Activist history

1 June 2011News

The last survivor of more than 70 million military personnel who served in the First World War died in Australia on 5 May, aged 110.

Claude Choules served in the British navy in the First World War, and then in the Australian navy in the Second World War.

Like Harry Patch, the last First World War veteran living in Britain, who died in 2009, Choules became a pacifist, refusing to celebrate Australia’s war memorial Anzac Day, or to join in commemoration marches.

Choules’s son Adrian told the Telegraph in 2010: “He used to say that while he was serving in the war he was trained to hate the enemy, but later he…

1 June 2011Feature

A PN board member looks back over the early years

Peace News had its origins in a pacifist study group convened by Humphrey Moore in Wood Green, London in 1936. Having completed their programme of studies they decided to engage in some form of practical action that would propagate the pacifist case to a wide audience. The publication of the first issue of Peace News on 6 June 1936 was the result, financed by donations from members of the study group and their friends.

The first issue had a print run of 5,000. Humphrey Moore was the…

1 June 2011Feature

Like much of the (male-dominated) British peace movement, Peace News had an uncomfortable time coming to terms with second-wave feminism in the 1970s. Here are some thought-provoking reflections on feminism and nonviolence published in PN over the last few decades.

“If I ever decided to go through Catonsville again, I would never act with men; it would be a women’s action for me or I wouldn’t act.... I don't want to waste the sisters and brothers we have by marching them off to jail and having mystical experiences or whatever they’re going to have.... I think you have to be serious and realise you could end up in jail but I hope that people would not seek it as we did.”

Mary Moylan, writing from underground (Peace News, 3 July 1970). Mary Moylan…

1 June 2011Feature

Albert Beale makes a personal selection of a few of the more noteworthy images and pieces of writing that have appeared in Peace News over the last 75 years. Some of the items are chosen because of their eloquence, some because they typify PN's often lonely and unique take on the world, and some because they connect with major world events. And sometimes all three.


The paper reports from the first meeting of War Resisters' International after the Second World War (10 January 1947)

The Hitler question

One of the challenges still regularly thrown at pacifists today is the “But what about the Second World War?” question. This might be thought to have been even harder to deal with at the time. But James Avery Joyce rose to the challenge on the front page of PN on 26 September 1941.

“At this…

1 June 2011Letter

Congratulations and thanks on PN attaining the ripe old age of 75; five years older than me! How the world has changed yet remained dangerous. Among the hundreds of events I cite three special memories.

My PN cuttings of 1961 (and arrest warrant) remind me of the Committee of 100 sit downs in London – I recall – no shouting or violence, but not enough involvement from the Labour movement either.  My notes of the Cuban Missile Crisis include a visit with local folk to Bertrand Russell…

1 May 2011Letter

Thanks for your considered letter last issue. Yes, we can certainly agree that we should struggle for an end to class division: maybe we still disagree about the need for a proletarian dictatorship. Who knows?

Trying to create a nonviolent revolution, like working for Swaraj in India, carries risks. That we might end up with civil war is one of these risks. Given the atrocities of war, everywhere, I sincerely hope PN continues to preach nonviolent revolution.

1 May 2011Review

Trine Day, 2010; 179pp; £9.23

I don’t doubt that this is an important book, it’s got a quote from Chomsky on the front, so it must be. And there are plenty of powerful stories in it that need to be heard. But, I did struggle to love it, which might perhaps be my problem.

I think it’s partly stylistic – the writer does tend to describe events in rather breathless “action hero” mode when a simpler clearer prose might do. But it’s also infused at other times with the kind of earnest dourness that gives the peace…

1 May 2011Review

Five Leaves Publications paperback; £5; available from Housmans and Freedom bookshops or post-free from Five Leaves, PO Box 8786, Nottingham NG1 9AW

This is a marvellous book about a marvellous man and it’s full of marvels. Remembering Colin Ward comprises transcripts of his friends’ tributes at his funeral – which various PN stalwarts attended – and his memorial meeting in Conway Hall four months later.

In fact, it amounts to a biography in just 50 pages and it makes you wonder at the hundreds of pages spent on lesser beings. To quote from its introductory note: “Colin Ward was an anarchist, a journalist, and an author of books…

1 May 2011Review

PM Press / Trade root music, 2010; 2 CD set; £14.99

This collection of spoken word and song was originally a project for the 250th anniversary of Paine’s birth. The spoken element consists of quotations from Paine’s work, newspaper reports and diary entries from the period. The songs address contemporary issues and are performed with the passion and sincerity one has come to expect from Leon Rosselson and Robb Johnson.

The excellent sleeve notes by the performers chart the development of the project since its beginning in 1987. The…

1 April 2009Comment

The British press has been marking the 25th anniversary of the start of the miners’ strike of 1984-5, a shattering event for many of us who lived through it. The strike was one of the major events of postwar British history, marking a turning point for owners and managers, supported by the state, in exerting their authority over working people.

The strike was ignited by a government programme of pit closures aimed at breaking the power of the National Union of Mineworkers, and thereby…

1 May 2008Review

(Seven Stories Press, 2007; ISBN 978-1583227718; 416pp; £13.99)  

Flying Close to the Sun tells how Cathy Wilkerson transformed herself from a nice middle class girl to a violent revolutionary. Describing how she became involved in left-wing politics as a student, the book charts her developing understanding of the political issues of the 1960s and ’70s and how she begins to see violence as a possible tool to respond to injustice.

Wilkerson is at her best when she describes the debates around the formation of the Weather Underground and the…

3 May 2007Comment

One of the most influential nonviolent actions of twentieth-century European history was carried out by men committed to violence -- the ten men of the IRA and INLA who fasted to death in British prisons in 1981, causing an earthquake in Irish politics.
5 May is the 26th anniversary of the death of the first hunger striker, Bobby Sands MP. This exchange centres on a new book by Dennis O'Hearn - Bobby Sands: nothing but an unfinished song - which has a different attitude to…