Ban the Bomb!. Martin Levy

of unresisting demonstrators. But, finally, it was the police who backed down. Can you think of any times from your own experience when the technique of moral jui-jitsu worked for you like that?

      I don’t think that I was ever quite in that situation. But certainly, the way that we responded to the use of force at demonstrations was very much part and parcel of that general philosophy. Probably, many policemen in those days would have expected someone they were arresting in the context of a political demonstration to offer some form of physical resistance; whereas the essence of our approach was not to do that, so we offered them resistance of a different kind. We didn’t threaten or abuse them, and that made some kind of rapport possible.

       I get the sense that Gregg’s is a very practical book?

      Oh yes. We took it and other literature on non-violence as a guide to how we should react and to how we should campaign. We went to it for inspiration and for examples. The very interesting thing to me now is that Gregg was looking at the whole psychology of non-violent resistance. But then Gene Sharp came along and changed the terminology from moral to political jui-jitsu, so it wasn’t just the individual reaction; it was how it would affect the politics if you didn’t comply, but you didn’t violently resist. And that was a very interesting shift.

       Tell me more about that.

      Okay, I’ll give you an example. In India, it wasn’t that the opponent was necessarily converted, though of course some people may have been. The real difficulty for the colonial power was enforcing laws when there was mass non-compliance. You had a large population who were simply defying the laws, that is the ones they considered unjust or unreasonable. And what did the authorities do about it? They couldn’t put millions of people in jail [laughs]. If a small number of people had used force, okay they could have dealt with that. But in India the resistance was widespread. I think that Richard Gregg, although he uses the term moral jui-jitsu, was also pointing to the political difficulties of dealing with that kind of resistance.

      I was so taken with the idea of non-violent resistance and the power of it, that I even began to think of it as something that you could use on almost every occasion. Once, following a meeting in Redhill, I took a shortcut home, and saw this big man, swaying from side to side, coming directly towards me. Then he came right up to me and grabbed my wrist. And I thought to myself, what the hell am I going to do about this? I could have resisted violently or at least struggled to free myself from his grasp as, I suppose, most people in that situation would have done. But, instead, I didn’t make any attempt to escape his grasp, but simply stood there and spoke to him very calmly and very rationally, telling him where I had been and where I was going. And as I did so, I felt his grip loosening. Then he let go of me. It turned out that he owned a house nearby which had just been burgled and that he thought that I was the burglar! I remember afterwards thinking to myself: this is non-violent resistance work. But, of course, it had taken place in a particular context.

      What about the other book you mentioned: Bart de Ligt’s The Conquest of Violence?

      Like Gregg’s book, that was also from the 1930s. He too was very much in the Gandhian tradition but at the same time he also looked towards other methods of struggle, notably those employed by the anarcho-syndicalists. He gave examples not only of Gandhi’s methods, but also of those of many others, including Abdul Ghaffar Khan. He may even have mentioned Shelley and William Morris; I’m not sure. He certainly has a few pages on Ruskin and Tolstoy. But, all that said, I didn't see the books as having a very different approach, but as sort of backing one another up. De Ligt does make some criticisms of Gandhi. Of course, he was writing at a time when India hadn’t yet got its independence. But de Ligt was long dead by then; he died in September1939.

       There’s a line in the book which I find particularly compelling. In fact, you’ve already quoted part of it: ‘The more there is of real revolution, the less there is of violence: the more of violence, the less of revolution.’

      That’s right. Yes, that did influence us profoundly.

       The book also has this huge appendix called ‘Plan of Campaign against all War and all Preparation for War’. Can you tell me what you remember of that?

      What I remember is that we discussed it and, though we never did so, we planned to reprint it as a pamphlet because it showed the politics and many of the facets of the kinds of resistance that we were interested in and promoting. It gave lots of examples showing how you could work at both the individual and at the collective level. It was very influential.

       Before we get onto Hugh Brock and the policies and the activities of Operation Gandhi, do you remember much about the other people involved in the organisation? Hilda von Klenze, for instance?

      Yes. She was very much involved. She may have come over before the war. She had quite a distinct German accent. Later on, she married Stuart Morris, the head of the PPU. So, from Hilda von Klenze she became Hilda Morris.

      Then I remember a disabled lady called Mazella Newman, who was closer to communism than the majority of us. In fact, if you got her onto the subject of the Soviet Union, she used to become quite defensive. I don’t think that she was a member of the party though; it was probably more a matter of sympathy. She also worshiped Gandhi and the other leaders of the liberation movement in India, to the extent that she used to get quite emotional whenever any Indian people came to see us or Gandhi was mentioned. The other thing I remember about her was that she was a regular at Peace News on Wednesday evenings when the paper was packed to go out for arrival at people’s houses on Friday. That was her big thing, in fact. She was a very nice woman.

       What about Kathleen Rawlins? Any recollections of her? I mention her particularly because Brock in one article I’ve seen describes her as an ‘ideological’ influence on Operation Gandhi.

      That’s true. She was a major contributor to our discussions. I don’t think that she published a great deal. But she was someone we looked to for her knowledge of Gandhi and of Gandhi’s methods. She was very close to Hugh and Eileen Brock and a very significant presence.

       A Quaker? I suppose that some of these ladies were. There was certainly a preponderance of women. Another one I might mention is Doris Wheeler.

      Yes, several of the meetings were held at her house. The daughter of Tom Wardle, who was another prominent member of Operation Gandhi, was in touch with me about her recently. Tom, by the way, was a clergyman, who had worked in South Africa with Gandhi’s son, Manilal Gandhi, and so was able to give personal examples of his involvement in the campaigns there. I remember having discussions with him during our demonstrations. He was an impressive man who founded something called the Congress of England, which looked at the constructive side of Gandhi’s teaching. Then he also wrote quite a lot for Peace News. Anyway, his daughter sent me some photos that were taken in Doris Wheeler’s house. Her name is Shanti, which means Peace in Hindi. Tom and his wife brought Shanti, who was then a baby, to one of our meetings.

      Another person I remember from the discussions was Rufus de Pinto, an artist, always a bit scruffy and unkempt, but a big walker and a very interesting man. A few years after the Mildenhall demo, he died while walking on the hills somewhere. Hugh Brock wrote an excellent obituary of him in Peace News.

       Can you tell me something about Hugh now? Some of the meetings, I believe, took place at his house, in Lordship Road, Stoke Newington.

      That’s right. Hugh’s house was at number 79 and that was where we held most of our meetings. I’d come up at weekends from Reigate or wherever it was on the train and we’d sit and drink tea—it was all very English—and talk about Gandhi and his ideas, ideas that would lead to the possibility of arrest and imprisonment, so in that sense moving us away from that totally respectable middle-class environment that many of us, I suppose, had grown up in. Usually, Hugh would take the lead. All in all, he was a very genuine, thoughtful man, a Quaker and very self-effacing, though his contribution to the peace movement was huge. He had a background in publishing and was assistant editor of Peace News, before taking over from J. Allen