Obituary

27 April 2012Comment

Michael Randle on the playwright and Peace News supporter John Arden who died aged 82 last month. 

John Arden at an 80th birthday tribute in 2010.

John Arden, who died on 28 March at the age of 81, was one of that generation of dramatists, novelists, film-makers and critics who transformed cultural life in Britain in the late 1950s and 1960s. They included, among others, fellow dramatists John Osborne, Shelagh Delaney, Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker and Brendan Behan; the theatre directors Joan Littlewood and William Gaskill; poets such as Christopher Logue…

31 March 2012Comment

My mother Raymonde ‘Ray’ Hainton, peace activist, Quaker and former teacher and medical social worker, died peacefully on 19 February 2012, aged 90.

As a result of her wartime evacuation to Cambridge, she met and married fellow-historian Godfrey Hainton. Ray’s wartime experiences left her with a strong commitment to working for a better world, and she was a campaigner throughout most of her long and active life. After many years of religious uncertainty, she became a Quaker in…

1 March 2012Comment

Dennis Gould surveys the life of the radical poet

One of the most important poems of the 20th century was Christopher Logue’s “To My Fellow Artists”, first printed in the New Statesman in 1958 and published by Logue as a posterpoem designed by Germano Facetti shortly afterwards. This was followed in the mid-’60s by half a dozen others including “Be Not So Hard”, “London”, “Crime One”, “Goodnight Ladies” and “I Shall Vote Labour”.

Logue took part in the famous International Poetry Incarnation gig at the Albert Hall in 1965 where 7,000…

24 January 2012Comment

Linguist, musician and mother of six


Frances at USAF Hythe, Southampton, 9 November 1983 when Greenham women set up peace camps at the 102 US bases around Britain, in support of their court case in the US against the siting of cruise missiles in the UK. PHOTO: Paul Carter

Frances MacKeith became a Quaker in the 1960s when she moved to Winchester with her husband Stephen. Here, as a lone ‘peacenik’, she was regarded with a mixture of respect and apprehension as the Peace Woman…

1 December 2011Comment

Veteran Welsh peace activist dies at 87

Olwen, one of Wales's most committed and colourful peace campaigners, has died in Aberystwyth aged 87.

She was vice-chair of CND Cymru for 20 years, a representative for Wales on the UK CND council, a member of the International Advisory Group, a founder member of Aberystwyth Peace Network, and the powerhouse for the Chernobyl Childrenís Project in mid-Wales.

Olwen thrived on company and she spread cheer. It was this that attracted…

1 October 2011Comment

Life-long activist and "guerilla anarchist" who helped expose plans for a paramilitary coup and stood trial for "incitement to disaffect" British troops in Northern Ireland.

John Hyatt, a member of the Peace News staff collective 1973-75 gave us the slogan “Don't Vote – it only encourages them”.

I first met him as a young man representing the Youth Section of the Peace Pledge Union at the WRI Council meeting in Vienna in August 1968.

Nearby Czechoslovakia was experiencing what turned out to be the last days of the Prague Spring. On the last day of the council meeting a WRI delegation, which I think included John, travelled to Bratislava at the…

1 September 2011Comment

Historian, novelist, anti-war activist and author of "The Making of a Counter Culture".

Theodore Roszack, historian, novelist, social critic and anti-war activist, was born in Chicago and had an academic career at universities across America.

Of 1964, Roszack wrote: “For those who were part of it, the American peace scene for the years 1963-64, during that paralytic lull following the partial test-ban treaty and preceding the recent, turbulent rise of the ‘New Left’, was rapidly suffocating in pessimism and dismal introspection”. In the summer of ’64 he became editor of…

3 September 2010Comment

He was born into a solidly Anglican line of squires, parsons, professors and army officers, and spent happy school holidays in Oxford during and after the First World War.

In 1934, as a young graduate, he sailed to Trinidad to work as an oil refinery operator. Here he met people of Indian descent and found himself identifying with the disadvantaged.

Subsequently, during theological training in Birmingham, he abandoned plans to be a clergyman and instead became a…

3 July 2010Comment

Jeffrey Segall was a champion of world peace through a democratically reformed United Nations. Specifically, he was convinced that peace would be possible only when “We, the peoples” have an established place within the UN system alongside our governments.

He came to his passion for peace from a background in medicine and left-wing politics. He was a member of the Communist party in his youth, leaving when disillusioned by the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia.…

3 May 2010Comment

On 10 March, Gene Stoltzfus died in Fort Frances, Ontario, Canada when his heart stopped while he was bicycling near his home on the first spring-like day of the year. He is survived by his wife Dorothy Friesen and many peacemakers who stand on the broad shoulders of his 70 years of creative action.

Gene was the founding director of Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), an international faith-based organisation that sends teams of four to eight peacemakers to partner with local…

3 April 2010Comment

Five years ago, I went to visit [the former Labour Party leader] Michael Foot, when I was writing a history of CND. He was kind, witty and utterly committed to nuclear disarmament. His vision for nuclear abolition, here and internationally, was far-sighted.

It cannot have been lost on him that many of his views, for which he had been so pilloried in the past, are now common currency at the highest levels and across the political spectrum.

We talked about his role in…

3 April 2010Comment

Howard Zinn, US historian and activist, died in January of a heart attack at the age of 87. Perhaps best known as the author who challenged the status quo with A People’s History of the United States, Zinn was at the forefront of the early civil rights movement and anti-war protests against the Vietnam War.

“He was fearless,” Noam Chomsky said. “He said the right things, said them eloquently, and inspired others to move forward in ways they wouldn’t have done, and…

3 March 2010Comment

John Rety, former editor of the anarchist newspaper Freedom and good friend of Peace News, has died at the age of 79.

John had several passions apart from politics, including chess (“the most Bohemian player we are ever likely to meet”, said the late Bob Wade, former British chess champion) and poetry (“He ran the only truly democratic poetry reading venue, where anyone was allowed to get up and read one poem before a guest reader,” said poet Jehane Markham).

3 March 2010Comment

Colin Ward was the leading anarchist thinker and writer of post-war Britain. His was an anarchism that was at once constructive, creative and immensely practical. It drew critical, but sympathetic attention from many outside the anarchist movement. It still holds many lessons for the left.

Born in 1924 in London, Colin gravitated to the anarchist movement while serving in the army during the Second World War. Towards the end of the war, the anarchist newspaper Freedom (or War…

3 February 2010Comment

A PN editor from 1976-1982, Chris Jones continued helping with PN as a volunteer until June 1983. Chris died suddenly in his sleep on 6 December of heart failure. He had felt ill the previous day playing in a marching band in Oswestry where he lived, and returned home early.

Howard Clark writes: Chris began helping Peace News just as I was leaving. He had come to pacifism by a strange route – having joined the RAF after school, and first became a vegetarian and only later a pacifist.…