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

Foreword

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.

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?

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.

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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