Dear John (Charlton)
I am writing to congratulate
on your 2009 book- Don’t’ You hear the H Bomb’s thunder? a project jointly of the North-East Labour
History Society and Merlin Press (for those circulated who are unaware of the
book) and which I have only recently discovered and read. I am publishing my
comments although I hope you will also pass on (unless otherwise mentioned) to
those who contributed their experience of activism in regional Tyneside with a focus on the first post WW II peace
movements in the UK 1958-1965 and which involved the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament, the Gandhi Satyagraha Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War,
where I was a short time employee helping to organise the London to Holy Loch
project which Peter Currell Brown devised and which I promoted while in
Stafford Prison following Operation Foulness, together with the attempted mass
movement of the Committee 100 and where I was also a short time member and
which in part was created because of what happened to the Foulness thirteen.
While I will be rewriting at
greater length my knowledge and experience and publishing on line, together
with some documentation, I have decided to circulate this now for three
reasons. While I am a supporter of oral testimony personal experience as an
aspect of explaining, what happened in times past, and why, there are risks
that without appropriate documentation collective views may become skewed because
of what is presently cultural and politically fashionable even where
contemporary documentation is also available. This is currently important in
relation to allegations made about past crimes where there is always that
problematic mixture of the lack of corroborative evidence, the nature of the
investigative and judicial process in the context of the law at original time,
the credibility of the complainant and other witnesses, human failure, and
deliberate cover up for good and bad reasons.
I will be writing separately
about recent events concerning the ill-conceived, wrongly developed and badly
managed child abuse inquiry for England and Wales but where everyone needs to
rally to ensure it now makes a better job of an impossible task.
The second reason is in part my
own long standing interest in why do some people become activists and some move
to the extreme end of the activist spectrum risking or sacrificing their own
lives and some having a personal involvement in the taking of the lives of
others in the name of greater social justice, ending wars and achieving peace. I
did not know of the book by Philip Roth on which the film American Pastoral is
based and which deals with this subject in the context of the Vietnam war and
race rioting in the USA. There is also my fascination in what happens to
activists when the cause is achieved or they decide to stop.
Thirdly, what impact does activism
have on bringing about changes for the better and where the dramatic increases
the membership of the Labour Party could bring about a Labour government at the
next General Election or destroy the party depending on the approach of members
of the parliamentary Labour Party and the administrative party machine over
coming months. My only surprise is that the margin in favour of Leaving the
European Political and Economic Community or the election of Mr Trump as the
U.S.A president was not greater. The professional politicians, political
advisers and media pundits still don’t get it and their recent failure puts us
all at risk.
I first became interested in
gaining an understanding of what happened and why when a Jesuit modern history
teacher at school said that if we wanted to know what the second world war was
about we should read the reports of the War Crimes Tribunal, and I persuaded
the library at Wallington where I was already borrowing works of adult fiction
as soon I discovered I was not restricted to the children’s section, to let me
read in the reference library first what was investigated at Bergen-Belsen and then
at Auschwitz.
When I returned from the film,
American Pastoral, I looked at a collation of video clips which had been posted
on Facebook with one of a speech by Tony Benn in the House of Commons, with
Jeremy Corbyn sitting behind him, in which he explains why it is impossible for
anyone who experienced the blitz to support the bombing of men, women and
children who are not willingly involved in a conflict.
One of my earliest memories, and
which remains vivid, is that of a V1 rocket heading in our direction in
daylight as we left the house for the Anderson air raid shelter in the garden,
hearing the engine cut out and knowing that it would hit the ground before
reaching us. When the V 2 rockets began to fall around, and more did than
anywhere in the UK because of our proximity to London’s main civilian and then military
airport at Croydon, we went to stay with an aunt who lived in officer’s
quarters at Catterick Camp in North Yorkshire. I also have a visual memory of
the day the telegram arrived to say that one of the two sons of the eldest aunt
had died in a Japanese concentration camp and when his brother returned wearing
his demob suit after experiencing prisoner of war camps in North Africa, Italy
and central Europe, never recovering from the experience of being freed by the
Russian Army and seeing what they were doing.
After the war, I was taken to
see British and American films about the war only suitable for a child if
accompanied by an adult, and at sixteen I was attached to a section of six men
in the Local Taxation department of the Finance Department of a large local
authority where one had lost part of his leg in World War I, another had been
an officer in the Royal Navy, three had been squaddies including service in
North Africa and the youngest served with the Royal Air Force in Korea. It was
also the time of the Suez War and petrol rationing only a couple of years after
the other forms of rationing had ended. Angus Calder and one of his brothers,
sons of Ritchie Calder were members of the local Youth CND wrote the important
account of the People’s War.
Only a few months ago, I
decided it was time to write and publish a new autobiography centred on my
political interests and involvements. I
have previously privately printed but not published how I became a contemporary
artist in the process of creating one work encompassing my life experience in
the context of major events and developments in the world to pose the question,
does any individual life matter except to those with whom we relate and
communicate?
I commenced new research on my
political activism with the peace movements of 1958 to 1961 and where I had
been invited to join the Labour Party in 1960. My activism ended in making an oral
commitment to stop activities at the Magistrate Court at Witney, Oxfordshire
just before Christmas 1961, a bizarre phone call on Boxing Day which was said
to have involved the Home Secretary, with the imprisonment of Mike Randle and
Lord Russell in 1962 and the Cuban Missile crisis that year. I switched from a politics and economics
course at Ruskin College to a Diploma in Public and Social Administration at
Oxford University and then with the help of the Home Office became a qualified
child care officer following a course at Birmingham University and where during
the first academic term someone who had been a close friend and worked at the
Admiralty was stabbed to death in a Soho Street and who had separately gained
knowledge of my role and what happened at Holy Loch in 1961.
Ten years ago, in addition to
my own documentation, I examined some of the records of the Direct-Action Committee
and some of the unpublished other written material at the J B Priestly Library
which is part of the University of Bradford and which had been curated by
Michael Randle who held an academic post for several years and who I briefly
met on my visit. There are now online indexes of these records. There is one
published academic work which covered these records and interviews with some of
the key people by Richard Taylor, Peace Movements 1958-1965 published only in
hard back and where a used copy can cost over £100. Richard with Colin
Pritchard published an earlier work in 1980 covering the same period. The C.N.D
Story edited by John Minion and Philip Bolsover published in 1983 includes
contributions from several leading activists during the period covered and adopts
a similar approach to your book. The story of the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament was brought more to date by Kate Hudson in her book CND- Now more
than ever, published in 2005. There have been two other published books which
attempt to cover the CND and Direct Action with the most well-known- The
Disarmers by Christopher Driver in1964 and the most controversial of all, Mud
Pie by Herb Greer also 1964. A worldwide study has also been completed by April
Carter former Secretary of the D.A.C- Peace Movements 1945-1990 and about a
decade ago she also published Direct Action and Democracy today.
The archives of the CND are
held at the London School of Economics (Includes those of the Youth CND) and at
the Modern Records Centre Warwick University)
The archives of Peace News are
also held at the Peace Library at Bradford and I went through these when I
visited. having worked briefly at Houseman’s 1959/1960, the ground floor and
basement bookshop managed by Harry Mister above which the editorial staff
prepared the newspaper at 5 Caledonian Road. N.1 just by Kings Cross station. I
was not a Peace News staff man as a staged photograph of me in the publication
taken during the Direct Action at Harrington in 1960 stated. I am seen with a
grappling hook to scale the barbed wire but the purpose was only to sit down at
the entrance. There is a six-minute newsreel video of this demonstration
available from Concord Films. I was also a Peace News volunteer preparing
postal copies on Wednesday evenings for sending to subscribers, part of a small
group, some already activists or who became activists.
I make this point because for
good and not so good reasons there has understandably been some rewriting of
history to suit individual and the more general needs of changing times and
personal circumstances and where it is also necessary to separate the genuine
activist from the undercover media and undercover security services from
several countries that were involved at the time together with the use of the
agent provocateur.
The behaviour of the police at
the Trafalgar Square Committee 100 action to protest Polaris was questioned by
some national newspaper although the violence happened very late at night when
most spectators and much of the media had departed. I monitored what happened with
the wife of the London region CND and Aldermaston organiser George Clark This
was a situation like Orgreave when there was political pressure on the police
to react in a way. Anyone who thinks the police and the judiciary are not
susceptible to political influence is living in a different dimension.
I hope the information now provided
will add knowledge until I get around to my own project which came to an abrupt
halt with the assassination of Jo Cox, the predictable Brexit vote, the
resignations from the Shadow cabinet, forcing the re-election of the
democratically elected leader and the attempted purge.
There are those, and a fellow
campaigner who became the Professor of Education at Newcastle and Durham
Universities, is one, who believed that the CND and Direct Action campaigns of
the later 50’s and early 60’s had positive outcomes. I am of those who believe
we failed just as the task of undoing the accumulated years of support for unfettered
international capitalism since Margate Thatcher came to power and pursued by all
governments thereafter will only be changed through a long struggle and
continued sacrifice by most working people.
I urge every Labour Party
Member and those who see themselves as part of the Labour and Trade union
movements who have not already done so to read Dr Gaye Johnston’s e- book,
available on Amazon for just over £1- “New Labour- Was the Gain worth the
Pain?” The book is based on a similar
approach of yours in consulting and involving a wide range of people within the
Party and Labour movement for their views on a range of related issues.
I am sending a copy of this
communication to Councillor Gladys Hobson who was my boss, so to speak, at
South Tyneside, in times past, and to Lord Beecham where our paths may have
first crossed when he was at Oxford and I at Ruskin College, before doing so
again three decades later, and to the constituency Member of Parliament for
South Shields. Emma Lewell-Buck. Please pass on if you believe others mentioned
in the book will find of interest, aspects of the ‘national’ story which I know
something about although like many participants I was a passing small player as
the majority were, many changing their positions following the Cuban crisis or
following the establishment of new relationships, marriages, and extended
families.
Please also pass on to Mike
Down who solved something which has I have spent several years trying to
remember and work out its former location, providing the name of the coffee bar-
the Partisan in Soho where I worked casually clearing and cleaning tables and
which enabled hearing what was going on including during a visit by Ralph Schoenman.
I have not forgiven Christopher Driver for not returning the letter from Dora
Russell after I had complained about the role of Ralph who interestingly
reappeared during the so called Arab Spring. The long defence by Lord
Russell included at the end of the
Ronald W Clark biography of how Mr Schoenman came to have such a hold is
questionable.
Like Mike Down I also used to
go to the Cy Laurie Club 1956-1957 on a regular basis and less frequently after
that until 1959 when I became an activist. Some years ago, I met through Myspace
space a couple who in the later 1950’s then attended an art college and who
danced at the club while I looked on and who are still together living in Wales.
Although I only came to live
in Sunderland and work for South Tyneside in 1974 everything I have learned
since then confirms what you and others have written about how and why young
people became politically active and supporters of the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament here in the North East, and some, an involvement in the nonviolent
Satyagraha campaigns of the Direct-Action Committee Against Nuclear War and
mass demonstrations of the Committee 100.
It is to my shame that I only
recently discovered the existence of the North East Labour History society when
one of the meetings was held in association with the 2016 Durham Miners Gala
and had two speakers talking about their experience of attending the adult
education college located at Oxford, Ruskin College and where by coincidence I
had returned from attending an annual reunion of their Fellowship and was in
the process of rewriting my own experiences from 1961 to 1963 which I have
circulated. I was delighted to read the four contributions from former Ruskin
students in the 47th Volume of the Journal of the Society.
I only recently went through
the Internet published information about the North-East Labour History Society
to find out what was already published on my present interests and discovered
your book.
When I can return to rewriting
my experiences and information I will put online my available documentation
with commentary excluding private correspondence unless the individuals are
dead, permission is gained, or the information is already separately available
for public use. Because I wrote letters by hand or used a manual typewriter I
do not have copies of letters I sent only those received. I have some pamphlets
from the period and with each year there is an increase in the number of videos
available on YouTube and Internet search engines. There is even one set of
short videos prepared by the Schools Council from Newsreels as part of a
history study course for schools to communicate a time of
war and peace 1939 to the Vietnam War. Peter Currell Brown who wrote
Smallcreeps day was giving talks to school children in Nottinghamshire about
his experiences last time I was in contact
Understandably, the police and
security services are not releasing the photographs and videos taken during
demonstrations or the work of their undercover people and informants although
some of this will be on the records of individuals and redacted copies of the
files are available under Freedom of Information now that 50 years has elapsed.
The main contribution I can
immediately make is in relation to the march to Holy Loch which passed through
the North East from Yorkshire on its way to Scotland and which Peter Currell
Brown and I decided we wanted to do while in Stafford prison in 1960 combining
the Salt marches of Gandhi (I have one of the 2000 published original in English editions of Satyagraha
published in Ahmedabad) and our then limited knowledge of the Jarrow Crusade
and other hunger marches and where there is an exhibition at the Museum and Art
Gallery in South Shields, and Society member Dr Matt Perry has published work
and recently made a presentation
commemorating the passing of 80
years at one of the Newcastle University public lectures. Matt’s ongoing interest in who were the
marchers and what happened to them matches one of my interests on who went to
prison in the 1960’s when they did not have to, making their individual point
that the possession and potential use of weapons of weapons of mass civilian
extermination cannot not be justified although I believe that for the purpose
of defence we need to participate and have access to ongoing research and which
I assume is the reason the Americans
continue to insist as they did in
1960 that the first strike nuclear submarine weapon base had to be located in
the UK because they did not want a first strike within the
states. The recent BB2 TV channel 2 documentaries The British Deterrent
explains the background from the now released transatlantic state papers.
The other similarity with the
Jarrow Crusade is that the core marchers on the Holy Loch march were also selected
and on the basis that they were giving up something, a job, their family as
there was concern about some becoming professional prison going activists and
which played into the hands of those seeking to damage and end the then growing
movement.
I wrote to Pat Arrowsmith with
our project idea and this was taken up by the Direct-Action Committee and the
letter is mentioned as a footnote in Gandhi and the West, Sean Scalmar,
Cambridge University Press and part of the D.A.C records.
I was also influenced by
having participated in two of the Youth CND organised marches from Liverpool to
Hull 1960/1961 1961/1962 which included the subsequent Professor of Education previously
mentioned, another who also became a Professor, with a third, a close friend
who became a senior University Administrator, after spending six months on her
own travelling in India and an Oxford degree at St Hilda’s during the time I
was at Ruskin. There was also the daughter of a known clergyman who became a
dancer at the Follies Bergere. Individuals just joined in the core march so
there may be no formal record other than the route, stop overs and provision of
hospitality which included private homes where at Hull the offer of a bath,
meal and bed by a member of the academic staff and his partner was very
welcome.
As you mention there was a
group of (selected) core marchers who walked all the way from Trafalgar Square
to Holy Loch which included an embedded journalist from the Daily Mail! The
intention was to gain support along the six-week march and where the
extraordinary Pat Arrowsmith had undertaken preliminary work making contact re
the provision places to put down the sleeping bags and provided food and drink
and where she then went ahead, checking arrangements before returning after the
marching day. Meetings and soap box stops were part of the project together
with arousing local media interest. There is one other aspect of the march
which has since been overlooked. Peter Currell Brown became a potter who loves
making things and this included the canoes and kayaks, one of which was to have
been pulled all the way to the Loch for the sea attempt to board a Polaris
submarine and tie a Peace Flag.
There is a great photo of a
flag being tied to a buoy and of the Polaris Action which had its base camp on
the beach in the grounds of the Youth Hostel at Strone Point and another of a
boat alongside the John Henry submarine in turn alongside the Proteus home base
ship which invited the media on board to a presentation.
The march set off from
Trafalgar Square at the end of the 1961 Easter weekend Aldermaston March which
became so big that once the Square and surrounding pavements were filled the
march went onto Hyde Park without stopping. No one has any idea of the actual
numbers who came to London in support that day because the end rally was
Trafalgar Square and not Hyde Park and some joined in during the central London
section and went home again on reaching the Square unable to stop unless they
had been told their coaches were parked around the Park. I said 250000 to one
media request from the USA.
As Chief Marshal for the Holy
Loch march, I had attended a meeting at the former New Scotland Yard with
Aldermaston march Chief Marshal, George Clark at which we were openly
introduced to representatives from other government departments and agencies as
well as senior officers of the Metropolitan Police. I could give the recorded
assurance that we did not intend to take direct action and deliberately break
the law before reaching Holy Loch but this did not prevent the police on the
day to renege on an agreement to allow two circuits of Trafalgar Square to
enable core marches to join in, as we had been permitted to park a small van
for our luggage, and for others to join in the first short leg that evening.
Therefore, we were moved away
quickly at fast pace and some of the core marchers had to find their way to where
we stayed overnight. In part police action appears to have been taken because
of the huge numbers which came to London in support of the C.N.D and unknown to
me the police had also gained intelligence that the Committee of 100 wanted to
get in on our respective acts was planning a break away demonstration at the
U.S.A embassy. My understanding is that there was a small inner group of the
official planning and steering group of the Committee 100 and which in turn was
set up after the first full meeting at which it was evident there were 100
different views of what we should do and when.
The Committee of 100 was a
great mixture of personalities led by Ralph Schoenman Earl Russell’s spokesman and secretary, John
Osborn, Arnold Wesker, Shelagh Delaney and such like, members of the British
Communist party and from the myriad factions supporting Leon Trotsky
assassinated because his opposition to fascist socialism, other socialists,
anarchists, syndicalists, pacifists, direct
actionists, the religious motivated and were also included those with
prior associations with the British, Soviet and USA intelligence and security
services.
Michael Randle merits separate
attention and I have got around to reading his book with Pat Pottle on why they
helped the spy George Blake to escape from prison published in 1989 called- The
Blake escape and who participated in the recent documentary with Blake who is
94 and still living in Moscow. I went out for a little while with a former
girlfriend of Mike just after she had graduated and one of the reasons I went
to Ruskin College instead of taking up the appointment as full time London
region CND organiser is that she rejected an offer of marriage recommending
Ruskin because going to the college would condense what I had to say!
I had been invited to join the
Committee of 100 only after several of the first signatories had resigned on
realising they were vulnerable to prosecution even if they did not participate
in individual events but which they were expected to do. I resigned when it
became evident that the Committee was not committed to the principles of
Satyagraha and fortunately, as my name does not appear on the Wikipedia published
list, I have retained the evidence of my membership and participation.
To emphasise that the march
was governed by principles of transparency and of orderly participation and
behaviour along the way, the police were called to take away a woman who joined
the march disclosing that her four children had been taken into care. It was
evident at the preliminary meeting for potential participant’s that agent
provocateurs were present and those with different agendas.
There is mention in the book
of Gerry Healey and the Socialist Labour League. I was asked by Harry at Peace
News to man a bookstall at a national conference of the League at which Pat
Arrowsmith was invited to speak. I therefore registered and listened to Pat and
then stayed to hear what Gerry had to say immediately afterwards. He commenced
by explaining that while the League supported the peace campaigns this did not
apply to the Soviet Union where it was essential to maintain the worker’s bomb
in the fight to destroy capitalism. He then reviewed their tactics of joining
in workplaces and industries to create strikes as part of the process of
educating and involving the working class and where he admitted there would be
casualties. The plan for the coming year was to enter the machine tool
industry. No one bought a book or pamphlet. Peter Fryer’s book, The Battle for
Socialism is of interest in this respect. I have never worked out if the person
who subsequently called at the family home was a League recruiter or from the
security services with access to the list of those who had attended. A
combination of my derision over retention of the worker’s bomb and the
fundamentalist Catholic basis of my beliefs meant I was not immediately
contacted again.
Throughout my life I have been
willing to go over the top and in some instances to take the lead but only on
the basis that those participating understood the risks and potential longer
term implications of what we were doing. This was to lead me to resign as Chief
Marshal of the Holy Loch march when it reached Glasgow.
Mention is also made in your
book of the former Member of Parliament for Salford and sometime chairman of
the Labour Party. On the private bus from London to Aldermaston march that year
I had sat with two others who had participated in Operation Foulness and who
had openly talked of their prison experience. I was called over by an older man
sitting on his own who shared a tube of pastilles or wine gums and after
talking about the experiences told him how I become a member of the executive
of the Wallington and Labour Party at my first meeting because of a coup by the
Young Socialists. It was only when we reached our destination that he disclosed
he was Frank Allaun, an MP and a founder of the
Aldermaston March, and he invited me to keep in touch which I did, and
later briefed him about Rackmanism housing conditions in Birmingham where I was
studying for a child care qualification and working in the City Children’s
department which led to Twilight zone headlines following a debate on Housing
in the House of Commons and to my nearly being asked to leave the course, but
where I was offered a job with the Council which I would have taken had I not
already been signed up by Oxfordshire.
Mention is also made of the
Labour Former Minister John Strachey and on the same bus to Aldermaston was his
illegitimate son and with whom we shared the six months as unwanted guests of
the specialist homes of the head of state and who also participated at Holy
Loch and the Aldermaston and Liverpool to Hull marches.
At Bedford. where I had been
held on remand refusing bail after the Harrington Northamptonshire Direct
Action, I left to go to Scotland to organise support, food and accommodation
from Glasgow, staying on an estate and at the Glasgow centre of the Iona
Community. At one point, I was required by the Committee to make an urgent
visit to Edinburgh where Pat Arrowsmith had persuaded other core marchers to
ignore a police ban on marching down Princess Street, they were arrested and
held at the police station until the substantial fines were paid. During the period in Scotland my contact was
with the office in London and not with Pat and the marchers. The money was
immediately raised and after collecting a banker’s draft I arrived at the
police station to be told the fines had been paid by the Scottish Union of Mine
workers and everyone had been taken to their headquarters. I contacted the
office was told to take a taxi, ensure the money was reimbursed and read the
riot act to Pat for jeopardising the project.
Anyone who has met Pat will
appreciate this was easier said than done. On arrival, I found the group
including the Daily Mail journalist celebrating with bottles of whisky in the
boardroom with Abe and Alec Moffat making everyone honorary members of the
union. Having completed the mission, I beat a hasty retreat reporting the
situation to the office in London and awaited the arrival of the marchers in
Glasgow where there was a counsel of war, so to speak.
My mission to Scotland had only
limited success as I was uneducated, young and inexperienced for the task and
what success there was depended on the good will of others. Most memorable is
the shoe maker at Clydebank who was said to be the local fixer and where when
contacted the local police insisted on stopping the traffic and making
available as many men as we needed to assist. At Greenock and Gourock the
politicians arranged for three of their chief officers to meet me and offer to provide
the accommodation, food and any other assistance necessary although I was
unable to give an estimate of the numbers likely to be involved. A Liberal
Party politician and supporter put on a party and his pregnant wife asked me to
discouraging him from participating in the direct action. He was on the
hillside overlooking one of the piers and I saw him come to join the sit down
as I and others were being thrown on top of other supporters to make a pathway
for USA naval personnel to access the Proteus or arrive from it. Fortunately,
he was not among those arrested.
No one on the Dumbarton bank
of the Clyde was prepared to meet and a Daily Express journalist warned that he
been told to twist whatever I said in a negative way which he did on the front
page of a Scottish edition. The executive committee of the Scottish Council for
Nuclear disarmament, as it was called, were also cool and my report led to a
visit by Peggy Duff. I had been invited
to attend the office of the chain fag smoking CND national secretary after
being interviewed and recommended for the London region organiser’s job and all
she wanted to know was if I would concentrate on campaigning within the law and
it was evident she was rightly sceptical about the reassurance given. The
interview for the position had taken place in a basement office of the Houseman’s
Peace News building which remains a meeting place for a range of contemporary
activists. The Scottish Council did give some reluctant support and I would
like to think the worldwide media attention given to the Whitsun direct action
led the Scottish T.U.C and Scottish Labour Party holding its own mini march and
rally at Dunoon in June 1961 with Michael Foot the main speaker and where there
is also a short film with a great musical soundtrack available.
A member of the Council took
me to his Edinburgh club after the morning meeting where I had my first taste
of pure long aged malt before I went back to Glasgow and he to the Dunoon
peninsular. He also arranged for me to meet the local police chief at Dunoon
where a short-hand typist took down what we proposed to do on the Loch and on
land. This led to a written warning from
the Commander of the Flagship Scotland.
The situation then commenced
to rapidly change as the Direct-Action Committee had joined forces with the
Committee of 100 and a larger scale protest was being organised with trains
hired by the Committee to bring people from London and I was asked to order as
many ferries as Caledonian McBride had available and which amazing they readily
agreed taking my word that there would many spectators in addition to
participants.
A study of the geography of
Holy Loch reveals that travelling by car or bus involved very long journeys and the quickest way was
take a Ferry from one of the many stops from places like Helensburgh and
Kilcreggan and other ferry stops in addition to the route from Gourock to
Dunoon and one into central Glasgow. I enjoyed little Scottish pancakes for a
few pence with a coffee on early morning trips as I worked out the options and
went to visit contacts, also staying for a few days at the base camp.
Pat Arrowsmith also had
acquired use of a launch and an ocean going size craft like one of the Clyde
Ferries and a well-known GP, Dr Rachel Pinney, whose mansion in Chelsea I later
visited, had acquired a car boat which she drove up from London onto the Loch for
Red Cross Rescue which proved necessary.
The problem was that the
proposed action was different from what I had advised the authorities, not too
great a problem as it was assumed there were one or more spies at the meeting and
where in a subsequent Naval history article it was admitted the plans had been
detected. The main reason why I resigned was because it was evident that people
were to be allowed to participate in the sea and land action straight off the
trains and ferries without preparation which then and now still I regarded as
irresponsible and which became an issue as events on the day unfolded.
Leaving Glasgow upset, I went
to the base camp contacting the youth hostel and arranging to be taken across
the Loch from Sandbank. The early morning beautiful silence of the Loch
contrasted with the presence of the Polaris supply ship and temporary nuclear
weapon base.
There had been several practices
runs and one of the group, the Operation Foulness prisoner who spent all six
months on his own, although weekly marches were held in London to support him
and those in Holloway, tied a peace flag on a Buoy which went on the front
pages. On protest day, the submarine went to sea but the large supply vessel remained.
The story of the American Years at Holy Loch is told by Andrene Messersmith,
Argyll publishing, and which presents the US Navy perspective, in addition to
that of the local community. Andrene was only a Scottish child when the then
secret deal between the UK Prime Minister and USA President was negotiated.
The British Prime Minister was
tricked into the base being at Holy Loch close enough to Glasgow for the city
to be in peril and it was only later that the concession of somewhere more
isolated was permitted. I now worry more about the two Trident births in the Gibraltar
docks which the crews use for R and R. and running repairs Gibraltar is my
parental homeland and with plans for it to become the Hong Kong of the
Mediterranean (reference the Golden Book) although I see it more as a Berlin,
given it is also the one of the online gambling capitals as well as money
laundering centres of the world. One of
my uncles used to manage at Tangiers, the ferry between there, Gib, Algeciras
and Ceuta (the film comedy the Captain’s Table with Sir Alec Guiness is centred
on the ferry), one first cousin managed the Taxation office and another
Customs. My father was the Vicar General and was awarded the OBE.
On the appointed day I decided
against taking the second birth in one
of our craft and was taken from
the beach camp where four of the former Operation Foulness prisoners were
involved to join the motor launch and to find that Pat and all the marshals had
been arrested and taken to the Police Station at Dunoon, in a tactic which was
subsequently used at Witney before Christmas that same year when there were
four simultaneous Committee 100 actions organised by local
committees and with Will Warren, also Operation Foulness, the Chief
Marshall for the action to Brize Norton. Will went on to do brave peace work in
Northern Ireland before his death.
One other had been in
Holloway, took a job as a waitress at a hotel in the area after the Holy Loch
protest, married and settled in Scotland. Another participated in one of the
blocking of the piers, so in total seven of the thirteen Foulness Prisoners
were directly involved. Two others, Jane, Lady Buxton and Margaret Turner published
Gate Fever- The Cresset Press, on their experience in Holloway and later reformed
the Prison Reform Council, with Lord Stonham the former Member of Parliament
Victor Collins as President and invited me to chair a group of ex-prisoners who
produced Inside Story 100 suggestions for prison reform.
Three events on that day
should be mentioned. The first was that the motor launch was subjected to power
hosing from the supply ship when we went alongside. We attempted to move away
to avoid sinking but the water had flooded the engine compartment and we were
without power. It had been evident that
special forces were monitoring events on the Loch and as we managed to move
along the side of ocean going ship so we could decant protestors from the launch,
a special forces unit attempted to smash a buoy between us and the ship and
damaged the ship as we moved away. The ship was then taken out of the action
and at this point the Red Cross car boat came to the rescue and commenced to
tow us to the shore but then with the reduced numbers and with some removal of
the water the engine restarted and we landed under[CS1] [CS2] our
own fuel. Rachel Pinney gave me her home
number to call when the demonstration ended and the visit to her Chelsea home
was arranged. She hit the headlines subsequently and went to the USA. There is
now good piece about her on Wikipedia.
Back on land I joined the sit
down blocking one of the piers with crew members of the supply ship attempting
to land or returning to the base vessel. They were then ordered to make their
way by walking on people which understandably caused a reaction and it was
necessary for me to intervene and to make the point that the naval men and
police were doing their job and it was important not to provoke violence. The
next tactic by the police was to remove people throwing them on top other
protestors This was when the mental and physical preparation of Satyagraha is
effective as you are relaxed prepared to be hurt but in fact after two or three
attempts to remove me this way, the police gave up and I was not hurt.
Others were arrested and take
away with a pathway created. A little later a former journalist at Peace News
came to find me with a message from Pat Arrowsmith to end the blockade of the
piers and to march in an orderly fashion to the Police station. Although there were a few calls of who are you
because I seemed to know what I was doing everyone assembled and waited until
those from the other piers further down the loch arrived all those who wished
set off for the police station where it was later reported there were some more
arrests, or to get a ferry homeward. I suspect Pat’s intention was that I would
accompany the march but I believed my place was to stay Lochside and ensure
everyone went home.
Some supporters who had travel
from afar decided to stay overnight and later when back at base camp we could
see fires lit all around the loch. The number of people present had been
extraordinary given the out of way location The Daily Mail journalist greeted declaring
that journalists from around the world were present as the coverage was to
prove. The following morning, I went
back across the loch to find out if people had the means to return to their
homes but did not go to Dunoon. At some point, I went up a hillside and met the
daughter of a future Labour Attorney General and Lord Chancellor together with
her fiancée and who with her brother I had walked from Liverpool to Hull.
Peter said he and another at
the camp proposed to go to the Iona community although later together we stayed
a community in South Wales. I knew I not have any skills to earn my keep at the
community where the Church and buildings were not completed until the mid-1960’s
and where I visited on a holiday several decades later. I believe the community
in Wales was Merthyr Tydfil where we were welcomed for a stay of a few days.
Both communities where different from the shared house at Balham which played
an unknowing role after I was released from prison when I commenced to
understand who I had become and why and first appreciated that others could see
into me what I had previously been unable to see or understand. The
breakthrough occurred when one of the friends with whom I had walked from
Liverpool to Hull came from Manchester where she worked to help and took me
home in Balham and who also travelled to Stafford to welcome the six on our
formal discharge.
At the end of the Holy Loch
venture I had the means to London by train. I was paid £5 a week plus expenses.
I had become adept at hitching lifts by then, once sleeping overnight in a bus
shelter on Boxing day with a companion and then getting a lift with a milkman
delivering for a couple of hours in the Derbyshire Peak countryside.
You mention Will Owen, the MP
for Morpeth who lived in the Wallington when Parliament was sitting and his daughter
attended at least one meeting of this group. As mentioned two other members
were the sons of Ritchie Calder and where sadly both are dead. The daughter of
the future Lord Chancellor visited to talk about the role of the Youth CND. The
daughters of a local shoe maker and shop who had been a conscientious objector
in WWII were also members. The wife of
Mervyn Peak who wrote Gormenghast held a social to raise funds for the small
adult CND. I remember being impressed by the set of drums in the hallway of
their home in Wallington, and learned that the drums belonged to one of their
sons who attended the same Private Catholic school and with whom I was to
establish brief contact four decades later when the book was turned into a play
and performed in Newcastle at what is now Northern Stage.
A young woman who had suddenly
appeared at a social event of the young socialists took an immediate interest in
me and because what she disclosed about her work, a secretary at the Admiralty
and her other background, I asked another member of the Executive Committee of
Wallington and Beddington Labour, a Young Socialist about her and she said the
first knowledge they had was from the social held to attract new members. This aspect only became of interest again when
talking with her about the Holy Loch experience and she commented with words in
effect “we knew.” What surprised me is given what she had disclosed about her
background that she could have the knowledge she alleged[CS3] .
By the time I commenced a full
12-month course to become a qualified child care officer at Birmingham
University, I had little contact with her or anyone in the protest and direct
action movements.
During the first academic term
and where my place had not only been arranged by the Home Office but course
fees were paid with a maintenance grant and which had to be supplanted because
of the number and location of the practical experience placements involved, my
care mother telephoned to say that my friend had been murdered on a Soho street
and the police wished to interview me. I arranged to see the head of the course
who advised me to take no action unless contacted by the police direct. However,
because I believed that I had information about her private life which I
considered relevant to finding her killer, I arranged to visit the police at a
local station in Birmingham and provided the information which was to be passed
to the investigating police force. It was not a formal statement under caution
and two officers present only had telephone contact with who I now assume was
the Metropolitan Police although what I believe was the home of her
grandparents was still then in Surrey. The gist of what I had said was
subsequently read over the phone to me by Birmingham Police and because it
broadly reflected what I had said, I agreed but was not asked to physically
sign.
I was not called to the
Inquest but heard from my family what had been reported in the local press. It
has been my understanding that the murder remained unsolved and there were
reasons reinforced by my work in child care that until recently I did not
consider it appropriate to make any inquiries. My mother who suffered severe
memory loss with psychosis as she approached her 100 years destroyed all the
press cuttings about me, and documentation about herself and me before going into
residential care, so deciding that I would include something my relationship and
the murder in the autobiography I used the Internet to see if press information
remained on any public file.
I discovered that the police
investigation papers had been sealed at National Archives for 100 years but
under Freedom of Information a copy has been made available of what is recorded
to have been my signed statement at Birmingham but which shows no signature and
which has been made available in full with the only the redaction of the names
of third parties I had mentioned. I remain in a dilemma because while the aspects
of the information which led me to make the statement are not included there
are continuing reasons in the interests of others not to pursue, as well as to
do so.
I mention now because it
demonstrates the gulf that can develop over decades between memory and written
record. When I decided to investigate, I believed the person had worked for the
Home Office because of the intelligence operation I assumed had taken place,
forgetting that Holy Loch was sea protest as well as on land and that the
official warning letter had come from the Admiralty. I had also forgotten that
I had been with her at a named location in London and I had introduced her to
two members of the Committee 100 who are not named[CS4] .
There is also another meeting in the street when she came out of a premise next
to the Two Eyes Coffee bar in Soho and to meeting her with a female friend
locally who was introduced including her then place of work. Memory without
supporting contemporary record must always be questioned and just not accepted
because the person saying it appears genuine and even the written record
without corroboration should be questioned.
An example immediately coming
to mind is one when as an Area Children’s officer, I took over a team where an
officer had just left and I decided to read through every file before deciding
if I agreed to the transfer notes that cases could be closed, or needed to be reallocated
based the departing officers stated level of recommended priorities and my
knowledge of the workload of the Senior child care officer and child care
officer team. I cannot now remember what it was in one file that made me decide
to make a personal visit before deciding on closure. The subject of the
original referral confirmed that it had been made but there had been none of the
subsequent visits which had been recorded in some detail. I believed the client
although the writing up was very good.
I will for now comment briefly
on the related issue of the ability of child care officers past and I suspect
present to keep records, to read what they and others have written and the
ability of supervisors, other
professionals and their managers other managers, magistrates and counclllors to
know what information is appropriate and
what questions therefore should be asked, together with my rusty memory of courts, police, records and statements
and one national inquiry during the
period 1962-2003. In Oxfordshire where I was attended courts on behalf of the
county it was agreed the Juvenile Court magistrates would hear reports and question
individual child care officers on children committed to the care of the local
authority instead of to approved schools and these sessions were attend by the
Children’s Officer and teams of officers in rotation. One got a frown of
disapproval at the time and a talking to afterwards if the magistrates asked
something and you did not know and could not be answered from the file. A
similar approach was taken when at the London Borough of Ealing when each of
the three area teams submitted summary reports on a selection of cases to a sub-committee
of the Children’s Committee in rotation and where the Children’s officer, the
Deputy, an ex head teacher, and the Assistant Children’s Officer attended and
where first as a senior and then as an Area officer I was expected to have read
the files of the selected cases before
one of the principals did the same and Councillors read and questioned the
child care officer.
By the time I arrived the
excuse that the files inherited from the former Middlesex Council were
inadequate and unacceptable was no longer acceptable because each file had a
record of relevant information with an updated summary and where regular
rereading of the whole file was essential for children who had spent and were
spending the greater part of their life in public care. I was only to spend a
few months getting know the sixty-six councillors before warning newly
appointed social workers to remember that the councillor would probably know
all that there was to know about an applicant seeking assistance for an
individual or family such was the nature of a stable community in the North
East.
Whether one is attempting to
pass the scientific research test, an academic thesis or beyond all reasonable
doubt test, there is no substitute for doing the work required and getting
others to check as well as judge. The other final example for now is what
happened during and independent inquiry in which I participated as an expert
panel member following the harrowing death of baby girl left alone by her
single parent.
The local authority was
negligent because it failed to recreate a missing file when it disappeared and
then to do so effectively before an Inquest, a criminal trial and before
the Inquiry hearings commenced and when
later in the inquiry, I asked a senior officer if I was right to assume that
the boarding out register had been checked and Deputy Director did not know the answer, the following morning it was
evident that two subsequent social workers, one who became a senior and went on
to be appointed by the Home Secretary to the original and what is not the
statutory Jay Inquiry panel did not know as all those in the authority, the
Area office, the Assistant and deputies the chief officers, the lawyers, and
the chief executives did not know of the register which the department kept by
law and brought to light two sets of foster parents who said they were
surprised not to have been contacted before and whose evidence was most significant.
I was struck about the issue
of politicians and magistrates knowing the right questions to ask if they had
been provided with the right basic information at the recent meeting of the
Home Affairs Select Committee when the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office was
recalled to explain why he and the
present Home Secretary had been economical in
disclosing what the former Home Secretary and our Prime Minister had
known, what the Home Office and present Home Secretary had known about the situation which developed throughout the period when
Dame Goddard had chaired the Panel following scrutiny by Government and an
appearance before the Home Affairs Committee. I apologise if I have
misunderstood the official record of the meeting and which I watched live at
the time. The Permanent Secretary appears to be saying that he was surprised
that the Committee had not pressed the Home Secretary further after she
stonewalled. One of the Committee Members asked how they were expected to ask
the right questions if the basic information was being deliberately withheld by
the Ministers and department!
I know also provide two example
of where culture, establishment protectionism, the limitations of oral
testimony and the need for a forensic examination of written records (and which
hopefully the monster digital data consuming and analysis programmes of today
have overcome) can be condensed first into one example from the Gates Inquiry.
At the request of the two other expert
panel members I had spent months going through all the documentation in
preparing our extended argument that had the professionals and their managers
made other choices, taken different decisions, the child may well have been
alive to this day and which was
different from the Chairman’s report which accurately reflected the position of
the barristers, the lawyers and their clerks employed by the authorities to
protect their reputations and limit the criticism. After the work was done, we
met and went through everything line by line, word by word, and one of two made
the brilliant suggestion that we should list the instances which came to more
than 100, although they were of different significance individually it was
their totality which we wished to communicate. The agreed document was
submitted to the Commissioning authorities for onward transmission to the core
participants to correct matters of fact. Unfortunately, the decision was taken
not to provide us with the final version of the Chairman’s report, now a senior
retired Judge, and it could be argued that the intention was to raise issues
which would discredit what we had prepared although in the event the media
focussed on what we had said because it fitted what they had anyway known
before the Inquiry commenced.
The point will appear trivial
now but we challenged in our report the oral statement by a health visitor on
being questioned that she had returned to the family home later the same day of
an earlier visit to check on the situation. The point the chairman made in his
report was that the written record showed that two visits had been made. This
was correct but if the record is closely examined it will be noted that the
writing is different as is initials which indicated that someone else visited
who may or may not have appreciated the situation and the background.
Twenty years later may care
mother was inappropriately and unnecessarily admitted to a district general
hospital against her expressed wishes and she died three weeks later from a
hospital infection. Over three years, I went through the then complaints
procedures of the local authority, the Family Practitioner Committee and the
District General Hospital, attending meetings, bringing in a local support
group in one instance, insisting on appeals, writing to Members of Parliament, one
of whom was the former Foreign Secretary and candidate for the Leadership of
the Labour party, having a meeting with the Deputy Chief Medical Officer at the
Department of Health, agreeing to an Inquiry by the Health Ombudsman and a
review by the Deputy Chief Ombudsman where some professionals and
managers lied, some their words against mine
but where in other situations there was recorded evidence and in the end
I stopped after weighing up the pro and cons of the options still available. When my
birth mother died in her 100th year, four years after the death of
my care mother. I could obtain a copy of her GP record as I was of mine for the
separate purpose of finding out if there was any record of my identity, but as
anticipated there were no records on either file until several years after the
creation of the National Health Service and the retirement of the GP who one
must suspect destroyed the records because of what they disclosed if my birth
mother had asked to do so.
I looked casually at first at
the social history and care plan, prepared for my birth mother and where one
had also been prepared for my care mother by the care manager, a senior manager
of the Social Services Department in the area where the two-sister lived and
had been appointed because of who I had been. They were excellent plans fully
implemented in so far as the two independent women were prepared to accept. My
mother first refused my suggestion of a walking stick in her early nineties
because they were for old people, but I now use in my seventies one of the
sticks they both agreed to use when going to mass on Sundays when accompanied
and not go out on their own and where following her retirement as a preliminary
school teacher, my birthmother insisted they went to mass every day of the
week.
Now here’s the rub. I took a
second look. Both had the initial M Smart but their Christian names were
different and it was evident what happened is that the reports had been placed
on each other’s file. The reports were
so good as case summaries that it was only if you read back into the files you
realised the report and the records did not match. There is evidence, and in
fairness when I met the GP he apologised four year before this and took
responsibility and retired, that this was start of an alarming chain of mistakes
and misunderstanding on the part of a dozen different people and where no one
at any time told me what the first mistake had been. When the GP visited, he
thought the person he was seeing was my birth mother and not her sister. Returning to the 1981 Inquiry hearings the
Consultant paediatrician in evidence broke down when admitting that it was only
when preparing to give evidence that he read back through the file and realised
for the first time what was there. He resigned and returned to his homeland.
I want to end for now with the
question how come the people of Scotland have voted to bring so many Scottish
Nationalist Party members to Westminster and to retain their control of the
devolved Parliament knowing their united opposition to the renewal of the
Trident carrying submarines when at the same time most the Parliamentary Labour
Party voted for their replacement? I wonder how many of those voting for the
mass extermination of human beings have been in a Blitz night after night, year
after year?
