Ban the Bomb!. Martin Levy

Action Committee for a while. Hugh was married to Eileen and they had a daughter named Carolyn and a son, Jeremy. In fact, I have a picture of our Porton Down demonstration with Jeremy in it as a teenager. We all got on well. Hugh and Eileen were lovely people. When I came back to England, after a year in Ghana, towards the end of 1960, Hugh and Eileen put me up; I had a room with them. That, I should add, was a very busy time. It was the start of the Committee of 100 and we were building up to our first demonstration.

      Was it via Peace News that you first heard about Operation Gandhi?

      Indeed, it was. Which would have been in January 1952, so a couple of months or so after I’d registered as a conscientious objector and then a couple of months again before I went before the tribunal. Peace News carried an account of Operation Gandhi’s first demonstration, which took the form of a sit-down protest in front of the War Office. Anyway, after that I subscribed to the newspaper and became a distributor. I used to be sent several copies from Blackstock Road in London and go from house to house in Reigate selling them, knocking on doors, trying to interest people in the issues. I didn’t get many takers, but I remember one man who invited me in. He was really supportive, but that was probably because he was in the Communist Party. Then there was another man who was also welcoming and sympathetic, who turned out to be a Quaker. So, he was probably already a subscriber. Of course, my whole approach was so random [laughs]. I must have been crazy.

      Of course, many older people at this time would have associated Peace News with appeasement and the failures of the 1930s. Did that issue ever come up?

      I don’t think it did, at least I don’t remember people associating me with appeasement. The truth is that probably most people just weren’t interested either way.

      Getting back to Brock again, when, later on, he wrote up the Operation Gandhi story for Peace News he noted that although the War Office sit-down was hardly a success, it did have three enormous benefits. Not only did it bring David Hoggett and Roger Rawlinson into the organisation—I think Hoggett was some sort of ‘observer’ on the occasion—, but it brought you into it as well. About you, he was particularly flattering. He quotes a letter you wrote to him in May 1952, which, quote, ‘shows something of the mettle of the man who nearly ten years later was to organise the sit-down outside the Ministry of Defence for the Committee of 100 of which he is now the secretary.’ Basically, Brock was having second thoughts about one of Operation Gandhi’s projects, and you were urging him not to lose courage.

      I’ll have to look that one up [laughs].

       Would you agree that part of your appeal to Brock would have been your relative youth and the fact that like other young people you were full of new ideas and energies?

      That seems likely. People like Kathleen Rawlins were a bit older. Other young people who were also conscientious objectors were coming into the movement. You’ve mentioned David Hoggett, but there was also David Graham and Ian Dixon. Later on, those two went off to India together and met up with Vinoba Bhave of the Bhoodan Movement, though they were not all that impressed by him. They were also among the people who volunteered to go with Harold Steele to the site of the first British H-Bomb tests in the Pacific.

       When I looked through the minutes of Operation Gandhi I was struck by the extensive planning that went into your actions. On every occasion you and other committee members spent hours poring over bus timetables and maps, organising food deliveries and so on. And then another thing that struck me: you were very candid with the authorities.

      Well, that was part of the Gandhi tradition, at least as far as we understood it. You acted quite openly, so you informed the police of what you were planning to do. But, then of course, we also wanted the publicity. If you didn’t tell the police and the press what you were going to do, then they possibly wouldn’t have turned up. And that went on through the Direct Action Committee and even, to some extent, through the Committee of 100 period. If you were having a sit-down or you were planning a demonstration, you let the authorities know about it.

       And you’d engage the police in conversation. You’d ask them what they were doing and why they were doing it. That must have been pretty difficult, I imagine. Policemen can be pretty bloody-minded. Did it work?

      I think it did. It certainly meant that our relations in general with the police at that point were quite good, even when they were arresting us. We didn’t express any hostility towards the police. The attitude then was very much you do what you do and we do what we do. And if you happen to arrest us, well, that’s the law.

      As for the planning, after a while I really learned to enjoy it. I was always very thorough, partly because I felt responsible for people and partly, I suppose, because it was an opportunity to do something that I was good at. However, during most of the early period the lion’s share was done centrally, from London by Hugh or one of the other people, though I do remember organising a demonstration in Reigate or Redhill. I guess I did that one because I was local!

       Looking back now at the platform of Operation Gandhi, at least to the very early months, there isn’t the emphasis on the nuclear issue that I would have expected. Take one of the early leaflets, the platform is this: the withdrawal of American forces; the withdrawal of Britain from NATO; the disbanding of Britain’s armed forces; and the stopping of the manufacture of atom bombs in Britain. So, you weren’t then calling for unilateral disarmament.

      It was implied; it was implied in the whole disarmament programme. But, yes, I’m quite interested to be reminded of these early emphases. Maybe under J. Allen Skinner and Hugh Brock the word ‘unilateralism’ didn’t figure much, but it was implicit. The Whitehall War Office demo may have been against the military in general. But think of the places that we went to after that. Mildenhall was not just any big military base; it was also strongly suspected of carrying nuclear weapons. Then we also went to Aldermaston, to Porton Down and to Harwell. These were all places related to weapons of mass destruction.

       By the way, was Aldermaston the first action you took part in? That would have been the one in April 1952.

      Yes, I think it was. Following the picket, we held an open-air meeting in Aldermaston village, at which Stuart Morris, a big figure in the PPU, was one of the speakers. We set up a stand in the village and preached to a few people, though really the main audience for our demonstration was a herd of cows in the adjoining field. They took fright as we walked past and stampeded into another field [laughs].

      Fig 5: Stuart Morris addressing the public meeting organised by Operation Gandhi in Aldermaston village on 19 April 1952. The man on Morris’ right is Francis Deutsch. The woman holding the banner with the words, ‘His hope for the future’ is Doris Wheeler. University of Bradford, Special Collections, Cwl HBP 1/5.

       Why didn’t you go to the second demonstration?

      You mean the one at Mildenhall? I didn’t go to that for the simple reason that my dad blew his top over it. I was still working for him on the farm, and he said, ‘No, you can’t have the time off.’ The fact was, I suppose, he saw the Operation Gandhi type of activity as provocative. I think he actually said, ‘It’s waving a red rag at a bull.’ And then the idea of one of his sons going out and courting arrest or being fined and imprisoned was way outside his comfort zone.

       You mentioned in our first interview that Aldermaston wasn’t very far from Douai. Did any members of the school come along? There must have been some curiosity about what you were doing.

      No, I don’t think so. But Pat Chambers, the person I mentioned earlier, did write something jokey for the school magazine mentioning that, ‘Michael Randle was last seen on his way to Aldermaston.’

       Later on, you changed Operation Gandhi’s name to the Non-Violent Resistance Group (NVRG). Why was that?

      I think that partly came out of discussions with some of our Indian friends, who were unhappy about linking Gandhi’s name to something