In 1960, when having milk delivered to your doorstep each morning was more common than it is now, the independent Kent Direct Action Group designed a small pink leaflet. In the centre of the leaflet a cross was cut through the paper. This enabled the leaflet to be slotted over a milk bottle, as shown in this photograph.

How the leaflet might have looked on a milk bottle!

‘Poisoned milk!’ screamed the leaflet. ‘Join CND’.  This alarming and innovative way of spreading the nuclear disarmament message was tried out in Nottingham.  The archives of the Direct Action Committee contain numerous copies of the leaflet.  One of these has been annotated with a green question mark next to the suggestion to ‘Join CND’.   Correspondence with the CND group in Nottingham reveals that they were less than pleased with this campaign tactic and the DAC had to dissociate itself from the Kent activists.

Until the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, countries such as the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and France carried out testing of nuclear weapons above ground.  This leaflet highlights widespread fears about the danger to public health of radioactive fallout from these tests passing into the food chain, and especially into the milk supply.

The PaxCat blog now has a new header image!  This comes from a leaflet produced by the Direct Action Committee in 1961 to advertise a march from London to the Polaris submarine base at Holy Loch in Scotland. The march began on Easter Monday and arrived at Holy Loch at Whitsun.  The Holy Loch action was the most ambitious project organised by the DAC.  It was also the last.  The DAC disbanded and its activists merged into the Committee of 100 in June 1961.  I choose this leaflet because it is a rare example of a DAC leaflet which features a striking image and moves away from dense text.  There are excellent collections of DAC leaflets in the DAC archive and amongst the papers of the academic Richard Taylor.

Leaflet advertising the first Aldermaston March, 1958

Leaflet advertising campaign against nuclear missile manufacture in Stevenage, 1959

One of the richest collections in this phase of the project is the archive of Hugh Brock, journalist and peace campaigner.  His role in the emergence of an organised non violent direct action movement in Britain in the 1950s was fundamental.  As editor of Peace News, he steered the pacifist journal towards coverage of non violent protest and nuclear disarmament, leading to a break with the Peace Pledge Union in 1961.  He was a leading member of the PPU’s Non Violence Commission and of the first groups to grow out of this, Operation Gandhi and the Non Violent Resistance Group.

The signpost points left to Aldermaston station

Still carrying the PPU slogan, 'Wars will cease when men refuse to fight'

A small-scale march to Aldermaston AWRE was carried out by Operation Gandhi members on 19 April 1952, as shown in these tiny black and white photographs.

Brock’s files read like a key to the network of British and American peace campaigners active during this period.  Many of these groups were transient and experimental, lasting a few years at best.  Protests by individual pacifists, such as Harold Steele’s attempt to reach the Christmas Island nuclear test site in 1957, fed into the creation of an organised movement.  International links with Japan, India, Europe and Africa weave through the collection.  Overlapping concerns with apartheid in South Africa, civil rights in the United States, the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 make clear that something new was emerging from the traditional pacifist stance of renouncing war.  This was a much broader view of peace based on social justice and equal rights.  This is the perspective by which the Commonweal Collection is guided.

The PaxCat project passed an important milestone last week with the publication on the Archives Hub of our very first multi-level catalogue covering the papers of the volunteer nurse and relief worker Barbara Bruce (1906-1976).  Many thanks to Paddy Collis at the Hub for working closely with me to get this right.

Barbara Bruce (left) at the Friends Mission Hospital, Itarsi, c1939

The full catalogue can be found by a quick search on her name or the reference code for the collection, GB 0532 Cwl BBR, or by visiting this link.  This will allow you to browse the collection.  To search and retrieve descriptions of individual letters, you should use the Hub’s advanced search option.  I suggest reading the collection description first, as a way of finding out about the content and scope of Barbara’s surviving letters and photographs.  This will help you to search the catalogue in a more focussed and useful way.

Please email special-collections@bradford.ac.uk or paxcat@bradford.ac.uk with any queries, or to arrange to view the collection.

The latest issue of the History Newsletter, published by the History Subject Group at Bradford, is now available online.  Find out more about research into women textile workers, school log books and Claus von Stauffenberg’s attempted assassination of Hitler.  Followed by news of the international Darwin conference in Bradford and the work of the PaxCat project.

Timothy Garton Ash wrote yesterday, in an article on 1989 in The New York Review of Books:

“The year 1989 was one of the best in European history.  Indeed, I am hard pushed to think of a better one. It was also a year in which the world looked to Europe – specifically to Central Europe, and, at the pivotal moment, to Berlin.”

This photograph of children playing near the Berlin Wall was taken in October 1983 during United Nations Peace Week.  It was found amongst the papers of Sarah Meyer, who travelled to West Berlin from the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp.  She describes events in Berlin in her ‘Greenham Rainbow Bus Newsletter’.  On 15 October, she spoke at a demonstration organised by a group called Frauen fuer den Frieden (Women for Peace).  This involved forming a human chain along the Berlin Wall and releasing balloons into East Berlin.

Stretching back to 1961 and the construction of the Wall, I have recently discovered a new archive documenting the American-European Peace March from San Francisco to Moscow.  This archive was created and kept by the European Organiser, April Carter.  Some of the files were found amongst the Direct Action Committee boxes and the remainder were boxed separately and labelled as the Committee for Non Violent Action archive.  The CNVA was an American direct action group whose members initiated the march.  The main CNVA archive is held at the Swarthmore Library Peace Collection.

The marchers entered East Germany in early August 1961 with the agreement of the authorities and were determined to reach Berlin.  However the construction of the Wall made this politically impossible and they were deported back to Helmstedt in West Germany.  A Central Office of Information film, In the shadow of the Wall (1962), available via The National Archives website, gives a contemporary view of its impact on East-West relations.

Timothy Garton Ash highlights one of the least understood aspects of 1989:

“By contrast, we have learned little new about the causes and social dynamics of the mass, popular actions that actually gave 1989 a claim to be a revolution, or chain of revolutions.”

It is this link with the tradition of non violent direct action stretching back to Gandhi that interests me.  Of course with the 20th anniversary of these events now upon us, wonderful new resources are appearing online.  I specially liked Wir waren so frei (We were so free), a photographic archive hosted by the Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen (German Museum for Film and Television).

Here are three women celebrating Hallowe’en at the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in 1983.

The photograph was found amongst the papers of Sarah Meyer, who arrived at the camp in December 1982.  This was the month of the ‘Embrace the base’ demonstration which saw 30,000 women gather at Greenham to link arms around the base.  In an interview for the Imperial War Museum Sound Archive, Ann Pettit describes how the women decorated and embroidered the fence and how the military responded:

“…the soldiers would become absurdly enraged by embroidery when women would darn the fence…  The military would be sent with scissors to cut through these silly bits of darning and then they’d reappear the next morning”.

As an example of non violent direct action, this has echoes of Gandhi and his spinning wheel.

borderlands e-journal is an international peer-reviewed journal that takes a trans disciplinary approach to research in the humanities.  It describes itself as ‘a virtual intellectual space for new forms of thought and writing in the humanities’.

American-European March from San Francisco to Moscow, 1960-61

The December 2005 issue looks at Gandhi, nonviolence and modernity.  It includes an interesting article by Sean Scalmer of Macquarie University on ‘Globalising Gandhi’.  Scalmer discusses how Gandhi’s ideas and methods were spread around the world, and how they changed in the process.  He uses the British nonviolent direct action movement of the 1950s and 1960s as a case study and has carried out detailed archival research, including in the Commonweal peace archives.  This is a brilliant example of the kind of research that the PaxCat project will open up.

Visit the Special Collections website for issue 2 of PaxCat News – bring yourself up-to-date with the progress of the project and follow up the collections featured in the blog.  Read about the story of Commonweal, an English Quaker nurse in India, peace ephemera, and the early campaign against the H-bomb.

I discovered last week that in late 1959, during the Direct Action Committee’s campaign against French nuclear testing in the Sahara, the film Aldermaston March (1959) was taken to Ghana to bring the cause of nuclear disarmament to a wider audience.

One of the files in the DAC archive contains a letter dated 27 September 1959 from Philip Willcox, in Tsito-Awudome in the Volta region of Ghana.  He gives advice on some of the practicalities of the plan to stage a protest entry into the nuclear test area.  He also suggests:

“People, in Ghana anyway, have no conception of the nuclear weapon and its results – this is almost certainly true for all of [West Africa] – and because of this any protest so far has lacked real conviction.  The power of cinema here is limitless; if you could bring films here and they could be placed in the right hands the issue could be made clearer and more urgent to the people – perhaps a mass march from border to border north to Algeria might conceivably be done.”

Michael Randle, about to depart for Accra, replied that they would try to obtain Aldermaston March and a Japanese film, Daigo Fukuryu-Maru (Lucky Dragon 5).  This second film documents what happened to the crew of a tuna fishing boat after they witnessed an American hydrogen bomb test at the Bikini Atoll on 1 March 1954.  The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum preserves the fishing boat and hosts an online exhibition.