Ban the Bomb!. Martin Levy

to that.’ But it was Dr Kerr who was the main influence.

       Did your parents join the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) or any of the other pacifist organisations?

      No, I don’t think either of them ever did that. Neither of them were really joiners. But on the matter of conscientious objection my father certainly had strong views as he had registered as a conscientious objector himself. I would say that my mother was anti-war on moral and humanitarian grounds.

       I used to think that your pacifism stemmed from your feelings about the bomb.

      Well, yes, that was a central consideration. In fact, in the first draft of my statement applying for recognition as a conscientious objector I did not take a totally pacifist position but argued that nuclear weapons were indiscriminate and contravened just war principles. But, really, I think it was discussing the matter with Dr Kerr that was the tipping point on the issue. When the A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki I was in Ireland and I was hardly aware of what had occurred. On my return to England I did speak about it to one of my aunts, my father’s sister, Margery, who told me how it had destroyed a whole city. But only later on did I think, ‘Oh, my God’. And then, of course, I had another reason to think a lot more deeply about pacifism and conscientious objection. The Cold War had begun and there was a lot of talk of war with Russia.

       Let’s go back a bit now. Surely there must have been some discussion of conscription at school?

      No, I can’t say there was. We knew, of course, that at a certain age you were expected to go into the army or into one of the other services for eighteen months or two years or whatever it was. But, really, I was very naive. In fact, one of the other boys told me he didn’t think it was possible to be a conscientious objector in peacetime.

       You discussed political and moral issues more generally though?

      Of course, we were Catholics after all. Morals were a very important part of the curriculum. I remember when the 1950 elections came up—this is about politics now—, I took part in a school debate with a boy called Pat Chambers, who went on to work for The Daily Telegraph. He spoke from the top table and I spoke from the floor, but both of us for the Labour Party. As was the custom, there was a vote both before and after the debate and the only boy to vote with us at the beginning changed his vote at the end! Then I remember one master saying to me, ‘You, Michael, could argue the hind legs off a donkey’, because I was always getting into these long discussions. Another teacher, a priest, Father Dean, ‘Dixie Dean’, used to call me Karl Marx, so you could say that I had quite a reputation.

       Do you have any regrets now that you didn’t join up? After all, it wasn’t all bull and the real possibility of fighting in Korea or somewhere in the empire. I’ve spoken to others of your generation who have described their National Service as amongst the best years of their lives, not least for exposing them to people from different backgrounds.

      Not in the least. Arthur did his National Service though. He was deferred whilst studying at the London Polytechnic, and then joined the army. I remember receiving a very friendly letter from him in which he said that he was finding the life that I’d rejected very interesting and how amused he was at all the nonsense of shouting sergeant majors and so on and at how the tears would well up in the young lads’ eyes. But, of course, he’d been to public school, so he’d been well prepared! If I remember rightly, he reached the rank of sergeant himself.

       You did join the PPU didn’t you? Was that before or after you registered as an objector?

      I don’t know for certain, but I think that it was probably a little earlier. I registered, I think, sometime late in 1951. Yes, I think it would have been before that.

       What about the Central Board for Conscientious Objectors, Fenner Brockway’s outfit? Did you receive any advice from that?

      Yes, I did. I wrote to them and I received some indications of the sorts of questions that objectors were asked. In fact, maybe it was through them that I learned about the Peace Pledge Union in the first place.

       You’ve said elsewhere that much of your application to the tribunal was ‘pure Huxley’, not meaning the novels, of course, but his various writings on pacifism.

      Yes. I was very much influenced by one of Huxley’s essays, in particular. Actually, it was more of a pamphlet than an essay. What are you going to do about it? The Case for Constructive Peace. In fact, I still have a copy of it somewhere. And then there was another book that I think I read about that time, Richard Gregg’s The Power of Non-Violence. That book, by the way, was very influential not just on my generation but also on the generation before mine. Then I read it again, a bit later as well, at about the same time as I got involved in direct action.

       I should say that I did a sneaky compare-and-contrast sort of thing between the Huxley text and your application for C.O. status before talking to you today, and it really is, as you’ve described it, ‘pure Huxley’. You’ve taken entire sentences and hardly bothered to re-write them. Which makes me think that the tribunal was … . How can I put this? A bit remiss? I would have thought they would have been more tuned in to what young people were reading.

      I’d forgotten just how much influence he had upon me.

       For instance, in the application you raise some of the common objections to pacifism, and then you dismiss them using Huxley’s arguments. I also have a further observation: the nuclear issue is hardly mentioned. There’s a line, but that’s about it. It doesn’t seem to have been much on your mind, which isn’t the impression I get from some of your later writings.

      That’s interesting. You know, when I did the first draft of the application, I didn’t take a completely pacifist point of view. As I said earlier, I said then that nuclear weapons were indiscriminate and that it was on those grounds that I wasn’t prepared to be part of the military. But then I read Huxley and was influenced by Dr Kerr, so I went down the completely pacifist route. And then I also discovered Gandhi, though without learning much about the whole history of what he had been doing. I had, I think, a rather simplified view of how Gandhi had operated. But yes, your observation is interesting, the fact that I hadn’t emphasised the nuclear issue.

       One, I think, very valid point you make, again it’s very Huxleyan, is about the connection between ends and means. You use the example of the Russian Revolution.

      Well, Catholic teaching insists that the ends do not justify the means. I concluded from that that killing even for a just cause was wrong. Huxley I think goes further and concludes that the means determine the ends. For instance, if you use lethal violence to achieve a revolution the result will be a violent and unjust society. As another writer on non-violence and revolution, Bart de Ligt, puts it, ‘The more violence, the less revolution.’

       By the way, on the subject of communism were you drawn to any of its variants?

      Certainly not to any of the authoritarian forms. The idea of equality did appeal to me. But the top-down, Stalinist, style of leadership? No, I’ve always hated that.

      Would that have had anything to do with reading Orwell, say, his Nineteen Eighty-Four, for instance?

      It may have done. I did read Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, but I can’t remember at what age exactly. Nineteen Eighty-Four had a big influence on me when I did read it, but that may have been a bit later, probably sometime in the late fifties.

      What about one of the other very influential anti-communist books of the period, The God that Failed, with the striking essays by Koestler and others?

      Yes, that had a profound impact upon me. I forget which of the essays it was. It may have been the one by Gide or Spender. But it contained an account of one of the great leader’s speeches. Apparently, everyone had to clap. And they were frightened of what could happen to them if they were among the first to stop clapping. And then there was another thing that stayed with