The Peace Protestors: A History of Modern-Day War Resistance

By Symon Hill

From Afghanistan to the Falklands, from Northern Ireland to Iraq, British troops are nearly always in action somewhere in the world. But whenever there is war, there will be people who resist it. Sometimes, they can draw on public sympathy. At other times, they stand alone against the crowd. Peace movements large and small have been a constant part of UK history, not least in the last 40 years. This book tells their stories. Drawing on interviews, fresh research and newly released government documents, the book sheds light on some of the most surprising and overlooked events of recent decades. Peace activists in the 1980s did not know that Margaret Thatcher's government feared that US troops on UK bases would fire on unarmed demonstrators. When the ceasefire came about in Northern Ireland, few noticed the peace work that Quakers had been doing behind the scenes for years. While the jingoistic atmosphere of the Falklands War is much remembered, there is less talk about the protests against it that saw more than 100 arrests at navy recruitment centres and public demonstrations. Four women who successfully disarmed a warplane in the 1990s were just a few of those to be acquitted after actions that could have resulted in years in prison. Apparent public support for the campaign against the Iraq war masked deep and bitter divisions amongst anti-war activists. Dissent and disobedience within the armed forces continues far from the public gaze. As recently as 2011, Michael Lyons was refused discharge from the Royal Navy despite developing a conscientious objection to war. He spent seven months in a military prison. This is a book that brings to life the realities of resistance by people whose refusal to conform has much to say about how we see the UK and British history today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9781399007870

Book preview

The Peace Protesters

The Peace Protesters

A History of Modern-day War Resistance

Symon Hill

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by

Pen & Sword History

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire – Philadelphia

Copyright © Symon Hill 2022

ISBN 978 1 39900 786 3

eISBN 978 1 39900 787 0

Mobi ISBN 978 1 39900 787 0

The right of Symon Hill to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Dedicated to the memory of my mother,

MADELINE HILL (1940–2020)

Not forgotten though the day break and the shadows flee away.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Timeline

Introduction

Chapter 1 Protest and Survive

Chapter 2 Lonely Pacifists

Chapter 3 Take the Toys from the Boys

Chapter 4 Remember and Disarm

Chapter 5 Swords into Ploughshares

Chapter 6 Ethical Foreign Policy?

Chapter 7 Shoulder to Shoulder

Chapter 8 Don’t Attack Iraq

Chapter 9 We Are Not the Criminals

Chapter 10 Single Biggest Danger

Chapter 11 It’s Called Democracy

Chapter 12 Everyday Resistance

Notes

Acknowledgements

When I began planning this book, I did not realize that I would be writing it all during a global pandemic. The difficulty of writing and research during lockdowns is fairly trivial compared to the suffering that many have experienced during the Covid pandemic and the attempts to deal with it. Nonetheless, I am especially grateful for the practical assistance and emotional support that I have received during this time.

First of all, my thanks go to staff at Pen & Sword, particularly my editor Claire Hopkins who commissioned the book and was always ready to discuss it with me, as well as Chris Cocks, Lucy May, the cover designers and their colleagues. Several chapters were improved considerably by the feedback of Christine Goddard and Hannah Brock Womack, who gave lots of time to reading earlier drafts. Christine also provided considerable moral support, general advice and encouragement, as did Ali Fleabite, Lindsey Hall and other friends, comrades and relatives too numerous to list. I owe many thanks to my colleagues on the staff of the Peace Pledge Union – Kathryn Busby, Geoff Tibbs and Saffron Gallup – for their patience and positivity about the book.

The book would not have been possible at all without the dozens of people who agreed to be interviewed, by phone, email or online. Many of them are quoted by name in the following pages, while others remain unnamed at their request. I hope I have represented them fairly and done justice to their experience. I was moved by the willingness of interviewees to devote time to answering questions, discussing their thoughts and in some cases digging out documents and information from the past.

I am very grateful to people who allowed me to explore archives for which they are responsible, particularly Claire Poyner at Peace News and John Cooper at the Fellowship of Reconciliation. They went out of their way to make this possible in a Covid-safe way at a time when we needed to stand at opposite ends of a room while wearing masks. Thanks to Bill Hetherington and others for their compilation over years of the archives at the Peace Pledge Union, of which I was able to make extensive use.

I have drawn on numerous books, newspaper reports, and peace movement publications, some published at the time to which they refer and others written at a later date. I am grateful to everyone who has contributed to such records, which are referenced in the footnotes. I feel that I must mention two important sources by name. The Greenham Women Everywhere project has published a treasure trove of oral and written interviews with nearly 100 Greenham women, which were extremely useful for discovering varied views and experiences of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. Ian Sinclair’s book, The March That Shook Blair, an oral history of the protests against the Iraq war in 2003, proved invaluable for researching that vital time in the history of peace activism.

My biggest thanks go, of course, to everyone who has contributed to the peace movement in the UK – and around the world – over the last four decades. They are the people who this book is about. I owe more thanks than I can put into words to the people with whom I have had the honour of campaigning for peace and from whom I have learnt so much.

I make no claims to infallibility. The responsibility for any mistakes in this book is, of course, mine.

Timeline

A small selection of key events in recent peace activism in the UK.

Introduction

Militarism is about doing what you are told. Pacifism is about not doing what you are told. This book tells the stories of people who did not do what they were told.

Resistance to war is as old as war itself. Sometimes pacifism is confused with passivity, and nonviolent action with a lack of action. In reality, people who reject war – or even reject one particular war – are often at odds with dominant views and practices. Far from ‘doing nothing’, they find themselves doing a lot once they refuse to go along with the wars and weapons that people in power want them to endorse. As Martin Luther King put it, ‘True pacifism is not non-resistance to evil, but nonviolent resistance to evil.’¹

While pacifists oppose all war, there are many other peace activists who oppose an individual war that they regard as unjust – such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003 – or campaign against the use of particular weapons, such as landmines or nuclear arms. Some peace activists sign petitions and write to Members of Parliament. Others blockade military bases and damage weapons. Many do both. Some are motivated by religion; others reject religion as much as they reject war. Some are well-known figures, both loved and loathed for their activism. Others spend hours stuffing envelopes, distributing leaflets or designing databases with little thanks or recognition. There are peace activists who devote many hours to planning strategies, while others rush out to take whatever action they can in the moment. All of these tendencies feature in this book, which is about peace activism in the UK since the early 1980s.

War resistance has been going on for centuries. One of the oldest surviving anti-war arguments was written by the Chinese philosopher Mozi around 2,500 years ago. He criticized ‘the rulers of the world’ who condemned murder against a single individual but praised the killing of hundreds in war. He compared them to people who could not distinguish black from white, or sweet from bitter, if the quantities involved were changed. ‘So as to right and wrong, the rulers of the world are in confusion.’²

Many of what are now the world’s largest religions had strong anti-violence elements in their early days, with followers believing either that warfare was prohibited or that it should be severely limited.³ Christians, for example, were largely opposed to participation in warfare for the first three centuries after the time of Jesus, until Christianity was domesticated by the Roman Empire. They quoted Jesus’ instruction to ‘turn the other cheek’; not an example of submission but a demonstration of nonviolent defiance.⁴ In around the year 1600, women of the Iroquois nation in North America refused to have sex with their husbands until they were given a say in decisions on whether to go to war.⁵ Half a century later in England, Gerard Winstanley and the ‘Diggers’ farmed on common land and argued that the rich and powerful could be brought down without violence if people refused to accept their system and co-operated with each other instead.⁶ Resistance to war and violence has often overlapped with campaigns on other issues that have involved similarly nonviolent tactics such as mass non-co-operation.

Theories of nonviolent resistance were put into more structured form in the early twentieth century. People such as Mohandas Gandhi, Bertrand Russell, Maude Royden and Bart de Ligt produced writings that distinguished active nonviolence from both violence and passivity. These writers were all activists as well as theorists, their ideas and strategies born out of practical experience of movements of which they were only a part. There were thousands of conscientious objectors on both sides during both world wars, as well as calls for working-class people to refuse to fight each other and to resist their rulers instead. Concepts of ‘nonviolent revolution’ were developed and built upon.

From the 1950s onwards, practices of nonviolent resistance were most famously associated with the African-American civil rights movement in the US, but they were widely practised elsewhere, such as in the opposition to apartheid in South Africa and Czechoslovakian defiance of Soviet invasion in 1968.⁷ They influenced various forms of feminism, socialism and environmentalism. In the UK in the 1950s and 1960s, ideas of nonviolence had a major influence on anti-nuclear civil disobedience, on the anti-racist Bristol Bus Boycott, on campaigns for language rights in Wales and on the movement for equal civil rights in Northern Ireland. Such ideas and practices continue to inspire civil rights activism today, which can be seen in movements of trans people, disabled people and people with mental health problems, as well as many others.

All these examples provide intriguing and important stories about peace activism, and nonviolent activism more broadly. The examples provided by the last forty years in the UK are just as fascinating, and just as useful to explore.

The early 1980s saw a rise in the use of nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience by British peace activists. Sitting in front of a tank, disarming a warplane or blocking the gate to a nuclear base are all forms of direct action: they involve using your own power, rather than relying solely on appeals to others – such as politicians or arms dealers – to use theirs. Direct action is frequently unlawful, but not exclusively. It overlaps with civil disobedience, which involves a deliberate decision, usually taken as a group, to refuse to co-operate with a particular law or state body. I have focused on direct action and civil disobedience in this book. In no way am I suggesting that other forms of peace activism matter any less. Direct action, however, often fails to make it into the history books, particularly if those books reflect a view of power that reduces politics to parties and elections.

I have struggled to choose what to include. So much has been done. There have been some painful decisions as I realized that there were many things that I would have to leave out. I am very conscious that the first campaigns described in this book took place before I was old enough to be aware of them (I was born in 1977 and attended my first peace meeting in 1992). I followed, and in some cases played a part, in some of the later events, but different participants will not all share the same interpretations. Other historians would have made different decisions to mine and I am not claiming that my choice is better.

The book deals with activism that is specifically about promoting peace and resisting war and militarism. These issues intersect with many other issues. For example, feminist and LGBT+ movements have had astounding success in changing both attitudes and laws. There has been inspiring direct action in recent years in support of refugee rights, disability rights and the Black Lives Matter movement. Appropriate tactics for campaigning about the climate emergency have become a source of heated debate. Industrial action has at times achieved considerable improvements to people’s lives and the poll tax was brought down largely by mass nonviolent refusal to co-operate. If I were to include all these campaigns, the book would be ten times as long. I therefore mention them briefly, providing the context for peace-focused campaigns and the development of nonviolent methods. I use the term ‘activist’ simply to mean anyone who acts on their convictions, usually in conjunction with others.

Peace activism can be ignored, vilified or romanticized. I want to do none of these things. I make no secret of being a pacifist. This does not mean that I want to shut out discussion about the negative aspects of the groups and campaigns in question. Peace activists are as fallible as any other people and it would be a straightforward rejection of reality to deny that peace campaigns often fail. The history of peace activism, however, is often presented as a series of heroic failures – inspiring, perhaps, but not successful in making an impact. I hope this book makes clear that this perception is severely mistaken.

This is not a book on campaigning strategy or theories of change, although such things are discussed in relation to some of the events that appear here. In the main I aim to tell stories of peace activism, stories that reveal a much greater impact than the people with power tend to admit. Worthwhile change comes from below, and we all play a part in making history.

Chapter 1

Protest and Survive

Ann Pettitt was fed up of meetings.

It was 1980 and Ann, aged 33, was living with her partner and children on a small farm in west Wales. With tensions between the USA and USSR on the rise, there was growing talk of nuclear war. Ann had put up posters about the nuclear danger around her local town of Carmarthen.

But Ann was frustrated by what felt like ineffective activity. ‘I was feeling bored and stuck generally with the way we seemed to be creating a re-run of the CND campaigns of the Sixties,’ she explained later. ‘We stuck to the same script, the usual suspects doing the usual things in greater or lesser numbers. We were another item of conventional furnishing in the political room.’¹

Nonetheless, there were groups starting up to resist the drive to war, and more people were joining the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) after years of dwindling membership.

It was the next year, when Ann was putting together a leaflet in a friend’s house, that the frustration really hit her. What was the point of what she was doing? Then her eye caught a story in Peace News. ‘I no longer felt bored or stuck,’ she said. ‘I felt terribly excited.’²

The article was about a group of women walking from Copenhagen to Paris to protest about the threat of nuclear war.

It gave Ann an idea. What if women were to walk from Wales in the direction of London? But not to go to London. Rather, they would turn off at the Berkshire town of Newbury and head towards the RAF base at Greenham Common, where the US Air Force were planning to site nuclear missiles.

Ann threw herself into putting this plan into action. She had no idea that she was laying the ground for what would be the most original and influential piece of peace activism in Britain for the next decade.

Second Wave

The threat of nuclear war was rising sharply. In December 1979, the US government persuaded their European allies to host a new set of US nuclear weapons at various locations in western Europe, including Britain. At the same time, the Soviet Union’s allies in eastern and central Europe were installing new Soviet SS-20 nuclear missiles.

Both sides in the Cold War justified their nuclear weapons on the grounds of ‘deterrence’. The USA and their allies, including other nuclear-armed governments such as the UK and France, argued that their nuclear arsenals deterred the Soviets from attacking. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union and their allies maintained that their nuclear arms were ‘for peace’, to deter an attack by the US and other members of NATO. In practice, this meant both sides building up ever greater arsenals of both nuclear and non-nuclear weapons, supposedly to deter each other.

Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government agreed that the UK would host 160 of the USA’s nuclear-armed Cruise missiles, as well as maintaining the UK government’s own nuclear weapons system, Polaris, tied closely to the US. Polaris nuclear submarines were based at Faslane to the west of Glasgow. It was a target of Scottish peace activists in particular and had been an intermittent target of nonviolent direct action. Months after agreeing to host US nuclear missiles, British ministers announced that they would also upgrade their own nuclear arms. Polaris would be gradually replaced with the new and even deadlier Trident nuclear weapons system, involving submarines made in Barrow-in-Furness and missiles made in the US. Trident submarines, like their Polaris predecessors, would be based at Faslane.

In 1980, the UK government published a thirty-page pamphlet called Protect and Survive. On the cover, it proclaimed, ‘This booklet tells you how to make yourself and your family as safe as possible under nuclear attack.’

The advice ranged from the optimistic to the obtuse. Families were advised to make a fallout room within the house, possibly a cupboard under the stairs, and stock up enough food to stay there for two weeks. In the event of someone dying in the fallout room, the booklet calmly advised them to ‘place the body in another room and cover it as securely as possible. Attach an identification’. Perhaps the most optimistic advice was for those who were outdoors when a nuclear attack happened. They were encouraged to ‘lie flat (in a ditch) and cover the exposed skin of the head and hands’.

CND’s general secretary Bruce Kent described the booklet’s recommendations as ‘ridiculous’.³ CND said it gave the lie to the idea of deterrence: if the UK government were sure that their possession of nuclear weapons would prevent an attack, why were they advising people to prepare for one? Others argued that the government was seeking to gain support for nuclear weapons by giving the impression that lots of people would survive a nuclear war. An opinion poll in April 1980 suggested that over 40 per cent of the British public believed that a nuclear war was likely within ten years.⁴

Some were sufficiently angered by the booklet to become involved in peace activism as a result. Ann Blair, a Leeds woman in her mid-twenties, got stuck into anti-nuclear campaigning because of ‘the absurd policy shift that argued we could survive nuclear attack’.⁵

Unsurprisingly, the booklet provoked parodies. The satirical radio show Radio Active featured advice for ‘the unfortunate fellow who finds that the nuclear bomb is about to fall directly on his head’.⁶ The problem for satirists, however, was that the booklet’s advice was so bizarre that it was difficult to parody it.

One of the most creative and influential responses came from the historian E. P. Thompson, who wrote a booklet with a similar-sounding but very different title: Protest and Survive. According to Thompson, the logic of nuclear deterrence simply fuelled the growth of armaments and military power, making nuclear war not only possible but probable. He argued that siting US Cruise missiles in Britain would make the UK more of a target. The only way of surviving, he insisted, was for people around the world to resist the drive to nuclear war:

We must generate an alternative logic, an opposition at every level of society. This opposition must be international and it must win the support of multitudes.

We aim to expel these weapons from the soil and waters of both East and West Europe, and to press the missiles, in the first place, back to the Urals and to the Atlantic ocean. The tactics of this campaign will be both national and international. In the national context, each national peace movement will proceed directly to contest the nuclear weapons deployed by its own state, or by NATO or Warsaw Treaty obligations upon its own soil. Its actions will not be qualified by any notion of diplomatic bargaining. Its opposition to the use of nuclear weapons by its own state will be absolute. Its demands upon its own state for disarmament will be unilateral.

In the international, and especially in the European, context, each national movement will exchange information and delegations, will support and challenge each other. The movement will encourage a European consciousness, in common combat for survival, fostering informal communication at every level, and disregarding national considerations of interest or ‘security’.⁷

According to Ann Pettitt, ‘People rang each other up and said have you read it? and passed it from one to the other.’⁸

In June 1980, news leaked out that two British military bases had been selected to host the US missiles. The Guardian’s Defence Correspondent, David Fairhall, ambitiously set himself the task of working out which they would be. By combining snippets of information, he came to a conclusion, and on 16 June he published his prediction that the bases would be Greenham Common in Berkshire and Molesworth in Cambridgeshire. The next day, he was proved right when Defence Secretary Francis Pym confirmed the details in Parliament.⁹

Greenham Common Royal Air Force base had been used by US forces in the Second World War, but few people outside of the Berkshire area had heard of it. It was soon to become a household name.

Reactions in the area were varied. In the local town of Newbury, journalists interviewed resident Caroline Holbrook, who had campaigned against the presence of US KC-135 refuelling tankers at the RAF base two years earlier. She said that she had no objections this time. ‘We fought against the KC-135s because they were noisy and dirty, whereas Cruise missiles are supposed to be nice and quiet,’ she explained, adding that she was ‘pro-NATO’. Some people are concerned not with peace but with peace and quiet.¹⁰

Not all Newbury residents were so happy. Local peace activist Joan Ruddock quickly began working with other locals to set up the Newbury Campaign Against Cruise Missiles.

CND used the slogan ‘Protest and Survive’ for a rally in London on 26 October. CND’s Bruce Kent was initially reluctant to hold the event in Trafalgar Square, fearing that they would look silly if only a few hundred people turned up. His colleague John Cox persuaded CND Council to have more courage. He was proved right: 80,000 people gathered in Trafalgar Square for the biggest anti-nuclear protest in Britain since the 1960s. E. P. Thompson urged the crowd to, ‘Feel your strength!’.¹¹

CND membership had fallen below 3,000 in the late 1970s. When Bruce Kent became general secretary at the beginning of 1980, he discovered that the list of supposedly paid-up members included people who were in fact dead.¹² But CND membership rose sharply from 1980, as did the number of local branches.¹³ ‘Week by week arrived more letters, more membership applications, more callers, more journalists, more requests for speakers, more orders for badges and leaflets,’ recalled Bruce Kent later.¹⁴ The emphasis on working internationally against nuclear weapons encouraged the development of organizations such as European Nuclear Disarmament (END).

Other groups were focused on particular areas and issues. The Scottish Campaign to Resist the Atomic Menace (SCRAM) combined challenges to the nuclear base at Faslane with resistance to all forms of nuclear power. Some were keen not to confine their concerns to nuclear arms but to oppose war and militarism more broadly. Around the same time, the Peace Pledge Union (PPU), a longstanding pacifist group, launched a Campaign Against Militarism, addressing issues from the large number of military bases to cadet forces in schools. ‘Over 140,000 children in military cadet forces are being taught that killing is justifiable,’ declared the PPU.¹⁵ The Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), set up in 1975, was campaigning about the sort of regimes to which British governments and arms companies were prepared to supply weapons. The Fellowship of Reconciliation was urging churches towards taking anti-war positions. Part of the UK was bordering on civil war itself, with the ‘Troubles’ continuing in Northern Ireland, where groups such as the Peace People and the Corrymeela Community worked away at the grassroots to challenge violence from all quarters.

The pacifist paper Peace News was looking back on the ‘first wave’ of anti-nuclear direct action in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and talking of the need for a ‘second wave’. In 1981, the paper’s co-editor, Ross Bradshaw, called for a major response to the nuclear build-up. ‘I believe, and Peace News believes, that this response will involve renewed nonviolent direct action,’ he wrote. In a thinly veiled criticism of certain other tendencies, he insisted that ‘the current disarmament movement does not look to stars for credibility nor a leadership which courts respectability above all else’.¹⁶

Who Are You Really?

Ann Pettitt recruited three other women from west Wales – Karmen Cutler, Lynne Whittemore and Liney Seward – to organize the walk with her. They hoped to gather around fifty women to walk from Cardiff to Greenham. They were soon phoning local peace groups and allies in the towns along the route, appealing for offers of meals and accommodation.

‘Who are you?’ asked an activist in Bristol when Ann phoned him to see if his local Labour Party could organize lunch for them as they passed through the city.

‘We’re just four women,’ replied Ann. ‘We’re acting on our own initiative and we’re organizing this