the library, surround myself with pamphlets, newspapers and books, and go through the factual statements one by one. It wasn’t often that I found anything that could be construed as an error. I would then forward the same interview to Michael, in case he wanted to make any changes of detail or emphasis.
In all, I must have done about twenty-five interviews. However, in the interests of readability, I’ve reorganised them and reduced them to eleven. These are the essential Michael.
Finally, a further word about politics.
Naturally, I didn’t agree with everything Michael said during our interviews. He’s on the libertarian left. So am I, but I’m grouchy with it. He’s a consummate team player. I don’t travel well in groups. Michael is also more understanding of identity politics than I am. He sees the benefits. I see intolerance and division.
But on the fundamental issues of non-violent direct action and the intolerable nature of nuclear weapons, I believe that he has absolutely made the right call.
If this book is your first acquaintance with Michael Randle, you can count yourself lucky and unlucky. Lucky because you have much to look forward to. Unlucky because you didn’t discover him earlier.
1 “On Trial: A Twelve Page Report with Comments, Disallowed Evidence and Profiles. ... A Peace News Special Supplement,” Peace News [February 1962]: 8.
2 Thomas Grant, Jeremy Hutchinson’s Case Histories (London: John Murray, 2015), 246.
3 “On Trial,” 8. My italics.
1. Family and Schooling
Let’s begin at the beginning. When and where were you born?
I was born on the 21st December 1933 at a nursing home near Worcester Park in Surrey.
Had your parents been in the area long?
I think for a couple of years. My mother came over from Dublin in the mid-twenties and married my dad in 1931.
Did you have any brothers or sisters?
There was only one brother before I was born. But the family kept growing and by 1949, when my youngest sister, Joan, arrived, there were nine of us children in all, three boys and six girls.
What did your father do for a living at the time of your birth?
He ran a children’s clothing factory, Hitchen, Smith & Co., Ltd., in Old Street, London. The firm was originally based in Nottingham specialising in lace wear. Nottingham was where his father’s family hailed from, though he himself was born and brought up in Folkestone and London. His father took over the firm sometime in the 1920s after it ran into financial difficulties and moved it to London.
Did your father employ many people?
It wasn’t a big factory, but there must have been thirty or forty people. I occasionally did some work there when I was on holiday from school.
So, the company stayed in business for some time …
Oh, yes. Later on, in the 1950s, my brother Arthur took it over after graduating in accountancy from the London Polytechnic and doing National Service in the army.
Tell me about your mother.
My mother, Ellen, came from what was pretty much a working-class family, with roots in County Carlow and Kildare. Her father, Patrick Treacy, was from Bagenalstown in County Carlow and set up as a builder in Dublin employing a few people; her mother, Esther Treacy, née Dowd, was from Prosperous in County Kildare. My mother worked in a local shop before coming over to England and entering service.