Activist history

1 February 2024News in Brief

PN worker Emily Johns is interviewed in a new 30-minute documentary about a First World War war resister who sheltered men avoiding conscription.

War on Lies: The Alice Wheeldon Campaign was made by young filmmaker Elizabeth McGlynn as part of her master’s degree at Birmingham university.

Alice Wheeldon, her daughter Winnie Mason and her son-in-law Alf Mason were jailed in 1917 on trumped-up charges of conspiring to shoot the prime minister, David Lloyd George…

1 February 2024Review

Pluto Press, 2023; 376pp; £14.99

Back in 2008, the 24-year old Plane Stupid campaigner Dan Glass was invited to Downing Street to receive an award and took the opportunity to superglue himself to the then-prime minister, Gordon Brown.

But Dan’s life as a campaigner neither began or ended with eco-activism.

Dan was a queer school kid who came out after Section 28 – which prohibited the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ by local authorities – became law in 1988.

Dan writes about how he would ‘slink out on the…

1 February 2024Review

Housmans Bookshop 2023; 190pp; £10; www.housmans.com

Every now and then, I get sent a book to review which is a sheer joy from start to finish. Peace! Books! Freedom! is such a book.

A short gallop through the history of 5 Caledonian Road, the Kings Cross home of Housmans Bookshop, Peace News and many other radical organisations, it’s a great story of activism, resistance and community.

It begins with the generous donation by pacifist curate, Tom Willis that enabled Peace News to buy a building in…

1 February 2024Review

Pluto Press, 2023; 248pp; £16.99

From Che Guevara to Gandhi and Lenin, revolutionaries and historians of revolutions have tended to focus on so-called ‘Great Men’.

She Who Struggles is an admirable attempt to correct this imbalance, an edited collection highlighting women who played key roles in revolutionary, anti-colonial and socialist struggles during the twentieth century, including in Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Kurdistan, Mali and Palestine.

‘Within these movements, women’s liberation was often placed as…

1 October 2023Review

Fernwood Publishing 2023; 240pp; £15.99

I first joined Women in Black (WiB) after the pandemic when people were still cautious about gathering.

Every Wednesday, we stand for an hour at the foot of the Edith Cavell statue in Central London. The passers-by are tourists, school trips, commuters in suits, daredevil cyclists, people dressed-up for a night out, theatre-goers, street homeless.

A few, usually men, react strongly to our standing there, apparently affronted by our call for an end to militarism and war.

1 October 2023Comment

Milan Rai reflects on the recent Active Resistance to the Roots of War (ARROW) reunion

In September, there was a reunion in London of the nonviolent direct action (NVDA) affinity group ARROW, something like 20 years after the group folded. Folk who had not seen each other for decades came together to catch up; it was a wonderful afternoon.

For me, ARROW was where I learned how to work with other people in a non-hierarchical group, or a group that was trying to put equality into practice. ARROW was my peace movement university. We didn’t just do actions, though we did a…

1 June 2023Feature

At the Journal of Peace and Nonviolence peace research workshop

By the end, my head was buzzing with new ideas, insights and possibilities. Should ‘care’ be the foundation for radical politics rather than ‘justice’? Is this another way of asking: aren’t relationships the foundation for (sustained and collective) action for change? (That made me wonder also about the relationship-based way of working common in community organising, and how much single-issue campaigning might have to learn from that.) How do submarines today seem normal when, at their…

1 June 2023Review

University of Hertfordshire Press, 2021; 166 pp; £16.99

Following the January 2023 mass trespass on Dartmoor, the 2014 – 2018 campaign to stop the felling of trees in Sheffield and the government’s 2011 U-turn on the privatisation of the forests, Saving The People’s Forest is a timely reminder that activists working today are part of a long line of popular struggles to protect public access to nature in the UK.

The book’s title refers to Epping Forest, on the border of Greater London and Essex. At 5,900 acres, it is the largest…

26 February 2023Blog

A tribute to a warm and humorous peace activist and community worker.

The death in January of Neil Collins has left a gap in my own and many other people’s lives.

Neil Collins was one of those individuals who, though involved in many campaigning groups and organisations over the years, was not someone who wrote all that much.

He was very knowledgeable about many aspects of the early history of the anarchist movement and the peace movement. I learnt a lot about this history and honed much of my radical political thinking while having long chats…

1 February 2023Feature

What Stop the War and the direct actionists missed in 2003

Could the anti-war movement have prevented the US-UK invasion of Iraq in March 2003? I think there was a real possibility, slim though it was.

In my view, the British anti-war movement came very close to halting British participation in the invasion – and derailing the war entirely.

Well, that’s not only my view. Just days before the war began, the British government told the US government that it might be forced to pull out of the invasion force. Britain’s ministry of defence…

1 October 2022Review

Ban the bomb!: Ibidem, 2021; 290pp; £26  Rebel verdict: Irene, 2022; 512pp; £25.50 from pmpress.org.uk or £22.50 (+ p&p if ordering) from Housmans bookshop: https://housmans.com/

Among the first books I read when I got involved in the peace movement in the late 1990s, three were by Michael Randle: Civil resistance (on the history, theory and practice of nonviolence), How to defend yourself in court (a useful instructional) and The Blake Escape (co-authored with Pat Pottle, their thrilling account of how and why they helped to break superspy George Blake out of Wormwood Scrubs prison and smuggle him out of the country).

Unhappily all…

1 October 2022Review

Pen & Sword, 2022; 272pp; £25

Symon Hill’s impressively comprehensive history of the modern UK peace movement takes us from the moment in 1980 when Ann Pettit had the idea of a women’s walk to Greenham to the 2021 supreme court Ziegler ruling which quashed the conviction of four protesters who blockaded the DSEI arms fair in London.

In between, The Peace Protestors maps the growth of peace camps in the 1980s, the Falklands/Malvinas War, the Ploughshares Movement, Robin Cook’s doomed ethical…

15 December 2021Resource

An oral and visual history of Peace House, home for over 60 years to Peace News, Housmans Bookshop and many activist groups. A project by On The Record.

5 Cally Road

1 December 2021Review

Mariner Books, 2020; 448pp; £13

With the Vietnam War still raging, in early 1971, a coalition of American anti-war groups converged on Washington, DC, around May Day (1 May) for a series of protests, including an attempt to shut down the city.

‘If the government won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government’ was the unofficial motto of the movement.

Though it remains one of the lesser-known demonstrations against the US attack on Vietnam, by 6 May more than 12,000 people had been taken into custody, making…

1 October 2021Feature

Erica Smith reviews a new book from Four Corners

The eighth of Four Corners’ picture-rich ‘Irregulars’ publications celebrates the powerful heritage of banners produced for and at Greenham Common Peace Camp between late summer 1981 and when the camps were finally disbanded in 2000.

Banners made by one of the Peace Camp founders, Thalia Campbell, often with the help of her husband, Ian, her children, friends and others, are well-represented in this book. Thalia was one of the women on the inaugural march from Cardiff to Greenham…