Obituary

1 February 2015Comment

Mike Phipps looks back at the life and activism of a radical writer

I first worked with Mike on Labour Briefing in the late 1980s. For those who don’t know, Briefing was – and still is – a magazine for socialist activists in the Labour Party that began life in the early 1980s, when it played a key role in the election of Ken Livingstone as the left-wing leader of the Greater London Council. By the late 1980s, those heady days seemed far behind us, following the catastrophic defeats of the movement under Thatcher’s government. Many at this time…

1 February 2015Comment

David Lane, lifelong pacifist and peace activist, died in September at the age of 80 after a long, and latterly very sad, struggle with Parkinson’s.

David met his wife, Nancy, when they were both members of PYAG (Pacifist Youth Action Group) and where they were also to meet Ian Dixon, currently chair of Housmans Bookshop and Peace News Trustees. David and Ian were both conscientious objectors and served as porters at The Royal Free Hospital in London from 1952-1955.

28 September 2014Comment

Peace Tax Seven activist & Quaker dies, age 65

Roy Prockter, who died suddenly on 18 June, aged 64, from a heart attack, was a chartered accountant and an active Quaker, who made both his professional skills and his commitment to nonviolence available to a number of radical pacifist groups and organisations.

One of his main concerns was the compulsory deduction of taxes contributing towards maintaining armed forces and providing lethal weapons.

He became active in the Peace Tax Campaign (now Conscience – Taxes for…

9 June 2014Comment

The Quaker meeting at Pwllheli Community Centre on Saturday 3 May, following the sudden death of Arfon Rhys, was, in many ways, unusual. Never had the small local group of Friends seen so many people at a Welsh Quaker meeting. The silence was enriched when someone felt moved to speak quietly of Arfon: family, students, peace campaigners, Welsh language campaigners, colleagues and friends. By contrast, the buffet provided by allotment friends afterwards was far from quiet.

People had…

9 June 2014Comment

Arlo Tatum played significant roles in the US, British and international pacifist movements. Born into a Quaker family in Iowa, he politely wrote in 1941, aged 18, to the US attorney general announcing his refusal to register for the draft – US conscription – imposed in advance of US entry to the Second World War. He was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in the Federal Correctional Institution, Sandstone, Minnesota, the youngest prisoner when he entered.

A natural baritone, Arlo, on…

1 April 2014Comment

Labour party left-winger and committed peace activist Tony Benn was one of those dangerous figures who can start to make you believe that the system might work after all.

He was a hereditary peer who campaigned (successfully) to be allowed to go back to being a commoner – and a member of the house of commons (where he served for 50 years). He was a cabinet minister who supported workers…

18 March 2014Comment

Few colleagues would have known that Sheila Oakes’ father was lieutenant-general sir Robert Sturges of the royal marines, until Sheila strategically revealed the fact during a TV debate. Her opponent, general sir John Hackett, argued that peace activists were naïve. ‘I’ll have you know I’m the daughter of a general,’ Sheila retorted, and, to their great surprise, her team won the debate.

With her sharp mind, fluent powers…

21 February 2014Comment

On the back of his precocious autobiography Sum Total, first published when he was 23, Ray is quoted: ‘I am for the working classes, for the underdog, for the seedy and the left behind… and the England that seemed and still seems an impossible dream.’

In a dim corner of Ray’s home from home, the Hard To Find Café in Nottingham, where I attended his wake, the photographs on display told their own story: young good-looking Ray, slight of build with attempted Tony…

19 December 2013Comment

Our dear friend and comrade Howard Clark was a mainstay of Peace News since the 1970s and of War Resisters' International (WRI) since the 1980s.

Howard's sudden death has left us shocked and bereaved, and with an irrational sense of outrage that he has left us so unexpectedly. He was only 63 and in the middle of helping organise next summer’s WRI conference in South Africa. He leaves a gap which others must strive to fill. It will be difficult, and the following overview and appreciation of his life as a peace activist, organiser and researcher will give some indication of the scale of the challenge.

But before reviewing his…

1 October 2013Comment

Di McDonald remembers a 'tiny woman of towering strength'

Known by Greenham Women and Cruisewatch as Jean Witney, this tiny woman of towering strength brought love, determination and common sense to her work as another peace woman extraordinaire. In an Oxford Mail interview, Jean once said: ‘Going to Greenham was a seminal point in my life. I don’t know what it was about the place, but you got a great positive strength from being there and…

5 July 2013Comment

If I’ve ever met a personification of the word ‘staunch’, I think it must have been Pat Allen. Over many decades, Pat was a linchpin of London Region CND and an indispensable part of the national CND office. 

Pat was born at the beginning of the Great Depression, and his family lived on or near the bread line for most of the decade. His father had lost part of a lung due to a gas attack during the First World War. His mother, who often told him of her recollections of that war,…

8 February 2013Comment

Leslie Gordon Harris, Christian pacifist and Second World War conscientious objector, died at West Middlesex Hospital in December, aged 96.

Born at 155 Hither Green Lane, Lewisham, in 1916, he was brought up in the Congregational Church, and in 1935 responded to the reverend Dick Sheppard’s invitation to declare that ‘I renounce war and will never support or sanction another’, joining the Peace Pledge Union. 

Having left Colfe’s Grammar School in 1932, Leslie started working at Barclay’s bank in 1935 after a brief spell working for stockbrokers in the City. He married Barbara Freeman – a shorthand typist at Barclay’s…

8 February 2013Comment

In December, our good friend Ian Thomas died, unexpectedly, aged 49. He had a heart attack while asleep at home in Southampton.

We got to know Ian in the early 1990s when starting Women’s Aid to Former Yugoslavia. Ian had co-founded Tantric Technologies in 1989 – a worker’s co-op providing IT services. He – and Clive Debenham, who died last year – helped us become early adopters of the then-new email technology to communicate with women’s and peace groups in the region via the ZaMir network. He also did time in our warehouses, packing and loading aid onto the trucks.

Over the following 20 years, we had…

1 December 2012Comment

Documentary maker, author and activist

Born in Hull and raised in Hackney, Dai Vaughan was a teenage poet when in 1951 he attended the opening of Britain’s National Film Theatre in London. He recalled: ‘That you could see shots or images as a complex metaphor was a revelation.’

His breakthough as an editor came after working with fellow London Film School alumni Jane Wood and David Naden on Gala Day. Filmed in 1962, using mute hand-held 16mm cameras, Gala Day’s structure and use of unsynchronised sound…

17 October 2012Comment

3 January 1946 – 28 September  2012

Peace News found itself involved – directly or indirectly – in several of the spate of political trials which were a feature of life in Britain during the 1970s. One of these was the ABC official secrets case; Crispin Aubrey, the 'A' of the trial's name, has died suddenly, aged 66.

Those of us editing PN at the time were hauled up before the lord chief justice for naming an anonymous witness due to give evidence in the ABC case, and both lots of defendants ended up…