Peace and Power in Cold War Britain: Media, Movements and Democracy, c.1945-68 1474279341, 9781474279345

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Peace and Power in Cold War Britain

Also available from Bloomsbury Churchill and the Bomb in War and Cold War, by Kevin Ruane The Cold War: A Military History, by Jeremy Black London Calling: Britain, the BBC World Service and the Cold War, by Alban Webb

Peace and Power in Cold War Britain Media, Movements and Democracy, c.1945–​68 Christopher R. Hill

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Copyright © Christopher R. Hill, 2018 Christopher R. Hill has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p.viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Adriana Brioso Cover image: Broken Missile, photomontage by Peter Kennard All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-​party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-​1-​4742-​7934-​5 ePDF: 978-​1-​4742-​7936-​9 eBook: 978-​1-​4742-​7935-​2 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements

vii viii

Introduction 

1

1

7

2

3

4

Middle Class Radicalism and the Media  Middle class radicalism Class and commercial media ‘Mass’ media Class-​based communication and state power The New Left and popular radicalism Radicalism and visual politics Single Issue Movements and Information  The Communist peace movement and the media The third way The nuclear issue and the media The media and movement mobilization Nuclear information and state legitimacy Public Intellectuals  The CND Executive Committee Public meetings and current affairs Educational broadcasting and television drama New dramatists Satire A failure of art Documentary The War Game The Street as a Medium  Regimes of representation CND and DAC Generational conflict

9 14 24 29 37 42 49 50 54 60 70 77 83 85 92 97 103 109 112 114 117 123 125 128 130

Contents

vi

The march and news coverage Young marchers and the media 5

6

7

Labour and Political Communications  Unilateralism and political communications Policymaking: party and public relations Intra-​party and parliamentary democracy Trade unions and political communications Frank Cousins Scarborough: Gaitskell versus Cousins After Scarborough: controlling the machine CDS: the counter-​revolution The Socialist Campaign for Multilateral Disarmament Law and Order  DAC and Thor missile bases The first demonstrations and news coverage The second demonstrations and news coverage Law courts and prisons Nonviolent direct action and the movement C100 and nonviolence C100 demonstrations The turn towards violence Spies for Peace Denouement: 1968  Vietnam, the media and the movement Students as intellectuals ‘Foreigners’ and revolution

Reflections Notes Select Bibliography Index

133 143 153 155 158 161 165 169 174 177 179 183 187 190 195 201 203 206 209 211 217 220 225 226 233 237 247 249 293 301

Illustrations 1.1 Between Admass and the Anti-​Establishment: The Voice for Nuclear Disarmament  2.1 The Korean War in the Picture Post  3.1 Alanna Boyce as Sally Dyson in Doomsday for Dyson  4.1 The respectable: a family marches  4.2 The Bohemian: a beatnik takes a break  4.3 Capturing public support: Trafalgar Square in Easter, 1960  4.4 Dancing on the march  4.5 Skiffle on the march  5.1 The Printer’s Strike and the Peace Movement  5.2 Richard Briginshaw as ‘The Reluctant Executioner’ of national dailies  5.3 Hugh Gaitskell and the ‘TUC flying millstone’  5.4 Frank Cousins’s ‘Reply to the Atom Age’  5.5 Gaitskell versus Cousins  6.1 Nonviolence in Norfolk: protestors go limp  6.2 Exposing the ‘military-​industrial complex’  6.3 A mass sit-​down outside of Whitehall  7.1 March 1968: a violent demonstration  7.2 Katherine Farr as the queen  7.3 Ethnicity and protest  7.4 Symbolizing violence in press coverage of the October demonstration 

35 55 101 136 137 140 146 147 166 167 168 169 174 195 199 212 239 243 244 245

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Acknowledgements I am incredibly grateful to the colleagues and friends whose advice and generosity has enriched this monograph and made it possible. I  would like to express my gratitude to Jerry DeGroot, an inspiring teacher who helped to shape the monograph from its early stages. I would also like to thank my former colleagues at the University of Birmingham. Among them, I  am indebted to Malcolm Dick, Elaine Fulton, Sabine Lee, Corey Ross and Gavin Schaffer, all of whom set a shining example of how to do history and what it means to be a researcher and teacher. Matthew Francis and David Gange have also been wonderful companions, intellectual and otherwise. For the most part, however, this monograph has been completed at Birmingham City University, where I am employed as a research fellow. I  would therefore like to single out two of my current colleagues, Caroline Archer and Tim Wall, for special mention. Both of you have shown tremendous faith in me, and for that I am truly appreciative. Throughout the course of researching and writing the monograph, the one constant has been the patience and support of family and loved ones. My dad, who fancies himself as the family wordsmith, took on the task of proofreading the first draft and seemed just as eagle-​eyed as he used to be while correcting my homework when I was a schoolboy. The manuscript might not have even got to that stage were it not for my mum, whose kindness and selflessness never cease to amaze me. More than anyone else, my partner Clare has had to endure my ramblings as the monograph took shape, offering much-​needed love and encouragement along the way. Her two girls, Chloe and Olivia, were also thoughtful enough to minimize noise levels during periods of the writing process. Chloe may well go on to write books of her own, while her younger sister, Olivia, has her sights set on being the subject of at least one or two. I am thankful to Peter Kennard for allowing me to use his artwork for the frontispiece, as well as to the anonymous reviewers who read and commented on the initial proposal and final drafts. The remaining mistakes are entirely my own.

Introduction

On 24 February 1958, a supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) proclaimed in the central lobby of the Houses of Parliament that ‘all we are trying to do is to make sure that there is no annihilation without representation’.1 In doing so, the unidentified supporter, described by The Times as a ‘small, earnest man’, touched on a theme that has been central not only to movements against nuclear weapons in Cold War Britain, but also to radical movements in liberal democracies more widely: the right of the so-​called ordinary citizen to participate in issues of high politics. In the case of the anti-​nuclear movement –​ as in the case of successive movements for suffrage or against wars –​this right of participation was enshrined in a radical tradition that in Britain had roots in the seventeenth century and espoused what might be called direct democracy or popular sovereignty.2 This study investigates how this radical right of participation has been conditioned and enabled by transformations in communications media.3 It does so through a focus on the anti-​nuclear movement  –​a single issue movement founded upon the premise of participation  –​and the rise of television  –​a medium often disparaged by ‘radicals’, yet one that arguably had invigorating effects for democratic politics in Cold War Britain. In recasting the history of participatory democracy through media and movements, this study does not regard relations between them as merely abstract or transactional.4 Rather, it seeks to embed these within  –​and understand them as part of  –​a series of sites of change and struggle, including among intellectuals, in public spaces and on the streets, in the Labour Party and in law courts and prisons. The same plurality is recognized in the individuals who made up the anti-​nuclear and anti–​Vietnam War movements. These were not simply leaders and supporters of organizations such as CND, the Committee of 100 (C100) and the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC), nor were they simply journalists and programme producers who worked in newspapers and television. They were also artists, civil

2

Peace and Power in Cold War Britain

servants, clergy, musicians, politicians, trade unionists and students. They were all invested in a mediated politics that was facilitated by television and reached its peak in the revolutionary drama and display of 1968. Since relations between media and movements are reciprocal, exercising an influence over democratic as well as radical politics, the argument developed in this study is twofold. On the one hand, it argues that radicals –​largely out of a desire to participate in political issues from which they were excluded  –​ have been highly influential in fashioning forms of political participation and expression during epochs of media change. In a manner not so dissimilar to the Levellers and pamphleteering, the Chartists and unstamped newspapers and the Suffragettes and photojournalism, the leaders of anti-​nuclear and anti-​war movements explored the nascent horizons of television as a means by which to enhance their involvement in democratic and public life.5 From inside the infrastructure of the media, these leaders were able to exercise a formative influence over television documentary, drama and satire; from outside, they were able to choreograph displays and spectacles that corresponded with television news. As these forms of participation and expression were popularized, they contributed to the furniture of democracy and political culture in Cold War Britain. The relationship between media and movements was not only consensual and progressive, however: it was also fraught with contradictions and tensions. On the other hand, therefore, this study also argues that radical movements in this period were driven by their engagements with the news media. Just as the emphasis of the news media on disorder and violence empowered ideologies within them that were more militant and shocking, its emphasis on human interest also prompted a shift away from nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War as abstract issues and towards the self as a site for political agency. It was as social constructs of gender, generation and race became more charged and visible in media discourse that the personal also became political: identity politics were reinforced by the growing need to subvert portrayals of the self that were proliferating on an unprecedented scale. In this interpretation, the anti-​ nuclear and anti-​ war movements were as much social as single issue movements and it was their social rather than ideological function that predominated. While ideologues of the movements were significant in shaping the actions and protests in which the rank-​and-​ file participated, they remained in factional minorities and the chief value of pacifism, anarchism and militant Marxism was as a social currency. The more extreme the prevailing ideology of the movements, the more utility it

Introduction

3

possessed for social groups seeking to challenge stereotypes in the news media and public. When the radicalization of the movements reached its crescendo in the demonstrations of 1968, the militant Marxists were largely confined to the organizing committee:  the overwhelming majority simply desired to appear revolutionary or adopt revolutionary styles. For Peter Cadogan, national secretary of the Committee of 100, a civil disobedience group formed in 1960, this subordination of ideological content to expressive form was the product of media-​led dialectics over time: ‘From 1961 to 1963 sitting down was the fashion’, he argued. ‘The Anarchists and the Beats had their day in ‘64/​65. In 1966/​7 came the Hippies. And 1968 is the year of the militant . . . The journalist and the photographer set out to find the novel and the photogenic and each [ideological] fashion is in consequence built up into more than its substance deserves.’6 The unfolding of this relationship between media and movements –​realized through the emergence of new opportunities and dilemmas in democratic and radical politics –​seems to offer a convenient framework for periodization. From one perspective, the argument that media and movements served to furnish democracy with an apparatus of dissent resonates with the liberal historiography of Britain in ‘the sixties’.7 The role of the media as a vehicle for cultural and social change has been integral to this interpretation, with the liberalization of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) being widely seen as marking a ‘golden age’ of television to which radicals made creative contributions.8 From another perspective, however, the argument that the movements became increasingly discordant and extreme also resonates with historiographies that have been more politicized and tend for diverging reasons to diagnose the period as the source of an oncoming crisis, often with an eye on the outbreak of industrial disputes and political violence in the 1970s.9 In a similar manner to histories of the 1960s in the United States of America and Western Europe, the radicals of Britain often looked back on the period as one of cyclical escalation and unfulfilled promise.10 ‘The revolution began as a dove, with a CND sign on its breast’, claimed the countercultural magazine International Times (IT), in 1972. ‘It became a peacock, fanning out a psychedelic rainbow of bells, beads and Beatles. But for many it became a hawk, whose outlook was that of the [terrorist cell,] the Angry Brigade, and even the Irish Republican Army [IRA].’11 In recognizing that the relationship between media and movements had outcomes for democracy and radicalism that were complex and contradictory, an attempt is made to capture the range of narratives and trajectories that emerged out of it. For radicals, these related to the experience of struggle and the ‘lessons learnt’ and were characterized by a retreat from mass politics. The turns

4

Peace and Power in Cold War Britain

towards identity politics, Marxism, political violence and the professionalism of non-​governmental organizations (NGOs) were all driven towards a far more critical negotiation of mass media and public life.12 In more recent scholarship, these ‘narratives and trajectories’ have been rerouted into categories that link the 1960s in Britain to its changing role in the world, drawing upon approaches developed in the ‘new imperial history’ of the 1990s and placing a much-​needed emphasis on declinism, postcolonialism and race.13 As social movements on international issues, the significance of the anti-​ nuclear and anti-​ war movements for gender, generation and race was interwoven with their capacity to destabilize assumptions about the local, national and global.14 It was through the movements that radicals reconfigured their social identities as Britain became a postcolonial power. Given that the media is seen as instrumental to the formation and function of the anti-​ nuclear and anti-​ war movements in Cold War Britain, the definition of social movement employed in this study is heavily influenced by communications theory. To cite Manuel Castells, ‘[T]‌he characteristics of communication processes between individuals  . . .  in the social movement [serve to] determine the organisational characteristics of the movement itself.’15 The first chapter of this book, ‘Middle Class Radicalism and the Media’, explains these ‘communication processes’ in relation to the shifting landscape of the media environment in post-​war Britain. It identifies and explores the historical significance of the ‘middle class radical’ in adapting and responding to transformations in communications media. The drive of these radicals towards participatory democracy, it suggests, served to imbue them with a special awareness of the forms and technologies by which that participation could be enhanced. For all the difficulties that television posed for class-​based radicalism in Britain, it also gave rise to egalitarian possibilities that were pursued by middle class radicals both in and outside the media and were reflected in the ethos and practices of the anti-​nuclear movement. The anatomy of the anti-​nuclear movement was informed not only by the media environment, however, but also by the sorts of information on which it depended:  in this case information that was guarded by the British state and requiring the expertise of intellectuals and scientists. To this end, the second chapter, ‘Single Issue Movements and Information’, demonstrates how nuclear-​ related information became the basic currency by which the movement was mobilized and structured. This necessitated the opening up of information circuits with news outlets that had tended to act as censors on nuclear issues, as well as the navigation of public discourses about peace and disarmament in

Introduction

5

the Cold War. The rise of a movement based on participation in high politics also challenged the normative role of the British state, with nuclear-​related information serving as a strategic asset in arguments for popular sovereignty. In this regard, the state is seen as deriving its power not only from a monopoly of violence, as Max Weber put it, but also from a monopoly of information that was often about violence.16 How that monopoly was threatened by a complex interplay between media change and radicalism is a major concern of the first two chapters. If movements are manifestations of preexisting communications processes, then it follows that they draw upon the same sources of influence and power that are rooted in the institutions and society that they oppose. These sources of influence and power are wielded by activists and intellectuals that Castells refers to as ‘empowered actors’, who in the anti-​nuclear and anti-​war movements tended to enjoy privileged positions within the class system and as a result often in the media and a range of occupations. It was through these actors that the politics of the anti-​nuclear movement were taken beyond their confines and into sites of power that were pivotal for their cause. The third chapter, ‘Public Intellectuals’, examines how generations of intellectuals sought to produce an artistic indictment of the nuclear age through a range of media forms, including ones relating to news and current affairs, documentary, drama and satire. At the same time, it recognizes that the cultural authority of these generations was evolving in line with the rise of television, posing problems for older intellectuals who relied on traditional modes of class leadership and presenting opportunities for younger ones with technical expertise in broadcasting and film. The fourth chapter, ‘The Street as a Medium’, shifts the focus to those who possessed no distinct media or public status, yet whose involvement in demonstrations and marches was highly mediated through news coverage. These rank-​and-​ file protestors were able to draw on heightened exposure to contest their representation not only by broadcasters and journalists, but also by movement leaders. The effort to bring about participatory democracy was also expressed through struggles within political parties and over law and order. The fifth chapter, ‘Labour and Political Communications’, conceptualizes a crisis over nuclear disarmament in the Labour Party as a ‘communications war’, waged between the professionalized methods of the Parliamentary party and the grassroots ones of activists and trade unionists. This communications war was significant not only for the issue of nuclear disarmament, but also the modernization of the Labour Party as a whole. Broadcasters and the press were influential in legitimizing

6

Peace and Power in Cold War Britain

what counted for democracy within the party, working with the leadership to discredit challenges that had been mounted through the Annual Conference. The sixth chapter, ‘Law and Order’, moves on from constitutional means of action to ones involving confrontation with the law. Through the example of nonviolent direct action in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it reveals how television exposed interactions between protestors and police, making them more media-​ conscious and tactical. It also shows how the movement began to radicalize as media interest in nonviolent direct action began to wane in the early 1960s. In turn, this facilitated the rise of groups who specialized in public practices that were more shocking and violent. As the title suggests, the final chapter, ‘Denouement:  1968’, views the revolutionary spectacle of 1968 as the culmination of relations between media and movements that can be traced back to the 1950s and the rise of television. In the absence of outbreaks of mass violence or arrests over the issue of the Vietnam War, the chapter claims that the imagery and rhetoric of revolution was largely fictitious: a cultural construct born out of mediated politics. This fiction of revolution was far from meaningless, however:  it signalled tensions over identity politics in Britain at the end of empire. Most notably, through solidarity with the National Liberation Front in Vietnam and student protestors across the world, the leaders and supporters of the anti-​Vietnam War movement in Britain sought to subvert discourses of ‘foreignness’. For the popular press in particular, such solidarity was used to portray the protestors as ‘foreign’ themselves –​an ‘outsider’ threat to British order and values at a time of controversy over mass immigration. The study concludes with a brief reflection on what this history of media change and radicalism can yield for the present, a time of both unprecedented possibility and risk for participatory democracy through digital communication and the internet.

1

Middle Class Radicalism and the Media

If communications media have enabled ideas and movements for participatory democracy, then those who seek such a democracy have tended to possess a remarkable sensitivity towards media change and the opportunities it entails. In the context of media and radical history in Britain, this hypothesis seems particularly compelling. The development of communications media and the mobilization of mass movements for democracy have been characterized by conjuncture since at least the Chartists and the unstamped press in the nineteenth century.1 This chapter argues that this development has at historic moments provoked crises in the identity and structure of the British state, focusing on the anti-​nuclear movement and the rise of television in the 1950s. In this case, the call among a section of the middle class for the right of the ‘ordinary citizen’ to decide whether or not Britain manufactures and tests nuclear weapons was inextricably linked to the emergence of televisual forms. In turn, this posed dilemmas for normative conceptions and functions of the state –​ones in which civil servants and politicians exercised the prerogative to act in the national interest. What the struggle over nuclear weapons signified, therefore, seemed to share much in common with previous struggles over defence and foreign policy: it was a conflict between those who believed that these policies should be subject to the approval of ordinary citizens and those who believed that the state should be  entrusted to carry them out on their behalf. As Michael Foot asked in an article on CND in 1964: Was defence and foreign policy ‘a debate in which everyone should join or is it one to be left to the experts, the scientists who know, the military advisers, the very few? The differing responses to that question go to the  root of our democracy and our political system. This was appreciated by many who joined CND and was a reason for its appeal’.2 At heart, these divisions over citizenship and democracy can be traced back to the English Civil War, when radical and republican theories about individual liberty and

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Peace and Power in Cold War Britain

popular sovereignty were challenged by Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan. For Hobbes, the idea that individuals can choose whether or not to relinquish their liberty to the state was misconceived. Instead, he proposed the state as a social contract to an absolute, yet not necessarily identifiable, sovereign that amounted to more than the sum of its parts –​the theory of liberty most manifest in the British state in modern history and arguably today.3 The theories of liberty that sprung out of the seventeenth century have since informed the British state on a perennial basis and in this regard radical movements are not seen as alternative to or outside the state so much as constituent parts of it, drawing upon its forms of power and resources and modifying meanings of democracy over time. The growth of mass communications is seen as posing a particular problem for the normative, Hobbesian model of the state, for it instrumentalizes and makes radical ideas about participatory democracy more possible and realistic. The relationship between middle class radicalism and the media, however, should not be seen as merely enabling or progressive. Its characteristics and effects were dependent on the socio-​economic contexts and organizational and regulatory frameworks in which communications technologies were introduced and developed over time. The advent of commercial or independent television (ITV) in the mid-​1950s provides a case in point, for it had repercussions for radical movements and politics that were ambiguous and often misunderstood at the time. On the one hand, it served to maximize the power of pictorial forms and the visual medium, while also weakening bonds between the BBC and the state that had been cemented in wartime. This made issues of high politics more accessible and communicable and enhanced the ability of radical groups to contest them in public. On the other hand, the rise of ITV also stimulated a shift away from the class system and towards the market place as the organizing principle for mass communication, thus exacerbating tensions in the social structure of British radicalism.4 These tensions reverberated throughout the life cycle of the movements of the 1950s and 1960s, placing strain on the class-​based and ideological differences within them throughout the period. In this chapter, then, the social and cultural history of the anti–​nuclear movement is narrated in terms of the media landscape, focusing in particular on the rise of commercial television and the national press after the end of newsprint rationing in 1956. This narrative begins with the demographics and politics of the movement, moves on to an assessment of how these intersected with changes in broadcasting and the press in the post-​war period and ends with an attempt to demonstrate convergences between the communicative forms and



Middle Class Radicalism and the Media

9

styles of the movement and those that were coming into fruition with the rise of television. The movements of the 1950s and 1960s are therefore comprehended in relation to how as well as what they communicated. Their leading activists and intellectuals took advantage of possibilities and reflected changes in mass communication that were latent in television as a medium, whether in the form of documentary film, drama, news or current affairs. That they were able to do so was key to the existence of the movements from the outset, making for a radicalism that was more populist and visible than in earlier mobilizations, yet not necessarily any more effective as a model by which to bring about meaningful change in politics.

Middle class radicalism In order to comprehend the implications of television for radical movements and democracy in Cold War Britain, it is necessary first of all to engage with the sociology of the movements in question, as well as the political traditions to which they claimed to belong. In the anti-​nuclear and anti-​war movements, the social background and class of its leaders and supporters and the democracy with which they identified were both influential in shaping their relationship with broadcasters and the press. From one perspective, the middle class and public sector demographic of the movements often meant that its participants were embedded in communications and media power. A  significant minority were even employed within media and cultural organizations, giving rise to ‘infrastructures of dissent’ within this sector as a whole.5 From another perspective, the democratic ethos of the anti-​nuclear and anti-​war movements, informed by ideas about popular sovereignty and the right to participate in politics, also meant that their leaders and supporters sought to exploit opportunities in a media environment that was being transformed. A  predisposition towards participatory democracy, it seems, tended to be expressed through engagements with the media that were experimental and quick to capitalize on emerging forms and technologies. This was especially the case among groups that perceived their beliefs and politics as marginal and under-​represented. The term ‘middle class radicalism’ has been commonplace in the field of social activism and movements ever since the publication of Frank Parkin’s study by the same name in 1966:  a self-​professed investigation into The Social Bases of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. From the 803 members of CND that responded to the survey for this study, Parkin found that over 80 per cent

10

Peace and Power in Cold War Britain

were middle class on the Hall-​Jones scale, a ranking method by which social class and occupation are correlated.6 Parkin sought in particular to provide an explanation as to why middle class radicals subscribed to a cause and politics that seemed to be against their class interests, in much the same way that Robert McKenzie and Allan Silver, two of his contemporaries, were doing in relation to working class conservatism.7 In this respect, Parkin’s study was indicative of wider tendencies and trends in the emerging field of social movements, which tended to treat movements as deviant and symptomatic of collective irrationality.8 The explanation that Parkin provided for middle class radicalism –​that it was an ‘expressive’ rather than ‘instrumental’ mode of politics that elevated ethical issues and ‘means’ over economic issues and ‘ends’ –​allowed him to distinguish it from working class radicalism and filtered into the trajectory of social movements as an academic field.9 By the 1970s, the term ‘social movement’ had even acquired the prefix ‘new’ as sociologists sought to explain the demographics and preoccupations of such movements in relation to post-​industrial society and the shifting weight of ethical and material issues in the radical politics of the time.10 While the middle class radicalism conceived by Parkin offers a useful frame by which to comprehend cultural and social hierarchies in grassroots politics, it remains rather clumsy and monolithic –​especially in relation to a period when the class system was being transformed by economic growth and the landmark legislation that had been passed by the Attlee government. In a later study, John Mattausch, another sociologist, took Parkin to task on his analysis of the relationship between occupational class and radicalism. Whereas Parkin argued that middle class radicals tended to enter creative and public sector employment in order to sustain their political beliefs and ideals, the data collected by Mattausch suggested that it was the experience of employment and training in these sectors that nurtured them: supporters of CND were what he referred to as ‘state-​class radicals’. Through ‘the ideology of their profession, the ethics and rationale of their work’, he claimed, ‘welfare state employees become personally committed to socially evolved and defined practices, and, as the interviews [from the research] show, this commitment is often deeply held and valued and spills over into other areas of their lives’.11 Far from the welfare state acting as an inhibitor of citizenship and voluntarism  –​as more libertarian critiques of the welfare state have had it –​for Mattausch it acted as a stimulant, feeding into an ethos and practices that were conducive to participatory democracy.12 The concept of state-​class radicalism is instructive for the definition of movement that this chapter works towards, for it ascribes radicals a position that is central to rather than outside the state and as a result renders disputes about democracy



Middle Class Radicalism and the Media

11

systemic. In short, it enables the movement against nuclear weapons to be seen not only as a protest, but also as a crisis taking place within the state and competing for its resources. The treatment of class by Parkin as a largely homogeneous and static category can also lead to narrow interpretations that fail to grasp the discrete features and politics of radical movements. These can only be fully appreciated through a broader analysis of middle class radicalism in which allowance is made for the accelerated mobility between and within classes in the post-​war period. Parkin did acknowledge generation as a key factor in the dynamics of the anti-​ nuclear movement, but he did not locate this within a discussion of class or seek to establish how generational change and social mobility coincided. In this study, the dynamics of the movement are seen as being shaped by a distinctive coalescence of generational and class-​based upheaval. This was expressed most notably in rivalries and tensions between the older, upper middle class, radicals who led CND and the younger, usually lower middle class, ones that tended to associate with the Direct Action Committee against Nuclear War (DAC) and the Committee of 100, both of which stood for a more proactive and participatory form of protest than CND. This coming together of generational and class-​ based perspectives was manifest in almost every aspect of the movement, from differing interpretations of the moral and social dimensions of nuclear weapons as an issue to the types of action that should be taken to achieve change. It was particularly prominent in the repertoire of media forms and styles that were employed and pioneered by activists and intellectuals, all of which pointed towards the complex range of ‘expressive politics’ that the movement comprised. The mobilizations over nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War can also be seen as a stage in the ongoing evolution and realignment of class as a basis for social change. While their middle class leaderships and support bases shared similarities with earlier movements  –​such as those for suffrage or against fascism –​the socio-​economic context of the 1950s and 1960s did pose specific problems for a class-​based model of radical politics. In particular, the expansion of the middle class and the upward mobility of the affluent worker seemed to compromise the cross-​class and inter-​class coalitions that had characterized the earlier movements.13 The configuration of class relationships as they appeared in Chartism or the popular front of the 1930s –​based on upper middle class leadership and gradations of deference and solidarity  –​were not quite so propitious in the socio-​economic circumstances of this period. In this respect, the organizational hierarchies and structures of the anti-​nuclear movement, informed by class leadership and status, tended to be at odds with the social

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Peace and Power in Cold War Britain

fabric of its support base: often in ways that were reflected at the same time in the development of the Labour Party. The middle class radicalism of the 1950s and 1960s was therefore marked by a high degree of individualism, especially because it was focused on issues that were primarily moral and not necessarily towards the betterment or enfranchisement of one given group. This individualist radicalism offered fertile ground in which an ethos of participatory democracy could flourish and no issue seemed to dramatize the need for the involvement of the ordinary citizen in high politics more than the manufacture and testing of nuclear weapons. In fact, the evidence from archives, published sources and ‘life histories’ conducted by other researchers suggests that the right to participate formed an important part of the self-​identity and self-​motivation of radicals in this period.14 As Michael Foot suggested in his article of 1964, this was often articulated and rooted in relation to radical histories and traditions.15 In this way, Michael Randle, a leading member of DAC and C100 who went on to chair the War Resisters’ International, described Peter Cadogan in an obituary as belonging to a ‘tradition of English radicalism dating back to seventeenth century movements such as the Levellers’.16 This depth of historical consciousness was in all likelihood shared by only a minority of the most active and involved radicals, yet popular conceptions of radical history did circulate more widely. The framing of the ‘ban the bomb’ struggle in relation to Chartism and the suffragettes, for example, was routine and a recurrent feature of internal media and public relations –​sometimes to the irritation of radicals who identified with a more specific lineage of protest.17 The relationship between historical consciousness and self-​identity in the movement arguably differed between those who led and supported CND, the more moderate organization, and those who led and supported DAC and C100, the more radical ones. A.  J. P.  Taylor, a member of the Executive Committee of CND and a renowned historian, made a helpful distinction in a lecture about Trouble Makers, a history of dissent over British foreign policy between the late eighteenth century and the Second World War, published in 1957. ‘A conforming member of the Church of England’, he argued, ‘can disagree with the Bishops and, I understand, often does. A Dissenter believed the Bishops should not exist.’ Likewise, ‘a man can disagree with a particular line of British foreign policy, while still accepting its general assumptions. The Dissenter repudiates its aims, its methods, and its principles.’18 It was under this definition, as Helen McCarthy described in The British People and the League of Nations, that Taylor deemed members of the League of Nations Union (LNU) in Britain as lacking



Middle Class Radicalism and the Media

13

the necessary credentials of the dissenting or radical traditions:  ‘The leading lights of the LNU, the League’s strongest champion in Britain, were too high-​ minded, too cosy with the “Establishment” and altogether too respectable to inherit the mantle of Fox, Cobden and the . . . [conscientious objectors] of the Union of Democratic Control.’19 When the definition devised by Taylor is applied to CND, its leaders and supporters also seem to be ruled out as radicals and dissenters. The sociological research, which for contextual and methodological reasons tends to exaggerate the role of ‘middle of the road protestors’, clearly demonstrates that the support base of CND was dominated by those belonging to more consensual and respectable traditions associated with Anglicanism and the Labour Party.20 In contrast, the leaders and supporters of DAC and C100 were far more in touch with the secular and religious radicalism that originated in the seventeenth century and had flared up at intermittent moments in modern British history. To echo Taylor’s words, they not only disagreed with the defence and foreign policy over nuclear weapons, they also disagreed with the entire apparatus by which it was determined. Their belief in direct democracy and the right of the ordinary citizen to participate in high politics was underpinned by political and religious traditions that also stressed the strength of connection that existed between the individual and secular or spiritual power. They were influenced by and proactive within strands of radical politics and Christianity in which the agency of the individual was seen as paramount, either in terms of liberty or faith and ranging from anarchism on the one hand to Quakerism on the other. How these ideological threads wove into the organizational structure of the movement –​and what this meant for how it functioned and its relations with the media –​is discussed further in Chapter 2. It is necessary to qualify the foregoing analysis by drawing attention to the geographical distinctiveness of middle class radicalism. When CND was at its height in the early 1960s, for example, it is estimated that it comprised around 900 groups throughout Britain and the United Kingdom.21 These not only mirrored more localized agendas and concerns, but also played an active part in their construction and evolution over time, especially in relation to nationalism in Scotland, where the Macmillan government installed Polaris missiles in 1960. Despite claims that groups in Scotland were more working class than their English counterparts, however, the evidence suggests that they still conformed to a middle class model of politics and radicalism.22 Sandy Hobbs, a graduate from the University of Aberdeen who was active

14

Peace and Power in Cold War Britain

in Scottish CND, suggested that the working class complexion of SCND was in fact largely superficial. It consisted for the most part of lower middle class Scots who thought it fashionable to appear working class: an identity and style that seemed particularly striking when juxtaposed with English CND groups on demonstrations and marches.23 The relationship between the anti-​nuclear campaigns and the nationalist parties, which was particularly close in Wales and increasingly became so in Scotland, also points towards the preponderance of the middle classes, since Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party (SNP) only had limited support among the working classes in this period.24 While the middle class radicalism framework has tended to emerge out of Anglocentric studies and surveys, it still has value as a means to explore and interpret the movement outside of metropolitan London. For all the complexity of middle class radicalism, the most effective means by which it can be identified in the 1950s and 1960s is through ideology and politics. The relationship between middle class radicalism and the media will be for this reason navigated through the perspectives of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), the Labour Party, independent socialism and pacifism, all of which were far from uniform themselves. In fact, the middle class radicalism of these parties and groups was in the midst of considerable transformation as they adapted to ongoing issues and problems in domestic and world socialism, leading to a fundamental realignment of radical politics in the form of a ‘New’ Left. The emergence of the New Left, prompted in particular by the Suez Crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary towards the end of 1956, is of considerable importance here, for it opened up approaches to and interpretations of communications and culture that broke from the immediate past.25 For the intellectuals of the New Left, it was culture –​and not merely class or economic materialism  –​that was a primary agent and driver of social change.26 To this end, they confronted changes in mass communication in a manner that was creative and cognizant of the possibilities for radical socialism: culture was an all-​embracing category through which socialism could be rebuilt and redefined in an intellectual project that spanned across the media and arts.27

Class and commercial media Having explored the sociology and history of middle class radicalism, it is necessary to situate it within the media environment of the post-​war period. The anatomy of middle class radicalism was highly compatible with public



Middle Class Radicalism and the Media

15

service broadcasting under the BBC, as both were structured around upper middle class leadership over politics and public affairs. The communicative functions and styles that they shared were to this end characterized by a cosiness that had the potential to stifle as much as facilitate the process of social change.28 The rise of commercial media in the mid-​1950s –​in the form of a resurgent press as well as independent television  –​threatened to destabilize and erode this relationship between politics, communications and culture. ‘By making the market place the most important arbiter of success’, to borrow the words of the cultural historian Dan LeMahieu, ‘the mass [commercial] media circumvented the authority of traditional cultural elites, accelerating a process that began centuries before in Britain.’29 This section of the chapter explores how the end of newsprint rationing and the introduction of commercial television challenged the fabric of middle class radical politics. In doing so, it focuses on responses to commercial television that stemmed from the same sociopolitical demographics that made up the movements of the 1950s and 1960s. These responses reflected not only a concern for the demise of class as the principal site of cultural power and social change, but also an enthusiasm for the possibilities that commercial television promised –​the rise of a more populist, vibrant politics captured above all in the formation and rise of a New Left from the mid-​1950s. The problems that commercial television posed for class-​based models of culture and politics seemed to echo those of the late nineteenth century, when a capitalist press gathered strength following the abolition of stamp duties on newspapers, or ‘taxes on knowledge’, in the 1850s. Ironically, it was radicals who had been instrumental in campaigns for the press to be ‘free’ from the state, only for their ideological forebears to realize the limitations of that freedom in the late nineteenth century.30 The free market radicalism of the mid-​nineteenth century, defined in opposition to the state through protectionist legislation such as the Corn Laws, was rechannelled as radicals began to comprehend the market place as an equally restrictive environment for their politics. The central importance of advertising to that environment was particularly debilitating. In this commercial model of political economy, it was even possible for radical and socialist newspapers to go out of business because  –​rather than in spite of  –​ increases in their circulation. If income from advertising failed to keep pace with circulation, then radical and socialist proprietors often fell short of funds for investment in printing materials and technology.31 As will be demonstrated, this was a line of argument taken up by cultural Marxists in the late 1950s and 1960s, ultimately feeding into a critique of press freedom that is dominant today and

16

Peace and Power in Cold War Britain

most succinctly expressed by James Curran. After the abolition of the taxes on knowledge, Curran argued, the press did not necessarily become free. Rather, the market merely replaced the state as the official censor of the press.32 The threat that the free market posed to radical and socialist politics extended far beyond the business of newspapers, however. It seemed to strike at the heart of social relations in a class-​based society –​not only among radicals, but also among cultural elites and patrons across the political spectrum. In short, the authority of these elites and patrons was endangered by entrepreneurs who sought to make the market the chief determinant of cultural power. This was exemplified by what Matthew Arnold, cultural critic and poet, described in a famous essay as the ‘new journalism’, a more aggressive and populist mode of reporting that had been influenced by newspapers in the United States, derided by Arnold as ‘feather-​brained’ and pioneered by the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, W. T. Stead.33 Just as the parallels with the United States point towards the role of America as a frame of reference for ‘visions of the press’ in Britain, the journalism of Stead also points towards the ambiguous effects of commercialism for radical politics.34 Yet the rise of commercial newspapers should not be seen as simply a negative development for radicalism. It also opened up possibilities for dynamic interventions in political and public life, as highlighted by Stead’s well-​known exposé of child prostitution in London –​a news story that brought about the Criminal Amendment Act of 1885. What counted for radical news or journalism in this context, however, had also diluted through adaptation to commercial demands and norms –​Robert Blatchford’s The Clarion forming yet another well-​known example, this time of a socialist newspaper in which politicized editorials were suppressed at the behest of entertainment and market demands. While the impact of the new journalism in the 1880s was bracing and dynamic, the productive possibilities it entailed for democracy and politics were always vulnerable to –​because they were tied in with –​the commercial imperative. Alfred Harmsworth, or Viscount Northcliffe as he became known after serving as director of propaganda in the First World War, was the entrepreneur who most capitalized on this commercial potential, using the new journalism as a formula to appeal to common desires and prejudices among the wider public, perhaps nowhere more so than in his Daily Mail, launched in 1896. For F. R. Leavis, the literary critic and founder of the quarterly journal Scrutiny, the Harmsworth stable of magazines and newspapers was responsible for the onset of a ‘cultural crisis’ and ‘overthrow of standards’.35 The commercialization of the late nineteenth century may have compromised and undercut the cultural leadership of the upper middle class, but it also



Middle Class Radicalism and the Media

17

galvanized the artists and intellectuals who belonged to this section of society into action. The ‘yellow press’, as the popular dailies became known among their detractors, was one of the prime symbols of a broader crisis of modernity to which elites responded, ranging in its concerns from the mass processing of tinned food to the entry of the working classes into democracy.36 This crisis elicited in turn a series of counteractive strategies among upper middle class artists and intellectuals, aimed in particular at the defence of their authority in the creative arts and media. It is tempting to narrate the origins of the British Broadcasting Company in this fashion, demonstrating, as Dan LeMahieu has done, how it constituted an attempt to ‘monopolise supply’ over the medium of broadcasting –​ a strategy that paid off with the inauguration of the Company as a Corporation under royal charter in 1927. The position of the BBC as the sole arbiter of the airwaves was also, of course, the product of military, political and technical considerations, but these should not obscure the strength of the cultural rationale behind it, especially in light of the ‘chaos of the ether’ that had been caused by the proliferation of commercial broadcasters in the United States.37 From the outset, the Company drew on the class system as a mechanism by which cultural production could be elevated and enhanced, with class-​based leadership forming the core of its ‘public service’ through the National Programme: a common forum in which class and cultural aspiration were two sides of the same coin. As John Reith, the first director general, put it, the Company served as ‘a cultural, moral and educative force for the improvement of knowledge, tastes and manners’.38 Insofar as the class system cut across British society, the mission and structure of the BBC was highly compatible with the forms of communication and social relations that were embodied in political groups and parties, irrespective of their ideological differences. Ramsay MacDonald, leader of the Labour Party between 1922 and 1929, was thus an advocate rather than critic of Reithianism, urging the director general to ‘keep up the standard of your service. Remember that the great mass of our people really want good things’.39 The CPGB, which in the words of one historian had ‘an influential if not uneven presence’ on BBC radio in the interwar period, was also inclined to a mode of politics that privileged the role of the upper middle class. Its leadership was dominated by elites and intellectuals, most of whom were active in prestigious universities such as Cambridge, Oxford and the London School of Economics (LSE).40 Through the BBC, the predominance of the upper middle class in both high culture and politics was therefore reinforced, serving to cement and conserve traditional formations of politics and political culture, even among the groups and parties set on social change.

18

Peace and Power in Cold War Britain

It was not until the introduction of commercial television in 1955 that the primacy of class in broadcasting was significantly challenged, with limited competition between the BBC and ITV prompting the former to relax its commitment to cultural improvement along class lines. The impetus for change to the Reithian system of broadcasting, however, stemmed from the Second World War. In order to sustain morale in wartime conditions, the BBC extended its light entertainment and news services by establishing the Forces Programme. Its popularity led to the replacement of the National Programme established by Reith with a three-​tiered service known as generic broadcasting. William Haley, director general of the BBC between 1944 and 1952, claimed that this system of broadcasting rested on an interpretation of ‘the community as a broadly based cultural pyramid slowly aspiring upward’.41 While the establishment of the Light, Home and Third Services can be seen as a concession towards differences in taste, these remained bound within a rigid framework of class: an upper middle class minority were still responsible for the cultural development of a working class majority. Despite the endorsement of the public service of the BBC by the Broadcasting Committee of 1949, however, the cracks between the broadcaster and the society it was intended to mirror already seemed irreconcilable by this stage.42 In a poll conducted as early as 1942, for example, it was revealed that while the upper and middle classes were largely opposed to commercial broadcasting, 44 per cent of the working classes were in favour of it.43 It was this impulse on which the rise of ITV in the late 1950s was predicated, bringing an end to a ‘monopoly of supply’ by class-​based elites and intellectuals and transforming the media landscape in which cultural politics were constructed and contested. The fiercest opponents of commercial television came unsurprisingly from the sections of society that the BBC most empowered –​the upper middle class artists and intellectuals who conceived themselves as custodians to the arts, education and religion. As this opposition was informed by social status, it once again transcended ideological differences, though these were also influential in shaping perceptions and responses. The strength of class as an intersectional identity was capable of bringing the most antagonistic of ideologues into unison over the issue of commercial television. Richard Hoggart, a socialist intellectual who established and led the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, was in this respect not so dissimilar to Mary Whitehouse, the social conservative who founded the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (NVALA) in 1965. As described by Dick Hebdige, a former student of Hoggart’s at CCCS, his ‘cultural if not political conservatism’ served to highlight the complexity and ambivalence of the ‘resistance to cultural



Middle Class Radicalism and the Media

19

innovation’.44 This point is borne out not only by Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy, a study of the impact of commercial media in the North of England, but also in later works such as The Way We Live Now, in which he lamented the demise of Christianity in working class communities.45 The conservatism to which Hebdige refers was captured in a parody of the launch of a commercial broadcasting company by Peter Black, a television critic for the Daily Mail. ‘Mrs Proudie’, the wife of a bishop, ‘was outraged to learn that Barset Television proposes to open on what she calls “the Sabbath” ’, wrote Black. It took all of the programme controller’s negotiating skill to cool her off by presenting her with Sunday schedules which seem to be in line with her interest in furthering education for working class adults. So far his Sunday programmes include films on English history, undersea exploration, and zoology. Mrs Proudie is yet to learn that the titles are: The Adventures of Wat Tyler, Waldo the Webfooted and Jungle Girl.46

It was only when concerns about quality intermingled with ones about what television should or should not cover that middle class interpretations began to diverge on ideological lines. Hoggart’s Television and Radio Committee, for example, was designed to combat ‘the dangers to British broadcasting from ill-​ informed and illiberal pressure groups’ such as Whitehouse’s NVALA.47 The early politics of television were in this context informed by perceptions about standards and status that were more linked to class than they were ideology: ideological responses were subsumed by class-​based anxieties and orientations. The pre-​ eminence of class in concerns over commercial television was reiterated by the cross-​party dimensions of the opposition to its introduction. Christopher Mayhew, a Labour MP with experience in television, sought to marshal this opposition through the National Television Council (NTC), a pressure group with support among members of the Conservative as well as Labour Party. As described by Anthony Crosland, a prominent figure in the move to ‘revise’ the constitutional commitment of the Labour Party to nationalization, the impetus behind this cross-​party opposition can be explained by the role of media –​particularly in its American guise –​in dystopian fantasies across the political spectrum. ‘On the right’, he claimed, ‘the media is seen as the symbol of “mass society”  –​populous, egalitarian, mobile, noisy, and mechanised  –​ which threatens aristocratic values and privileged tranquillity. On the left the Madison Avenue Executive . . . play[s]‌the allegorical role of villain previously played by the Finance Capitalist, the Oil Magnate or the Armaments King.’48 In Dear Viewer, a pamphlet drafted by Mayhew and selling over 60,000 copies, the

20

Peace and Power in Cold War Britain

Labour MP presented the case in cultural rather than political terms: the need to attract advertisers would encourage the formulation of mass audiences and neglect distinctions of age, intellect and taste.49 The winning of popular support for a campaign based on the preservation of a paternal interest, however, was inherently contradictory and flawed. As the Popular Television Association (PTA), the pro-​ITV lobby, tended to point out, the NTC could not admit that the objection to giving people a choice of programmes was that the majority would choose the easiest to watch: to do so would expose a fundamental elitism. If the defence of the monopoly was entrenched in an upper middle class tradition of cultural leadership and patronage, however, then the move to break it up was also entrenched in class-​based politics and transformations. The establishment of ITV through the Television Act of 1954 can in fact be ascribed to a shift of power within the Conservative Party from aristocratic tradition to neo-​ liberal enterprise. Quite strikingly, it was the younger generation of backbenchers from lower middle class backgrounds, not the older generation of grandee ministers, who were the driving force behind its introduction.50 The implications of this sociopolitical current for the history of broadcasting were arguably profound. Ripples of it can be detected in the Peacock Committee on Financing the BBC, appointed in 1985 and led by Alan Peacock, a professor of economics and specialist in the political economy of the free market.51 While opposition to commercial television stretched across the major parties, it was within the Labour Party that it took on a distinct importance and trajectory. The enthusiasm among the working classes for commercial television, illustrated by the migration of audiences away from the BBC when ITV became operational, was a prime symbol in debates about how class was transforming in an age of affluence and what this meant for the future of socialism. These were waged between modernizers and revisionists such as Crosland and a cross-​ section of socialists intent on retaining the commitment of the party to common ownership over the means of production, enshrined in Clause 4 of its constitution. The rise of commercial television, it seemed, was yet another indication that the class-​based model of cultural politics on which the Labour Party relied was eroding and coming to an end. It made it difficult for the upper middle class leadership of the party to act on behalf and in the interests of working class betterment and cultural improvement –​indeed, the upward mobility of the post-​ war period seemed to put the whole idea of a ‘working class’ into jeopardy. For these reasons, a Labour Party pamphlet had applauded the BBC for giving ‘the public something a little better than it thinks it wants’. It vowed that ‘television



Middle Class Radicalism and the Media

21

was not to be used –​as Karl Marx and Charles Kingsley said that religion had been used –​as the opium of the people’.52 Anthony Crosland, aware of how such arguments could lose votes, supplied a more cutting assessment. The left blamed the media for depoliticizing the worker, he claimed, who chooses not to ‘spend [his] newfound leisure . . . studying history or philosophy as Trotsky had hoped’.53 The strength and influence of upper middle class concerns about commercial television, embedded as they were in institutional power and social relations, were also prevalent in the findings of the Pilkington Committee on Broadcasting, published in 1962. The Committee, on which Richard Hoggart served as an influential contributor, censured ITV for its overdependence on American-​ style entertainment and imports, at the same time recommending the allocation of a second television channel to the BBC  –​what would become BBC2.54 The provision of a memorandum to the Pilkington Committee by Common Wealth (CWP), a small party of independent socialists who believed in worker control, offers a representative measure of what ‘middle class radicals’ made of commercial broadcasting. The Party, formed during the Second World War and seeking to ‘transform society into an egalitarian, libertarian democracy’, seemed to capture the participatory ethos that this chapter has framed as a vital characteristic of radicalism in Britain: one that imbued radicals with a special role in the history of communications media. In seeking the implementation of ‘democratic techniques’ such as ‘the referendum, the right of recall . . . [and] election instead of appointment’, the Party had a heightened interest in the egalitarian potential of broadcasting, describing it in the submission to the Committee as ‘a major factor in determining the quality of our society’. ‘It is fundamental to our view of society’, argued the Northern Federation Council of CWP in a separate submission, ‘that freedom of speech and formation of opinion in the modern era depend largely on the means of dissemination and creation of opinion being available to all sections of the community on as wide and unrestricted basis as possible.’55 In light of this importance, the leaders of CWP regarded the development of broadcasting under commercial principles as largely unacceptable. They did not accept the ‘very general view . . . that broadcasting is primarily a medium for entertainment’, adding that ‘the tragedy of film has been that it has . . . been overwhelmingly used as a provider of entertainment as a result of its channelling through the commercial cinema industry’. The Party therefore regarded the commercialization of cinema and the film industry as having ‘wasted one great potential source of enlightenment’ and was inclined to view television in similar terms. While it did not ‘propose the abolition of ITV’, it claimed that

22

Peace and Power in Cold War Britain

‘experience has shown that a television service relying on advertising revenue for its finance can provide virtually nothing that cannot equally well be provided by public corporation’ and drew attention to ‘grave offences against taste and the social good’. At the same time, however, the memorandum also conceded that commercial television had shaken the sterility of broadcasting under the BBC. It had been ‘instrumental in reducing the fuddy-​duddiness which seems to lie dormant in BBC soil, the blanket of monopoly [having served] as a suitable cover for comfortable sleep’. Despite a fundamental disagreement with commercialism, then, the Party did acknowledge that the medium could be liberating for radical politics: it had produced programmes of ‘high quality and serious social intent’.56 In the same period that ITV emerged, the national press also began to re-​ engage in struggles over circulation that had intensified in the interwar period and were fuelled by commercial incentives:  advertising revenue in particular. These struggles were relieved by newsprint rationing in the Second World War, yet it did not stifle the demand, especially among Labour MPs, for a proper investigation into the conduct and structure of the press, which convened as a Royal Commission between 1947 and 1949. The impact of newsprint rationing, however, had meant that businesses had less space in which to advertise and as a result advertising revenue in this period was spread more equitably and widely. This may have prolonged the lives of dailies and weeklies that by the late 1950s were in ruins, prompting a further investigation into the press through a second Commission, appointed in 1961. When print rationing ended in 1956, it served to restore advertising as a decisive factor in the newspaper business as production costs and space for advertisements both increased. Since businesses had more freedom over where to advertise, they tended to shun newspapers that took bold and uncompromising positions on domestic and foreign politics. This was underlined by newspaper coverage of the Suez Crisis in 1956, whereby most of the newspapers that opposed the intervention of Britain lost advertising revenue. The News Chronicle, a newspaper with pacifist roots and traditions, suffered a blow to its circulation and advertising appeal from which it never recovered.57 The political economics of advertising and the free market  also offered a persuasive framework for explaining the types of newspaper that were produced at the time, which tended to polarize between quality broadsheets on the one hand and popular tabloids on the other. Here, the cultural Marxism of Raymond Williams represented a breakthrough, forming the basis of a critique of press freedom that was picked up downstream by activists in the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom and researchers such as James Curran. Williams, a



Middle Class Radicalism and the Media

23

prominent figure in the New Left that coalesced in the mid-​1950s, mounted a major case against the liberal theory of the press by demonstrating that the rise of the press did not correspond with that of a literate public. On the contrary, it had responded to commercial and technological conditions that facilitated the artificial construction of that public:  the popular newspaper was in this interpretation little more than a commercial recipe proven successful.58 In its 1949 report, the Royal Commission had in fact acknowledged the capacity of advertising to distort the entire enterprise of newspaper production. It described how ‘a quality paper, by appealing to special classes of reader, can obtain special classes of advertisement without achieving mass circulation’.59 By contrast, a popular newspaper, because it relied on poorer readers, had to maximize its circulation in order to attract a lesser class of advertisement  –​in other words, makers of cereals and detergents rather than Rolex watches. A popular newspaper therefore became popular because it was forced to dilute its content and pursue mass publics through the construction of common denominators between social groups. In this way, a newspaper only reflected a reader’s interests insofar as he or she had spending power. The notion of the free press serving to disenfranchise readers with less disposable income gains force in relation to the newspaper history of the late 1950s and 1960s. A newspaper attempting in this period to steer an intermediate course between the quality business model of The Times and the mass circulation one of the Daily Mirror would in all likelihood be destined for failure. The News Chronicle, the Daily Herald and Reynold’s News were all newspapers that strove to occupy a space between the binary business models of elite and mass journalism and all of them succumbed to either closure or takeover in the early 1960s. Despite commanding readerships of over one million, the Chronicle was merged in controversial circumstances with the Daily Mail and the Herald sold to the Mirror Group, which relaunched the newspaper as The Sun in 1964, five years before it was taken over by Rupert Murdoch. Reynold’s News, a Co-​ operative Party weekly with roots in the Chartist movement, was relaunched as a tabloid in 1962 prior to closure in 1967. What these newspapers had in common was not only their attempt to offer a richer form of mass journalism, but also to provide a popular alternative on politics –​the Herald having been launched as a strike sheet in 1911 before becoming the official newspaper of the Labour movement. As the Royal Commission on the Press explained, the national press tended to the right and the range of political viewpoints in the popular press was ‘not so large . . . their values, their taste and their appeal vary within very narrow

24

Peace and Power in Cold War Britain

limits’.60 By the 1960s, their journalistic formulas and political representations had become even narrower, another side-​effect of free market logic.

‘Mass’ media The anxieties and reservations that surrounded commercial television were intertwined with ones about broadcasting technology itself. It was not only the commercialism of broadcasting and the press that led to the construction of artificial publics, but also the very function of radio and television as mechanisms of communication. The content and programmes that were transmitted by these media were controlled and formulated by an elite minority and tended to be received by listeners and viewers in the relative privacy of their own homes. In this sense, the ‘mass’ involved in mass media really represented an aggregation of all the isolated individuals who were listening to radio or watching television at a given time. Along with the commercial drive towards the construction of profitable audiences and publics, it was for this reason that Raymond Williams argued that ‘there are in fact no masses; only ways of seeing masses’.61 While it is not always helpful to interpret the listener and viewer as a passive victim on the receiving end of mass communication, the point here is that there seemed to be a dislocation between the abstract public of broadcasting and the real public of the church, the social club and the trade union. This dislocation was perceived in contradictions not only between the abstract and the real, but also between the exclusiveness of ownership and production on the one side and popular consumption on the other, between the reach and scale of broadcasting power and the neglect of local and minority identities. Such apprehensions were particularly pronounced among radicals and socialists, the majority of which were concerned that mass media were inhibitive to the social basis of participatory democracy. The perceived tension between the abstract masses or publics of broadcasting and the ‘real’ ones engrained in local communities and social environments has been a familiar theme in the history of broadcasting. Paddy Scannell, a media historian and theorist, described how in the 1920s the BBC ‘struggled to establish the right of the microphone to relay events beyond their immediate location. Concert and variety impresarios feared a fall-​off at the box office, the Football Association worried about declining gates and the churches foresaw diminishing congregations’.62 The rise of television, which by 1954 had an audience the size of the three radio services combined, was seen as similarly inimical to community



Middle Class Radicalism and the Media

25

activities and participation.63 Since it was a medium that supplied standardized forms of entertainment to conditions that were largely private and isolated, it seemed reductive of the diversity and vibrancy of community and public life –​ a perception that was particularly strong among socialist writers who had progressed beyond their working class roots through education and middle class professions. In his Uses of Literacy, for example, Richard Hoggart framed the working class community in which he was raised as an organic one, disrupted and weakened by the artifice of communicative change. It was an approach that echoed F. R. Leavis’s idealization of England prior to industrialization and from this perspective Hoggart has been accused of turning ‘Leavis’ historical mythology upside down, displacing the organic society of Merry Old England with the working class culture of his youth’.64 While ideas about authenticity and community are transferable and were utilized across political ideologies, they seem in this period to have been appropriated as a means by which to explain the decline of working class socialism in particular. A perceived correlation appeared to exist between the vitality of socialism and traditional forms of communication, with television seeming to domesticate and detract from the machismo and rowdiness of the meetings and rallies that had been characteristic of the Labour movement.65 In David Mercer’s Where the Difference Begins, one of a trilogy of plays about generational change on the left and broadcast by the BBC in 1961, the lead protagonist implies that television had led to the enfeeblement of combative socialism. He describes to his son how life is ‘not t’same. Now, we’ve gotten t’telly, tha knows. . . . I thought t’time’d come when we should have a different road of going on in this country. By the talks about socialism!’66 This romantic evocation of a varied and vigorous public life, encapsulated by the regional accent of the male lead, was also a feature of The Changing Forest, a biographical depiction of social change in the mining community of the Forest of Dean by Dennis Potter, another English playwright and socialist. In it, Potter described how ‘home is now a more private place, and “community” more the public, distant word it sounds . . . there used to be few places where you could escape the insistent beat of the Forest of Dean’s sense of community, it’s totally encompassing and occasionally imprisoning way of life’.67 The argument that advancements in capitalism can impair the fabric of community, pioneered by Hoggart and Williams in the late 1950s, formed a literary theme that young socialist writers in the 1960s seem to have inherited. It was the control and ownership of mass media  –​not merely the inbuilt tendencies of the technologies they comprised –​that seemed to remove them from the heartbeat and politics of the community. This control and ownership

26

Peace and Power in Cold War Britain

was characterized by the statism of officials and politics as much as the high capital of the businessmen and entrepreneurs. It was through negotiating these rival ends of media control and the relative degrees of political agency they yielded that middle class radicals in the mid-​to-​late 1950s were able to redefine social movements and popular politics. This redefinition meant moving away from the radicalism of upper middle class leadership, tied up as it was in communicative forms and dynamics that were linked to public service and the state. Instead, it meant adjusting to and working within the market place, which offered an alternative vehicle for reinventing radicalism and the culture of socialism, especially for younger radicals whose class experience had been shaped by post-​war mobility. The politics and tensions of this transition were manifest in the mass movements of the 1950s and 1960s, usually in generational terms, and offer a window through which their development and organization can be narrated and understood. The detachment of mass media from the communities they were supposed to represent was highlighted by the history of the press in the interwar period, which through economies of scale had become increasingly monopolistic. The growth of press syndicates and ownership of local newspapers by outside interests seemed to epitomize the forms of standardization and top-​down communications that Hoggart and Williams loathed and prefigured the appointment of the Royal Commission in 1947. It is possible, therefore, to explain dilution of content in the press in terms of control and ownership as well as advertising. As Hoggart remarked, in contrast to the older type of newspaper of his youth, the newer ones of the 1950s ‘are rather like the latest synthetic cocktail to a glass of not-​very strong beer. . . . The newer forms are even less wholesome than the older’.68 The monopolistic trends in local newspapers were also reflected in national ones. By 1962 the three leading press groups controlled 67 per cent of the circulation of national dailies, compared with 45 per cent in 1949.69 The concentration of media ownership that had occurred through the press was exacerbated further through commercial television, where businesses and entrepreneurs applied to the Independent Television Authority (ITA) for regional contracts. The criteria by which ITA awarded these contracts tended to favour businesses with an existing stake in the media –​press groups in particular. The only application that can be seen as representative of the ideals of middle class radicalism, made by the Co-​operative Party and calling for ‘local finance, control and popular participation . . . in the running of a commercial station’ was rejected outright.70 When it was revealed that two out of the four original programme contracts were intended to be awarded to newspaper magnates associated with



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27

the Conservative Party, however, the deputy leader of the Labour Party, Herbert Morrison, expressed his opposition in Parliament. He objected to the ‘further concentration of power in the hands of a few men’ –​a development contrary to the recommendations of the Royal Commission on the Press. His motion that the government ‘bring forward legislation to amend or repeal the Television Act’, the statutory framework by which ITV was constituted and regulated, was defeated 300 votes to 268.71 The Conservative Party, whose headquarters had funded the PTA to the tune of £20,000, was similarly hostile to an application from Sidney Bernstein, a socialist who had made his fortune in cinema.72 Despite his initial opposition and support for public service broadcasting, Bernstein wrote to Morrison to clarify that ‘if there is to be commercial television in this country, we think we should be in . . . this may well be very useful to us one day’.73 His Granada Television, transmitting to Manchester and the North West, became the most progressive of all the commercial companies in terms of current affairs and drama. In the same way that the monopolistic tendencies of commercial media risked tearing communications away from their social roots, so too did narrow or restrictive interpretations of what the community or nation constituted, especially in public service broadcasting. The output and structure of the BBC, especially after the Second World War, was based on a one-​dimensional conception about the British ‘nation’ that tended to neglect local and regional identities and interests that lay outside of the home counties and London. Nowhere was this more the case than in Scotland and Wales, which since ‘they are nations in their own right’, the Common Wealth Party suggested be permitted to form their own broadcasting corporations. As described in its memorandum to the Pilkington Committee, ‘the BBC has never fully understood regionalisation, this probably being an effect of “Londonisation” to use a term employed by the Broadcasting Committee [of 1949]’. In a nod to its more libertarian interpretation of social democracy, it claimed that the absence of effective regionalization ‘may be the inevitable price to pay for the centralised soullessness we have permitted in the name of efficiency and the welfare state’. The CWP also drilled into statistics that the BBC had utilized in annual reports to illustrate its commitment to regional broadcasting, which in 1959 and 1960 was supposed to represent a sixth of its coverage. These ‘did not differentiate between the nature of the programmes [broadcast], but only . . . [their] origin and transmission’, rendering the statistics erroneous. As the Northern Federation Council of CWP put it, ‘[A]‌programme of, say, variety by nationally-​known summer season artists broadcast from Blackpool is not necessarily any more “Northern” in nature than it is “West”

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or “Midland”.’ To this end, it concluded that ‘the great resources [offered by the North of England] in programme material and potential broadcasting personalities . . . [are in danger of remaining] inadequately exploited so long as the basic programme planning of the BBC is centralised in London’.74 That the technology existed to make broadcasting more inclusive and representative contributed to the frustrations of those in favour of participatory democracy. This technology had been utilized ‘merely to improve the centralised broadcasts of the state monopoly’, to cite the 1957 Committee, an initiative set up by radical pacifists and socialists, and seeking to bring about structural change in key aspects of British politics and society.75 In the words of the Northern Federation Council, ‘[T]‌he major argument for monopoly control of broadcasting [in the past] has rested on the restricted number of frequencies available  . . .  under such international agreements as the Copenhagen Plan of 1948 . . . the development of VHF [Very High Frequency] bands has deprived this argument of its force.’ The National Committee of CWP, reiterating this point, suggested that the clearance for broadcasting of Band II –​a VHF wavelength between 87.5 and 108 megahertz (MHz)  –​would enable the creation of over 100 channels. In turn, this would facilitate a far more sophisticated system of broadcasting, able to respond to the needs of the regions and allowing for the involvement of a range of local and voluntary organizations.76 The system that CWP envisaged was also supported by the 1957 Committee, which favoured ‘the Dutch system of control’ over broadcasting, because ‘the rights of all kinds of organisations . . . to share in . . . television time was fundamental to democracy’.77 It was this system that CWP recommended to the Pilkington Committee in 1960, with the proviso that all local stations must run on a local basis, which included advertisements from only local business if it were to operate on commercial lines. The structure of ITV, in which commercial companies provided services for a specific region, did mark a step forward in regional representation. This is not to suggest that the companies were completely successful in this regard –​the regions to which they catered were defined according to commercial rather than cultural factors and the companies tended to share content rather than act in direct competition, as had been intended.78 Where the companies did have an impact, however, was in opening up television to a wider range of people and voices: a development that also pressurized the BBC into revisiting its regional provision. Michael Foot, who supported the introduction of commercial television as editor of Tribune, a fortnightly magazine on the Labour left, described in 1958 how ‘bustling showmen are taking over’ from ‘safe civil servants. And instead of the



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last word being handed down to us from the London bureaucracy, Manchester and Birmingham and Cardiff are allowed to get a word in edgeways’.79 This notably departs from the stock response of upper middle class radicals and socialists to commercial broadcasting. A  minority from the older generation, Foot and A. J. P. Taylor among them, recognized the potential of market-​based media in unshackling the working classes from the bonds of cultural patronage, rejuvenating socialism in the process. The roots of this response were in the era of the General Strike and the ‘Popular Front’  against fascism, when the BBC repeatedly demonstrated its social aloofness and allegiance to class rulers.80 It was also in this period that radical newspapers turned to commercial forms, the Daily Worker abandoning a dense and inaccessible journalism reminiscent of the late nineteenth century and embracing illustrations, brief and colloquial language and even a woman’s page that encompassed domestic as well as ideological issues.81 The effect of programmes that responded to the market of the regions could therefore be quite striking, especially in the rare circumstances that they related to local controversies or politics. In a letter to Robert Fraser, director general of the ITA between 1954 and 1970, Edith Hollingsworth, a viewer from Manchester, was able to articulate the excitement of feeling represented for the first time on television. ‘May I plead for at least an extension of half an hour for Under Fire?’, she asked in reference to the current affairs programme, whereby a live studio audience in Manchester ‘fired’ questions over a monitor to a panel of subject ‘experts’ based in London. ‘It is the first time since sound and television began that anyone has realised that there is such a place as the North of England’, claimed Hollingsworth, ‘and that the people are quite as civilised and educated as Southerners’.82 Michael Foot, conscious of the political effects of this liberation, put it another way: ‘Once there’, he argued, ‘these awkward people [in the studio] ask awkward questions, in even more awkward accents.’83

Class-​based communication and state power If the geographical diversity of the regions had laboured under public service definitions of the nation, then political, religious and social forms of diversity had done so as well. For minority groups who fell beyond the parameters of these definitions, the term ‘mass’ held almost tyrannical connotations:  their identities were disenfranchised and seemingly unworthy of occupying a space in a majoritarian democracy or the mirror of the media. Since ‘mass’ in this sense

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was entangled with the social identity and make-​up of the British state –​and particularly the power it exercised over mass communications –​it warrants its own section for discussion. In beginning to approach the idea of a consensual, state-​enforced version of the ‘mass’, this argument borders on a critical tipping point in the transformation of middle class radicalism in post-​war Britain. This took place between what tended to be older, upper middle class radicals who had been complicit in public service broadcasting and younger ones, more wide-​ ranging in their class backgrounds, who sought to remove the constraints and obstacles that stood in the path of their own creative careers and radicalism. As well as a movement among a section of radicals to defend class-​based broadcasting and communication, then, there was also an opposing one –​emanating out of a different set of social roots and equally as forceful –​that sought to knock it down and seek alternatives. The impact of this latter movement, serving to weaken the grip of the class-​ordered state over communications and culture, has been likened to a great catharsis in British society –​‘a dam bursting’ to borrow the words of the author and journalist Christopher Booker.84 The marginal if not non-​existent position of minorities in radio and television coverage was fixed from the beginning by the royal charter and legislation on which the duties and responsibilities of the broadcasters were based. Both the BBC and ITV were compelled to impartiality in news and current affairs: an undertaking that served to militate against minority access to political broadcasting. In the words of Stuart Hood, controller of programmes at the BBC between 1960 and 1970, ‘impartiality’ was interpreted by both the BBC and ITV ‘as the acceptance of that segment of opinion which constitutes Parliamentary consensus. Opinion that falls outside that consensus has difficulty finding expression’.85 For the BBC, however, the charter assumed almost the status of a biblical document, exegesis of which was part of an actual ethos and identity: a rather separate situation to the cold and hard legislation that lay down the framework for ITV. The BBC interpretation of its charter could therefore be particular zealous, culminating in an ongoing deference to the holy trinity of church, monarchy and state, as well as an active avoidance of all matters controversial. How the BBC treated controversy also seemed to marginalize the minority viewpoint, whether in relation to entertainment, politics, music or sport. As CWP observed, even the BBC policy on controversy seemed uncontroversial, amounting to ‘an unexciting but not exceptionally objectionable orthodoxy and respectability’. ‘There seems to be a general assumption’, argued CWP, ‘that even the most basic differences in viewpoint on any subject can somehow be synthesised into colourless agreement if the chairman or speaker [of a programme] tries hard enough.’ This was not so



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much ‘evidence of a vicious social purpose’, however, as ‘the results of gazing too deeply into the coffee when it is black’.86 The BBC could find consensus in any controversy, yet again working to reinforce a dictatorship of the majority. The version of the public that the BBC empowered through its interpretation of the charter had a social identity and structure that was also amenable to the interests of the British state. In short, this can be summarized as middle class, affiliated to the Church of England and the Conservative, Labour or Liberal Parties, and aspirational with due deference for social hierarchy as defined by the class system. ‘At all times one can sense in the background the opinions and thought processes of middle class suburbia’, claimed CWP, ‘with its concomitant of a “stage” working class curious in speech and habit.’ This discrimination and projection of middle class norms and publics was rendered all the more powerful by the messianic impetus that informed it. William Haley seemed to capture this in his statement on religious broadcasting for the 1949 Committee. ‘We are citizens of a Christian country’, remarked the director general, ‘and the BBC –​an institution set up by the State –​bases its policy upon a positive attitude towards Christian values . . . The whole preponderant weight of its programmes is directed towards this end.’87 The tasks of public-​building and state-​building seemed to this end not so far removed. The BBC cultivated a public that was consensual to the social identity and make-​up of the state, at the same time excluding ones that endangered it. As the religious complexion of middle class radicalism in Britain fell beyond the Church of England and into the dissenting and non-​Conformist denominations, it was particularly vulnerable to prescriptions in the field of religious broadcasting.88 The connection between these denominations and conscientious objection contributed to this vulnerability, since pacifism was banned from the airwaves in the Second World War. The hangover of this ban was felt by religious minorities well into the post-​war period, with pacifism featuring in only three broadcasts between 1945 and 1954.89 When pacifism did receive coverage through a male character in the radio drama The Archers, the general secretary of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) complained to the BBC that they had made him odd and undesirable. This would usually have been irrelevant, claimed General Secretary Stuart Morris, ‘but, as you know, pacifists are never given an opportunity by the BBC to explain their position’.90 By 1960, CWP felt it necessary to condemn religious broadcasting as ‘partisan and propagandist’, at the same time reiterating the calls for wider representation among religious minorities that had been made in 1949 by the Ethical Union and Rationalist Press Association.91 Whatever middle class radicals gained in a public service

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system organized around class, it seemed, was taken away as a result of their alternative political and religious convictions. Geoffrey Crowther and Robert Watson-​Watt, both contributors to the 1949 Committee, had no doubt that ‘certain sections of opinion are denied the air’. While conceding that purveyors of this opinion were often ‘extremists’, they also recognized that ‘the same could be said in the past . . . of Protestants and Quakers’. They therefore concluded that ‘any system in which it is not safe to let cranks speak is a bad system and . . . a weakness to the nation that adopts it’.92 That an occasional expression of middle class crankiness could be dismissed as ‘unsafe’ underlines the fragility of ‘the public’ that the BBC sought to serve and underpin. The area of broadcasting in which the exclusion of radical minorities was most notable, however, was also the one in which they had the potential to pose the greatest threat: politics. In order to explore how the BBC dealt with political minorities, it is necessary to focus on the relationship between the BBC and the machinery of government more closely, especially from a radical perspective. The argument that the BBC enjoyed independence from the state due to a series of constitutional and financial checks and balances was regarded by radical groups as no better than a fiction designed to disguise the realities of power. For CWP, the means by which the BBC received its funds, the licence fee, was particularly problematic. This was not paid direct from the post offices at which it was collected, but by the broadcasting vote, the same procedure by which other government-​financed services were administered. In the view of CWP, this politicized the BBC, giving the Treasury the financial muscle by which it could exert pressure on the Corporation through the retention of funds.93 That the Treasury often did so was highlighted by the BBC Annual Report, which detailed how ‘the Corporation had tried to establish the case for the full [amount] . . . of the net licence revenue [in both 1959 and 1960]’. The retention by the Treasury of ‘five percent of this revenue’, however, had ‘necessitated the slowing down, or, the postponing beyond the two-​year period, of a number of projects which the Corporation regards as highly desirable’. Despite this revenue forming ‘the essential foundation of good broadcasting in the sole interest of the public’, to cite the Corporation, it had been ‘withheld down the years by the Exchequer’.94 The control and governance of broadcasting also seemed to open up broadcasting to political interference, since the Board of Governors on both the BBC and ITV were selected by appointment rather than election. The role of the post master general (PMG), at the time fulfilled by Charles Hill under Harold Macmillan, was regarded by CWP as a clear example of democratic malpractice. It was a position appointed and determined by the government of



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the day, yet comprised a remarkable degree of powers over broadcasting and communications media. These powers had been exercised, unduly in the view of CWP, in July 1955, when Hill vetoed alongside the major parties a proposal for a series of party political broadcasts by Plaid Cymru. In order to democratize the control and governance of broadcasting, it was suggested by CWP that the Pilkington Committee endorse the creation of a Broadcasting Licensing Board, an elected body that would assume responsibility from the PMG over whether or not a station be permitted to broadcast. In addition to a Council for Controversial Broadcasting with statutory powers to broaden participation in politics, this measure would bring broadcasting closer to the ‘Hyde Park of the Air’ that CWP idealized.95 As a result of the decision to veto the party political broadcasts in July 1955, CWP resolved alongside the Fellowship Party, the Independent Labour Party, Plaid and the SNP to establish what was known as the Five Party Committee (FPC), a pressure group designed to widen the access of these political minorities to radio and television. Between the creation of the Committee in January 1956 and the appointment of the Pilkington Committee in 1960, these parties engaged in extensive correspondence, beginning with Charles Hill, but also extending to the BBC, ITV and the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Parties. The efforts of the Committee, however, were to no avail. They received no explanation as to why the criteria for airtime had become more restrictive between General Elections, with parties having to submit a minimum of twenty Parliamentary candidates in 1945 and fifty in 1955.96 Nor, for that matter, was an explanation forthcoming as to why double standards seemed to exist for political broadcasting in Scotland and Wales on the one hand and Northern Ireland on the other: the implication being that more leeway was given to the latter because of the strength of the unionist parties. The whole experience had been ‘reminiscent of punching a plum pudding’, in the words of CWP: ‘the battle was lost as soon as the sterile letter [from the PMG] was received in on 25 March 1956’.97 Given that almost 1,000 hours of political broadcasts had taken place between April 1958 and its memorandum to the Pilkington Committee, CWP could not comprehend the resistance to airtime for political minorities. ‘Against [a]‌ . . . background’ of 20,000 hours in radio and 3,000 hours in television in the same period, ‘would an occasional short broadcast by a minority spokesman be such a disaster?’98 Despite ‘pious lip service  . . .  to the principle of no ban on minorities’ among officials and politicians, the net result of the Five Party negotiations was ‘no broadcast for minor parties on average of near upon 500 broadcasts a year for the other parties’.99 The BBC’s definition of the public once

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again proved restrictive, with Ian Jacob, the director general, arguing that it was not ‘the Corporation’s duty or purpose to stimulate interest in the small parties or any other minority’. Any Answers, a BBC current affairs programme in which letters from listeners were discussed on air, had never featured a single item from the parties of the FPC.100 It was when minorities were denied the opportunity to convert themselves into majorities that CWP believed a majoritarian democracy became tyrannical: this was precisely what had happened in the field of political broadcasting. The exclusion of minor parties on radio and television, combined with the participatory ethos that ran through their politics, did spill over into pirate broadcasting. As the 1957 Committee noted, these began with the SNP in 1956, whose ‘illegal broadcasts had created widespread interest . . . had continued for a year . . . [and] no-​one had yet been arrested’.101 It was this line of thinking, often entwined with the anarchist strands in radical politics, that fed into the Voice of Nuclear Disarmament, a pirate station run by the Committee of 100 on the BBC and ITV wavelengths in the 1960s. As the Daily Worker described following a successful broadcast in December 1961, ‘seconds after “God Save the Queen” ended on ITV, the quavering, owl-​like notes of “Don’t you hear the H-​bomb’s thunder?” were heard’. This song, popular on CND and C100 marches and demonstrations, was followed by an interview with Bertrand Russell, the world-​ renowned philosopher, in which he ‘was asked about his “frightening statement” that none of us might be alive a year hence’.102 The decision to broadcast on a television wavelength, and not a separate one in the fashion of Radio Caroline, the offshore radio station established in 1964, is curious and must have represented an attempt to tap the mass audiences that television monopolized (Figure 1.1). An awareness of those audiences must have also been the reason why the broadcast took place after rather than during full coverage. ‘We don’t want to annoy anyone’, remarked the presenter of the Voice, an anonymous young woman known to the BBC as ‘Fallout Freda’.103 The conditions of access to politics were limited not only by a lack of representation for minorities in broadcasting, but also by the suppression of information on political issues. Such suppression was governed by constitutional and legal instruments to which both broadcasters and newspapers were subject and can be traced back at least to the Admiralty, War Office and Press Committee, established in 1911 in the wake of spy scares. The D-​Notice Committee, as it became known, brought together high-​ranking members of the military and press to determine what newspapers, and later on broadcasters, should and should not publish, issuing ‘D-​Notices’ to this effect.104 While no fixed penalty



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Figure  1.1  Between Admass and the Anti-​Establishment:  The Voice for Nuclear Disarmament. The caption to the cartoon reads:  ‘And ‘ere’s da commercial  –​don’t forget to eat at Tony’s downstairs, for da best spaghetti this-​a side of da Tottenham Court Road’. © Raymond ‘Jak’ Jackson, Associated Newspapers Ltd.

was incurred for defying the D-​Notice, the broadcasters and journalists who did so opened themselves up to potential prosecution under the Official Secrets Acts. As Chapter  2 explores in further detail, the problem with D-​Notices was that they were employed not only to guard information in the interests of national security, but also to prevent it from being subject to public scrutiny. In other words, they were a means by which democratic judgement could be bypassed –​a tool of the Hobbesian state. As well as an infrastructure around the censorship of information in high politics, a sophisticated one had also materialized around its manufacture – especially through the establishment of the Central Office of Information (COI) and Ministry of Information (MoI) in the Second World War. The state socialism of the post-​war period seems particularly influential to this end, as it was the Attlee government that oversaw the appointment of public relations officers (PROs) to the Ministries. The Information Research Department (IRD), established in January 1948, also gathered facts and presented news likely to inspire anti-​Communist sentiment at home and abroad. When seen in this context, the failure of radical politics

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to mobilize movements and popular politics in the immediate post-​war period seems far more comprehensible: they lacked the basic currency of information to mobilize. What made the suppression of information on high politics so effective, however, was not so much the state machinery that made it possible as the culture it engendered. This tended to be one of self-​censorship, whereby the BBC and quality newspapers willingly avoided, downplayed or omitted information of a sensitive nature. Such a culture was not merely a by-​product of the fear of reprisals, but also an engrained element of the often consensual and deferential relations that upper middle class leaders shared in politics and public life. It was manifest in the Fourteen Day Rule, conceived by the BBC in 1944 as a ‘self-​ denying ordinance’, and preventing the Corporation from discussing any issue to be debated in Parliament within a fortnight. As the BBC explained to the 1949 Committee, the rule was designed ‘to ensure that at no time [does broadcasting] become an alternative simultaneous debating forum to Parliament’.105 This was the same argument politicians employed to extend it in the post-​war period. Winston Churchill, speaking in the Commons, claimed that ‘it would be shocking to have debates in this House forestalled time after time by expressions of opinion by persons who had not the status or responsibility of Members of Parliament [MPs]’.106 The idea that radio and television could provide the basis of a rival forum of opinion to Parliament, diminishing the authority of MPs and enhancing that of members of the public, serves to underline the extent to which communicative change had implications for the state and the form of democracy it comprises. Just as Churchill perceived the need to bring this under control and transfix broadcasting in the proper order of democratic politics, the radicals of CWP and later the New Left perceived the need to use it as a space in which those politics could be redefined and made more participatory. In the late 1940s and 1950s, however, it was the Churchillian conception of communications and democracy that prevailed, with election campaigns also being treated as ‘close periods’ in which controversial items were also dropped from radio and television schedules. ‘Voters can be influenced by the most balanced broadcast’, remarked William Haley.107 Together, the Fourteen Day Rule and the ‘close period’ ensured that issues of high politics remained the preserve of an elite, while also limiting public involvement. In February 1955, for example, a Parliamentary debate prevented the television current affairs programme, In the News, from discussing whether the government should develop thermonuclear weapons. Such measures could make a farce of democracy. When it was announced during the General Election



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of 1950 that there would be ‘atom talks’ between the Big Three, only the BBC and Soviet Radio ignored it.108 The predilection for self-​censorship in the BBC had bordered on the exclusion of the public from politics altogether. It was not only political broadcasting in which social class and state power coalesced to create a climate of repression, but also in sectors of the media more concerned with leisure, such as the cinema and theatre. The right of the class-​ ordered state to dictate standards in arts and entertainment seemed not so far removed from its right to dictate the ‘national interest’ in politics. The Lord Chamberlain, a royal official invested with the authority to veto the performance of plays, was emblematic of this control and paternalism.109 As described in Encore, a magazine established in the mid-​1950s to promote a ‘new drama’, the criteria for appointments to this position seemed to be completely arbitrary. The Earl of Scarborough, Lord Chamberlain between 1952 and 1963, ‘was once Conservative MP for East Hill, a Governor of Bombay, and is now Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of Masons’.110 For the editors of Encore, the meaning of the position, in effect, was to preserve theatre for the upper middle classes, insulating it from the social realism that they sought to champion. They therefore bemoaned the Lord Chamberlain as ‘a bastion for all those who regard theatre not as a noisy, bustling and popular art form, but a polite, after dinner divertissement, a fairy land of shallow glitter’.111 A preoccupation with upper class life seemed to estrange theatre from the social forces emerging all around it. As Arthur Miller, the American playwright, remarked during a visit to London in 1957, the theatre was ‘hermetically sealed from the way in which society moves’.112 The disconnection between a society transformed by affluence and education and a communications media that continued to be structured around class hierarchy was a frequent source of friction. It brought two conceptions of democracy into direct conflict: the right of citizens to engage with social and political issues and the right of paternalistic leaders to determine them on their behalf.

The New Left and popular radicalism The New Left, coming together in the mid-​1950s and in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, was indicative of a welling up against the oppressiveness of class-​and state-​organized control of public life. While its chief ideologues and thinkers were former Communists and socialist intellectuals, its importance lay in the nascent connections it seemed to embody

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between politics and culture in a changed environment of communication. Since the class-​ordered state had inhibited the expression of radical art and culture as well as politics, these were coming together in social formations and realignments that appeared and felt ‘new’. Stuart Hall described in Encore how there were people who ‘interpreted the new spirit after Suez and Hungary as a literary and aesthetic experience’. There are plenty of these people in the first nights at the Royal Court [Theatre], and at the National Film Theatre, at the ‘Visual Persuaders’ [an eight-​day conference about film and television] and the Monday meetings of [a club around the journal,] Universities Left Review . . . They knew that the fruit of the period would lie in the gradual unfolding of opportunities and possibilities –​in politics, art and communication.113

The ‘opportunities and possibilities’ of which Hall spoke provided scope for cultural experimentation in a whole range of endeavours: the task of the New Left was to marshal these and infuse them with an ethos of what was referred to as socialist ‘commitment’. The radicalism of class deference and patronage had given way in the New Left to an up and coming radicalism that was negotiating the potential of commercial and visual media for a more popular and vibrant form of politics and political culture. That the New Left seemed to mark a watershed in the arts and politics is highlighted by its historiography, in which 1956 has served as the key year around which narratives of post-​war Britain have been ‘emplotted’.114 It has been elevated to the status of a ‘year zero’, to cite Wade Matthews, or depicted as the year in which ‘the dam burst’, to return to Christopher Booker’s well-​known metaphor.115 In 1956 and All That, the English dramatist Dan Rebellato provided a critique of such framing in theatre history. ‘By 1956, British theatre was in a terrible state’, he claims in an introductory caricature: The West End was dominated by a few philistine theatre managers, cranking out emotionally repressed, middle-​class plays, all set in drawing rooms with French windows, as vehicles for stars whose only talent was to wield a cigarette holder and a cocktail glass while wearing a dinner jacket. While war and suffering raged around it, the theatre continued to reflect a tiny segment of society, and ignored the rest . . . Then, on 8 May 1956, came the breakthrough. At the Royal Court, Look Back in Anger, John Osborne’s fiery blast against the establishment, burst onto the stage, radicalising British theatre overnight. New, youthful audiences flocked to the Royal Court to hear Jimmy Porter express their own hopes and fears. At a



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stroke, the old well-​made dramatists were shown up as stale and cobwebbed, and most of them left to ply their trade in films. A  new wave of dramatists sprang up in Osborne’s wake; planting their colours on British stages, speaking for a generation who had for so long been silent, they forged a living, adult, vital theatre.

‘This trite little account of the impact of the Royal Court’, notes Rebellato, ‘dominates virtually everything written on modern British theatre  . . .  all accounts use some of its figures, its images, its tone and its metaphors.’116 As the editors of Encore admitted themselves, the ‘distinction drawn between the “kitchen sink” school of theatre (embracing the Royal Court Theatre and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop) and the tea-​tinkling bourgeois entertainments of Shaftesbury Avenue’ may have been persuasive, but it was also false.117 In political histories of the left in this period, the year 1956 has also assumed the status of literary binary, demarcating between agency and stalemate and expression and repression. This is particularly prominent in what may have become the most influential narrative of the left in 1956, constructed by one of its core protagonists: Stuart Hall and his ‘Life and Times of the First New Left’. ‘The First New Left was born in 1956, a conjuncture’, he argued in a well-​known passage, that was ‘bounded on one side by the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution by Soviet tanks and on the other by the British and French invasion of the Suez Canal zone’. These two events, whose dramatic impact was heightened by the fact that they occurred within days of each other, unmasked the underlying violence and aggression latent in the two systems that dominated political life at the time  –​Western imperialism and Stalinism  –​and sent a shock wave through the political world. In a deeper sense, they defined for people of my generation the boundaries and limits of the tolerable in politics  . . .  ‘Hungary’ and ‘Suez’ were . . . liminal, boundary-​marking experiences. They symbolised the break-​up of the political Ice Age.

‘The New Left came into existence in the aftermath of these two events’, explained Hall. ‘It attempted to define a third political space somewhere between these two metaphors. Its rise signified for people on the left in my generation the end of the imposed silences and political impasses of the Cold War, and the possibility of a breakthrough into a new socialist project.’118 The ‘breakthrough’ identified by Hall, though capturing the sense of departure in art and politics, has clearly served to obfuscate a more complex process of social change, underway long before the upheavals of Suez and Hungary. As will

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be shown in Chapter 2, the internationalism described by Hall, providing agency in culture and politics through the articulation of a third way in the Cold War, had in fact been part of an ongoing struggle among independent socialists and pacifists since at least 1945. Likewise, a cultural shift, defined against class-​based authority and communication, was also beginning to bubble to the surface before John Osborne’s Look Back, permeating a whole range of creative practices and struggles. It was manifest in the student union magazine that preceded Encore, which stemmed from the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art in 1954; in Ian Nairn’s ‘Outrage’, a seminal issue of Architectural Review that led to the formation of the Anti-​Ugly Action group; and in Lindsay Anderson’s experiment in ‘Free Cinema’, starting in 1956.119 Just as the new drama stood against the Lord Chamberlain and state censorship, the Anti-​ Ugly Action group did so against the ‘architectural conservatism’ of upper middle class town planners.120 Similarly, the Free Cinema Movement represented a protest against the founders of the British Documentary Movement, who had allegedly abandoned their radicalism by remaining in service to the state after joining the Empire Marketing Board in the 1920s.121 In order to fully comprehend the New Left, it is therefore necessary to go beyond the contribution of its intellectuals to socialist thought and focus on their actual relationships with creative arts and practices. These relationships were constituted out of exchanges in journals and shared meeting places –​nowhere more so than in the New Left clubs, which by 1961 amounted to almost forty across the United Kingdom, providing fora for debate and discussion on issues that spanned from education and literature to jazz and race relations.122 The journals on which the New Left was based, the New Reasoner and Universities Left Review (ULR), both of which merged to form the New Left Review in 1960, also underlined the rise of culture as a serious category of Marxist analysis in Britain at the time. For E.  P. Thompson and John Saville, the founders of the New Reasoner, this was conceived as a reclamation of a socialist humanism that was more inherent to British traditions, as well as a rejection of ‘mechanical Marxism’, discredited in Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalinist atrocities in February 1956. For the four editors of ULR, all in their late twenties and educated at Oxford, the turn towards culture represented a genuine extension of the realm of politics –​a commitment to breaking ‘with the view that cultural or family life is a secondary expression of human creativity’.123 The leading lights of the New Left were also heavily involved in the cultural politics of adjacent movements and trends in the creative arts and industries, informing these as they developed and pushing them towards a socialist



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interpretation of popular culture. Stuart Hall, for example, saw in the new drama a movement that shared a strong sensibility with the politics he was attempting to nurture as part of the New Left and was a regular commentator on social realism in the pages of Encore. He acknowledged that John Osborne’s Look Back and the furore that surrounded it was indicative of the power of the arts and theatre to redirect as well as merely reflect the social forces it set out to dramatize. The play was ‘painful in its accuracy and immediacy’, according to Hall, even for those that would never agree with its protagonist, Jimmy Porter, that there were ‘no brave causes left’.124 Raymond Williams also identified in cinema and the theatre forms of communication that coincided with his own socialism, with its emphasis on communal life and participation. ‘There is something inherent in the making of art, and in the nature of communication’, he argued in Encore, ‘which is closely connected with social relationships.’125 Neither was this relationship between the New Left and the creative arts and industries merely one-​directional or static. The editors of Encore clearly echoed Hoggart and Williams when they argued that ‘mass literacy has meant competition for mass rewards to our press, cinema and television’ and denounced ‘trivialisation’ as ‘the worst social injustice since slavery’. ‘A government has a responsibility’, they claimed in contrast to their own suspicion of state-​based paternalism, ‘for caring for the welfare of the mind, for setting about the creation of a genuinely popular culture.’126 The difficulty of negotiating the shifting possibilities presented by the media landscape –​steering a course between a statism that tended to elevate class and a commercialism that tended to debase standards –​was highlighted by the cultural experiments associated with the New Left. Among the more successful of these was Lindsay Anderson’s Free Cinema Movement, which culminated in a series of six exhibitions of short films at the National Theatre between 1956 and 1959. The films involved in this movement were supposedly ‘free’ from the pressures of the box office, the constraints of studio production and the social conservatism of high street cinema.127 Despite stimulating debate within the film industry, however, this model of cinema, dependent on small pockets of private and state funding, was largely unsustainable. In fact, it may have even contributed to the perception of the New Left as ‘isolated’ and ‘intellectual in character’, to cite E. P. Thompson, who attributed this problem to a lack of ‘access to the means of communications’.128 This sentiment was also held by the 1957 Committee, which believed its radical programme for reform was unlikely to be heard given ‘the refusal of such fundamental rights as access for minorities to broadcasting . . . [and] the capitalistic monopolisation of mass newspapers’.129

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When the cultural experimentation associated with the New Left did coalesce with the commercial or mass media, it was often diluted and distorted beyond recognition, tending to expose the radicalism at its core as superficial and transient. The ‘Angry Young Men’, a term used by the Royal Court to publicize Osborne’s Look Back, came to be used more widely in the mass media to signify a group of authors and playwrights whose work was mildly subversive at the time. That it was more of a media creation than a real movement was underlined by the fact that those who were deemed to belong to it were not necessarily angry, young or men at all. What seemed to unite the group was not so much their backgrounds or politics, however, as their ability to express a stand against the class system in Britain. The emotional frustration of Osborne’s Look Back, the class anxiety of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim and the non-​conformist anomie of Colin Wilson’s The Outsider were all symptomatic of a common agitation and restlessness. While those branded as Angry Young Men often did not have a choice in a matter, it was a commercial enterprise that most were happy to indulge. According to one journalist, these writers ‘deliberately sought out the advantages of being known to the enormous public served by the Sunday Pictorial, commercial television, and the monster women’s magazines’.130 This was more radicalism as a posture than a position. It drew on class-​based antagonisms in communications and culture to contrive a public impact and performance:  dissent had become a commodity and as it did so the social impulses and forces that had informed it in the first place were often forgotten or rendered obsolete.

Radicalism and visual politics Despite all the problems that the rise of television posed for radicalism in Britain, it did serve to empower radical concepts and practices in one basic respect. By enabling ordinary citizens to assess politicians and interpret political issues through a visual medium, it made politics more accessible and open:  participatory democracy was enriched by a technology of seeing. This point was understood by CWP, which claimed that the ‘influence of broadcasting for good or ill is as great as that exercised by the printed word in the past  –​greater, indeed, because it is independent of the acquisition of any special technique such as the ability to read:  it can make a direct impact on even the least educated or the most unthinking’.131 What television facilitated, in other words, was a vernacular politics –​a more democratic and equalizing set of cultural forms by which the currency of politics could be traded. The dark



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corners and secret spaces of post-​war politics struggled to remain in the shadows following television: they became increasingly exposed and brought into public view. This newfound visibility informed the less paternal, more popular, model of radicalism associated with the New Left and was pivotal to the emergence of the anti-​nuclear movement in the late 1950s. The relationship between radicalism and visual politics was aided in particular by developments in television news and current affairs. These were also undergoing a transformation that had been precipitated by the rise of commercial television, which put more weight on picture value in news, and the Suez Crisis, which prompted a reformulation of broadcasting and ‘the national interest’. Since the Suez Crisis caused divisions in public opinion, it prevented broadcasters from simply equating this national interest with that of the government in power –​an equation that had been cemented in the Second World War and a cornerstone of BBC policy ever since. The reformulation of this interest during the crisis was exemplified by the decision of the BBC to air a prerecorded speech by Major Salah Salem, the editor of a Nasserite newspaper. For Alan Lennox-​Boyd, secretary of state for the Colonies, this was almost treasonous:  he was outraged ‘that a body widely believed to be  . . .  associated with the British Government should broadcast at such a moment a speech by a notorious enemy’.132 That it did so, according to Harman Grisewood, assistant to the director general, was ‘tantamount to a refusal . . . to recognise . . . that Britain was at war in the sense that Britain as a nation went to war in 1914 or 1939’.133 Given the urgency of news in the Suez Crisis, the authority of the Fourteen Day Rule also collapsed. In the words of Geoffrey Cox, editor of Independent Television News (ITN), ‘every interview we did . . . every report. . . was a breach of the Rule. The issues of Suez went too deeply into the lives of the public to be inhibited by such formalities’.134 Through the crisis, the parameters in which political broadcasting took place were democratized and enlarged, progressing beyond the narrow interests and prerogatives of political leaders and towards a more complex and independent idea of ‘the public’: one in which citizens could disagree and opposition could be expressed. It was under definitions of news itself, and not only politics, that the development of television news in Britain had laboured. In the BBC, these were marked by an earnestness that militated against the visual. The Corporation tended to distinguish between news values, which were objective and serious, and picture values, which were subjective and entertaining and in this respect were regarded as a preserve of the popular press. It was for this reason that its sound-​only bulletins and newsreel had been produced and broadcast separately

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until July 1954, when the Corporation established ‘News and Newsreel’. Especially in the News Division, it was argued that in-​vision newsreaders and newsreel personalized and sensationalized the news in a manner more common to the popular press. Grace Wyndham Goldie, assistant head of Television Talks, recalled how the editor of news believed that visualization would jeopardize standards and impartiality: ‘It derived from the doctrine that, in a newspaper, news must be clearly distinguishable from comment. News was fact; comment was opinion. If a newsreader were seen while giving the news, any change in his visual manner, a smile or lift of an eyebrow, might be interpreted as comment.’135 This suspicion of the visual was demonstrated by the fact that responsibility for ‘News and Newsreel’ was assigned to the News Division rather than the Film Department. When television bulletins were broadcast by the BBC three weeks prior to the launch of ITV in September 1955, they struggled under news values and production methods more suited to radio. The running order, for example, was the same in television as radio bulletins: no allowance was made for picture value. The effective reconciliation of news and picture values into a single programme,  however, occurred for the most part through ITN. Unlike the unnamed newsreaders of the BBC, the newscasters of ITN contributed to the retrieval and selection of news, delivered it in their language and were public personalities in their own right.136 The hallmarks of ITN in this period consisted of action film with natural sound, human interest stories and interviews that were journalistic rather than deferential.137 This made for a striking contrast with the BBC, through which television news was more akin to a ‘foreign office communiqué’ according to an American broadcaster.138 The personalization of political broadcasting, however, was also stimulated by current affairs programmes, specializing in what Richard Dimbleby, host of Panorama, described as ‘the big and vital field of topical but non-​immediate news’.139 This can be ascribed to the different settings in which these programmes were made. In the BBC, they were produced by Television Talks rather than the News Division, while in ITV they were produced by the commercial companies rather than the ITA, which had editorial jurisdiction over news. As a programme, current affairs can also be considered far more participatory than the news. Whereas news ‘happens’ to members of the public, current affairs provides a platform in which they can voice their opinions on a predetermined issue or subject. By experimenting with current affairs programme formats, the commercial companies that made up ITV could also seek to redress the imbalance that existed between political leaders and the ordinary citizens they represented. The



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empowerment of the ordinary citizen at the expense of the expert or politicians was a trend that was discernible in programmes on Granada Television in particular. This seemed an extension of the egalitarian ideals on which the programme company was based and brought it into regular conflict with the ITA, so much so that the regulator opened files entitled ‘Confrontation’, detailing disputes between itself and Granada that spanned across the 1960s and 1970s.140 The attempt to interfere with the balance of representation in politics was illustrated above all on Under Fire, which established very much an ‘us and them’ dichotomy between experts and ordinary citizens and ‘gave the poor old underdog a chance to have his say’, to quote Robert Fraser.141 The egalitarian impulse that informed this programme had reverberations elsewhere, at least in the more experimental phase of current affairs broadcasting that led up to the appointment of Charles Hill, former PMG, as chairman of ITA in 1963 and the Television Act of 1964. Prior to the General Election of 1964, for example, members of the audience were entitled to demand straightforward answers from their representatives. In a practice which has since been abandoned due to charges of partiality by the political parties, they brandished postcards containing phrases such as ‘no hedging on this question please’ and ‘please answer yes or no’.142 This had come a long way from the days of the monopoly. ‘To appreciate the enormity of opening up public debate on television’, claimed a programme producer for Granada, ‘one has to recall that the previous attitude of the BBC to politicians was one of the utmost deference.’143 The capacity of television to alter the dynamic between politicians and the public, however, was a logical extension of the medium. Before television, the opportunity to regularly see political leaders was restricted to civil servants, lobby correspondents and MPs, whose assessments were then mediated to the wider public. Through television news and current affairs, however, the wider public was able to make these assessments for themselves, outside this framework: the political elite had become vulnerable to the public gaze. The shift in emphasis from current affairs programmes on the side of authority to those on the side of the audience reinforced this equalizing effect. Tonight, a weekday current affairs programme launched by the BBC in February 1957, demonstrates how the Corporation were catching up with ITV in this respect. According to the Observer, it reflected the principle that ‘politicians need not be treated with awe, railwaymen with condescension’.144 Goldie later described how it marked ‘a kind of national explosion of relief. It was not always necessary to be respectful; experts were not invariably right; the opinions of those in high places did not always have to be accepted’.145 A  deference fostered by the public distinction

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Peace and Power in Cold War Britain

of political leaders was increasingly eroded by a scepticism fostered by public familiarity. The discretionary powers politicians were able to wield away from public scrutiny became subject to it: areas of politics that were hitherto a private preserve were pulled into the public domain. The interference of the commercial companies in balances of representative power, however, did cross over into the partial and subversive. Bernard Sendall, deputy to Robert Fraser in the ITA, deemed the format of Under Fire as encouraging ‘boorish rudeness’ among members of the audience, while Fraser himself felt that it was ‘difficult and dangerous  . . .  to handle within the impartiality code of the [Television] Act’.146 The director general had been inundated with complaints about the programme, with one correspondent warning that he ‘should be a little more careful of the blood pressure of your old friends . . . I never envisaged ITV being used as a vehicle for blatant socialist propaganda’.147 When Robert Fraser wrote to Sidney Bernstein to take issue with the programme, the Granada chairman could not ‘accept that the questions [to experts and politicians] are always hostile, although I do agree that they are pertinent because the people who ask them feel strongly enough about the subject to send in their names and to come to the studio’. In his view, Granada had proven that ‘there is a public who want to ask questions on a variety of subjects’: the audience had been no more bad-​mannered than in ‘the rather more important forum operating from a building not a thousand yards from Westminster Bridge’.148 The debate over the future of the programme, however, was highly partisan and politicized itself –​a sure sign that it was perceived as standing for a political position. Michael Foot interpreted Conservative interventions against it as an attempt to force ‘the new TV companies into the old straitjacket which the BBC has always found becoming’. ‘What do they think Bernstein and his boys do’, he remarked, ‘comb the backstreets of Manchester for evil-​minded conspirators against Church and State?’149 In this climate and out of recognition of the Television Act, the ITA imposed ‘safeguards’ on the programme in early 1957, before terminating it altogether in February 1959. The evolution of political broadcasting on television and the willingness of ordinary citizens to speak out on issues of high politics were more than coincidental. The launch of CND and the first televised by-​election in Rochdale, both taking place in February 1958, were arguably manifestations of the same egalitarian movement. In ‘vox pops’ from the surviving footage of the by-​election, the locals seem surprised at being asked their views  –​a reaction that must have stemmed not only from awe at the medium, but also from the implication that their views mattered.150 The stress on the agency of the ordinary citizen, a common theme of the coverage carried out by Granada and the ITA,



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seemed to translate in the voting, with the Conservative Party losing 30 per cent of its share of the previous vote. Significantly, the overwhelming majority of the vote was cast in favour of candidates who sympathized with unilateral disarmament, including the Labour candidate and eventual victor, Jack McCann, and the Liberal candidate, Ludovic Kennedy, who gained the highest Liberal vote in a by-​election since the 1920s.151 In this way, the mobilization of a popular movement against nuclear weapons drew on an egalitarian spirit that ran through broadcasting and public life more widely, grounded in the principle that the ordinary citizen be entitled to his or her say. An episode of Under Fire entitled ‘Fallout’ highlights how the impetus for participatory democracy, as pressing in parts of broadcasting as it was politics, was reaching its resolution in the anti-​nuclear movement. In the episode, the programme producers challenged an attempt by the government to downplay an accident at Windscale nuclear power station in 1957. They brought a Cumbrian cow into the studio and milked it on air with a Geiger counter handy to check for radiation. When held near the milk pail the counter clicked alarmingly. The use of visual spectacle to expose a deception of the ‘experts’ and assert the public right to know encapsulated a form and ethos of communication that sections of the media and radical politics shared. As a producer of Under Fire described, the series ‘merged with wider movements for participatory democracy’.152 It was this capacity of television and film to educate and empower citizens that attracted filmmakers to the anti-​nuclear movement. As an issue of supreme importance from which the public had been excluded, the manufacture and testing of nuclear weapons by Britain presented them with creative opportunities and challenges. The formation of the Film and Television Committee for Nuclear Disarmament in March 1958, along with Nuclear Disarmament Newsreel Committee (NDNC) in December 1958, serves to reiterate the influential cross-​section that had emerged between middle class radicalism and the media  –​an ‘infrastructure of dissent’, to use that phrase again, that was to shape media, movements and democracy throughout the late 1950s and 1960s. The hypothesis outlined at the beginning of this ­chapter –​that communications media empower participatory democracy and that radicals play a special role in their social adaptation and development  –​seems to gain force in relation to middle class radicalism and television in post-​war Britain. For all the wide-​ ranging criticism and reservations that radicals had of television, it did have democratizing effects in political and public life in the mid-​ to-​ late 1950s and these were driven, ironically, by commercial rather than public service

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broadcasting. If responses among radicals to television were hostile, this was because its emergence –​especially along commercial lines –​was complicit in the transformation of the class-​based mechanisms and relationships on which radicalism in Britain had depended. As it came into fruition, the visual medium broke down barriers in perceptions of political issues and leaders and led to a re-​engagement with the role of the ‘ordinary citizen’ in political broadcasting. It rendered an issue such as nuclear weapons –​distant and the preserve of an elite  –​the property of a far wider public. The initial evidence, supplemented further in Chapter  3, also indicates that middle class radicals, located in the infrastructure of the media, were influential in developing the egalitarian tendencies in television. From the mid-​1950s and the rise of the New Left, in fact, the entire project of radical politics seemed to hinge on the extent to which changes in mass and popular communications could be exploited and utilized.

2

Single Issue Movements and Information

The mobilization of single issue movements such as those against nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War was inextricably linked to the sourcing and reworking of related information in the press and on radio and television. In the words of DAC, such information, whether in the form of ‘speeches, meetings, pamphlets, radio and television programmes’, was ‘vital  . . .  without it no real movement would be possible’.1 So essential was this information to the activity and lifeblood of single issue movements that the anti-​nuclear and anti–​Vietnam War movements themselves can be defined as information ‘ecologies’ or networks, to adopt the parlance of social movement theorists. In conceptualizing the rise of the anti-​nuclear movement in these terms, this chapter builds on a branch of social movement theory concerned with ‘resource mobilization’ –​the theory that movements are constructed from pre-​existing forms of social and political capital that their pioneers and proponents are able to tap.2 This tradition helps to explain not only how movements form and emerge, but also how they take on a specific set of organizational and social characteristics. The activists and intellectuals most able to ‘mobilize resources’ in favour of a cause or single issue tended to enjoy an elevated status within the politics or society they were seeking to change and by extension in the movements themselves. In the anti-​ nuclear movement, these ‘empowered actors’, entrenched in the apparatus of the media and the state, had a stronger than average command over the science of nuclear weapons, as well as a facility for translating this science into a language that could be accessed and understood by a wider public. This analysis draws attention yet again to the connectedness of movements and the state and the importance of mass media as intermediaries of contentious politics between them. It comprehends movements as alternative conduits of information, contesting information as an asset of state power over issues of public interest and appealing to the supposed independence of broadcasters and newspapers as arbiters of the public right to know: an appeal that had particular

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resonance in the media climate of the late 1950s. The role of the mass media as a common forum of information is pivotal in this respect, since engagement with the nuclear issue among activists and intellectuals was characterized not so much by the creation of new information as the reinterpretation and recirculation of information already in existence. If this information seemed ‘new’, then this can be ascribed in part to the success of branches of the state in manipulating and suppressing it: branches that extended far into the infrastructure and outlook of media organizations themselves. A key reason that a movement against nuclear weapons took so long to coalesce, in fact, was that the quality and volume of information necessary for this to occur simply did not exist until the mid-​to-​late 1950s. Another was that the pioneers of the movement did not occupy the same positions of influence as the ‘empowered actors’ who intervened in the late 1950s and established CND –​a fact that caused distortions in both the organizational structure and historiography of the movement. The sourcing and reworking of nuclear-​related information in the media –​ so central to the process of building a movement  –​demanded that activists and intellectuals respond to the news discourses in which this information was conveyed. These were characterized above all by binary frameworks that mirrored and perpetuated the politics of the Cold War. In the opening sections of this chapter, therefore, an attempt is made to illustrate how activists and intellectuals fought for a public position that overcame the Communist history of nuclear disarmament and seemed nonaligned to the peace politics of the capitalist and communist blocs:  a third way in international relations that identified with the emergence of independent states that had gone through decolonization. The construction of this third way, it will be argued, was pivotal to interactions between activists, intellectuals and the news media, on the one hand pressurizing broadcasters and journalists to speak out on a taboo subject and on the other laying the foundations of a mass movement. The opening up of these circuits of information signified the beginnings of a dialectical relationship between movements and media in this period, as well as a challenge to the media power of the state, which was no longer capable of exercising a public monopoly on this issue of defence and foreign policy.

The Communist peace movement and the media In the aftermath of the Second World War, the nonaligned peace organizations that fed into and prefigured the anti-​nuclear movement of the late 1950s were



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hard-​pressed for public support. Just as their activities and operations had been heavily curtailed by wartime restrictions, their reputations had also been tarnished by the failure of appeasement policy in the late 1930s. The total membership of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU), for example, had declined during wartime by over 30,000, with sales of its weekly newspaper, Peace News, also falling as part of a circulation crisis that extended into the post-​war period.3 The heyday of the peace movement in the 1930s, when pacifistic tendencies and sentiments infused a broad cross-​section of civil society and public opinion, seemed to have been effectively marginalized by the challenge posed by Hitler and the Third Reich.4 On the eve of war, the absolute pacifism of the PPU could even appear tantamount to pro-​Nazism, since German hegemony in Europe was preferred by a section of pacifists to the outbreak of an all-​out total war.5 The rebuilding process of the post-​war period, while providing an opportunity for organized pacifism to recover and reinvent itself, was thus also marked by chequered progress. The experience of the National Peace Council (NPC), an organization founded in 1908 to coordinate between peace groups, is illustrative in this respect. Despite an increase in subscribers to its magazine One World, the pace of recruitment was not ‘quick enough’ to compensate for the loss of two benefactors, both of whom had sought to give the Council a head start in responding ‘to the challenge of the post-​war situation’. As a result, the Council was forced to cut the size of its staff, as well as the number of issues and pages of its publications.6 It was in the context of a beleaguered pacifism that a Communist movement for peace was able to take hold. The World Peace Council of the Partisans for Peace (WPC), as this movement became known, comprised a range of national organizations, including the British Peace Council, and had roots in a ‘World Congress of Intellectuals’ that took place in Wroclaw, Poland, in August 1948. The initiative, conceived by the Communist Bureau of Information (Cominform), had been inspired by the propaganda opportunities that ‘peace’ seemed to offer the Soviets in the wake of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.7 In framing Communism as the ideology of peace, the Soviet Union could pose a dilemma for Western powers, especially since the United States had already used nuclear weapons and planned on retaining control over the technology. As an IRD report recognized in October 1949, the British ‘cannot use the slogans of peace ourselves for two reasons: we could not do so nearly as effectively as the Russians; and with different conditions prevailing in the West, there would be a danger that people might actually demand unilateral disarmament’. The manufacture of the atomic bomb in Britain could easily be derailed by an

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upsurge of unfavourable opinion –​a prospect that the Peace Partisans sought to facilitate. While the IRD could not ‘encourage the illusions of the masses about peace’, however, it noted that it could ‘at least disillusion them about the USSR and show that the Kremlin’s claim to be leader of the forces of peace is false’.8 By this time, the meaning of ‘peace’ had become heavily politicized in media and public discourse, a signifier of interests embedded in the power structures of the Cold War. The politicization of peace stemmed not only from the inauguration of a Communist-​led peace movement, but also from a shift in the news frameworks that the BBC and the press employed to report on issues such as nuclear disarmament and relations with Russia. This shift was not merely a passive reflection of the emergence of Cold War rivalries; it was actively constructed as a means by which public opinion in Britain could be informed and organized. In the post-​war period, the BBC and newspapers came under intense pressure to remove Communists and Communist sympathizers from positions of influence. The Times purged its staff of political undesirables, the Manchester Guardian and Reuters replaced their Moscow correspondents and Reynold’s News was criticized for its ‘Communistic tendencies’ by A. V. Alexander, the minister of defence. As the editor of the Sunday Express confided to its owner, the press magnate Lord Beaverbrook:  ‘this business of political sabotage in journalism is much more prevalent than we are inclined to think  . . .  There is no remedy except dismissal, and no real protection except never to employ anyone with any “red” in his background, if you can discover it.’9 The removal of pro-​Communist correspondents from the news media ensured not only that coverage of the Soviet Union hardened, but also that it became more dependent on government networks and sources. The methods by which journalists gathered as well as presented ‘the news’ were re-​calibrated to meet the political demands of the Cold War. Since the BBC was considered the most influential provider of foreign news, its coverage of Communism and the Soviet Union came under a disproportionate degree of scrutiny from civil servants and leading politicians. The airtime the Corporation devoted to Communist-​ related news, for example, was often regarded as excessive, while its commitment to impartiality was also seen as giving the Soviet Union more credit than it deserved: what was known among broadcasters as ‘false objectivity’.10 When the Attlee government threatened to investigate pro-​Communism within the Corporation, the director general William Haley decided to embark on pre-​emptive measures with the Board of Governors. The governors agreed with Haley that coverage of Communism and



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the CPGB had ‘tended to get out of proportion’ and resolved to monitor both the appearances of Communists and references to Communism in future.11 In this way, the existence of a neutral or nonaligned space in news coverage of international relations was reduced further still. As in the press, the provision of news in the BBC had been restructured under political pressure to suit the needs of British foreign policy in the Cold War. The news media had been pushed into reflecting and reinforcing the polarizing logic that rising tensions seemed to engender. The extent to which the Attlee government was able to mobilize the news media and public opinion against the Communist peace movement was highlighted in 1950, when the WPC attempted to host their annual congress in Sheffield.12 Between the Wroclaw and Sheffield congresses, the Foreign Office had succeeded in mounting a considerable cross-​section of opinion against the WPC, extending across the Parliamentary Parties and Church of England to the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and nonaligned peace organizations such as the NPC.13 This counter-​campaign drew on networks in the news media as well as those in civil society. Prior to the Sheffield congress, for example, the public relations advisors to Clement Attlee and the Ministry of Defence met with and briefed the editors of all the major newspapers. They also persuaded the BBC to broadcast on its Home and Overseas Services a speech by Attlee in which he used IRD information to reveal the motives behind the congress.14 The anti-​Communist propaganda of the IRD, carefully compiled and disseminated since the Wroclaw congress, was highly influential in shaping the media discourse on peace. Its emphasis on Communist deceit and subversion was strongly reflected in the news coverage of the Sheffield congress, which had to be relocated to Warsaw after a day due to visa restrictions on its delegates. The press placed peace in inverted commas, referred to the WPC as a ‘Fifth Column’ and a ‘Trojan Horse’ and mocked the ‘dove of peace’ logo that had been created by Pablo Picasso.15 As the cartoonist ‘Giles’ suggested in the Daily Express, peace had become a wicked word even among children.16 The success with which the Attlee government had discredited the WPC had enfeebled peace as a meaningful discourse altogether. As ‘peace’ became confined to the politics of the Cold War, it also obstructed nonaligned intellectuals and organizations who wanted to build opinion in favour of it and campaign for disarmament. The significance of these intellectuals and organizations had become defined almost solely by the relationship they shared with the interests of East and West. Since they occupied an ideological position that sat between Soviet Russia and the United States, their conversion to pro-​or anti-​Communism was also regarded as a political commodity among

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Cold War propagandists. In order to counteract the recruitment of intellectuals and ‘opinion-​formers’ to the WPC, for example, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) established in 1950 the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF): an umbrella organization seeking to promote the cause of liberalism in countries worldwide.17 The strategic value of nonaligned intellectuals and organizations was also recognized by the Attlee government. By inviting the NPC into collaboration against the WPC, for example, the Foreign Office was able to expose the motives behind the Sheffield congress with greater precision.18 When the NPC set out to attract support for its own initiatives, however, the Attlee government did nothing to alleviate suspicions that it was under Communist influence: this also suited its agenda.19 In a media and public landscape in which peace was a bipartisan concept, the non-​Communist peace campaigns seemed detached from political realities and struggled to gain exposure. A series of nonviolent demonstrations against the military establishment in the early 1950s provide an example. While carried out by precursors to the Direct Action Committee against Nuclear War –​the highly effective protest group of the late 1950s and early 1960s –​these came across as bizarre and had no discernible impact on the wider public. In one sit-​down, a pamphlet distributed to passers-​by had an almost apologetic tone, stating that ‘we owe you an explanation. We are not crackpots and we are not Communists. We know we look silly’.20 The campaigns run by high profile pressure groups did not fare much better. The ‘Peace with China Committee’, established by Labour MPs and the New Statesman during the Korean War, suffered from a complete blackout in the press.21 In the cases where nonaligned initiatives for peace did break through and take a critical position towards the West, they were faced with a wave of political retribution. An exposé in the Picture Post, depicting the maltreatment of North Korean prisoners under the watch of the United Nations (UN) and United States, led to the dismissal of its editor, Tom Hopkinson. James Cameron, the author of this account, also resigned after subsequent reports were censored. The photographs in the exposé remain among the most harrowing to have been published in a British newspaper (Figure 2.1).22

The third way Only by envisaging a positive role for Britain as a nonaligned power in the world could activists and intellectuals mobilize a peace movement that seemed meaningful and sincere. Such a movement, based on the articulation of a ‘third



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Figure 2.1  The Korean War in the Picture Post. Photo by Picture Post/​Getty Images.

way’ between the foreign policies of the United States and the USSR, would be capable of subverting the bipolar frameworks that had become so prevalent in media and public discourse. In practice, the construction of a public position between the power blocs represented by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact remained fraught with difficulty. As Stuart Hall described at the dawn of the New Left in the first issue of ULR, ‘[E]‌very political concept became a weapon in the Cold War of ideas . . . To recommend the admission of China to the UN was to invite the opprobrium of “fellow-​ traveller”:  to say that the character of contemporary capitalism had changed was to be ranked as a Keynesian liberal.’23 The struggle for a third way did not

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begin with the New Left, however, but with a range of nonaligned groups and organizations associated with radical pacifism and socialism. In this sense, the New Left is interpreted here not as the starting point for an analysis of British radicalism –​as in so many histories and accounts –​but rather as an end point. It was the fulfilment of a position for which radical pacifists and socialists had been striving since at least the late 1940s, whereby mutual disgust at the Suez Crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary prompted a mass migration of radicals away from the Labour and Communist Parties and the foreign policies for which they stood. To this end, the rise of the New Left was an actual as well as theoretical realignment in British radicalism.24 It embodied the idea of a third way through a demographic transformation in radical politics. The most influential early formulation of a third way for Britain came from the ‘Keep Left’ group of Labour MPs in the spring of 1947. In a pamphlet drafted by Richard Crossman, Michael Foot and Ian Mikardo and published by the New Statesman, the group outlined a socialist manifesto for post-​war Labour:  what in effect constituted a minority report on the official policies of the Attlee government. The group was particularly critical of a cross-​party consensus on American-​led collective security against Communist Russia:  a key aspect of British foreign policy.25 While they condemned the encroachment of Soviet Russia into Eastern Europe, they also argued that collective security against it was ‘a polite name for the same in reverse’. ‘The question we have to ask ourselves’, the group contended, ‘is whether collective security against Russia is the best way of fighting totalitarianism and of promoting democracy and Socialism’. ‘The answer’, they concluded, ‘is clearly no. By accepting the American lead in a world alliance against Russia, we shall merely ensure that every small people has to choose between the bleak alternatives of anti-​Communism and Communism’. The solution of the group to this impasse contained the seeds of the third way concept, stating that ‘the task of British socialism must be, wherever possible, to save the smaller nations from this futile ideological warfare and to heal the breach between the US and the USSR’. This suggestion, though a flagrant overestimation of British influence and resources, went on to occupy a powerful position in radical thinking and media and public discourse around foreign policy.26 In denying Britain as a ‘junior partner . . . of an American-​dominated system of collective security’ and enshrining a positive vision ‘of a lead from Socialist Britain’, it laid the foundations for the international outlook taken up by CND and the New Left.27 The struggle for a third way should not be regarded as merely conceptual, however: it was also part of a daily negotiation in the grassroots activities and lives of activists and citizens who belonged to nonaligned organizations in Britain.



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These activists and citizens had to contend with their marginalization under the Cold War on an everyday basis and as a result were eager to develop outlooks and practices that could navigate around it. The sources of this struggle came from both pacifist organizations such as the NPC and PPU and independent socialist ones such as the Common Wealth Party. As described at a ‘third camp conference’ in Hampstead, London, in 1955, the third way idea extended across ‘pacifists, federalists, devolutionists and decentralists, campaigners for World Government, for Industrial Democracy and for Human Rights’.28 This colourful array of groups, while diverse and capable of contradicting one another, was involved in pushing back the public spaces and social networks in which a third way could thrive  –​a process that by the mid-​1950s had become coordinated and systematic. As described by John Banks, secretary of the Third Way Group, the aim in both a national and international settings was ‘to get as many people, organizations, and ultimately government and opposition parties as possible to support the general neutralist position in their diplomacy, their economics, their education and propaganda’.29 The distinction between the third way of the Keep Left group and that of radical pacifists and socialists is worth stressing, for the two shared inconsistencies that became significant for the anti-​nuclear movement and the tension between its moderate and radical wings. Whereas the third way of the Labour MPs was reminiscent of a ‘nation-​embracing’ internationalism of the 1930s  –​in which Britain provided a ‘lead’ to ‘smaller nations’  –​that of the grassroots activists seemed less concerned with British leadership and more with the rights-​based internationalism of the UN and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.30 The networking of the Third Way Group, in fact, was designed to militate against British predominance. Only by brokering relationships with organizations such as ‘War on Want and the Movement for Colonial Freedom’, claimed John Banks, could they ensure that the initiative would not ‘degenerate into the formation of a “Third Force” of rival imperialism based on, say Britain and France, or even India’.31 As decolonization gathered pace and independent states began to proliferate outside the power blocs, the scope to forge nonaligned relationships beyond borders also expanded. The rise of a third world, on the surface aligned to neither NATO nor the Warsaw Pact, was symbolized by the Bandung Conference, a meeting of Afro-​Asian states in Indonesia in 1955. This prefigured what became the Non-​Aligned Movement of states at Belgrade, Yugoslavia, six years later.32 The end of empire and the rise of independent states was not merely seen by radical pacifists and socialists as an opportunity by which the world role of

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Britain could be reconfigured. They were inspired by and actively drew on the ideologies and traditions of anti-​colonial struggles, seeking where possible to bring them into a British context. This was exemplified by the history and origins of the Direct Action Committee against Nuclear War, which was established by the PPU as a commission into the nonviolent methods and philosophies of Mahatma Gandhi in 1949, only two years after Indian independence. That a British group chose to learn from the struggles of one of the most creative and formidable opponents of British imperialism is highly significant. It showed that anti-​as well as pro-​British sentiment was influential in shaping the international outlook that the anti-​nuclear movement and the New Left were to inherit. The importation of Gandhian methods and philosophies into Britain –​satyagraha or ‘truth force’ through nonviolent demonstration most notable among them –​ was made possible by international activists such as Michael Scott, an Anglican priest and founding member of DAC and later the Committee of 100. Scott had been sentenced for participating in a passive resistance campaign in South Africa as early as 1946, on this occasion against the Asian Land Tenure and Indian Representation Act. He also put the PPU group in touch with the ideals and machinery of the UN, having defended the rights of the Herero of South West Africa in the General Assembly in December 1949.33 If a movement for nuclear weapons in Britain were to emerge, then it needed to be linked to the nonaligned activities and policies pioneered by grassroots activists and the Keep Left group. The failure of the first national campaign against nuclear weapons to make this linkage meant that it struggled for public impact and support. The Hydrogen Bomb National Committee, as it was called, was established following a meeting of four Labour MPs and over 300 delegates from church, peace and labour organizations on 7 April 1954.34 It aimed to petition Parliament ‘for a reduction and control of armaments’, just as Clement Attlee had proposed two days earlier as Leader of the Opposition in the first Commons debate on whether Britain should manufacture the H-​bomb.35 The Committee was therefore an expedient rather than a solution: its scope was too modest to capture the full support of nonaligned intellectuals and organizations. Peace News even discouraged pacifists from participating in the campaign because its petition did not make clear the ‘moral issues involved or demand that the British government give a clear moral lead to other governments’.36 A third camp conference organized a month later by Professor G. D. H. Cole, an influential figure in the emergence of the ULR group, attracted far more interest. It culminated in a petition in which 1,140 students declared that the ‘best hope for world peace lies in an attempt on the part of Britain . . . to mediate between



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the two power blocs’.37 The inability of the Committee to mobilize opinion was demonstrated by its opening meeting, which according to an IRD report was attended by a ‘tiny audience’ of 1,500.38 In the absence ‘of almost all genuine pacifist support’, concluded the report, ‘the H-​bomb campaign will probably deteriorate until it is no more than an instrument of the Communists’.39 It was through the New Left that the third way idea became an instrument of public action. The defection of radicals from the Labour Party and the CPGB following the Suez and Hungarian crises had led to the enlargement of a middle ground that stood outside of Stalinism and Western imperialism, while at the same time remaining resistant to Trotskyism.40 In their efforts to define this position, the intellectuals of the New Left built on the foundations established by the Keep Left group and made a seminal contribution to the rationale of the anti-​ nuclear movement, which was non-​ Communist, anti-​ NATO and anti-​Anglo-​American. They understood that a nonaligned foreign policy was integral to the renewal of the left as a whole: only through its advancement could an ethical socialism flourish in Britain and abroad. Their advocacy of positive neutralism, whereby Britain would provide a lead to an alliance of nonaligned postcolonial nations, was particularly influential, despite the practical problems that it posed.41 As a CIA report recognized in 1956, the romantic role that positive neutralism afforded a declining power at the end of empire was capable of summoning significant public support.42 This proved perceptive, since it was on this basis that CND sought to mobilize support in the late 1950s. Through unilateral disarmament of its nuclear weapons, the Campaign claimed, Britain could provide a moral lead to the world. In its embodiment of a position independent of Cold War ideologies, the New Left also enabled a broad base of collaboration between pacifists and socialists. Hugh Brock, editor of Peace News between 1955 and 1964, welcomed the ‘new left as a real new left, with hopes of our influencing them towards a politics of non-​violence’.43 In return, the New Reasoner and ULR groups regarded the peace movement as a channel through which their politics could gain expression: ‘we must learn from their practices and work out with them forms of action’, wrote C.  Wright Mills, the American sociologist, in his ‘Letter to the New Left’ in 1960.44 As has been shown, the formation of the New Left had already been prefigured by a spirit of cooperation between small pacifist and socialist groups. The 1957 Committee, founded in the spring of 1956 by the Third Way and the Pacifist Youth Action Group, highlighted the struggle for fresh perspectives: it called for ‘the decentralisation of the bureaucratic, managerialist and militaristic features of State Socialism and State Capitalism experienced today’.45 The political

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upheaval brought about by the Suez and Hungarian crises served to reinforce the intermingling of pacifist and socialist ideologies and practices. As the novelist Mervyn Jones argued in 1958, it had become clear that ‘to be a socialist today one had to be a pacifist . . . and to be an effective pacifist one had to be a socialist’.46 An independent position had been established in British radicalism: it served as a platform on which pacifists and socialists could communicate their politics in a media and public landscape dominated by the Cold War.

The nuclear issue and the media The adaptation of activists and intellectuals to media discourses on peace and disarmament occurred in tandem with the increasing circulation of nuclear-​ related information from the mid-​ 1950s onwards. Prior to this, however, such information had been slim to say the least:  a by-​product of the secrecy surrounding the nuclear energy and weapons programme and a state-​imposed censorship in which the BBC and the quality newspapers were only too willing to acquiesce. When information about nuclear energy and weapons did begin to circulate in the mid-​1950s, this was not simply a matter of course. Rather, it was the result of an ongoing struggle in which civil servants and politicians, intellectuals and scientists, and broadcasters and journalists all engaged. This struggle was predicated on contrasting conceptions of democracy and fed into the original mission of the anti-​nuclear movement –​to stimulate education and informed opinion on an issue in which the state, the scientific establishment and the news media had collaborated to keep outside the realm of public politics. From the outset, the development of nuclear energy and weapons by Britain was founded upon the exclusion of political representatives, the electorate and the public from this field of defence and foreign policy. In this way, it represented an extension of the wartime work that Britain had carried out as part of the Manhattan Project, the American-​led programme that led to ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man’, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The decision to manufacture the atom bomb in Britain, taken by Clement Attlee and a secret cabinet committee in January 1946, was not revealed in public until May 1948, when George Jeger, Labour MP for Winchester, asked a planted question in Parliament about ‘the development of the most modern types of weapon’.47 In response, A.  V. Alexander, confirmed that ‘all types of modern weapons, including atomic weapons, are being developed’. When pressed for further information, he claimed he did not ‘think it would be in the public interest’,



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effectively bringing the matter to a close.48 The wider impact of this revelation, slipped into Parliamentary business as if it were no more than a mundane distraction, was just as sedate. Whatever its magnitude for post-​war Britain, the Alexander announcement was cushioned by a D-​Notice, circulated in advance to the BBC and the press and stipulating that there was to ‘be no disclosure of information about, or reference to, certain aspects of the development and production of atomic weapons’.49 On one of the single most important decisions of post-​war British history, the news media merely regurgitated the exchange between Jeger and Alexander, refraining from comment on how the decision had been made or the repercussions it might have for Britain in the world.50 It was not until the spring of 1954, almost two and a half years into the Churchill government, that the BBC and the press began to reassess their coverage of the nuclear issue. The trigger for this reassessment had been an incident involving the unfortunately named F/​V Lucky Dragon 5, a Japanese fishing vessel that was irradiated by fallout from an American hydrogen bomb test near Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, despite being outside the exclusion zone. The incident, which led to the death of one crew member and the hospitalization of the other twenty-​three, was a global media moment and a turning point in anti-​nuclear movements worldwide. ‘I can imagine few things more frightening than the discovery in Japanese markets . . . of radioactive fish’, commented Richard Goold-​Adams on the BBC’s Home Service.51 The timing of the incident was also significant in a British context, as it occurred not long before a Parliamentary debate on the development of a British H-​bomb and stimulated Churchill’s calls for a more open discussion around nuclear weapons. In the H-​bomb debate on 5 April, the prime minister claimed that a combination of media reticence and public anxiety had forced him to speak with more candour than usual. He expressed his astonishment that a speech by the director general of the International Atomic Energy Authority, warning of the awesome power of the H-​bomb, had not received more publicity.52 That Churchill, a believer in democracy as ‘leadership by the best’, should also cast himself as a proponent of the freedom of information needs to be treated with caution.53 His stance was as strategic as it was sincere and needs to be seen in relation to the sheer repressiveness of the Attlee government on the subject of nuclear weapons, as well as the ongoing servility of the news media. The press response to the ‘nuclear scare’ of 1954 was caught between the sensationalism of popular newspapers and the self-​censorship of quality ones. The precedent established in 1948, whereby defence correspondents awaited instruction on nuclear issues from political leaders, had become routine.

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The coverage of the Lucky Dragon incident in The Times, for example, was characterized by a defensiveness, with one correspondent claiming that ‘the mood since . . . the H-​bomb explosion . . . has been widely misinterpreted. Talk of panic or “hysterical pacifism” is altogether false’.54 By 1957 this newspaper was still sticking to the official line on radiation, reporting regularly on the possibility of a ‘clean bomb’.55 The mechanism for this subservience was the lobby, named after the space in Westminster where correspondents and politicians intermingled and traded information under a series of tacit and written rules. This system, cloaked in secrecy and reliant on special relationships, seemed to encourage a reluctance to risk-​taking:  valuable contacts could easily be jeopardized as a result of overzealous reporting.56 In contrast, the popular newspapers, led by the Daily Express and Mirror, were far more outlandish. During the H-​bomb debate, for example, the Mirror published a story on ‘The Horror Bomb’ which had caused the Lucky Dragon incident, as well as ‘A Child’s Guide to the Bomb’ only days later.57 In the emphasis of the popular press on the dramatic and horrific effects of nuclear weapons, however, their coverage tended to be unreliable. Joseph Rotblat, a physicist seeking to educate the wider public on nuclear issues, later claimed that the press was only interested in his work if he ‘told them that something was going to be dangerous . . . when they began to exaggerate things and talk about babies being deformed . . . I would tell them this is not true and then they lost interest’.58 The BBC also struggled to deal with the growing interest in nuclear issues. It seemed torn by its duty to fill the gap in public understandings of nuclear energy and weapons on the one hand and its duty to protect listeners and viewers from demoralizing information on the other. The latter, a function that took on increasing importance in the Second World War, also offered a convenient pretence by which the Corporation could sidestep the controversy around the Lucky Dragon incident and the H-​bomb debate altogether. It therefore refused ‘to accede to a request from the Home Office’ to show a film about the atomic bomb in March 1954 on the grounds that it was ‘likely to alarm and even horrify many people’.59 The self-​censorship of the Corporation on nuclear issues had reached such a degree that even civil servants and politicians were beginning to find it neglectful. While these civil servants and politicians had an interest in keeping this area of policy outside the public domain, they found themselves in a position where, quite remarkably, they were leading calls for greater coverage. In responding to these, the BBC resolved to invite intellectuals from military, political, religious and scientific backgrounds to appear on Panorama, as well as a series of ten lectures on the radio.



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That the BBC chose to educate the public through current affairs and lectures rather than film, as the Home Office suggested, is also significant –​an indication of its attitudes and working practices when it came to broadcasting on issues of controversy. What the Corporation wanted was a sober discussion among intellectuals of a subject it deemed as beyond the grasp of the ordinary public: a visual representation of the H-​bomb and its effects had the potential to achieve the opposite. The broadcasts, more an exercise in moral and political philosophy than a critical engagement with policy, were stifling and turgid, even by the standards of the time.60 In this context, the problems posed by the H-​bomb came across as no different from those posed by conventional armaments. Bertrand Russell, who contributed to the broadcasts, captured this in a newspaper article in August: ‘I have not much sympathy with those who regard the bomb as more wicked than previous forms of warfare’, he argued. ‘From the times of bows and arrows onwards, warfare has always been as wicked as people knew how to make it.’61 His lecture, an appeal for world government with international control over nuclear power, served to detract from the responsibilities of the British government and was a step removed from the unilateralism he went on to advocate as president of CND. If the broadcasts seemed contrived in favour of the government, then this was confirmed by the treatment of a lecture by Kathleen Lonsdale, a Christian pacifist. This lecture, the only one to denounce nuclear weapons and tests, was also the only one broadcast on the Third Programme rather than the Home Service, as a result going out to a smaller audience.62 Since the BBC conceived of nuclear energy and weapons in terms of civil defence and the maintenance of public morale, it had a habit of camouflaging and minimizing the dangers they entailed. As early as 1951, for example, the Corporation broadcast a programme in which a scientific advisor on atomic energy claimed that the threat from radioactivity was ‘the least to be feared’.63 The framing of a nuclear attack as ‘survivable’, or the understating of effects from radioactive fallout, was often a by-​product of cooperation between the BBC and the Home Office. The Corporation assisted the Home Office by giving precedence to COI-​produced films and ministerial speeches during annual recruitment drives for civil defence workers, as well as by injecting related propaganda into its most popular programmes. In an episode of The Grove Family in 1955, for example, ‘nine million television viewers saw and heard’ what one civil defence organizer described as ‘the most modicum of politely restrained and slightly persuasive propaganda. Mr Grove and his son Jack, their attention having being caught by Civil Defence Week, decided after some discussion NOT TO JOIN’.64

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The purpose of such propaganda was not only to bolster recruitment, however: it was also to render civil defence an irrelevance by reassuring the majority of citizens that they were safe and secure. When it came to radioactive fallout, this meant that information had to be at least sugar-​coated, if not actively concealed or withheld. In this respect, the only physicist to lecture on the radio series that took place after the Lucky Dragon incident, Otto R. Frisch, made a concerted effort to dampen concerns about radiation. ‘In war [an H-​bomb] will most likely be exploded in the air  . . .  so there will be no nuclear dust to come down’, he claimed in a dubious passage. Even if a bomb were exploded near ground level, ‘the total destruction would certainly be smaller . . . if there is an efficient civil defence equipped to carry out decontamination’.65 The scientific input to the broadcasts that followed the Lucky Dragon incident was coordinated not only with the Home Office, but also with the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE) in Harwell, Berkshire. This underlined the peculiarity of the circumstances, since the chairman of the AERE, Edwin Plowden, had a reputation according to Grace Wyndham Goldie for being ‘an opponent of publicity’. Goldie, commissioned to produce three programmes on the ‘Atoms for Peace’ conference in August and September of 1955, ‘happened to be in the UK Press Office when a message came through . . . that no Harwell personalities were to give interviews for either sound or television’.66 In 1954, nonetheless, Joseph Rotblat was put forward as the only physicist on the Panorama programme. The ‘Pole with a British passport’, as he liked to call himself, had experience of educating the public on nuclear issues, having established the Atomic Scientists Association (ASA) for this purpose in 1946. Between 1946 and 1948 this organization ran an ‘Atom Train’, which was ‘designed to give the public the facts [about the peaceful and military uses of atomic energy] in a simple and attractive manner’ and visited twenty-​five cities over 168 days in England, Scotland and Wales.67 The contribution of the physicist on the Panorama programme, however, was based on ‘information that was provided by the official powers’, as he later recalled: ‘they said the H-​bomb was a clean bomb.’ In accordance with the official position of the government and the AERE, Rotblat explained that while the blast and heat effect of the hydrogen bomb was a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb, the level of radioactive fallout was not increased. The detonation of a hydrogen bomb, viewers were informed, consisted of two stages: fission and fusion. Only during the first stage was radioactive material released. When Rotblat inspected data collected by a Japanese physicist from the Lucky Dragon incident three months later, however, it did not tally with the



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explanation he had been given. He soon realized that the detonation of the hydrogen bomb consisted of three rather than two stages: there was another stage of fission after the occurrence of fusion. As a result, it was radiation, not only heat and blast, that increased by a factor of almost a thousand. How such a startling fact should be made known to the public was extremely problematic. Its disclosure would suggest that leading politicians and scientists had been ignorant or deceitful about the true nature of the H-​bomb. Either deduction would foster the view that risks were being taken with the security of the British people. Rotblat believed that the public must be informed as soon as possible, since ‘every test could produce a level of radioactivity which could be harmful to the population’.68 The decision to develop the H-​bomb in Britain became dependent on the success with which the Churchill government could deny Rotblat a credible platform from which to present and publicize his findings. As scientists and intellectuals learned of the radioactive effects of the H-​bomb, they began to construct a more robust moral case against it. The revelations about fallout were particularly pivotal in facilitating the perception that the dilemma it posed was unique. It became increasingly possible to oppose nuclear weapons without opposing conventional methods of warfare, a development that helped to broaden the base of post-​war pacifism. Bertrand Russell’s ‘Man’s Peril’ statement, broadcast on the Home Service to an estimated six million viewers on 23 December 1954, was indicative of the growing assertiveness. While the statement reiterated his earlier calls for world government, it was delivered in a style of unprecedented urgency and through Russell’s connections with Rotblat and other physicists reflected the latest facts about radiation: ‘[I]‌f many hydrogen bombs are used’, he claimed, ‘there will be universal death –​sudden only for a fortunate minority, but for the majority a slow torture of disease and disintegration.’69 Since it is almost certain that Russell’s contact with physicists would have been noted by Harwell, it is also likely that the BBC came under informal pressure to sabotage his statement. In November, he was informed that his broadcast would be followed on separate dates by contributions from the journalist Sally Graves and the athlete Roger Bannister, so as ‘to give the views of three generations on the world situation’.70 Russell’s reply, in which he declared that he ‘was not willing to fall in with [such a] frivolous suggestion’, led to the revival of the original format.71 The impact of the statement demonstrated the importance of media coverage to the formation of a movement on the nuclear issue.72 ‘Man’s Peril’ provoked such a public response that it prompted Russell to undertake initiatives which led to the establishment in July 1955 of Pugwash,

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an international organization of scientists dedicated to assessing the dangers of nuclear weapons. The Churchill government was concerned not so much by Russell’s statement, however, as by reports from Harwell that the BBC planned to broadcast a scientific programme on nuclear weapons in the New Year. It learned of the programme through the research of a BBC producer who had contacted diplomats and physicists about the effects of radioactive fallout, representatives from the Japanese Embassy and Rotblat among them.73 The programme was scheduled for transmission not long before the publication of the White Paper on Defence, where the decision to develop the H-​bomb for Britain would be revealed. It therefore posed a major problem for the government, threatening to flare up democratic debate and obstruct its attempts to act in the national interest. ‘We cannot have the BBC going off in advance of the government’s decision on the public handling of this question’, opined Harold Macmillan, the minister of defence, in a cabinet meeting on 14 December.74 The programme responsible for startling political leaders was being developed by Nesta Pain, a radio producer who specialized in science features. Pain wanted a programme that went beyond the dull intellectual formats which had so far characterized the output of the BBC on nuclear issues.75 In August, she proposed a sixty-​minute feature on the Home Service, with the aim of charting the history of the bomb from the Manhattan Project to the outcry over testing in 1954. ‘Like many people’, she claimed, ‘I have simply avoided thinking about these bombs and their implications over the last ten years . . . it is a clear duty of all of us to know and appreciate the facts, and so have the chance of doing any small thing from preventing such things from happening.’76 Such an egalitarian view of this area of public policy was bound to conflict with the paternalist ethos of the BBC and the interests of the Churchill government. How the BBC and the government dealt with the Pain programme served to illustrate the intimacy of connections between them, with pressure being exercised on the Corporation through a combination of informal and formal channels. Even prior to the opening of official correspondence between the government and the BBC, Edwin Plowden had already contacted the director general of the BBC about Pain’s programme. At the Cabinet meeting of 14 December, it was revealed that Ian Jacob had agreed to ‘i) enquire [about the programme], ii) to put his people in touch with reputable atomic scientists and iii) to vet the programme himself to make sure it is not fellow-​traveller inspired’.77 ‘Reputable atomic scientists’ was a euphemism for those who were unwilling to claim in public that the hydrogen bomb was a three stage device. The PMG, Lord



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De La Warr, followed up Plowden’s informal request by writing to the chairman of the Board of Governors, Peter Cadogan, on 18 December. He warned that ‘the wide dissemination . . . of information about thermonuclear weapons might well raise important issues of public policy . . . this is a subject . . . which . . . might require the issue of guidance or directions’. De La Warr asked to see a script of the programme ‘so that the government might have an opportunity to consider whether it is necessary in the public interest that such guidance or directions may be issued’.78 The letter cast the BBC as a subordinate partner in the production of government information  –​a role that can also be inferred from the positions that the director general and the chairman of Governors had earlier held in Conservative governments. Jacob had been a deputy military secretary to Churchill, while Cadogan had been an undersecretary to Eden in the Foreign Office. It was in the context of informal pressures and ties that the formal intervention of the government had such an impact. In Cadogan’s absence, the BBC responded to De La Warr by hinting that the Corporation would not embarrass the government over radiation: ‘a programme on such a delicate matter would have to receive careful consideration before it took shape and arrived in the schedule’.79 Meanwhile, the Sound Broadcasting Committee ordered that ‘suggestions for programmes on atomic or hydrogen bombs . . . must be referred to the Directors from the outset’.80 When Cadogan returned and responded to De La Warr on 24 January, he made a token defence for the independence of the BBC: ‘[T]‌he Corporation cannot agree to adopt and follow government guidance over particular fields of output except where security is concerned. To do so would be to abdicate from responsibilities given to the Governors by the Charter.’ The apparent robustness of Cadogan’s reply, however, amounted to no more than a formal façade. From the outset, he insisted that the BBC never planned to depart from the official position so far as nuclear weapons were concerned.81 A single letter from Westminster had been sufficient stimulus for the BBC to abandon its coverage of the H-​bomb prior to the publication of the Defence White Paper at the end of February.82 More than temporarily silencing the BBC, however, formal intervention led to closer relations between the government and the Corporation. That the request for increased collaboration on the nuclear issue came from the BBC rather than the government highlights the extent of its deference. In Cadogan’s reply to De La Warr, he claimed that the BBC would ‘welcome enlightenment’ on the rationale behind government intervention, ‘either through the medium of discussion or in writing’. A meeting at the Ministry of Defence on 15 February

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was attended by Cadogan, Jacob, De La Warr, Macmillan and two senior civil servants. Macmillan took the lead in outlining to Cadogan and Jacob the level of public relations that the government felt were desirable on the nuclear issue: the government ‘did not desire to keep the public in entire ignorance; . . . [but] they did not want to stimulate the feeling –​so easily accepted by the British people because it is agreed with their natural laziness in these matters –​that because of the terrible nature of the hydrogen bomb there was no need for them to take any part in home defence measures’.83 Macmillan neglected to mention that this strategy would also enable the Churchill government to bypass the public he had so heavily patronized. According to Jacob, at the end of the meeting he suggested that thereafter the nuclear issue ‘be handled on a more informal basis’. Cadogan agreed with his suggestion that ‘that there would be no difficulty in close touch being maintained on the matter . . . this would enable both parties to exchange information and views without hampering documents’.84 What had been cemented was an informal relationship by which the government and the BBC could ensure that public opinion did not impede the manufacture of the H-​bomb by Britain. On the basis of the 15 February meeting, Jacob drafted Thermonuclear Weapons and Broadcasting, a policy document circulated to directors and programme controllers on 4 March. The document provided guidance on how the BBC should treat the nuclear issue in the aftermath of the publication of the Defence White Paper. Jacob had already assured Macmillan that coverage of the H-​bomb and its effects ‘would be founded on the information contained in the [White Paper]’: what amounted to a tacit declaration of support for the government.85 Thermonuclear Weapons and Broadcasting demonstrated an acceptance of the view that the manufacture of the H-​bomb was in ‘the national interest’. As explained in the document, ‘the national interest in this case will be to give full exposition to the facts given by the white paper, as well as the theories expounded in it by the government’. In satisfying this interest, the Corporation would not only have to promote facts that were endorsed by the government, but also exclude those that came from its opponents. When broadcasting on ‘topics such as the symptoms induced by “fallout” ’, the document stated, there were ‘two tests to be applied’: ‘First, is there a worthwhile object to be achieved by the programme, which would outweigh its horrific impact? Secondly, subjects of a medical and scientific nature are [often] best dealt with by means other than broadcasting.’86 By suggesting that the facts of radiation were too horrific or specialist for broadcasting, the BBC was able to contract out of its responsibilities to the public and leave unchallenged the perception of the H-​bomb as ‘clean’.



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The restrictions introduced by Jacob were to the detriment of both the volume and content of programmes broadcast on the nuclear issue.87 Michael Barsley, the producer of Panorama, encountered Jacob’s constraints when he proposed to reassemble the contributors to the 1954 programme on the H-​bomb for a special edition on the tenth anniversary of Hiroshima. His proposal was altered by Leonard Miall, the head of Television Talks, to a programme on Victory over Japan (VJ) Day in which Hiroshima was only one element. After checking ‘the policy questions on Hiroshima material in connection with anniversary’, Miall scolded Barsley for not following procedure on the nuclear issue.88 He had not sent an outline of the programme and its contributors to the director general, as had been requested in Thermonuclear Weapons and Broadcasting.89 Miall informed Barsley that he was ‘very disturbed to hear that he had already been in touch with Rotblat’: a claim that demonstrates that BBC personnel had been warned against the scientist. When the director general examined Barsley’s proposals, he was particularly critical of Rotblat’s inclusion. Although he did not object to the use of Rotblat, he claimed that he was ‘a rather wild man’ who is not ‘fully conversant with the present atomic energy work as are some others’.90 Such was the degree to which the BBC censored Rotblat’s script, however, that he refused to participate in the programme. As Rotblat described to Pain, who was forced to abandon her programme that autumn, he was told to alter the script so ‘radically as to avoid talking about fall-​out radiation effects altogether’.91 His attempts to inform the public that ‘last year’s test explosion in Bikini the fallout covered an area of 7000 square miles’ were foiled.92 The treatment of nuclear issues by the BBC was a major factor in the delayed mobilization of a movement around them. While the popular press was influential in leaking information about radiation in this period, the ‘scare story’ discourses in which it was presented were not all that conducive to the construction of a credible opposition. Furthermore, the scientists who opposed the H-​bomb also resented coverage of their research in popular newspapers. Joseph Rotblat, for example, was dismayed that his findings on radiation had been ‘scooped’ by Chapman Pincher, a journalist for the Daily Express, before they could be published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in May 1955.93 The founders of the anti-​nuclear movement, increasingly active in local churches and trade unions from 1954, were therefore faced with a dearth of usable information. A gulf had developed between the realities of defence policy and nuclear weapons and public assimilation and understandings of them and this had been brought about by the shortcomings of public service broadcasting in particular. As the economist Robert Hall recalled upon joining the Strath enquiry, an investigation

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into the predicted effects of a H-​bomb attack on Britain, ‘[I]‌t was a very top secret affair . . . not . . . because the material we are using is secret . . . but because the facts are not absorbed here and are so unpleasant that it is very tricky to know how best . . . to get them absorbed.’94 It was as the BBC and the state failed to inform citizens about the H-​bomb that the role of nonstate actors as agents of information and educators became increasingly important.

The media and movement mobilization The scale and structure of a movement against nuclear weapons would remain fragmentary and localized as long as the news media misrepresented or neglected nuclear-​related information. The task of mobilizing a mass movement was to this end contingent upon the opening up of circuits of information with broadcasters and the press; the coordination of local activities and campaigns with national and international news. In this sense, the early pioneers of the movement can be likened to citizen journalists, retrieving and sourcing information of inherent news and shock value and relaying it through a repertoire of creative and expressive techniques. In the course of this process, these pioneers served to expand the horizons of the movement, broadening its support base and prompting the conversion of ‘big names’ to the cause. Ironically, this also brought about the marginalization of their own positions within the movement and its subsequent history. The mobilization of movements through the media shaped dynamics of power and social relations within them, pushing aside feminists in favour of men and local campaigners in favour of high profile intellectuals. As the movement mobilized, therefore, its organizational and social make-​up echoed the fault lines and inequalities of the wider public in which it existed, establishing precedents that shaped its identity and politics during and after its first wave of protest in the 1950s and 1960s. This emphasis on the role of news media in the mobilization of the anti-​ nuclear movement is not meant to detract from the significance of alternative media. In the mid-​1950s, the use of independent film was particularly influential in creating a groundswell of information at a local level. While the BBC was downplaying the Lucky Dragon incident, for example, the self-​ employed filmmaker and pacifist Erik Walker was using his daylight cinema van to tour London and broadcast The Japanese Fisherman.95 The power of film to educate and dramatize nuclear issues had a transformative effect on grassroots activism. Francis Jude, field secretary of the Friends Peace Committee, later recalled that



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before the emergence of the anti-​nuclear movement, pacifists had been ‘very slow to recognise the value of film. This was partly due to the fact that until the advent of television we found that we could usually get people to turn out to public meetings . . . and partly because we are not interested in entertaining people  –​except in so far as it will challenge their accepted assumptions and values’.96 As films about nuclear issues did challenge ‘assumptions and values’ in an entertaining manner, they formed a cornerstone of local activities and communications –​a key source in what was becoming an alternative network of information about nuclear weapons and tests. It was not enough, however, for activists to merely gather and circulate anti-​ nuclear information at a local level. In order to effect a broader breakthrough and mobilize a movement, this had to be coordinated with nuclear events and issues as they unfolded in the press and on radio and television. As a Campaigner’s Guide to the Media explained in the second wave of anti-​nuclear protest in the 1980s, ‘[R]‌eporters and journalists like to place stories into a context, relating news to recent or forthcoming events and thus establishing continuity by linkage.’97 The conditions in which this coordination or linkage could occur became more receptive after June 1956, when Anthony Eden announced H-​bomb tests on Christmas Island and nuclear-​related news took on a more critical tone.98 As an American intelligence report described, Eden’s announcement was met with ‘varying degrees of repugnance’ by the British press.99 The turn against the government on nuclear weapons and tests was hastened in February 1957, when Minister of Defence Duncan Sandys conceded in a White Paper that ‘there is at present no means of providing adequate protection for the people of this country against the consequence of an attack with nuclear weapons’.100 This compromised journalists who had backed the government in spite of growing opposition.101 As a correspondent from The Times remarked when Sandys republished his White Paper a year later, ‘[I]f he really means what he says, Sandys should make way for someone who realises that the aim of defence is to defend and not destroy us.’ This editorial, completely out of keeping with the track record of The Times in matters of national security, caused outrage, the Macmillan government having become accustomed to unquestioning compliance from the quality press.102 As issues around nuclear weapons and tests became ‘live’ in the news media, the opportunities to circulate anti-​nuclear information on a national as well as local level also increased. In the words of Harold Steele, a lifelong pacifist and conscientious objector in the First World War, the subject of nuclear weapons and tests seemed by 1957 ‘a good bandwagon to be on’ and a ‘godsend to pacifists’.103 The orchestrating of anti-​ nuclear information between local groups from

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Bournemouth to Edinburgh, as well as with national and international news events where possible, was a core function of the National Campaign against Nuclear Weapons Testing (NCANWT), established in February 1957 to ‘canalise the large volume of support  . . .  in favour of the cessation of nuclear weapon tests’.104 That its chairman, Arthur Goss, was also owner of the Hampstead and Highgate Express, a weekly newspaper from a leafy suburb of north London, also highlights the value of media power in the making of the movement. The Ham and High, as the newspaper is known to its readers, was instrumental in raising awareness of nuclear issues among a leisured class of radicals and writers with influential connections in the capital. The headquarters of NCANWT, located on Fleet Street and run by Sheila Jones and Peggy Duff as the general and organizing secretaries, reiterated the value of media power as a resource: it was vital to remain responsive to breaking news on nuclear issues. While the National Campaign was able to draw on the emergence of a critical climate around nuclear weapons and tests, its interpretation of these issues remained cut off from the news media and self-​enclosed. The section of public opinion that NCANWT represented, reaching a total of 113 local groups by 1958, remained for the most part frustrated and underground. The media initiatives that the organization did pursue, including a radio programme in which a scientist from NCANWT offered to question experts on the dangers of the H-​bomb, were invariably unsuccessful. The radio programme, proposed to the BBC in 1957, was too hot for the Corporation to handle and rejected on the grounds that too often ‘the “needling” questions are remembered and the somewhat complicated replies are forgotten’.105 The problem, it seemed, was that NCANWT had no entry point into the news media –​its leaders and supporters, while often of standing within their communities, were relative unknowns. Likewise, its methods of protest, often conservative and involving letter-​writing and lobbying, failed to tap into the inherent newsworthiness of nuclear weapons and tests as taboo issues. As the leaders of NCANWT recognized themselves, so long as they failed to persuade politicians and high profile personalities to intervene, the organization would struggle in its aim of ‘giving effective expression to widespread public concern’.106 For the activists who went on to form the Direct Action Committee against Nuclear War, the ongoing suppression of anti-​nuclear opinion in the news media was justification for more creative and radical means of action and news-​ engagement, especially in a time-​sensitive context in which Britain was able to persevere with H-​bomb tests. In contrast to the methods of protest employed by NCANWT, which were conventional and predictable, the ones employed by



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this group were innovative and posed broadcasters and journalists with more of a challenge. The group did not merely respond to nuclear events and issues in the news, for example, they sought to create them, doing so through protest performances that were informed by nonviolent principles in particular. Inso far as nonviolent direct action struck at the nerve centres of the nuclear complex, it had the potential to set rather than merely respond to news agendas: a secret machinery of warfare could be exposed and brought into the public light. The pitfalls of this method of protest, where engagements with the police and trespass could lead to negative portrayals in the media, could be pre-​empted by careful choreographing and preparation, usually around key frames of law and order news, as Chapter 6 shall demonstrate. The rewards could also be immense, with nonviolent direct action often serving to break the press barrier and ignite discussions about defence and foreign policy. In this sense, the relationship between nonviolent direct action and more conventional forms of campaigning was not overlooked by the activists. Just as it was necessary to justify such action through the exhaustion of ‘ordinary’ channels of protest, the performance of it also transformed the public environment in which ordinary protest was carried out and took on meaning. At the same time that NCANWT suffered from a media blackout, therefore, an intervention by Harold Steele, a ‘white-​haired and keen eyed’ ex-​poultry farmer from Great Malvern in Worcestershire, proved critical to consciousness-​ raising.107 In an act that inspired nonviolent activists in the United States and as a result the foundation of Greenpeace, Steele set out in spring 1957 to enter the exclusion zone of a British H-​bomb test on Christmas Island. While unable to complete the final leg of his journey by boat, Steele was highly successful in focusing attention on the tests, not only in Britain, but also among the Pacific nations. During a stay in Japan, he was able to address a rally of 15,000 in Tokyo, as well as make appearances on newsreel, radio and television.108 It was on the back of the Steele expedition that DAC was established, a development that seemed to respond to the power of nonviolent direct action as an instrument of news creation. The correlation between this function of nonviolent direct action, which was to make news, and another function, which was to express a sincere set of beliefs, was often in conflict. A tension existed, in other words, between what the activists referred to as the ‘symbolic’ and ‘practical’ dimensions of nonviolent direct action. The balance between these and how they were managed in the protest planning of the Committee was a constant consideration –​one that had implications for its relationship with the news media and the evolution of radical protest throughout the late 1950s and 1960s.

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As much as Steele believed in getting ‘in touch with the direct mechanics of the opposition’, to paraphrase his speech at the inaugural meeting of DAC, he also recognized that it was ‘important to win over an intellectual minority who can act as a vanguard’ in the struggle against nuclear weapons and tests.109 This importance reflected the role of representative democracy as the central system by which media power was apportioned. In the post-​war period, the ‘representativeness’ of an individual stemmed not only from their democratic mandate as an MP, but also from their public mandate as an intellectual, which was often defined by their presence in illustrious periodicals and on the Third Programme. It was not unusual in this context for politicians and intellectuals to engage in high profile exchanges over international issues. In the winter of 1957, for example, Nikita Khrushchev and John Foster Dulles, the US secretary of state, both replied to an ‘Open Letter’ on nuclear disarmament by Bertrand Russell, published in the august pages of the New Statesman in the winter of 1957.110 Since the support base of NCANWT constituted a public without representation, an opportunity had emerged in which politicians and intellectuals could intervene, furnishing the nascent movement with leadership and media resources in the process. The rejection of unilateral disarmament by the Labour Party in October 1957 meant that this opportunity became the sole preserve of a coterie of intellectuals around the New Statesman. The conversion of this group of intellectuals to the movement was marked by public as well as ideological factors and took place through two media moments. The first of these was an article in the New Statesman by the playwright J.  B. Priestley, which offered an eloquent, if not particularly original, interpretation of nuclear disarmament from a British perspective. In a passage that reiterated arguments that had been common currency since the late 1940s, he stressed the importance ‘of a third nation, especially one like ours, possessing great political traditions, to which other and smaller nations could look to while the two new giants (the US and the USSR) mutter and glare at each other’.111 The public response to the article underlined the view of the editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin, that a well-​timed publication in the periodical, ‘written with distinction’, was capable of capturing ‘a whole movement of thought’.112 As Priestley put it in the press conference at which the formation of CND was announced, his participation had been secured by ‘the size of [his] postbag’.113 The immediate stimulus behind the formation of CND, however, were the Reith Lectures on the subject of ‘Russia, the Atom and the West’, delivered towards the end of 1957 by George Kennan, a former US ambassador to the Soviet Union. The lectures, which were expected within the BBC ‘to arouse international interest and



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controversy’, criticized the United States and Britain for their overdependence on nuclear deterrence in world affairs.114 A measure of their clarity and impact can be taken from a letter to the BBC by Erik Baker, secretary of the NPC, which claimed the lectures had ‘led to a much more informed discussion of the problems [of international relations] among ordinary men and women’.115 It was in honour of Kennan that Kingsley Martin hosted a dinner party at which the idea of CND was conceived. The movement, hitherto unrepresented, had gained its mouthpiece in the media. The ‘representation’ that the New Statesman intellectuals offered the movement did not simply reflect the interests of its supporters, however:  it also obscured their contribution to the history of the movement and signalled a reframing of its objectives and policy with which they did not necessarily identify. Since the movement had mobilized in relation to media-​defined criteria of ‘representativeness’, it echoed inequalities of public power. The first draft of the movement’s history was therefore tied up in the course of its creation, marginalizing the groundwork carried out by local churches and women in particular.116 As described by Reverend Werner Pelz, a refugee from the Third Reich and a founder of an H-​bomb group near Bolton in 1954, he and his wife ‘wrote letters to most of those who were to feature as the leaders of CND . . . but none deigned us worthy of a reply’.117 Yet the intervention of the New Statesman intellectuals served not only to distort the first draft of history: inequalities in private as well as public forms of evidence have posed problems for historians working further downstream. The private papers of intellectuals, combined with the opening up of CND archives from the 1980s, have exercised a disproportionate influence over the historiography of the movement:  one in which intellectuals and the rank-​and-​file are treated as one and the same and differences and tensions are minimized and underplayed.118 It has been assumed, for example, that the rank-​and-​file subscribed to objectives and policies that the intellectuals of CND set for them following their intervention in 1958. As Manuel Castells has suggested, however, the definition and imposition of these objectives and policies did not necessarily signify an expression of the interests and identities of a movement. It also signified a reframing of them, introducing ‘cleavages between the actors of the movement and the projects constructed on their behalf, often without their knowledge or consent’.119 When historians have interpreted the anti-​nuclear movement in relation to the objectives and policies of CND  –​unilateral disarmament by Britain chief among them –​they have therefore run the risk of misrepresentation. The insight these offer into the attitudes and outlooks of

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the intellectuals and rank-​and-​file is on its own unreliable. For the intellectuals, the idea behind unilateral disarmament –​that Britain give a moral lead to the world by renouncing its nuclear weapons alone  –​was tempered by public as well as moral and political concerns. It provided a means by which they could appeal to public patriotism and manufacture the movement as non-​Communist and pro-​British. The reception of this line of thinking among the rank-​and-​file also depended on a range of social and political factors. A significant minority even regarded unilateralism as no more than make-​believe. David Widgery, a Trotskyist, was not alone in the view that unilateral disarmament by Britain would be tantamount to ‘the old imperial lion turning out to be the fairy godmother after all’.120 Only a month after the launch of CND, a student on the Easter march to ban the bomb in 1958 described how he was tired of ‘all this guff about Britain giving a moral lead’.121 From this perspective, the historical interpretations that have emanated from the policy pronouncements of a small group of intellectuals seem far more suspect. One of the most problematic of these has involved taking the idea of Britain giving a moral lead as direct evidence of ‘Britishness’ in the movement. According to this interpretation, the leaders and supporters of the movement were ‘imperial pacifists’, overestimating the influence of Britain in the world at the end of empire, or ‘national internationalists’, unable to collaborate across borders because of an overwhelming sense of British identity.122 Insofar as these characterizations extrapolate from the official record of CND and the intellectuals, however, they present a crooked picture and reflect the same inequalities of evidence that stem from the process by which the movement was made. The movement did not offer a ‘Britishness’ that could be ‘embraced by all of its members’, as one account has had it.123 On the contrary, it consisted of nationalists who fought for the break-​up of Britain, radicals whose methods of protest were inspired by anti-​colonial struggles and republicans who railed against that supreme symbol of ‘Britishness’:  the monarchy.124 The power dynamics and relations that informed the making of the movement have in this way fed into and warped its history. The anti-​nuclear movement was shaped not only by the media and public stature of its leaders and supporters, but also by that of nuclear issues themselves. Since issues such as radiation were complex and raised concerns that were transcendent of politics, they were well-​suited to intellectual representation. The nature of this representation, however, tended to err more towards those with a background in the arts than the sciences. As Rotblat discovered, so sensitive were the political implications of scientific research that public involvement could be



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counterproductive. In 1957, for example, he was attacked by the ASA for making a public statement about the cancerous effects of radioactive fallout, its members threatening to resign unless such statements were unanimously approved in future.125 In these circumstances, it was far more effective for scientists to supply intellectuals in the arts with ‘the facts’ behind the scenes, with Rotblat deciding to relinquish his position on the CND Executive Committee almost as soon as he had taken it up. Since intellectuals in the arts were independent of the pressures that faced scientists and politicians, they had far more license to explore the moral dimensions of the issues in a dramatic and newsworthy manner. This independence was indeed a public prerogative they protected, as highlighted by the disbarment of MPs from membership of the Executive Committee.126 The composition and structure of this Committee, the organization standing at the forefront of the movement, had in this way evolved around the public demands of nuclear issues in the news media, its intellectuals serving as popular educators and moralists on a subject that was secretive and misunderstood.

Nuclear information and state legitimacy By the launch of CND in February 1958, the stage had been set for a publicized contest over nuclear-​related information in the news media. The freedom of this information had been enhanced, the news media had become more critical in its coverage of defence and foreign policies and the movement had mobilized networks and resources that facilitated expression of the anti-​nuclear cause. If the legitimacy of the nuclear state depended on a ‘monopoly of information’ –​as the introduction of this book proposes –​then by 1958 this monopoly had been broken, in spite of attempts by civil servants and political leaders to sustain it. At this stage, the leaders and supporters of the movement were heavily engaged in using the same nuclear-​related information that the state had published in order to mobilize further opposition against it. This involved the sourcing and repackaging of this information, along with the maintenance of the media channels that had opened up during 1957. The state, led by the Prime Minister’s Office, attempted to counteract the movement on both of these counts, denying it information and squeezing the independence of the news media as a forum in which the anti-​nuclear cause could gain expression. This contest over shared information and resources on nuclear issues should not necessarily be seen in dualistic terms, as a case of the movement versus the state. It is better seen as a crisis of legitimacy within the state, where ‘empowered actors’ sought to bring

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about competing versions of statehood, from the expansion of the public right to know on one side of the spectrum to the preservation of the national interest on the other. Through nuclear issues, the very workings of the state were at stake. That the movement served to reinterpret and relay state-​ sponsored information made the question of state legitimacy all the more pressing. It did so because it subjected the claims of politicians and scientists to blatant contradiction. A  growing concern that information sponsored by the state was being turned against it was highlighted by the Home Office, which over the course of 1958 became increasingly sceptical of applications among CND groups for literature and films on civil defence. In April 1958, for example, an official from the Home Office drew attention to requests to the Central Film Library (CFL) for civil defence posters ‘showing the explosion of an H-​bomb’. These were to be used at a meeting on 21 May ‘as a basis of propaganda against the Government’s policy of making and testing the H-​bomb’.127 The day after the meeting the poster was reprinted in the Guardian, which commented that it was not based on ‘any partisan view but on the Home Office Manual of Civil Defence, Volume 1, No.1, 1956’.128 While posters of this sort had appeared in the popular press after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and first British atom bomb test, their news and shock value took on greater significance in the context of Sandys’s admissions and the splintering of the scientific community over radiation.129 As the body of research into the dangers of radiation grew, however, the movement was provided with a framework not only by which it could reinterpret ‘old’ information, but also by which it could produce its own. An exhibition by Watford CND, for example, featured ‘a study of tests from all over the world’.130 The success with which the movement was able to ‘spin’ state-​sponsored information, reinterpreting it in light of the latest research on radiation, was underlined by attempts by branches of the state to deny it access to nuclear-​ related information altogether. This denial of information formed part of a broader offensive against the anti-​nuclear movement and was overseen by Macmillan and his Minister of Information, Charles Hill. In March 1958, the prime minister had written to Hill, asking him ‘to find some way of organising and directing an effective campaign to counter the current agitation against this country’s possession of nuclear weapons’.131 From then onwards, all interactions with the movement were passed through Hill, including correspondence with the Home Office about an Ipswich CND application to hire The Atomic Bomb, the film that the BBC had refused to broadcast following the Lucky Dragon incident in 1954. The minister of information believed that rejection of the application



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would be ill-​advised in this case. As he explained to the Home Secretary R. A. Butler, ‘[T]‌he Central Film Library have it on their open list and I  think we would be blamed by a lot of people . . . outside the nuclear disarmament group if we broke the Library’s own rules.’132 In order to guard against the movement using nuclear-​related films in future, however, the Home Office ensured that The Atomic Bomb, The H-​bomb, Atomic Attack and Civil Defence Makes Sense were all omitted from the next edition of the CFL catalogue.133 The perceived legitimacy of the nuclear state was contested through anti-​ and pro-​nuclear representatives as well as nuclear-​related information. Since the representation that the New Statesman group lent to the movement was determined by their ethical rather than political credentials, it posed a significant challenge to traditional models of political leadership. In particular, it gave this group access to independent and religious platforms from which politicians were excluded. When the canon of Carlisle Cathedral delivered a unilateralist sermon at the cathedral, for example, a request by the revisionist wing of the Labour Party for a right of reply was denied: the cathedral was not to be used by political parties.134 The ability of leaders of CND to appear transcendent of politics, while at the same time influencing the course of politics through their moral stand, proved particularly problematic for the Labour Party. As a pamphlet of the Socialist Campaign for Multilateral Disarmament (SCMD) put it in 1960, the moral space that CND had filled seemed rich with public potential: ‘every activity, right down to the tiniest demonstration at a country village war memorial’ received coverage.135 If the representative credentials of intellectuals were enhanced by the appearance of moral independence, however, then those of leading politicians were weakened by what appeared to be their collusion in nuclear-​related deception and secrecy. The intimation that leading politicians were liars did indeed become a common feature of ban the bomb propaganda, providing a source of inspiration for the satire boom in the same period. In ‘No Place to Hide’, an anti-​nuclear exhibition that went on to tour around Europe, the grave implications of nuclear-​related ‘lies’ were made plain: ‘a large picture of Mr Dulles declaring that nuclear weapons are the “umbrella of the free world” ’ stood side by side ‘with the distorted face of a Japanese woman, her eyes burnt-​ out like fog lamps’, as the Guardian reported.136 Just as actors in the movement sought to delegitimize leading politicians by framing their ‘representativeness’ as false and misguided, leading politicians sought to delegitimize intellectuals by framing theirs as pro-​Communist and subversive. The orchestration of ‘attacks’ on the intellectual representatives of CND was a routine tactic of the Thatcher as well as the Macmillan government.

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In the 1980s, the Ministry of Defence used information from Mi5 to besmirch the reputation and undermine the credibility of CND leaders in public.137 For J.  B. Priestley, the stigma of leading CND was such that ‘people of weight, agreeing with CND policy, have felt they could not appear on a public platform with us  . . .  Others have been victimised because of their connection with the Campaign’.138 In order to counteract the monopoly of the movement over moral fora and spaces, the Macmillan government also began to mobilize its own intellectual and religious networks. Prior to the Easter march in 1958, the prime minister even ‘considered whether he might write to the Archbishop of Canterbury to warn the local clergy not to help the demonstrators’.139 As it happened, his approach was more protracted and subtle. A year later his minister of information reported that despite ‘many difficulties’ a ‘modest beginning’ had been made in advancing the pro-​nuclear agenda through a religious body wary of its autonomy.140 If counteractive measures and ‘dirty tricks’ against the anti-​nuclear movement were to be effective, however, then they needed to be conducted both covertly and carefully. The instances in which they were exposed could provide the movement with considerable publicity and underline its sense of mission. When the Home Office attempted to deny Linus Pauling, a Nobel Prize winner, entry into the United Kingdom to speak at a ‘Scientists on Trial’ meeting, for example, they were forced to retract and merely prompted more scientists into attendance.141 The dismissal of anti-​nuclear agitation as Communist-​inspired was also becoming trite, as Selwyn Lloyd, the foreign secretary, discovered on Woman’s Hour in June 1957. On this occasion, his slur provoked over thousands of letters of complaint. ‘Selwyn must have thought he was talking on Children’s Hour’, retorted the Labour MP Barbara Castle.142 The media and public landscape in which the leaders and supporters of the movement were able to scandalize the counteractive politics of the state, however, remained for the most part hostile and unfavourable.143 The producer on Woman’s Hour, for example, did not broadcast a sample of the complaints against Lloyd until permission had been granted by the Foreign Office.144 Where the news media could be shown as siding with the state on nuclear issues, however, the sense of direction and impetus within the movement was also reinforced: DAC even welcomed ‘attacks in the section of the press supporting nuclear weapons . . . as a sign that the movement is gaining sufficient power to threaten to change that policy’.145 The monitoring of the media for bias and fair treatment indicated how the movement was beginning to evolve. It was becoming about more than nuclear weapons and tests as single issues, since it was also engaging in mediated dialogue about the questions these



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raised for democratic politics and practice. As its leaders and supporters started to pre-​empt and respond to news coverage on a broader basis, it was becoming as much a social as a single issue movement. How activists and intellectuals negotiated relations with news media was of critical importance for the movement they sought to mobilize, shaping its organizational forms and structures as well as the version of democracy and statehood for which it stood. The mechanics of this negotiation had involved the construction of a nonaligned position in the media and public discourses of Cold War Britain, the exploitation of nuclear-​related facts in a media environment that manipulated and suppressed them and the opening up of channels of expression and representation through creative methods of protest and high profile personalities. At the same time, the struggle to realize an effective opposition over nuclear issues also pushed the news media into a position of at least relative independence from the state, a process that was underpinned by the introduction of commercial television, as discussed in Chapter 1. By the time the movement was able to pose a challenge to the nuclear state, however, it became clear that nuclear issues were not simply abstract or singular. They were instead symbolic of the functions and workings of the Cold War state and were therefore a powerful tool by which democracy and political legitimacy could be reassessed. Indeed, the more nuclear weapons and tests presented entry points into other political and social issues, the more the dynamics between media and movement altered and took on a range of trajectories. These ended up being characterized not so much by the abstract issues of nuclear weapons and tests as the activities and identities of the participants in the movement themselves. It was as these participants responded to this coverage that single issue politics were socialized.

3

Public Intellectuals

‘The hydrogen bomb is hunched on the shoulders of every intellectual today’, claimed E.  P. Thompson in an article for ULR in 1957.1 As the manufacture and testing of nuclear weapons by Britain gave rise to ethical and existential questions of the highest order, it formed an issue that captivated intellectuals and consumed their creative energies. How intellectuals engaged with this issue provides an insight into the evolution of their cultural authority in the post-​ war period, as well as the media forms they innovated while seeking to make a meaningful statement against nuclear weapons. If the cultural authority of intellectuals had been transformed by upheavals in class and communications, then these were reflected in generational divisions over what constituted an appropriate and committed art form by which to condemn the nuclear age and the kind of politics and society responsible for facilitating it. The cultural authority of intellectuals on the CND Executive Committee, of new dramatists on the Committee of 100, and of filmmakers and satirists who were involved in the movement in general were all founded upon contrasting criteria. Their public statuses ranged from grandee generalists and patrician polymaths to grammar school graduates and popular iconoclasts; their artistic practices ranged from ‘men of letters’ to film and television technicians; and their conceptions of the media and politics were conditioned by age and experience. By focusing on the struggle of these intellectuals to create a radical form through the nuclear issue, it is possible to show how cultural authority passed from one generation to another and to identify the importance of the role of the media in this process. In tracing the evolution of the intellectual through figures as diverse as J. B. Priestley, Marghanita Laski, John Osborne, David Mercer, Spike Milligan, Peter Cook, Lindsay Anderson and Peter Watkins, a clear problem of taxonomy emerges. When all that connected these figures were their efforts to represent the anti-​nuclear movement through their art, an attempt to group and study them together risks an illusory picture of intellectual development. At a time

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when television demanded more of the personality of the intellectual –​as well as of their skills behind or in front of the camera –​this analysis can stray into narratives of ‘celebrity’ and ‘expertise’ that according to Stefan Collini straitjacket much of the intellectual history of Britain. ‘As these two juggernauts drive the relevant aspects of society in . . . opposite directions’, he explains, ‘the terrain on which the intellectual . . . stood breaks apart and the species tumbles to its death in the resulting crevasse.’2 To ascribe the disintegration of the intellectual ‘type’ to the rise of television is tempting. The generation of documentarians, new dramatists and satirists who first articulated their art and radicalism through the anti-​nuclear movement do indeed seem like alien entities compared to their elders; their public position appears more determined by media image than class relationships and their artistic excellence more by esoteric specialism than encyclopaedic command. The rhetorical use of television as a breaking point in the intellectual history of Britain has its limits, however:  it obscures strong continuities that existed between generations of intellectuals. The intellectuals who expressed their art through the anti-​nuclear movement learned from one another, despite tensions between them over what a politicized art might constitute. They pushed back the frontiers of film and television in genres such as current affairs, documentary, drama and satire in particular. Peter Watkins’s The War Game, which combined these genres in order to depict the effects of a nuclear strike on Kent, can be seen as the culmination of a creative endeavour against nuclear weapons through current affairs programmes such as Ritchie Calder’s It Can Happen Tomorrow, documentaries such as Lindsay Anderson’s March to Aldermaston, dramas such as J. B. Priestley’s Doomsday for Dyson and satires such as Beyond the Fringe and That Was The Week That Was (TW³). An account of intellectuals that privileges the media forms they pioneered above the ideas they held poses another methodological problem, especially when these intellectuals are considered ‘radical’. It leads to a history that coheres around communication rather than ideology; one in which the transience of culture is placed above the permanence of theory. It is for this reason that E. P. Thompson opposed Mervyn Jones’s claim that ‘what defines an intellectual is his public position’ in an issue of ULR dedicated to rebutting Socialism and the Intellectuals, a pamphlet written by Kingsley Amis in 1956. While he conceded that ‘public showmanship is . . . important for that . . . small segment of socialists . . . invited onto a Brains Trust’, he drew attention to the ‘teachers or miners, housewives or students’ who make up the body of the labour movement and ‘who are concerned more with the humdrum work of promoting a flow



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of ideas’ and engaging with socialist theory.3 As Perry Anderson has shown in two essays on Marxism in twentieth-​century Britain, an emphasis on radicalism as ideology would produce a history in which intellectual genealogies are far more explicit and simple to follow. In explaining the emergence of radical intellectuals in a ‘national culture’ resistant to Marxist thought and sociological disciplines, Anderson stressed the importance of ‘the interplay between three or four generations of socialist intellectuals’, beginning with the Communist Party Historians’ Group of the late 1930s.4 The anti-​nuclear movement was formative for at least a generation of the socialist intellectuals Anderson describes, but the mobilization of intellectuals over a moral issue cannot be explained by ideology alone. The intellectuals under discussion ranged from anarchists to liberals and were inspired by Christian as well as political traditions. Beyond their basic revulsion to nuclear weapons, it was their creative attempts to represent and utilize the moral and public force of an oppositional movement that connected them and imbued them with a common radicalism. The radical forms they innovated were to this end embedded in and inspired by the social make-​up of the movement. By combining the educational and the dramatic, rank-​and-​file supporters of the movement informed the emergence of docudrama; by protesting against upper middle class leaders, they inspired documentarians and the new dramatists; and by identifying and posturing against the establishment and establishment figures, they nurtured the satire boom. If radical intellectuals were to maintain their cultural authority within the movement, then they had to ‘deploy, re-​work, or otherwise make use of the shared evaluative language of those to whom they [were] addressed’.5 In this way, radical intellectuals provided an interface between the movement they represented and the wider public in which they occupied an elevated position and status. It was through these intellectuals that the language of a radical movement was translated into the vernacular of common citizenship and public life in Cold War Britain.

The CND Executive Committee The scale of influence the generation of intellectuals who founded CND had over the media becomes clear through a brief examination of its Executive Committee and public relations and press liaisons office. Among the 19 members appointed to the Executive in January, ‘13 were listed in Who’s Who; 4 were journalists; at least 12 were authors, almost all had at one stage contributed

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to newspapers and journals; most were associated with the Labour Party’.6 They were the ‘prima donnas of the campaigning business’, according to the chairman of the Committee, Canon Collins.7 The CND public relations and press liaisons office was led by J. B. Priestley, a figure described as ‘the voice of the forties’ and one of the first ‘multimedia personalities’ in Britain.8 His wartime broadcasts on Postscripts were each heard on average by 31 per cent of the population and were taken off air in 1941 after a complaint from Churchill and political pressure from the Ministry of Information.9 As Graham Greene described, ‘Priestley became in the months after Dunkirk a leader second only in importance to Mr. Churchill . . . he gave us what our other leaders have always failed to give us –​an ideology.’10 Priestley was assisted in public relations and press liaisons by Ritchie Calder, a journalist specializing in science and technology who served as director of plans and campaigns for the Political Warfare Executive in Second World War; Michael Foot, editor of the Evening Standard between 1942 and 1944 and later Tribune between 1955 and 1960; and James Cameron, a foreign correspondent and journalist chosen to witness the first detonation of an atomic bomb by Britain in 1952.11 The public roles of these intellectuals had been heavily conditioned by their involvement in or relations with the BBC and MoI in the Second World War, as well as their collaboration over the 1941 Committee and its successor, the Common Wealth Party, both of which stressed the importance of common ownership over the means of production and morality in politics.12 It was a measure of the profile of these intellectuals that Harold Macmillan took steps to counteract CND within a month of its establishment. In a memo to Charles Hill he asked whether we could get ‘the ITA to take the initiative . . . by finding suitable people who would speak in support of the UK’s possession of nuclear arms?’ He wondered ‘whether we can persuade some influential publicists to write articles? Are there any reliable scientists or Church of England Bishops?’13 The media power of the intellectuals who founded CND, and their cultural authority over the anti-​nuclear movement, rested on a combination of the social class and creative achievement of its members. Their upper middle class backgrounds and ability to express their talent through writing and public speaking gave them a privileged position in systems of mass communication and radical politics structured around social hierarchy. Their work in radio through the BBC and MoI was particularly influential, altering ‘the conditions of literary practices, authorship and cultures in the newly re-​constituted sphere’, according to Andrew Rubin.14 The organization of radio broadcasting into three tiers, with the Third Programme as the pinnacle in education and taste, had underpinned



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the cultural and social status of the upper middle class intellectuals who led CND. In the words of Collini, ‘[T]‌he expansion of the Sunday papers, the success of the Third Programme, and a slowly democratising system of secondary education’ enabled intellectuals to command a wide and deferential public in the post-​ war period: ‘high culture . . . and high class were still closely associated’.15 This link between class and culture was prevalent among the intellectuals of CND. Ernest Simon, 1st Baron Simon of Wythenshawe, had served as chairman of the BBC Board of Governors between 1947 and 1952 before becoming a founding member of CND. When the Third Programme was threatened by cuts in 1957, the intellectuals who went on to form CND were prominent in the campaign to save it.16 The upper middle class backgrounds of these intellectuals dovetailed with the dynamics of radical politics as well as those of broadcasting and the press. They were heirs to a tradition of progressive radicalism based on cross-​class coalitions, whereby the upper middle classes utilized their superior education and status to provide cultural and political leadership to their lower middle and working class counterparts. This tradition had roots in Chartism, the Liberal Party and the Labour Movement and gained expression in the 1930s, when the cultural wing of the CPGB began to allow the participation of social democrats and the middle and upper classes in its organizations. George Orwell touched on the possibilities and tensions inherent in such cross-​class coalitions in The Road to Wigan Pier. ‘If you belong to the bourgeoisie’, he advised, ‘do not be too eager to bound forward and embrace your proletarian brothers; they may not like it, and if they show they do not like it you will probably find that your class prejudices are not so dead as you imagine. And if you belong to the proletariat’, he continued, ‘do not sneer too much at the Old School Tie; it covers loyalties which can be useful to you if you know how to handle them.’17 The departure of the CPGB from a position of ‘Class against Class’ and towards a ‘Popular Front’ against fascism was endorsed at the Seventh Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1935 and provided opportunities for the intellectuals who went on to become leaders of CND to develop their progressive radicalism. Victor Gollancz, an intellectual whose involvement in CND was hampered by a personal rivalry with Canon Collins, exploited the shift towards a Popular Front by building cross-​class coalitions through the Left Book Club; in his words an ‘educational body’ with ‘two positive goals  –​the preservation of peace, and the creation of a just social order: and one negative one  –​defence against Fascism’. By the outbreak of the Second World War, the  Club had 50,000 members and according to Gollancz had distributed

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over two million books, almost half a million pamphlets and fifteen million leaflets.18 J.  B. Priestley also furnished the Popular Front with upper middle class leadership in his capacity as president of the Writers’ Section of the Society for Cultural Relations between the Peoples of the British Commonwealth and the USSR, as well as a member of the General Council of Unity Theatre.19 The importance of the educative influence of artists and writers to this radicalism can also be seen in the Workers’ Educational Association, which expanded from 219 to 800 branches in the interwar period and later employed E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams as tutors.20 The progressive radicalism that flowered in the 1930s and fed into the election of the Attlee government in 1945 was compromised in the post-​war period by class relationships and ideological alignments that were transformed by affluence and the Cold War. As the affluence, education and social mobility of the working classes increased, the social foundations on which such cross-​class coalitions were built seemed to deteriorate. In Kingsley Amis’s Socialism and the Intellectuals, a pamphlet published by the Fabian Society in 1956, he argued that the improved position of the working classes had bred contempt among older intellectuals for the symbols of their affluence, commercial television and the welfare state notable among them. ‘The welfare state . . . is notoriously unpopular with intellectuals’, he claimed. ‘It was all very well to press for higher wages in the old days, but now that the wages have risen the picture is less attractive; why, some of them are actually better off than ourselves.’21 According to Amis, the contentment of the worker under the Conservatives was more conducive to the intellectual as an eccentric than radical. ‘At home . . . few causes offer themselves to the cruising rebel’, he observed. ‘No more millions out of work, no more hunger marches, no more strikes; none at least that the rebel can take an interest in, when the strike pay-​packet is likely to be as much he gets for a review of Evelyn Waugh or a talk about basset horns on the Third Programme.’22 Despite the cynicism with which it is carried out by Amis, the argument that the dynamic between intellectuals and their social base was undermined by changes in class is worthy of further consideration.23 While the public position of upper middle class intellectuals in the post-​ war period was buttressed by a corresponding hierarchy of communications, it seemed increasingly disconnected and self-​serving  –​as Amis recognized in his reference to the Third Programme. E. P. Thompson, ‘enough of a Party man still to be riled by the picture of Mr Amis telling . . . [Fabians] that it is “too easy to laugh” at the intellectuals who went to fight in Spain’, conceded in a reply that the ‘circuits’ that had existed between the intellectual and the labour movement had indeed



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been broken. ‘In the thirties’, he argued, ‘points of contact existed in Left Book Clubs, the Communist Party, the Unity Theatres, the International Brigade and journals like New Writing and Left Review’.24 If the tradition of radicalism exercised by intellectuals of CND was based on progressive coalitions between classes, it seemed increasingly threatened in the post-​war period. The successive closure of national newspapers on the left to which members of the CND public relations and press liaisons office contributed, including the Daily Herald, News Chronicle, Picture Post and Reynold’s News, serves to highlight an erosion of the class-​based relationship between radical intellectuals and their public. During the period of the Popular Front and the Second World War, the circulations of these newspapers grew considerably. The Picture Post, which had a circulation of almost two million within two months of its establishment as an anti-​appeasement and anti-​fascist newspaper in 1938, demonstrated the potential of national newspapers on the left as vehicles by which radical intellectuals could communicate with the wider public and working classes.25 J. B. Priestley, Ritchie Calder, Michael Foot and James Cameron all utilized their positions on these newspapers to articulate and promote a popular radicalism that informed post-​war planning. The Picture Post even served as the axis around which the 1941 Committee and the Common Wealth Party were organized. The falling circulations of national newspapers on the left after 1945 reflected the declining appeal and cultural authority of the journalistic radicalism that figures such as Priestley, Calder, Foot and Cameron purveyed. Their efforts to enlighten and elevate the working classes seemed outmoded and paternalistic in the context of increasingly affluent, educated and mobile readerships. National newspapers on the left folded as a mass movement of the left blossomed. As James Cameron acknowledged in his eulogy to the News Chronicle: [T]‌he newspaper with the most admirable free-​thinking radical traditions withered on the bough precisely at the moment when the nation was ripe to appreciate these liberal qualities.’26 The scope for cross-​ class coalitions on which a progressive radicalism could be based was also hindered by the disillusionment of intellectuals with Communism and the polarizing politics of the Cold War. Although the popularity of the CPGB surged in and around 1945, a significant number of the intellectuals who enrolled as members in the 1930s had long since abandoned it for reasons ranging from Stalinist show trials to the Nazi-​Soviet pact. The absence of intellectuals such as W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Cecil-​Day Lewis, Stephen Spender and John Strachey from CND in the post-​war period can be explained by a suspicion of radicalism that was rooted in the 1930s and manifest in their contributions to edited volumes such as Victor Gollancz’s Betrayal of

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the Left and Richard Crossman’s The God That Failed, along with participation in the pro-​American Congress for Cultural Freedom.27 For Perry Anderson, this ideological collapse represented the failure of these intellectuals to plant a seedbed of Marxist theory in English culture. As ‘their liberalism often subsisted quite unaltered’, ‘it was inevitable that anything so provincial and insubstantial would be blown away by the first gust of the international gale. A few years later most of the rebellious litterateurs were banal functionaries of the reaction’.28 While the liberalism of radical intellectuals was not capable of establishing and underpinning a durable culture of opposition in Britain, it was capable of allowing them to respond to the Cold War with far more flexibility than Marxism. The intellectuals who went on to found CND were for the most part those who had been most distant from and sceptical of Communism: their unwillingness to commit to Marxism spared them from the humiliation of Stalinism and left them unhindered from the international obligations of the Soviet Union. Most notably, Bertrand Russell, the president of CND, was one of the first intellectuals to reject Marxism in The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism in 1920.29 Priestley also became quickly disenchanted with Popular Front style societies, referring to them in 1951 as ‘disguised Communist platforms’ and adding that ‘it is significant that no attempt is made to create similar societies for the spreading of English culture in Soviet Russia’.30 In January 1952, he was removed from the General Council of Unity Theatre for an article he had written for a ‘war-​on-​ Russia’ issue of the American magazine Collier’s, in which he depicted a post-​ apocalyptic Russia. A letter from the Council described his forecast that Guys and Dolls would replace the ballet in the Red Army Theatre after a nuclear war as ‘horrific’ to any true lover of art and culture.31 The ‘circuits’ between intellectuals and the labour movement to which E.  P. Thompson referred had certainly become more disconnected as a result of the ideological realignment of the radical intelligentsia from the late 1930s onwards. The underlying liberalism of the intellectuals of the 1930s did not stop their opponents from exploiting their Communist connections and flirtations during the Cold War. Alex Comfort, Kingsley Martin, J. B. Priestley and A. J. P. Taylor, all of whom went on to become members of the CND Executive Committee, were among the 135 ‘crypto-​Communists’ listed by George Orwell in a notebook he had been keeping after the Second World War. Martin and Priestley were also among the 38 names that Orwell passed on to the anti-​Communist IRD in 1949.32 The intellectuals who were able to forge connections with the labour movement and who personified the tradition of radicalism to which CND belonged had been monitored by intelligence services since the interwar period.



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Victor Gollancz, for example, was considered by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) to be ‘a person requiring the closest and most careful watching’. An agent from the SIS was concerned about Gollancz utilizing his ‘public reputation for purely Communist purpose’ and acting as ‘the Communist “homme de confidence” in respectable society, professional or literary circles’.33 The intellectuals whose Marxism in the 1930s had been more explicit assumed a particular degree of strategic importance in the Cold War following their bitter departure from the CPGB. Stephen Spender became coeditor with Irving Kristol of Encounter, a cultural-​political periodical based in London and covertly funded by the CIA and Mi6.34 Encounter was one of twenty-​one periodicals to be published and distributed worldwide by the Paris-​based CCF and became an outlet for the revisionist right of the Labour Party under the editorship of Melvin J. Lasky from 1958 onwards. As Lasky described to John Hunt, a CIA agent employed by CCF, the relationship between Encounter and the revisionists provided an entry point into ‘the more burning issues of the H-​bomb, neutralism, NATO, and the like’.35 Andrew Rubin has shown how CCF was able to exercise a disproportionate degree of influence over the British intelligentsia in the 1950s because of its dominance in the periodicals market and its contacts with media organizations. Encounter emerged in 1953 at the tail end of a series of closures in the market for ‘little magazines’ and Harman Grisewood, the first comptroller of the Third Programme, was treasurer of the British Society for Cultural Freedom. As Rubin has remarked, literary magazines and radio ‘interacted’ and ‘overlapped’ with CCF in ‘conjunctures of power and authority’.36 The cumulative impact of these transformations in ideology and class served to challenge and redefine the progressive radicalism that CND had inherited. As the intellectuals on the Executive Committee distanced themselves from Communism and their social bases became more mobile, the means by which they had augmented their cultural authority and communicated to their public also shifted and lost legitimacy. The cross-​class coalitions they represented had become increasingly narrow and centred on issues that were middle class and post-​material. Since the middle classes who supported CND were closer in background and education to the intellectuals who led it, the social distinctiveness of these intellectuals inevitably waned. Richard Acland, whose Forward March movement had merged with the 1941 Committee to form the Common Wealth Party, actually recommended bypassing the ordinary public altogether: ‘[I]‌nstead of spending time at local meetings’, he argued, ‘our National Names should give an equivalent number of evenings to long quiet

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conversations with four or five carefully chosen people’.37 It was as the constitution and methods of CND became more democratic that its star speakers and writers abandoned it.38 A tension emerged between intellectuals whose leadership over the movement was based on superior education and status and middle class supporters whose participation in it was based on the premise that every citizen is entitled to his or her say on an issue of national importance. The social dynamic of radical movements moved away from a progressive radicalism driven by class relationships to an equalitarian one driven by individual conscience and social identity.

Public meetings and current affairs The public meetings by which the intellectuals of CND sought to engage the media and represent the interests of their public can be seen as a prime example of the progressive radicalism they embodied:  biddable audiences listened on as intellectual benefactors enlightened them as to the science and politics of the nuclear menace that endangered their existence. While these meetings were integral to the emergence of CND as a national organization, they failed to fulfil their purpose as an interface with the national media and the wider public. Despite the stature of the intellectuals on the Executive Committee, for example, the press conference at which they announced the launch of CND received a total of sixty column inches  –​nine in the Guardian and fifty-​one, more disconcertingly, in the Daily Worker. An inaugural meeting at Central Hall in Westminster reiterated the reluctance of the press to report the organization. In front of an audience of 5,000, Bertrand Russell gave the human race an ‘even chance’ of surviving the next forty years, Canon Collins spoke of ‘timid church leaders who fear to give offence to the established set up’ and A.  J. P.  Taylor described the effects of nuclear fallout in graphic detail. ‘Is there anyone here who would want to do this to another human being?’, asked Taylor. No one spoke. ‘Then why are we making the damned thing?’39 The inaugural meeting may have been ‘the biggest indoor demonstration since the war’ –​to cite the News Chronicle –​but it was almost entirely ignored by the news media.40 The Times, which did not mention the meeting, reported J. B. Priestley’s misgivings a week later: he ‘thought the national press had boycotted the meeting  . . .  it had been an “unparalleled success”, yet there was hardly a mention of it in the national press’. Priestley noticed that ‘The Times had all four [of the London] meetings in its diary, and yet there was no report of one of



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them the following day’.41 The reasons for this neglect stemmed not only from an unwillingness to publicize challenges to the government on a sensitive issue, but also from the shortcomings of public meetings as a form of political expression. As these meetings provided a platform for eloquent men to air their views on defence and foreign policy uncontested, they were increasingly regarded by journalists as too didactic and one-​sided to report. The diminishing newsworthiness of meetings at which the high-​minded conferred wisdom upon a partisan public was highlighted by the inaugural meeting of the CND Women’s Committee. The failure of the Women’s Committee to make the news can be explained in part by the chauvinism of media organizations: male reporters were barred from their inaugural meeting on the grounds that they ‘would write [it] up from a humorous angle’.42 That broadcasters were reluctant to accept the interventions of women on serious items of news was demonstrated by the treatment of women newscasters. ITN’s Barbara Mandell, the first female television broadcaster in Britain, delivered the midday news from a kitchen with plates piled up in the background. The BBC prohibited the use of female announcers from evening programmes altogether until 1960.43 When broadcasters did cater for the interests and involvement of women in serious news on issues of peace and security, they tended to appeal to gender stereotypes that originated in the World Wars and were becoming swiftly outdated. It was characteristic of the BBC in particular to present such news as linked to the obligation of women to civil defence and the home front: defence of the nation and housekeeping and motherhood were treated as synonymous. Woman’s Hour, one of the most regular providers of serious news about peace and disarmament across radio and television, assumed a special importance as a space in which women appropriated and contested these stereotypes in order to argue for and against civil defence and nuclear disarmament. Keith Fowler, a public relations officer for civil defence who earmarked Woman’s Hour as a conduit for government propaganda, clearly believed that it communicated effectively with female audiences. On 1 August 1958 he wrote to its editor, Joanna Scott-​ Moncrieff: ‘More women are giving their spare time to civil defence than to other voluntary services in the country. The fact that it is a hobby for a large number of women all over the country is something that producers of women’s programmes might consider worth exploiting.’ Scott-​Moncrieff responded by arranging a ‘drop in’ session on a civil defence meeting that would be broadcast on the programme.44 It was middle class women, making use of their leisure time to stress either the futility or survivability of nuclear warfare, who most often exploited conservative

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gender stereotypes in the media. The emergence of CND was especially indebted to the activism of such women. The early campaigning of the Golders Green and Suburb Women’s Co-​operative Guild, for example, was decisive in bringing about the first national anti-​nuclear organization, NCANWT.45 The power of gender as a construct in media discourse about peace and security was reaffirmed by the efforts of CND Women’s Committee to also lobby Scott-​Moncrieff. It called for a ‘controversial discussion’ about nuclear weapons and women: the BBC would be better served focusing on the prevention of nuclear warfare than its outbreak.46 The women who made up the Committee sought to utilize their high profile positions to accentuate the threat that nuclear weapons posed to the traditional stereotypes that seemed to carry so much weight in media and public discourse. It was suggested, for example, ‘that Dr Winifred De Kok . . . make the main speech’ at their launch event: ‘She is well known to women TV viewers as a . . . motherly figure on her medical programmes.’47 As with the inaugural meeting of CND, the women’s meeting was characterized by a progressive radicalism in which pre-​ eminent and upper middle class intellectuals patronized their public and shocked it into action. An audience of 800 women gathered to hear ‘Dr. Antoinette Pirie say that after nuclear war children would have to be conceived from sperm previously collected, to ensure one set of uncontaminated genes  . . .  and Dr Winifred de Kok say that “every woman knows that a deformed baby is a tragedy which she would not wish on any other woman.” ’48 Jacquetta Hawkes, the wife of J. B. Priestley, claimed that the importance of the nuclear issue to women was capable of instigating a movement ‘against Britain’s nuclear armaments at least as powerful as the movement for women’s suffrage’.49 That this movement did not emerge until the establishment of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in September 1981 reveals the shortcomings of the Committee. Its elitist and conservative style alienated it from a younger generation of women and failed to engage the national media. The intellectuals of CND were more likely to gain coverage in the media through current affairs programmes in which their opinions could be counterbalanced by opponents. Their appearances on current affairs programmes tended to be both frequent and memorable. Michael Foot and A. J. P. Taylor, for example, participated in more than thirty episodes of Free Speech between 1957 and 1958, more than any other panellist.50 Following an episode featuring Foot on the hydrogen bomb in February 1957, a ‘Welfare Civil Defence Instructor’ named Betty Millman wrote to the ITA to request a transcript of the programme, which had been mentioned ‘on a number of occasions’ while she had been delivering lectures in her local area.51 On moral issues that transcended



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politics such as nuclear disarmament, Foot and Taylor could also find that their usual adversaries on the programme, Robert Boothby and W.  J. Brown, were not so dogmatic or hostile. As Robert Fraser acknowledged, Free Speech was ‘a programme of eccentrics’ and the left and right wing intellectuals who appeared on it represented the orthodox positions of neither the Conservative nor Labour Parties. When Boothby and Brown argued in an episode on decolonization that the Conservative Party was acting improperly by enforcing sanctions in Nyasaland and Rhodesia, Conservative MPs complained that the programme contravened the Television Act.52 The impact that the intellectuals of CND could have through current affairs programmes was hampered by Macmillan’s counter-​campaign as well as the legal obligation of balance. In a memo to the prime minister on 2 April, Charles Hill described how ‘active steps are being taken to identify . . . intellectuals, churchmen and scientists who support the government in this controversy . . . The BBC and the programme companies will be confidentially informed that these people should be invited to give expression to their views on sound and television.’53 The need to recruit intellectuals outside of the Conservative Party underlined the strength of CND as a nonpolitical movement. It was necessary for the government to demonstrate that its policy was supported by public figures whose immediate interest in the nuclear issue was not political. As a civil servant described, the government wanted to have its position stated ‘as repeatedly and as widely as that of the nuclear disarmers’.54 The tendency of clergy, scientists and writers to contradict one another in public seemed to relegate the debate over defence policy to what Ralph Miliband described as ‘a minor world of BBC disagreements’.55 While intellectuals were divided over the moral issue of nuclear weapons, they were united over the way in which they contested it. The Executive Committee and the counter-​campaign were the inverse image of one another. The use of the intelligentsia to represent the interests of CND and the state was conducive to public service politics. Broadcasters could instruct the public on a complex issue through identifiable figures whose intellectual reputation made them seem impartial. The fact that they had been converted to predetermined positions on the debate over defence rendered it simple to organize and convey. It fed into programmes that intended to provide arguments ‘for’ and ‘against’ nuclear weapons in the context of Parliamentary opinion. If the politics of a representative did not conform to established categories of broadcasting, then their invitation onto current affairs programmes was unlikely. A  nonpolitical intellectual such as Kingsley Amis was rejected as a panellist by the producer of Any Questions because ‘he has no politics you could catalogue under the acceptable headings’.56

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The privileging of established categories of politics in current affairs programmes served to politicize nuclear disarmament as a cause. Jeff Nuttall, a jazz musician who became involved in CND through the Easter marches, later recalled how the Executive Committee ‘edged the whole organisation towards protest against . . . a whole gamut of socialist grievances. . . .  they destroyed the universality of an organisation in which Conservatives had once participated’.57 As producers were easily able to exercise control over programmes in which intellectuals appeared merely as ‘talking heads’, they could often bypass controversy and avoid a meaningful engagement with sensitive issues. A review in ULR claimed that current affairs programmes were undermined by a ‘doctrine of acceptability [which was] in many ways as pernicious as a straightforward censor’.58 ‘As far as we could see’, the reviewers argued in an analysis of a programme about ‘the Establishment’, ‘the main thing the producer had in mind was the danger of treading on a good many Top corns if the speakers were allowed to get down to essentials. To safeguard against this, ITV allotted the programme fifteen minutes late at night . . . They [also] selected Lord Boothby and Lady Violet Bonham Carter as the “experts”.’59 Radio and television appearances among intellectuals who were conscious of their respectability in polite society were liable to consensual forms of debate. Ned Sherrin, an assistant producer for Tonight, complained that current affairs programmes were hindered by the maintenance of ‘the fiction that the participants like one another’.60 When commercial companies sought to subvert the formality and genteelism of this public service politics, their programmes could suffer from superficiality. Free Speech was described in ULR as a ‘variety show in which the scoring of cheap debating points replaces argument, and the fruitful exchange of ideas is lost in a barrage of invective’.61 In this sort of programme, an audience could easily make their judgements on the basis of style rather than substance:  visual spectacle took precedence over intellectual rigour. By stimulating a debate in the national media, however, the Executive Committee was able to extend the message of CND and provided opportunities for rank-​and-​file involvement. Whether its intellectuals intended it or not, their leadership facilitated a climate of publicity in which the interventions of ordinary citizens over the nuclear issue had more impact and resonance. The writing and sending of letters, for example, was coordinated with current affairs and news coverage and guided by seasoned activists. A  C100 circular urged supporters not to ‘miss listening to Any Questions on the Light . . . unilateralism crops up quite often; this is your chance to write a comment on the discussion to Any Answers?  . . .  I  have had letters included in 3 consecutive weeks.’ It



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also claimed that ‘the subjects discussed in Woman’s Hour . . . are surprisingly unfettered . . . This programme has a very large listening public . . . I have often had letters read out on it giving as much publicity to my point of view as would cost thousands of pounds if paid for as advertising’.62 The formation of CND served as a watershed in the degree of publicity that rank-​and-​file supporters of the movement could generate and secure. As the CND Bulletin described in April 1958, ‘[T]‌he message of the Campaign is being transmitted by press, radio and television . . . we have lost count of the programmes and articles devoted to the campaign.’63 The Times alone published sixty five letters on the subject of nuclear disarmament between 27 February and 27 March.64 If the purpose of the Executive Committee was to create ‘a climate of opinion essential for the political parties to follow’, as Canon Collins put it, then it can be considered a partial success in its early years.65 The Labour Party modified its position on defence within a month of its inaugural meeting, while the newspapers read most often by supporters of CND, the Guardian and the Observer, stepped up their demands for multilateral disarmament through the Labour Party. Although the editors of these newspapers disagreed with unilateral disarmament, their coverage of those who campaigned for it was in the beginning generous and sympathetic. ‘The objective [of CND] is admirable’, claimed an editorial in the Guardian, ‘but is it not more likely to be achieved if the destruction of British bombs is used as the price to secure it?’66 The adoption of unilateral disarmament as the editorial line of the Daily Herald, a newspaper part-​owned by the Labour Party, illustrates the disarray caused by CND in certain sections of the labour movement.67 While the tide of public opinion to which CND gave rise posed a threat in its initial stages to the Conservative as well as the Labour Party, the state-​sponsored counter-​campaign served to hold it in check. Whitehall possessed strong ties with the current affairs programmes in which CND supporters participated:  Any Questions, Topic for Tonight and Woman’s Hour.68 Charles Hill reported to Macmillan how he was ‘busy “killing” stories’ relating to unilateral disarmament through the press lobby.69 When set against the media contacts and networks of the Conservative Party and the civil service, CND struggled to transcend its traditional constituencies of support.

Educational broadcasting and television drama The inherent complexity and theatricality of the nuclear issue lent itself to the radical and artistic practices on which the intellectuals of CND relied. In the

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same way that the convoluted politics and science of the nuclear age cohered with a radicalism that was educative and enlightening, its apocalyptic consequences also cohered with artistic representations that were dramatic and fictional. By informing the wider public about the implications of nuclear weapons through educational broadcasts and television drama, the intellectuals of CND sought to empower a culture of citizenship in which the layperson was able to participate in high politics. The centrality of education to the radicalism of the CND Executive Committee was personified by Ritchie Calder, a journalist with a particular talent for translating science into the popular vernacular. In an episode of It Can Happen Tomorrow, an educational series he produced and hosted for Scottish Television (STV), he aimed to ‘emphasise the difference between the explosive uses of atomic energy and its peaceful uses’ and interrogate ideas about scientific progress in the nuclear age.70 His educational endeavours were underpinned by the assumption that increased awareness of ‘the facts’ would translate into increased support for the anti-​nuclear movement. As he argued in an article about a series of radio broadcasts by a Nobel Prize winner in physics, ‘[I]‌t is easy to say “I cannot understand the atom. I leave that to the brainy blokes”.’ Nuclear energy dominates world politics, and, in its military implications, threatens the whole of humanity. In its peaceful applications, it concerns our well-​being and also our jobs. The ‘brainy blokes’, the scientists, do not decide these things. They make their discoveries available and others decide how they are to be used or abused. So it is a question of forming judgments and that depends ultimately on a well-​informed public. If, however, the layman feels that the atom is beyond them, then the judgments on its use are going to be haphazard and misdirected.71

Calder mediated between the ivory towers of science and the mass markets of popular journalism. By providing citizens with knowledge hitherto beyond their ken, he enabled their participation in the democratic process. This paternalism was shaped not only by his educational and class distinction, but also his conviction that the media has a duty to elevate and raise standards. In order for educational broadcasts to engage the public, they had to be conducted in a dramatic fashion. James McCloy, the assistant editor of the Atoms for Peace broadcasts in 1955, recognized that interest in the nuclear issue was dependent on the novelty and clarity of the facts. He advised against



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a repeat series three years later:  the 1955 series included ‘the disclosing of a lot of secrets, which were of considerable interest at the elementary level. Any new information that will be released this year will be much more specialised and highly technological’.72 The complexity of scientific research rendered a public organization like CND far more suited to literary intellectuals.73 The facts had to be presented in an idiom not only comprehensible, but also entertaining. ‘Survivors: Fiction Based on Fact’, a pamphlet edited by Antoinette Pirie, demonstrated the potency of combining scientific research with literary creativity. It contained a short story by Marghanita Laski inspired entirely by the Manual of Civil Defence.74 The dramatization of science was even more necessary in a popular medium such as television, where visual gimmickry was required to captivate the audience. In Ritchie Calder’s educational series, for example, he asked an extra from the audience to hit a lump of uranium with a hammer. The extra refuses:  ‘what about the police message  –​that chap in Glasgow who was supposed to be wandering around with a lethal capsule in his pocket? Not on your life’. Calder takes back the hammer and hits the uranium:  ‘you see; nothing happens  . . .  this is natural uranium  . . .  If all the atoms in this were split the energy you would get from it would be equal to 150 ten-​ton trucks of coal’.75 The method of combining science and drama for educational purposes may have seemed elementary and contrived in Calder’s series, but it became an increasingly influential means by which radical artists and intellectuals could communicate with the wider public. The emergence of television drama also enabled the playwrights of CND to reach audiences and depict the nuclear age on a scale and with a precision that was not possible through theatre. Due in part to the establishment of commercial companies with existing interests in film production, television drama in this period became more open to social and political controversy and realism. ABC Television was especially influential in facilitating a shift away from polite society to the realities of working class life. In the words of Sydney Newman, a Canadian film and television producer appointed by ABC to run the Armchair Theatre series in 1958: ‘[T]‌he only legitimate theatre [in Britain at the time of his arrival] was of the “anyone for tennis” variety . . . Television dramas were usually adaptations of stage plays, and invariably about upper classes. I said “Damn the upper-​classes –​they don’t even own televisions!” ’76 It was through commercial television that the ‘new drama’ gained expression. In October 1956, Granada Television defied warnings from other commercial companies by televising

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John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. This was considered such a departure from the standard fare of televised drama that it seemed tantamount to a political act. Howard Thomas, the chief executive of ABC, later argued that ‘television drama is not so far removed from television journalism, and the plays which grip the audience are those that face up to the new issues of the day as well as to the problems as old as civilisation’.77 The necessity for television drama to address issues that were contemporary and divisive was demonstrated by the BBC’s appointment of Sydney Newman as head of drama in December 1962. He inaugurated and oversaw the controversial Wednesday Play series that tackled issues such as homelessness, political apathy, abortion, atheism and nuclear disarmament. Only a month after the inaugural meeting of CND in February 1958, Doomsday for Dyson, a play by J. B. Priestley, was broadcast to over 2,414,000 viewers on Granada Television. The play was deemed controversial enough to be rehearsed in secret and one-​sided enough to be followed by a ‘balancing’ debate in which Peter Thorneycroft and Emmanuel Shinwell argued for nuclear weapons and Barbara Castle and the Reverend Donald Soper argued against them.78 That a play so openly propagandistic could be televised at peak hours was exceptional. As a critic from The Times described, the play belonged to ‘a class of writing usually eschewed in English broadcasting. It must be judged more as a dramatised pamphlet than a work of art’.79 The broadcasting of the play owed much to the influence of Sidney Bernstein and the willingness of Granada in this period to permit programmes that harmonized with its political biases. Bernstein was known to sympathize with Priestley not only over nuclear disarmament, but also over the duty of television to educate and foster a vigorous culture of citizenship.80 His earlier concern that commercial television would lower standards among the working classes was alleviated by the political potential he saw in the medium. The purpose of Doomsday for Dyson –​to win over working class support for CND –​is reflected in its central theme: the importance of the layperson to high politics (Figure  3.1). In this respect, the play had more in common with the progressive theatre of the 1930s than it did the new drama. As the critic from The Times explained: ‘Dyson, in his dream, dies in a nuclear explosion.’ In a twisted landscape of shattered masonry and coiling vapour he is arraigned before a tribunal and ordered to prove himself innocent of having caused the disaster. He summons all the parties concerned  –​the pilot, the commanding officer, and the technician who accidentally unleashed the attack; they, of course, join in declaring that he –​the lethargic Everyman –​is the criminal.81



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Figure 3.1  Alanna Boyce as Sally Dyson in Doomsday for Dyson. Photo by Keystone Pictures USA/​Alamy Stock Photo.

The play has an unmistakable message: activism over nuclear weapons rendered politics more accountable and therefore reduced the prospect of annihilation. It developed and dramatized the argument Priestley had made in his New Statesman article: ‘Why should it be assumed that the men who create and control such monstrous [weapons] are in their right minds?’ –​he had asked.82 Only by democratizing defence and foreign policy could real security be achieved. Doomsday sought to counteract what Priestley regarded as the soporific effects of affluence and commercial television on the working classes. ‘It growled pugnaciously at the commercial TV audience that if the H-​bomb is dropped it is their own fault’, claimed a review in the Daily Express.83 For Priestley, the arrival of ITV meant that ‘thousands of extremely clever men and women are now engaged not in the task of “elevating the masses”, but in the business of catering to all their whims, prejudices and idiocies’.84 He argued in 1955 that ‘the creative, enthusiastic, vigilant and combative types’, like the working class radicals he once knew, were beginning ‘to look like anachronisms’.85 In this diagnosis, Priestley shared common ground with Kingsley Amis: affluence and commercial television undermined the cross-​class coalitions on which upper

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middle class intellectuals and a progressive radicalism depended. He blamed commercial television for ‘the demise of the man of letters’.86 It disconnected intellectuals from their audience and posed challenges for a generation of intellectuals whose literary culture and popular reputation had been defined by journalism and radio. Doomsday represented an attempt by Priestley to reconnect with the working classes through the medium they had embraced. If this medium had been responsible for their political sedation, then it could also be responsible for their reawakening. It was important to televise the play, he argued in a letter in May 1958, because ‘the working class just look at the television and hope for the best’.87 Priestley may have idealized the participation of the working classes in high politics, but his attempts to bring it about were ultimately patronizing and rooted in attitudes and practices that were becoming outmoded in the post-​war period. Doomsday was a remarkable success despite its tendency towards condescension. A Daily Mail poll estimated that two-​thirds of viewers approved of its message: that a more active democracy would safeguard against the misuse of nuclear power.88 What made Doomsday so persuasive, however, was the way in which its message was visualized. Its depiction of a nuclear holocaust invested the case for nuclear disarmament with an emotional power unattainable in literature and sound. Philip Purser, a drama critic, later praised the director of Priestley’s play for ‘a genuinely scary impression of the nuclear unthinkable coming to pass’.89 Although it was as ‘didactic as a medieval miracle play’, according to a critic from the Observer, it got ‘across surprisingly well on television’.90 The impact of the play can also be gauged by the level of international interest in it. John Montgomery, a literary agent who represented Priestley, responded to an enquiry from A. M. Kheir of the International Institute for Peace in Vienna about the rights to the play: ‘We should certainly be interested in having it performed on television in Japan, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, the Argentine, and Venezuela . . . The play is being translated into German and we expect soon to arrange for television productions in Western Germany.’91 The potential of television to enhance arguments for nuclear disarmament was demonstrated by The Offshore Island, a play written by Marghanita Laski in 1954 and broadcast by the BBC in April 1959.92 Laski’s play is set on a small farm in England that miraculously escapes radioactive fallout from a nuclear war. The farm is visited by American and Russian soldiers whose claims to be the ‘friends’ and ‘comrades’ of its occupants merely disguise their intention to neutralize ‘this offshore island so that neither side can try to hold it against one another’.93 The message of unilateral disarmament lies at the heart of the play:  Britain could



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only be secure by renouncing nuclear weapons and the polarizing alliances they entailed. The persuasiveness of the message, however, was enhanced by the power of television to make the drama emotive and vivid. One viewer later described how he was 13, the same age as the daughter in the play, when he watched it on the BBC. ‘The opening scene had the daughter playing a recorder rather badly. I too had learnt to play the recorder, badly . . . the sense of identification was strong. The play was a shattering and stunning experience, which I  have remembered for over half a century.’94 The capacity of television to illustrate the dangers of the nuclear age as well as to reach audiences across the United Kingdom meant that television drama ‘probably woke up more people than all of the [CND] meetings put together’, according to Mervyn Jones.95 The identification and lobbying of film and television contacts sympathetic to nuclear disarmament became commonplace among activists. In the first meeting of C100, for example, its members discussed the possibility of writing and producing ‘an “Everyman” play’.96 The task was undertaken by David Mercer and Don Taylor, a producer who assured ‘the Acting Assistant Head of Drama at the BBC . . . that Mercer was writing a play, not a CND pamphlet’.97 During the decline of CND in 1964, a ‘disarmament and strategy’ group continued to explore ‘the ease with which unilateralist ideas could find a place on television . . . it was noted that BBC2 seem to be very short of ideas  –​perhaps we can present them with scripts’. The group resolved to ‘pursue their TV contacts and discuss with them . . . [how to] effect an entry’.98 It was because of this initiative that the group entered correspondence with Peter Watkins, a young filmmaker who informed them that ‘I’ve been making over the past six years a series of anti-​war and other films’. He had been contemplating and pressing for the production of a project that would materialize into The War Game for almost two years. ‘After the Bomb’, as Watkins referred to it, was given stage-​by-​stage approval by the BBC in December 1964.99

New dramatists Radical intellectuals may have agreed over the importance of television drama as the medium for their message, but they were divided over what that message should be and how it should be expressed in dramatic form. The transformation of mass communications and radical politics over time was manifest in generational discrepancies as to what constituted radical art and drama. The plays and productions of the Executive Committee, which had an average age

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of over 50, were at odds with those of the new dramatists, whose average age was between 25 and 35. As the radicalism of the new dramatists was forged in a period of rising standards of living under successive Conservative governments, it was not marked by the same moral and political confidence as their elders. The radicalism of these dramatists can also be distinguished from that of artists and writers who were in further or higher education as CND emerged. As described by Peter Worsley, a sociologist of the New Left, the optimism of this generation was rocked by the Suez Crisis and the politics of the Wilson governments in the 1960s: Suez in particular ‘was a betrayal of all they had been taught of a reformed Britain, the dutiful servant of the United Nations and of the Free World’.100 The political experiences of these generational cohorts translated into distinctive styles of art and drama –​the propaganda of the progressives, the nihilism of the new dramatists, the scepticism of the satirists and the demagogy of documentary filmmakers and writers. The increasing obsolescence of progressive radicalism as a form by which intellectuals communicated to their public was captured by Dennis Potter, a graduate from the University of Oxford and a regular contributor to TW³ and The Wednesday Play. In The Changing Forest, an account of social change in Potter’s home of the Forest of Dean, he describes how educated members of the community ‘thought of themselves as emancipators of their class . . . performing a major social function after a fashion which would sharpen and purify the institutions of working class culture’. In their use of education for moral and political advancement, these class-​based leaders were practitioners of a similar radicalism to those of CND. Their provision of ‘adult “bible classes” ’ served as ‘centres of further education’, according to Potter: ‘since any problem . . . could legitimately be yoked into passionate and full-​scale discussion of religion and morality’. The uncompromising use of moral and religious language was also a trait they shared with the intellectuals of CND. As Potter described, ‘[T]‌he language of the bible would swell out into political terminology, Jewish history into the hopes of twentieth-​century English coal-​miners.’ In spite of the emotive power of such language, claimed Potter, ‘you will not find . . . any of the under thirties using [it] . . . They have moved on to another political situation which is more difficult to express; but where, as always in working class communities, people are still attempting to grapple with it’.101 The progressive radicalism of CND, founded on class and educational elitism and expressed with moral and political confidence, seemed unsuitable as a means by which younger generations could realize their politics in the post-​war period.



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How far radicals were able to effect change over time and in historical circumstances that redefined their power to do so is a recurring theme of the new drama. An emphasis on the shifting agency of radicalism allowed the new dramatists to reflect on their own position as radical intellectuals in a culture inhospitable to their politics. As playwrights also active in CND and C100, Robert Bolt, Doris Lessing, David Mercer and Arnold Wesker all sought to explore  –​and where possible promote  –​the ideas of citizenship manifest in Doomsday. Bolt’s The Tiger and the Horse focuses on the dramatic consequences brought about by a decision over whether to sign a petition for unilateral disarmament; Lessing’s Each His Own Wilderness on those of a mother who devotes herself to campaigning against nuclear weapons. In Mercer’s A Climate of Fear, the second in his Generations, Frieda, the wife of a physicist who opposes unilateral disarmament, succumbs to sitting down alongside her children in Trafalgar Square and proclaims that ‘no one should leave [the duty to protest] to anyone else’ upon arrest. In Wesker’s Roots, also the second in a trilogy about generational change on the left, Beatie Byrant, a young girl from the country, shakes off her apathy and criticizes a former friend for saying ‘she don’t care if that ole atom bomb drop and she die . . . And you know why she say it?  . . .  because if she had to care she’d have to do something about it’.102 Like Priestley, these playwrights perceived the manufacture and testing of nuclear weapons by Britain as a failure of democracy. The elite decision-​makers on defence and foreign policy were ‘members of a committee’ according to Lessing: ‘They have no responsibility. They represent me. But I repudiate their act[ions].’103 While these playwrights also believed in the importance of activism to democracy, they were not so certain about the prospects of it effecting social or political change in the 1950s. They all used generation as a category by which to illustrate the declining agency of socialism in this period. In Wesker’s trilogy, for example, he explains the malaise of the 1950s in the context of the demise of working class socialism. The plays range ‘from the rising exhilaration of collective action at the beginning of Chicken Soup with Barley’, in the words of Dan Reballato, ‘to the gloom of a third successive Conservative victory in I’m Talking About Jerusalem’.104 In Lessing’s To Each His Own Wilderness, it is notable that it is Myra Bolton, rather than her 22-​year-​old son, Tony, who believes that campaigning on issues such as nuclear disarmament can have a meaningful impact. If the attitudes of these two characters towards activism are divergent, they are informed by a common despair at the continuing deterioration of world politics. The title of the play, To Each His Own Wilderness, highlights how each

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character carries the burden of their attitudes towards politics alone in a social situation that militates against the forms of political action possible in the 1930s. The rise and fall of working class socialism as a vehicle for change was a perception that also coloured David Mercer’s Generations. In the words of Don Taylor, this trilogy spans ‘three generations, and three classes:  the northern working class, hardened in the thirties, the middle class liberal intellectuals, in their youth as the war began, and the rootless and less deceived young, in some of whom the passions of their grandfathers are reborn’.105 At the end of the trilogy, the suicide of Colin on the Berlin Wall symbolizes the paradox of human commitment to political ideals:  the need to communicate an alternative does not negate its futility in a system based on power. Through the shifting agency of their protagonists, Wesker, Lessing and Mercer revealed an acute awareness of their own predicament. If they were to develop as political writers, then an exploration of the problems of contemporary socialism was insufficient: their art had to demonstrate the relevance of activism and socialism in a period in which collective and meaningful action was unlikely. Perhaps it was out of a distrust of moral and political causes that the new drama also signified a retreat into the psychology of the individual. In Look Back in Anger, Jimmy Porter’s attacks on the prime minister, the H-​bomb and the middle classes become indistinguishable from those on lovers and friends. While it was the unification of personal and public politics which imbued the play with its emotive power, it was also what made it seem inarticulate and raw: it does not seem to amount to a coherent statement of politics. The political impulse behind the play was most effectively identified by Stuart Hall. He described how Osborne ‘is constantly seeking for the moment when the audience will identify so closely with what is going on they will rise up and lift their voices and make “a great big beautiful fuss” ’.106 Such a concentration on the person of the protagonist can be seen as a lament to moral and political partisanship. As Porter declares, ‘[T]‌here aren’t any good, brave causes left. If the big bang does come . . . it won’t be in aid of the old-​fashioned, grand design. It’ll just be for the Brave New-​nothing-​very-​much-​thank-​you.’107 Even writers whose politics were more explicit were guarded against the idealism of their elders. Don Taylor argued that Mercer’s ‘plays are not aimed at the man who is prepared to take up simple positions about the issues raised by CND, or the state of modern socialism. The simple positions are almost by definition false’. The plays are not propagandistic: Mercer was not seeking to ‘to change . . . nuclear policy’, according to Taylor, ‘but to communicate his vision of how people live in the twentieth century’. In order to do so, he pursued a method



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of writing which fused ‘political conflict and personal psychology in an absolute and indivisible way’.108 Lessing was also much more concerned in To Each His Own with ‘portraying the inner lives of a galaxy of characters than with projecting her opinions of the nuclear situation in dramatic form’, to cite Charles Carpenter. In Bolt’s The Tiger and the Horse, the act of protesting against nuclear weapons is linked to the psychology of the protagonists, not their moral virtuosity. The play suggests that the individuals most willing to consider civil disobedience over the nuclear issue are the ones least serene when confronted with the horrors of the nuclear age: the violence symbolized by nuclear weapons is reflected in the violence inherent in individuals and this tension can only be resolved in apocalypse or disarmament. In the new drama, the clarity of the message against nuclear weapons is obscured by the idiosyncrasies and temperaments of the characters who subsume it. The new dramatists purposefully employed literary devices that stressed moral and political ambiguity and complexity. According to Dan Rebellato, they ‘characteristically resort to rhetorical questions to express their points, which raise questions that the plays seem unable to answer’. Archie Rice’s ‘Why should I  care?’ in John Osborne’s The Entertainer, a play about the decline of the music hall, is a prime example.109 The use of dramatic irony to illustrate the ambivalence of moral and political positions was also common. In John Arden’s Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance, the sergeant and his soldiers return the body of a dead comrade to his hometown after deserting a colonial war. They want to demonstrate the reality of war to the residents by killing twenty-​five of them. As Hall described, ‘[T]‌he ironic movement in Musgrave is the complex way in which the man, driven by his hatred of war, becomes the instrument of violence.’110 In spite of Arden’s belief in pacifism, the play suggests that violence is an inherent feature of human nature. The obfuscation of moral and political messages was a means not only by which plays could be made more dramatic, but also more credible. In Mercer’s trilogy, his appeal for individual involvement in politics did not prevent him from convoluting characters and ideological positions that seem stereotypical. ‘At first sight’, opined Don Taylor, ‘Colin appears to be merely a character who plugs the CND line. But the political attitude is not as simple as that, and it reflects the expected psychological complexity. Every statement of position that Colin makes is closely followed by a qualification: “Here I am, a passionate socialist  . . .  a very difficult thing to be at this time”.’111 As the new dramatists reconfigured the relationship between art and ideology, they also distanced themselves from the progressive radicalism that was characteristic of CND.

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Given the resistance of the new dramatists to the moral absolutism of CND, their support for the anti-​nuclear movement seems perplexing. Their involvement was far more superficial than that of their elders. John Osborne later claimed that he took part in the march to Aldermaston Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE) only to please his wife, Mary Ure: he wished he had been ‘touting cheap umbrellas and briefcases rather than self-​consciously hawking peace’.112 Along with Doris Lessing, Bernard Kops, Shelagh Delaney and Lindsay Anderson, he attended only one meeting of C100, while John Braine, author of Room at the Top, attended none at all.113 Osborne had ‘no intention of associating with lunatics intent on disrupting theatricals such as Trooping the Colour, still less of throwing [him]self beneath the well-​trained boots of British squaddies’.114 While the majority of new dramatists were more serious about their commitment, their involvement dwindled after a large demonstration in September 1961 and those who remained active had little influence within C100.115 Jim Radford, an activist from Hull, described how Vanessa Redgrave ‘never said a word for seven years’ at C100 meetings: ‘She used to sit quietly, learning.’116 The association of new dramatists with C100 is better understood through their artistic practices and public status than their ideological or political motivation. They utilized the rebellious and high profile image of C100 to define and project their own credentials as radical figures and practitioners. The organization reinforced their status as emerging artists and writers and pitted them against upper middle class elders who dominated intellectual and public life. In contrast to the respectable and elitist ethos of CND, the anti-​establishment and libertarian one of C100 allowed the new dramatists to distinguish themselves from older intellectuals on the left and bypass their monopoly over a movement that enjoyed considerable support among young people:  quite often the same young people who appreciated the edginess of the new drama. If the radicalism of CND was underpinned by the intellectual leadership of the upper middle classes over a deferent public, then that of the new dramatists represented an inversion of this dynamic. As artists and writers who for the most part were from lower middle class backgrounds, they railed against the ‘ceiling’ that upper middle class hegemony placed on their aspirations in a rebellion that resonated not only with social tensions in the anti-​nuclear movement, but also with wider ones in public life. This antagonism between the populism of the new drama and the progressivism of CND was manifest between writers. J. B. Priestley regarded the upsurge in social realism as a negative development: the function of art and literature should be to inspire the working classes out of their social condition rather than depict them



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in it. He spoke of ‘a somewhat loutish style of sullen acquiescence, found in some younger novelists’.117 To new dramatists and young writers, however, the class-​ based progressivism of Priestley was an impediment to effective expression. Jimmy Porter goes so far as to characterize the writings of Priestley as anachronistic in Look Back. In a reference to the conservative father of his girlfriend, he describes how Priestley is ‘like Daddy –​still casting well-​fed glances back to the Edwardian twilight from his comfortable, disenfranchised wilderness’.118 This perceived dislocation between art and literature and social and political realities also inspires Porter’s attack on the artificial devices and forms by which The Sunday Times and The Observer determine and cement a class-​based high culture. ‘The book reviews seem to be the same as last week’s’, he despairs: ‘Different books –​same reviews’.119 The imprisonment of culture and politics to media forms commanded and controlled by the upper middle classes could even be seen in the protests against nuclear weapons. These were channelled and stultified through intellectual forms and proxies that precluded the public. The leaders of CND were ‘a little establishment of their own’, according to Lindsay Anderson.120

Satire By attacking the primacy of the upper middle classes in public life and demonstrating their detachment from the citizens they represented, young intellectuals tapped into one of the driving forces behind the anti-​nuclear movement and furthered their own art and reputation. Roger Law, who went on to become coproducer of Spitting Image, ascribed the appeal of the movement among ordinary citizens to the feeling that they had been ‘hoodwinked about the nature and extent of the nuclear threat’.121 Their exclusion from an issue that had grave implications for their very existence eroded trust in class-​based leadership over democratic politics and was exploited by young artists and writers who went on to become the stars of the satire boom in the late 1950s and early 1960s. As the anti-​nuclear movement facilitated what Stuart Hood described as a public climate in which ‘the sacred cows of the Establishment –​the monarchy, the church, leading politicians –​were attacked’, it exercised a strong influence over anti-​political satire and satirists.122 The use of nuclear weapons as the supreme symbol of estrangement between political leaders and ordinary citizens was routine among the rank-​and-​file of the movement: young supporters were especially keen to depict class-​based leaders as maladjusted to the technicalities of the nuclear age. A member of C100 recalled how

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a letter purporting to be from an irate colonel and complaining about a CND poster parade appeared one week in our local paper and provoked the secretary of our local CND group to write a lengthy and most effective reply that was published in full the following week. Only later did we discover that the original letter was the joint effort of members of the local Youth CND!123

The tactic of ridiculing class-​based leaders by exposing their deceptions over nuclear issues connected with ideological tendencies across the movement, from mothers who drew attention to the irradiation of children to anarchists who drew attention to Regional Seats of Government (RSGs): political satire was a popular and standard form of protest. The unmasking of the public language and visages that leading officials and politicians employed to communicate politics was endemic among young writers. In Look Back, Jimmy Porter is nauseated by upper middle class figures who seem more conscious of their status than the problems posed by nuclear weapons. When his friend reads out a newspaper story in which the bishop of Bromley issues an ‘appeal to all Christians to do all they can to assist in the manufacture of the H-​bomb’, he turns to his girlfriend and comments: ‘You don’t suppose your father’s written it, do you? . . . Is the Bishop of Bromley his nom de plume?’124 The absurdity of pro-​nuclear statements by public figures was a source of inspiration for comedy as well as drama. Spike Milligan, creator of the Goon Show and a major influence on younger satirists, wrote an article for Tribune in December 1960 in which he claimed to have been appointed as speech writer for the minister of defence:  ‘[H]‌e’s been slipping lately, I  mean, making statements that have no double entendre.’125 As Albert Hunt recognized in Encore, political satire and the act of protesting against nuclear weapons were highly compatible:  nonviolent direct action against Thor missile bases represented a response to ‘the machinery of contemporary politics’ as a ‘powerful dehumanising force’. Banning the bomb and satire were linked by an attempt to demolish ‘by ridicule all that is anti-​human . . . politicians have . . . in their public masks, become the personifications of the anti-​human’.126 The relationship between anti-​nuclear and satirical forms was evident in the participation of prominent satirists within the movement. Spike Milligan described in March 1958 how he ‘stopped being Spike Milligan, Goon . . . I write letters to newspapers. I write articles for political weeklies’.127 His definition of his comedy, ‘one man shouting gibberish in the face of authority’, resonated with the anti-​establishment and participatory ethos of the movement.128 If satire influenced anti-​nuclear propaganda, however, then the reverse was also true.



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The anti-​nuclear movement supplied satirists not only with loaded symbols that could be co-​opted for their comedy, but also audiences, events and places that could facilitate their performances: it constituted a public forum for their art. Richard Ingrams, the founding editor of Private Eye in 1961, recalled how the magazine was ‘sold in fashionable restaurants like “Nick’s Diner” and cafes like “the Troubador” where bearded CND men gathered to listen to folk songs’.129 The comedian Eric Idle, the musician Leon Rosselson and the artists Peter Fluck and Roger Law all drew upon the movement in developing their status as anti-​political figures. In a forerunning art group to Spitting Image, for example, Fluck and Law produced posters and literature for CND. Law was even expelled from Cambridge Art School for organizing an anti-​May ball in which he and Fluck took ‘over an unoccupied house in a nearby village, painted the walls with satirical illustrations of establishment targets and sent invitations to every CND activist in the country’.130 The public and symbolic significance of the anti-​nuclear movement to satire was particularly pronounced in the productions and performances of university satirists in the late 1950s. The Last Laugh, a revue by the Cambridge Footlights, opened with a nuclear explosion. William Donaldson, its producer, later recalled how the audience were subjected to an evening ‘of terribly gloomy stuff ’:  ‘the punchline of every sketch was people dying’.131 Jonathan Miller’s Beyond the Fringe, which combined the highlights of the Cambridge Footlights and the Oxford Revue, can also be interpreted as the product of a creative symbiosis between comedy and anti-​nuclear protest. Alan Bennett performed a monologue entitled Let’s Face It, in which he parodied a middle class conservative who supports apartheid in South Africa and opposes CND: ‘Don’t let’s take any notice of these demonstrators . . . This is a democracy. Government isn’t run by people like that; it’s run by the people.’132 Sheila Rowbotham, at the time an undergraduate at Oxford, verified this relationship between satire and anti-​nuclear protest in her autobiography: ‘[L]‌aughing at . . . Beyond the Fringe was an acceptable way of demonstrating a radical stance without being exactly political’, she claimed.133 When satire was directed against the radicalism of the movement, it tended to receive a hostile reception. ‘The sacred cows at that time  . . .  weren’t Macmillan, or the Church’, recalled Peter Cook, they ‘were ladies like [the activist] Pat Arrowsmith. If his nightclub ‘The Establishment’ attacked Pat Arrowsmith, ‘people used to get physically violent’.134 As satire had been incubated in the cultural milieu of the anti-​nuclear movement, it struggled to transcend it.

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A failure of art Despite the potential of satire as a radical form, the boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s never amounted to much more than popular entertainment. As Jonathan Coe acknowledged in a recent reappraisal, it became clear that laughter is not only ‘ineffectual as a form of protest’, but that it also replaces it.135 By demonizing leading officials and politicians and exacerbating public distrust in their authority and competence, satirists may have even contributed to declining levels of participation in politics. Britain was ‘in danger of sinking giggling into the sea’, according to Peter Cook.136 The transformation of Peter George’s book Two Hours to Doom into Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb serves to illustrate how entertainment overrode protest as the dominant response to the nuclear age. Whereas Two Hours represents a serious treatment of nuclear war and the ease by which it can be triggered, Dr Strangelove represents a comedic one that invites the audience to laugh at and reconcile themselves with the absurdities involved in such a situation. Peter George, an RAF officer and CND supporter, continued to write on the theme of nuclear apocalypse until he took his own life in 1966. When the purpose of satire was social criticism as much as entertainment, it struggled to progress beyond the anti-​establishment sensibility of Look Back. John Osborne’s The World of Paul Slickey, a musical in which he satirizes the popular press, was indicative of the failure to fulfil the political promise of satire.137 ‘The Establishment now has a name and a face’, explained Stuart Hall in review: ‘[I]‌t is in that context that we regret the weaknesses of Paul Slickey –​ for its failure to define in words, music and satire, at a time when definition and precision would have been immensely valuable.’ Since the musical lampooned the journalists and newspapers responsible for reviewing it, however, Hall insisted on defending it ‘against the planned, wilful and conscious attack of Fleet Street and the critics, who have tried to use it as a weapon with which to overthrow Osborne, Look Back and the whole show’.138 Charles Marowitz, an editor of Encore, believed that political partisanship precluded artistic assessment:  ‘[I]n knocking Paul Slickey, the press is knocking the raucous ban the bomb enthusiasts who flocked in Trafalgar Square . . . That is why one cannot simply review Slickey as an ill-​fated musical by Britain’s most important playwright.’139 As Hall and Marowitz interpreted Paul Slickey as the by-​product of a wider struggle to create a vigorous culture of politics, they felt compelled to defend it, irrespective of its weaknesses.



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In a lament to the new drama in 1961, Hall claimed that ‘what we have managed to do best is  . . .  a British brand of naturalism’, drawing attention in particular to ‘the desire to recreate working class life, the pre-​occupation with humanist values and an interest in attacking the Establishment through social criticism’.140 For Hall, these dramatic forms and tendencies were inadequate in realizing the politics of the anti-​nuclear movement and the New Left. Osborne struggled to identify the causes behind the objects of his satire, while Wesker did not clarify his ideas about the relationship between community and socialism. Given the turn towards non-​naturalistic methods among the next generation of radical artists and writers, it is significant that Hall regarded The Entertainer, the play deviating furthest from the naturalistic form, as the most notable contribution of the new drama. The use of the music hall to communicate to the audience on more than one level allowed Osborne to cut ‘right across the restrictions of the naturalistic stage’, as the playwright put it in the preface to the play.141 The limits of the new drama, however, were ‘intellectual as well as artistic’, according to Hall.142 Only a year later he yielded his editorship of New Left Review to Perry Anderson, a transition that marked the shift of the New Left away from the struggle for a relativistic culture of socialism and towards one for a durable theory of it. Since radical drama and satire was not pegged to a shared set of ideals or rooted in a systematic theory, it was ephemeral and militated against the building of a political culture. Arnold Wesker, who in 1960 enlisted support from the Trades Union Congress to develop Centre 42, a permanent venue for socialism and the arts, spoke in May 1959 of his concern at the transience of cultural protest: ‘all around us movements are rising and falling’, he argued. ‘Free Cinema has come and is going, the attendances at the ULR Club are dropping, the faith people have had in a theatre like the Royal Court is being lost.’143 As satire became more popular, it also became more detached from the ideals that had inspired it: CND became the target rather than the stimulus of satire. In Ned Sherrin’s proposal for TW³, a programme providing ‘an opportunity for saying things . . . not usually said on television’, he suggested a sketch in which ‘a father who is off to join an Aldermaston march is in violent conflict with his child who has just joined the Young Conservatives’.144 The programme, which seemed more sympathetic to socialists because of its attacks on traditional symbols of power, was suspended during the second series – only a month after a sketch about the appointment of Alec Douglas-​Home as prime minister that received over 500 complaints.145 Its political content, regarded by the BBC as ‘its most successful constituent’, would be ‘difficult to maintain’ in the election year of 1964.146

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If the radicalism of the new dramatists and satirists seemed ephemeral, then this was also because it was largely defined against the older generation they were seeking to replace. ‘Even when he writes badly’, argued an American critic, the young British writer ‘can feel he is performing a service for the literature, liberating it from the tyranny of a taste based on a world of wealth and leisure which had become quite unreal’.147 In his rebuttal of Kingsley Amis’s Socialism and the Intellectuals, E. P. Thompson made a similar argument. The revolt of young intellectuals who ‘feel themselves to be rebels against “the Establishment” ’ was undermined by their tendency to imagine ‘themselves to be “outside” this thing, posturing and grimacing through the window’. As they could see ‘no social force capable of making headway’ against these circumstances, Thompson considered them to be ‘outside nothing but the humanist tradition’.148 When the symbols of authority and power shifted, it was only logical that the radicalism of several of these writers would shift with them. In an obituary to Amis in International Socialism, Gareth Jenkins described how he was ‘against what he took to be the Establishment’ of the time. ‘In the 1950s it was the cultural establishment of pompous old bores, with their aristocratic manners; in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s it was the trendies, the lefties, the politically correct, psychiatrists [and the] women’s libbers . . . No wonder, then, that Amis came to be a political supporter of Margaret Thatcher.’149

Documentary In constructing a radical form by which the nuclear age could be condemned and ordinary citizens empowered, young artists and intellectuals turned to documentary film as well as theatre and comedy. This medium embodied practices and traditions that seemed highly compatible with the critique they wanted to make about power and democracy in Cold War Britain. It was infused with an egalitarianism that in the interwar period became manifest in the inception of the Documentary Film Movement (DFM) and the proliferation of film societies associated with the Popular Front. As described by John Grierson, the father of the DFM, he and his peers were ‘interested in all instruments which would crystallise sentiments in a muddled world and create a will toward civic participation’.150 The capacity of documentary to educate and politicize made it a suitable medium through which to critique the nuclear age and overcome the ignorance and apathy it engendered. The legacy of the interwar period, however, was problematic. Lindsay Anderson, acquainted with radical groups such as Kino Film and the Progressive



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Film Institute through the CPGB, accused ‘Grierson’s band of pioneers (many of them now established in positions of influence)’ of abandoning ‘the treatment of contemporary life in their films’.151 They had ‘faith in documentary as propaganda, but not art’, according to Karel Reisz, a collaborator of Anderson’s on Free Cinema.152 For this generation of documentarians, in their thirties as CND emerged, the potential of the medium had been restricted by its dependence on state funding and attachment to official organs such as the Empire Marketing Board, the Post Office and the MoI. The withdrawal of state sponsorship in 1952 from the Crown Film Unit, a remnant of the DFM and a subsidiary of the MoI, demonstrated the impoverishment of documentary as a tool of democracy: films were only to be commissioned in circumstances that political leaders deemed exceptional.153 Free Cinema, with its agenda to secure alternative and independent sources of funding, represented an act of defiance against the methods of production that had held the documentary form in captivity.154 By liberating documentary from the economic and structural shackles of the state, the proponents of Free Cinema reasoned that they could create the conditions in which innovative techniques and forms of expression could flourish. They sought to break from the informational tone that dominated the DFM and represented its thraldom to upper middle class bureaucracy and officialdom. As in the new drama and satire, the encroachment of ‘the state’ into documentary was perceptible through class-​based characteristics that formed the limits of cultural authority. The use of voice-​overs in particular seemed to neutralize the documenting of ‘real life’ and direct viewers towards political ends that were consensual and ‘safe’. It was for this reason that Anderson was reluctant to superimpose ‘social commentaries’ on his films. By allowing ‘real life’ to express itself through images, he was performing far more of a service to his socialism than he would be by channelling it towards predetermined ends. If this approach distinguished the films of Free Cinema from the propagandistic ones of the 1930s and the Second World War, then it also distinguished them from the plays of the new dramatists and the sketches of the satirists. In the view of Anderson, it was ‘more important for a progressive artist to make a positive affirmation than an aggressive criticism . . . The left in Britain suffers too much from the complexes of opposition’.155 Whether the eight films that came out of Free Cinema succeeded in revitalizing documentary as a critical form was disputed at the time. Derrick Knight, a film director and editor about to embark on his career, claimed that Free Cinema ‘only rediscover[s]‌with a certain informality of approach some exercises in

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documentary which were explored long ago’: they showed ‘no real innovation in content, technique, style or approach’. He was far more impressed by the films being produced by Associated Rediffusion, the commercial broadcaster: ‘[T]he direct speaking-​to-​camera by people in all walks of life . . . has an impact which filmgoers are not used to. It is documentary with the gloves off once more.’156 In practice, the observational techniques of Free Cinema and the on-​the-​spot ones of television were informed by the same impulse. They sought to penetrate the sterile surface of public life by documenting in images and sound the rawness and variety of ordinary people in their communities, homes and places of work. This convergence of documentary techniques was in part the product of collaboration between documentarians who sought to enlist their medium in the struggle against nuclear weapons. The Film and Television Committee for Nuclear Disarmament, established by Derrick Knight, Kurt Lewenhak and Alan Forbes and supported by the Association of Cinematographic, Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT), drew on a range of radical forms and practices in order to document the emergence of the ‘nuclear-​industrial complex’ in Britain and the resistance of ordinary citizens to it. Its first production, a documentary about the march to AWRE in 1958, was based on borrowed equipment and the expertise of over thirty technicians from advertising, documentary, newsreel and television. March to Aldermaston, which combined observational shots of marchers with on-​the-​spot interviews, was edited by Lindsay Anderson, set to a script written by Christopher Logue and narrated by Richard Burton. Despite the significance of the film as a point of exchange between documentarians and technicians, the length of the post-​production process arguably weakened its impact on audiences. As William Whitebait argued in the New Statesman when the film was released a year later, ‘I think it’s a pity that it shouldn’t have been rushed out at the time . . . only by repeated assault will the average cinema audience ever be reached.’157 The importance of immediacy to documentary was demonstrated by Rocket Site Story, a film about nonviolent direct action against a Thor missile base near Swaffham, North Pickenham, in December 1958. The film was produced by Eric Walker and Eric Bamford, two self-​employed filmmakers who became acquainted through CND. In contrast to the Aldermaston march, which was amorphous and comprised thousands of participants, nonviolent direct action at Swaffham was choreographed and comprised less than 100. Its pre-​scripted symbolism translated to camera in an instant: prolonged editing was not required in order to render it intelligible to the viewer. The film not only informed citizens about defence in a manner that was dramatic and eye-​catching, but



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also affirmed and verified the dangers and details involved in such a protest: it served as visual testament to the aims and integrity of the participations. As no television cameras were present at the missile base, Walker and Bamford were also able to sell their footage to ITN, using the proceeds to establish the Nuclear Disarmament and Newsreel Committee. The Committee went on to produce documentaries about the Aldermaston march and nonviolent direct action at a missile base at Harrington in 1959, copies of which were distributed to CND groups by Eric Walker and his wife, Lydia Vulliamy. In 1960, it was superseded by the Concord Film Council, which catalogued and distributed educational films on subjects ranging from mental health to the environment.158

The War Game The struggle to establish a radical form by which to condemn the nuclear age reached its climax in Peter Watkins’s The War Game. This docudrama borrowed from the educative, humanizing and anti-​authoritarian styles and techniques of documentary, drama and satire in the late 1950s and early 1960s and assembled them into a narrative and spectacle that was stunning. In the same way that J.  B. Priestley sought to politicize the ‘everyman’ with Doomsday for Dyson, Peter Watkins also sought ‘to make the man in the street  . . .  stop and think about himself and his future’ with The War Game.159 He wanted to evolve docudrama into a tool of the citizen and undo the monopoly of political elites over information essential to democratic debate. In a letter to CND in May 1966, he explained how in ‘the past five years, the total television output on BBC1, BBC2 and ITV [on nuclear weapons in Britain] . . . has averaged a four to five hours in each year’. The last major programme broadcast by the BBC on this subject was in 1962/​ 63 . . . a two hour programme in which there was not one single element critical of the possession of thermo-​nuclear weapons: ‘well ladies and gentlemen, there it is. We have been discussing a terrible subject but until the world finds some other solution, we must keep these terrifying weapons. Good night.’ This is the ‘impartiality’ with which this subject has been [treated] in the last five years.160

If programmes on nuclear issues did not seem impartial, then this is because they were often products of collaboration with the civil service. The PRO for civil defence, while respecting that the BBC was not a ‘mouthpiece for the government’, still insisted on modifications to a programme about nuclear

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deterrence in 1961.161 When the Home Office learnt about the production of The War Game in 1965, they argued that they should be involved: ‘as partners in . . . civil defence’ they needed to ensure that the film was ‘prepared with the utmost care and responsibility’.162 The medium of documentary, enhanced in the 1960s by technological developments in film and sound recording, was instrumental in enabling Watkins to develop an artistic indictment of the nuclear age and to unlock the critical capacities of the new drama and satire. Through the peripatetic camera, he was able to harness the lived environment as an active and central component of the drama –​an effect that was reinforced by the inclusion of amateur actors and CND supporters in the film. He was able to free his depiction of the nuclear age from the electronic studios and proscenium arches that had confined the new dramatists and bring about a union between fact and fiction to which the propagandists of CND could only aspire.163 In short, he was able to construct a factual representation of nuclear war within a fictional context. The modelling of the drama on the latest information about civil defence and radioactive fallout, combined with the capturing of it on handheld cameras in and around the town of Rochester in Kent, made for a shocking realism. Nuclear detonation is portrayed not as a distant and exotic mushroom cloud, but as blinding and intense whiteness:  the black and white picture in which the actors appear inverted as if to suggest that the core of their being has been irradiated by heat and light. In documenting disparities between private and social experiences of civil defence and nuclear weapons with the public and official discourses that surrounded them, Watkins developed on a literary tendency of the new dramatists and satirists and brought it into the medium of documentary film.164 He later described how he contrasted the film’s ‘scenes of “reality” ’ with ‘stylised interviews of “establishment figures”, [such as] an Anglican Bishop and a nuclear strategist’. The outrageous statements by some of these people  –​in favour of nuclear weapons, even nuclear war –​were actually based on genuine quotations . . . My question was . . . where is ‘reality’? . . . in the madness of statements by artificially-​ lit establishment figures quoting the official doctrine of the day, or in the madness of the staged and fictional scenes from the rest of my film, which presented the consequences of their utterances?165

It was through this juxtaposing of the private and the social with the public and the official that Watkins exposed contradictions over civil defence and nuclear



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weapons and subverted the traditional voice of authority in public service broadcasting. The deficiencies of democratic paternalism are laid bare as the statements of experts are outmoded by unfolding events:  blazing firestorms, social disintegration and personal sickness and trauma exemplify the horror. The genius of docudrama lay in its adaptation as a form in which the expression of politics and social criticism could improve rather than impair artistic credibility. Watkins demonstrated that visual representations of a nuclear attack and its effects did not have to appear fantastical, as they did in Doomsday and The Offshore Island: documentary made it possible to be hypothetical without seeming escapist. Neither was political ambiguity necessary in the attainment of social realism, as the new drama seemed to suggest. The power of docudrama as a vehicle for politicized art was reflected in its popularity among socialist producers and writers who contributed to the Wednesday Play series in the late 1960s. Huw Wheldon, the broadcaster responsible for approving the production of The War Game, described in 1969 how ‘the documentary element entered into every political play these days’.166 In enabling producers and writers to make authoritative statements about contemporary issues, however, docudrama posed problems for broadcasters who were conscious of their commitment to impartiality and the ‘national interest’. While the interweaving of fact and fiction was designed to engage viewers and appeal to their critical faculties, programme controllers worried that it could also disorientate and mislead. The prerogative of public education was shifting away from traditional forms of broadcasting based on talks with intellectuals and politicians and towards ones in which the perspectives of producers and writers were privileged. So striking was The War Game that Lord Normanbrook, chairman of the Board of Governors and cabinet secretary between 1947 and 1962, decided that the responsibility for its broadcast was ‘too great for the BBC to bear alone’. He sought the advice of government officials through Burke Trend, his successor as cabinet secretary, after seeing a final version of the film on 2 September 1965.167 The founding premise of Watkins’s film, that Cold War rivalries over Vietnam precipitate a nuclear strike on Britain, was subjected to particular scrutiny. It implied that world leaders were irresponsible and that nuclear deterrence was unworkable. The fictional basis of the film might not have been so contested if it were not for the veracity of the facts that it introduced. As Trend recognized, ‘[I]‌t cannot be seriously argued that the portrayal of the effects of a nuclear attack on a particular target area is generally misleading, inaccurate or likely to convey an exaggerated impression of the miseries that would befall.’168 The broadcasting of such a graphic depiction of a nuclear strike on Britain had the potential to

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severely damage the BBC and the government. It threatened to override their duty to promote civil defence and protect public morale; to reinvigorate the anti-​nuclear movement and public debate about the possession of nuclear weapons by Britain; and to jeopardize relations between the BBC and the Labour government at a time when they were already fraught. That the broadcast of The War Game was capable of having such serious repercussions was understood not only by the BBC and the government, but also by Watkins: his correspondence with CND demonstrates his awareness of its propaganda value.169 The government informed the BBC not only of the problems involved in broadcasting the film, but also of the problems involved in banning it and advised how these could be overcome. As Burke Trend warned, the BBC had to be careful not to ‘stir up controversy or provoke political prejudice, whether of the pro or anti-​CND type’.170 The avoidance of a public outcry was best achieved by banning the film not on grounds that it was propagandistic, but on ones that it was ‘too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting’, as the BBC claimed in an independent statement issued on 26 November.171 In order to temper the public response further still, the BBC hosted private viewings of Watkins’s film at the National Film Theatre in February 1966. Only politicians, civil servants, journalists and members of the armed forces were invited. According to Hugh Greene, the director general, the screenings established ‘a remarkable press consensus in [the BBC’s] favour. It was certainly worthwhile having the Defence Correspondents rather than the usual boys’.172 By turning the screenings into public relations exercises, Greene ensured that the ban was perceived in terms that related to national security rather than democratic entitlement. The banning of The War Game from the BBC until 31 July 1985, when it was broadcast in a BBC2 series commemorating the fortieth anniversaries of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, did not take it out of circulation. After the BBC sold the rights of the film to the British Film Institute (BFI) in March 1966, it became available for private hire and was seen widely across Britain and abroad as a result. Dick Nettleton, general secretary of CND between 1967 and 1973, described how forty-​nine people signed up to the organization after seeing the film at a local cinema in Morecambe. ‘When people see this film’, he argued, ‘they want to join CND.’173 Despite the screening of the film in most towns by March 1967, CND was unable to capitalize and its overall membership declined to less than 1,000 by the end of the year.174 The message and impact of The War Game were softened by the mechanism of its release: private and separate cinema screenings as opposed to public and shared television broadcasts. According to Watkins, the confinement of the film to cinema channelled it towards ‘a certain



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mental and intellectual type’ and precluded the audience he was most intent on reaching: ‘the voluntary ordinary public’.175 It also nullified one of his major motivations for making it in the first instance: to fulfil the civic and educational duties of television and facilitate the participation of the ‘everyman’ in high politics. In the period in which television came of age, it seems ironic that the public element of intellectual involvement in the anti-​nuclear movement seemed to diminish with each generational cohort. The talking heads of CND, accustomed to promoting their politics in front of the camera and behind the microphone, were supplanted by the radical filmmakers and writers of the Wednesday Play, accustomed to promoting theirs through representational and televised forms. The basis of cultural authority within radical politics therefore shifted away from the intellectual as a public actor on radio and television and towards the intellectual as a private one located within the infrastructure of the media. That it did so was largely the result of a complex interplay between transformations in class and communications. The weakening of social bonds between classes and the emergence of populist communications through television combined to give rise to new and dynamic forms of intellectual expression. It was no longer sufficient for radical intellectuals to communicate their politics through media mechanisms that were class-​based and didactic:  these had become outmoded and resented. If they were to communicate their politics effectively, they had to do so through mediated representations that removed the intellectual from the picture and encouraged identification among viewers. To this end, television and televised forms allowed younger intellectuals to distance themselves from the audience and escape the class-​based dynamics that had restricted the radicalism of their elders in left wing social movements. In short, it allowed them to offer an art for change that seemed more authentic and meaningful.

4

The Street as a Medium

In October 1968, the month of a major demonstration against the Vietnam War in London, an editorial in radical monthly proclaimed that ‘The Street is our Medium’. So long as the Labour Party ‘reject[s]‌successive resolutions passed by Conference’, it argued, ‘then we say they leave us no alternative but the streets’.1 The failure to achieve change through constitutional channels prompted the organizers of the October demonstration to turn to a form of ‘street politics’ that had been a standard feature of radical movements since the late nineteenth century: a protest march. By taking to the streets, anti–​Vietnam War demonstrators represented the latest incarnation in a radical tradition that included suffragettes, hunger marchers and nuclear disarmers, but they did not possess a special claim to the streets: they did not monopolize them as instruments of political expression and public performance. ‘The streets’ were multimedia spaces in which the groups that made up radical movements projected their plural identities and images; in which banners, dress and placards competed for attention in moving landscapes and built environments; in which opponents carried out counter-​campaigns and acts of sabotage; and in which cameramen and journalists pieced together selective interpretations of public display. As will be evidenced by the marches to and from Aldermaston Weapons Research Establishment in Berkshire in the late 1950s and early 1960s, ‘the streets’ served as shifting scenes in which a range of protestors and news media fought over the right of representation on an issue of supreme symbolic importance. The Aldermaston marches, taking place on Easter weekends in successive years between 1958 and 1963, represent a watershed in the history of radical movements and the media. For Colin Seymour-​Ure, a broadcasting historian, the first march signalled the beginning of televisual politics in Britain:  it was ‘visually varied, sustained in a dead news period (a bank-​holiday weekend) and included both ordinary people and several kinds of social and political elite’.2

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While the marches were informed by the media interactions and styles of earlier protests, the advent of television allowed their organizers and participants to engage in a symbolic dialogue that was unprecedented in its immediacy and scale. Jo Durden-​Smith, a trainee with Granada Television, recalled rushing home from anti–​Vietnam War marches to watch the evening news. ‘It was the first days of instant reaction. You got to see yourself on television, perhaps.’3 As marches at their most basic level can be understood as ‘motion pictures’, the ones to and from Aldermaston were made for the growing medium of television news. They offered a syncretic selection of human interest, political and law and order stories, all relatable in visual code and all stemming from a single visual event. Insofar as television news raised the public profile of marches, it also exacerbated a number of recurring tensions in the history of radical movements. The ease with which marchers could be seen in the age of television served to intensify divisions between leaders and rank-​ and-​ file, old and young and conservative and radical wings of the movement. The advent of television news reinvigorated the politics of representation: increasing exposure rendered debates over who had the right to represent more urgent than ever before. In the Aldermaston marches, these took place between the organizers of DAC and CND and a spectrum of groups spanning from Communists to Conservatives and festive revellers to suburban housewives. These groups engaged in what can only be described as a contest of choreography, each tailoring their participation in order to create a distinctive performance and elicit a distinctive response from the news media. As these ‘performances’ were informed by social and political interests that were pluralistic, the groups that carried them out entered into relationships with news media that were divergent and prone to pulling the public image of the movement in opposing directions. Whereas the organizers of the marches appealed to news frames and values by presenting their protest as Christian, common-​sensical and patriotic, young marchers subverted them by presenting theirs as alternative, iconoclastic and nonconformist. The motivations behind such performances were mutually exclusive. One was to build a constructive relationship with the media and to develop a public image that would attract support and sympathy; the other was to shock the media and assert an ‘authentic’ identity that broadcasters and the press had misrepresented or failed to capture, irrespective of the implications that this might have for wider perceptions of the movement. In the words of Stuart Hall, there were ‘two styles of politics operating [in the Aldermaston marches], conveniently symbolised by the Front and the Back of the March’.4



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The dynamics that emerged out of the marches and between media and movements were therefore complex and often contradictory. An attempt will be made to show how ultimately it was a dynamic based on shock and subversion that prevailed and shaped the evolution of the peace movement in the 1950s and 1960s. If marches were to remain newsworthy, then they had to become more experimental and radical in their form and style, a necessity that facilitated the rise of militant groups within the peace movement and the transition from peaceful to violent imagery and tactics. While the radicalization of marches served to sustain the interest of broadcasters and the press, the coverage they received was for the most part preoccupied with the styles in which they were carried out rather than the single issue causes they were intended to represent: marches and marchers that made the news did so above all else because of their utility for human interest and law and order news. Between the Aldermaston march in Easter 1958 and the anti–​Vietnam War demonstration in October 1968, the practice of marching to publicize a single issue cause increasingly gave way to the practice of marching to publicize a social and political identity.

Regimes of representation While the groups that made up the anti-​nuclear movement all sought to ‘represent’ themselves through the Aldermaston marches, their ability to do so was neither democratic nor equal. It was shaped by their organizational position within the movement and the media environment as a whole. Regimes of representation were enforced by both the organizers of the marches and the news media that reported them.5 The organizers of the marches, DAC in 1958 and CND thereafter, sought to establish a common and sympathetic code of conduct by which the movement could be identified and to which marchers could adhere. This regime of representation was informed in part by their comprehension of broader regimes that were embedded in broadcast and newspaper journalism. Since they were aware that the news media employed frames and lenses by which to report acts of protest, they sought to appeal to those that were positive and avoid those that were negative. Through performance and the practice of marching, they sought to signify an image of the movement that could be relayed in a persuasive and sympathetic manner to a wider audience. The ‘regimes’ that DAC and CND employed in order to window dress the movement, however, were largely unenforceable. As organizations that were largely libertarian, they were averse to the discipline that characterized fascistic

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or militaristic marches. Their campaigns were also predicated on the principle that every citizen should have his or her say and the nuclear issue, in contrast to the issues of radical movements gone by, was universal and the cultural and political property of all groups: anti-​nuclear symbolism could be appropriated by any group and linked to any cause.6 The libertarianism of DAC and CND, combined with the universality of the anti-​nuclear cause and the visual space opened up by television news, made for marches that were carnivalistic rather than regimental and pluralistic rather than uniform. It was this idiosyncratic version of the marches –​and not the sanitized one offered by DAC and CND –​ that was most newsworthy and troubling for image-​ conscious organizers. It offered journalists an infinite array of anecdotes and images from which a picture of a movement could be constructed. That the leaders of DAC and CND failed to brand their rank-​ and-​ file supporters with a singular and self-​contained identity can be explained by the emergence of the movement from the grassroots and the malleability of its symbolism. The initiatives that came from above, such as the appointment of Gerald Barry, director of the Festival of Britain, as public relations consultant, were largely ineffectual. It was only when the public relations initiatives of the leadership coalesced with the participatory impulse of the rank-​and-​file that they were successful. The art of Ken Sprague, commissioned by CND and described by his biographer as ‘art for engagement  –​engagement for change’, was particularly popular.7 By far the most influential contribution to the public image of the movement, however, came from a rank-​and-​file supporter and was sent to DAC ahead of the first march to Aldermaston in Easter 1958. The CND logo, designed by Gerald Holtom and encompassing the semaphore sign for the ‘N’ and ‘D’ in ‘nuclear disarmament’, became in the words of the political broadcaster Andrew Marr, ‘an international brand almost as recognisable as Coca Cola’.8 The New Daily, a far right newspaper established and run by the free market radical Edward Martell, went as far in 1963 as to describe the logo as ‘the most effective . . . since the Swastika’.9 What distinguished the CND logo from those belonging to commercial companies and other movements was that it possessed neither copyright nor a fixed meaning. It could not be monopolized by one group or associated with one issue. It was adaptable and facilitated participation. The idea behind the logo, a drooping cross to symbolize despair at the inaction of the churches over nuclear disarmament, was too narrow for DAC: ‘No, it’s not a religious march and we’re not all  . . .  religious’, Holtom was told.10 As CND Bulletin described, ‘[P]‌arts of the sign had . . . several meanings.’11 The emblazoning of the logo onto



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a ceramic badge by Eric Austen completed a revolution in the visual politics of the everyday. The badges provided what the Bulletin referred to as a ‘talking point about the Campaign’, filtered through a range of social contexts.12 In an episode of Family Affairs on BBC television, it was discussed whether schools should ‘prevent the wearing of ban the bomb badges? Should they prevent the free expression of political opinion?’13 It was this pattern of bottom-​up innovation and publicity that predominated within the movement following the adoption of a democratic constitution by CND in 1960. The tools by which the media infrastructure of the movement had been controlled passed from the Executive Committee to younger supporters more representative of the rank-​and-​file. The replacement of CND Bulletin, a news sheet focused on intellectuals and unilateral disarmament, by Sanity, an illustrated newspaper focused on features and human interest, was indicative of the shift. Whereas the Bulletin was issue-​driven, plain and sober, Sanity was multifaceted, striking and experimental. Its eye-​catching pictures and headlines owed much to its young editor, David Boulton, whose understanding of visual communications accounted for his entrance into broadcast journalism with Granada in 1965. The shift from a regime that was top-​down to one that was bottom-​up transformed the concept of protest within and beyond the movement:  protest became less about the abstract issue of unilateral disarmament and more about the process of social change and the people involved in it. It was for this reason that Sanity could run a story about Fanny Hill, an erotic novel banned by the Obscenity Act. By this stage, it was Christians and social conservatives who were misrepresented and under-​represented in the movement: copies of Sanity were frequently returned to headquarters.14 This socialization of protest, where focus transferred away from the issue of unilateral disarmament and towards the identities of those who rallied behind it, was based on and encouraged an alternative dynamic with broadcasters and the press. The issue of unilateralism, for all of its significance and stature, ultimately possessed a limited lifecycle in the news; the identities and protests of those who championed it were far more engaging and newsworthy and this was exploited by younger activists in particular. A  C100 leaflet, for example, distinguished between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ propaganda. It claimed that ‘local papers will be pleased to accept items for . . . feature pages . . . When the South East London Working Group put on a Folksong Concert in aid of the Committee, we were given most valuable coverage in Borough News in the form of the leading item on the theatre page, complete with a photograph of the Ian Campbell group’.15 If in this case the social element of the protest served to sustain the nuclear issue as news,

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then it should not be regarded as especially typical. Quite often such protests had the effect of eclipsing the issue at hand and were utilized by news media to demonstrate why their readers and viewers should not support unilateralism: to do so would be to ally with people who behaved and dressed in ways that were abnormal and alternative. In these cases, public protest became more about contesting identities than it did the abstract and explicit arguments for and against disarmament.

CND and DAC Regimes of representation within the movement were contested not only between leaders and rank-​and-​file, but also between the reformists of CND and the radicals of DAC and C100. Whereas the intellectuals of CND comprehended their purpose as a pressure group and sought to restrict rank-​and-​file involvement in protest, the activists of DAC comprehended theirs as a creative vanguard and sought to facilitate it. The tension between these approaches heightened following the establishment of a March Committee by DAC, shortly after Harold Steele’s return from Japan in 1957.16 The CND Executive Committee was reluctant to endorse an initiative that challenged their control over the public relations of the movement. While it ended up giving its ‘blessings to the  . . .  [proposals] and [agreed to] . . . publicise them’, it also made ‘it clear that at this stage of the Campaign it could not be very closely involved’.17 J. B. Priestley, despite stressing the importance of public participation in his writing, typified the elitism of the Executive Committee towards marching as a medium of protest, claiming that it ‘would attract the wrong type of publicity’.18 This aversion towards marching, especially among high profile and elderly campaigners who wanted to maintain a model of pressure group politics, survived the adoption of the Aldermaston march by CND from 1959 onwards. In the words of Sevenoaks CND, the marches provided ‘a hostile press with an excellent opportunity to ridicule the Campaign, and reassures our MPs in their conviction that they can afford to disregard our lobbying and our letters of protest’.19 As the model of politics pursued by DAC was more participatory than that of CND, it was also more compatible with the desire of rank-​and-​file protestors to express themselves over the nuclear issue. Nicholas Walter, a founding member of C100, described how nonviolent direct action, the guiding practice and philosophy of DAC, was based on an empowering and individualist ethos. ‘It involved a  . . .  do-​it-​yourself revolution, as opposed to the more familiar coup



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d’etat carried out by an elite  . . .  [it stood for] do-​it-​yourself disarmament, as opposed to disarmament carried out by a Labour Party influenced by CND’.20 April Carter, a leading member of DAC, explained how the group ‘were very keen on the notion of people taking control of their own lives’.21 The empowerment of individual expression through nonviolent direct action, however, did not necessarily lead protestors to embrace the ideologies that underpinned this form of political expression. While evidence suggests that anarchist organizations recruited well among young protestors in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the expressive power of nonviolent direct action was often utilized for purposes that were social as well as political.22 As a ‘disarmament and strategy’ group argued in 1964, the appeal of the movement and the marches was that they were ‘beyond politics . . . working directly on public opinion’.23 The role of DAC as a creative vanguard within the wider movement was pivotal in opening up channels of communication between the rank-​and-​file and the news media. As its members acknowledged, a movement based entirely on the pressure group politics of CND would soon lose impetus among both its support base and in the public sphere:  their ‘opponents were accustomed to conventional “cause” campaigns’ and the interventions of intellectuals.24 It was therefore ‘desirable that there be an independent group . . . to pioneer and experiment with methods of action’. Only by the group being independent of CND could these types of action be taken without alienating . . . supporters of CND who might not be ready yet to support such action  . . .  Later if CND came officially to endorse more radical methods of action, the group which had earlier used these methods would be able to be of assistance by providing a hard core of disciplined and experienced ‘radical campaigners’ . . . keeping the movement as whole dynamic and fresh.25

The Aldermaston marches followed this pattern precisely: a form of protest that came across as innovative and radical in its first year was adopted by CND and became a ‘normal’ part of the movement and public life. As the marches became a standard device in the repertoire of the movement, however, DAC and C100 continued to develop forms of action that were novel and less predictable. This struggle for a newsworthy form of protest was central to both the radicalization of the peace movement and the extension of popular politics in Cold War Britain. In contrast to the nonviolent direct action against missile bases and in London, which can be seen as an expression of radical traditions, the first march to Aldermaston represented a compromise between a radical agenda of nonviolent confrontation and a reformist one of persuasion and propaganda. It

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was this that not only distinguished it from other marches, but also rendered it adoptable by CND, which simply reversed the existing route from Trafalgar Square to AWRE the following year. The first march was therefore daring and provocative without being illegal and this can be seen as a major reason for its appeal. The inspiration behind the march reflects its position between radical and reformist traditions. On the one hand, its roots can be traced back to a sit-​ down protest outside of the AWRE in 1952. On the other, it can be traced back to a women’s demonstration observed by Hugh Brock and Lawrence Brown in May 1957.26 In the words of Christopher Driver, a Guardian journalist who went on to write a book about the movement, the women’s demonstration was ‘highly reminiscent of the suffrage movement. Two thousand women with black sashes and flags walked on a pouring wet Sunday from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square’.27 In the first march to Aldermaston, the radical practice of bearing witness to the ‘military industrial complex’ coalesced with the reformist one of appealing to the wider public for sympathy and support.

Generational conflict The tensions over representation that existed between leaders and rank-​and-​file supporters and radicals and reformists also possessed a generational character. The younger generation interpreted the nuclear issue and the forms of action that could be taken over it in ways that conflicted with their elders. If the younger generation were more likely to comprehend the nuclear issue in terms that were personal and social rather than abstract and moral, then they were also more likely to view marching and nonviolent direct action as a more acceptable model of politics. Since perceptions of nuclear disarmament and practices of protest were closely correlated with age, generational antagonism could be particularly strong. For the young, the older generation was a barrier to self-​expression and self-​representation both within the movement and also in the wider public. ‘No longer could teacher, magistrate, politician, don, or even loving parent, guide the young’, claimed Jeff Nuttall: ‘Their right to do so was invalidated by their membership of the H-​bomb society.’28 For the old, the efforts of the younger generation at social and political change was misguided and self-​serving. As Diane Collins, wife to Canon Collins, bemoaned in a letter to J. B. Priestley, ‘[T]‌he thought of spending an evening with our long-​haired bearded friends fills me with despondency and gloom.’29 That perceptions of nuclear disarmament varied between generations of ban the bomb supporters is demonstrated by the difficulties the intellectuals of CND



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encountered during lecture circuits across universities. A. J. P. Taylor, a lecturer at Oxford, described at the time how CND struggled to surmount a generational ‘cleavage’ among its support base: The over 50s remember the Peace Ballot, sanctions, and the Abyssinian War. They want the old phrases about morality and disarmament . . . The under 25s are exactly the opposite. My undergraduate friends at Oxford all say: ‘Give us the practical arguments against the H-​bomb and cut out the uplift.’ It is the same wherever students are in the audience. There is a shiver of distaste at the moral approach.30

His suggestion that the missing generation, ‘having been taken for suckers in the war against Hitler, are resolved to never believe anything again’, seems consistent with new dramatists in this age range. As has been shown in Chapter 3, their attitudes towards nuclear disarmament and protest tended to be ambiguous and in retrospect appear caught between the more confident moral and political frameworks of their elders and the next generation. While students and young protestors were strongly supportive of unilateral disarmament as an ideal, they were far more sceptical of its practicality than their elders. Dennis Potter, who promoted CND as editor of the student newspaper at Oxford, exemplified this disconnect between moral idealism and political pragmatism that prevailed among the younger generation. In his book The Glittering Coffin, a ‘youthful description . . . of present-​day problems in Britain’, he argued that ‘moral arguments . . . when linked to a conception of the status of the country’ are impractical.31 As explained by an alumnus of Cambridge University and CND supporter, the moral argument was a ‘way of saying that it’s not fair that the world has moved on and we’re no longer the bee’s knees around the globe . . . if you get a Labour government which abolishes nuclear weapons the US will sell sterling and we will be forced to devalue [the pound], which will not be popular’.32 Since the younger generation interpreted the nuclear issue in terms that were distinctive from their elders, it is only logical that this would also redefine how and why young people participated in protest. It was not only over the content of protest that generations conflicted, then, but also over the form that it should take. As Dennis Potter proclaimed in the student newspaper at Oxford, ‘[C]‌onventional political ways of thought are about as effective as conventional weapons in the present crisis’: new forms of dissent had to be pioneered in order to communicate an alternative to the nuclear age. The disparity between generational preferences for either marching and nonviolent direct action or lobbying and pressure group politics was highlighted by the age

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gap between DAC and the CND Executive Committee, which correlated with the ‘cleavage’ mentioned by A. J. P. Taylor. A sample survey of the Aldermaston march in 1959 estimated that four out of every ten marchers was under the age of 21.33 To participate in a march was therefore a value-​laden act. In the regimes of representation that existed within the anti-​nuclear movement, it signified discrepancies of age, status and politics: the Aldermaston marches were far from a neutral medium. The appeal of the marches stemmed in part from their capacity to allow young people to express themselves, independent of the senior figures who led the movement: ‘youth’ was too often treated in the news media as a passive category to be represented and debated by intellectuals and politicians who were at least middle-​aged. A series of referenda on disarmament, carried out in universities and receiving widespread coverage, serve as a prime example. The results from these formed a political football to be kicked around by media elites. Lionel Heald, a Conservative MP, chided the news media for making too much of ‘the supposed “revolt of youth against the bomb” ’. I have been twice asked during the last twenty four hours by quite responsible people whether I  have read that both Nottingham and London Universities have voted in favour of unilateral disarmament, the authority quoted in each case being The Times. . .on careful examination the astonishing fact emerged that only 1,330 out of the 24,000 London undergraduates . . . had even troubled to answer! [In view of this] is it really right for The Times to headline such admittedly meaningless material as ‘London University  –​Majority ready for renunciation’?34

Where the leaders of the movement sought to inflate the significance of these findings, Heald made it his mission to ‘counteract misrepresentations about the views of undergraduates’, just as he and Harold Macmillan had done following the King and Country debate of 1933. Macmillan, who requested the results of the Oxford referendum a day before they were released to the press, utilized his contacts in the lobby to make sure they were reported with more restraint, even though 53 per cent of students opted for a unilateralist statement from a much broader sample.35 The importance of the form as opposed to the content of the protest was demonstrated above all by the disjuncture that existed between younger and older generations of women. Although female students were more supportive of unilateral disarmament than their male counterparts, it is notable that they did not ally themselves to older women on the basis of gender politics.36 Sheila



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Rowbotham later recalled that her ‘recognition of women as a group [in the 1950s] was as creatures sunk into the very deadening circumstances from which I was determined to escape. Most older women seemed like this to me’.37 The forms of protest carried out by the Women’s Committee –​along with the social relations they embodied and signified –​seemed archaic and obsolete to younger women. In contrast to older women seeking to appeal to traditional stereotypes of motherhood and domesticity through respectable forms of protest, younger women sought to transgress such stereotypes through radical and subversive ones. A  friend of Rowbotham’s informed her of the ‘young men she met in Bristol CND’, for example:  ‘They were not looking for oneness, nor did they share our intensity about “relationships”. They were pre-​occupied with being cool, discarding conventions and living, as far as possible, from day to day. And they wanted sex.’38 The protests carried out by younger and older women were therefore largely incompatible and entailed media and public agendas that were largely irreconcilable with one another.

The march and news coverage In opening up the anti-​nuclear movement to the news media and wider public, the Aldermaston marches represented a breakthrough for radical, rank-​and-​file and young protestors who were previously marginalized from representation by hierarchic regimes. The marches had a levelling effect on the public statuses of leaders and supporters of the movement and ensured that groups that were hitherto invisible, such as Communists and ethnic minorities, became very much ‘seen’ by onlookers, newspaper readers and television viewers. The marches therefore provided an expressive outlet for a range of social and political groups and gave them more power to pursue their media and public profiles. By choreographing their performances on the marches, these groups could signal their public identities and interests to the media and gain a degree of exposure that offered affirmation or a basis for further action. They could appeal to –​or challenge –​the interpretative frames and norms that broadcasters and newspapers employed to make sense of the marches and relay them to their publics, including ones pertaining to ideology, violence and social change. These frames and norms made up the broader regime in which the groups participating in the marches operated:  performances on the march were inscribed with a media logic that stemmed from them and responded to representation in the news over time.

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While marchers sought to pre-​empt the news through performance, they could not guarantee how they would be reported. The sheer diversity and scale of the marches, with around 5,000 people taking part in the first march to AWRE, provided the news media with a licence for selective interpretation. In mass protests such as the Aldermaston marches, it is always likely that the message or performance of one group will be contradicted by that of another, whether reformism by extremism, peace by violence or solemnity by festivity. As a result, it is always possible for journalists and cameramen to ‘find’ a story that resonates with the editorial line or process of the news organization to which they belong:  the agenda of the protestors is therefore relegated to that of the broadcaster or newspaper. Whereas news media that were sympathetic to unilateral disarmament tended to accept and relay the central message and performance of the march, those that were unsympathetic were more likely to publicize counter-​messages and counter-​performances. The New Statesman was as likely to find evidence of moral leadership and virtue in the event, for example, as the Daily Mail was to find that of decline and disorder. On television, the balancing techniques employed to provide the public with a sample of the groups participating in the marches tended to create a disproportionate picture. The surviving films of the marches from ITN, for example, all feature either footage of or references to Communists, even though Communist marchers were in a small minority and the CPGB did not endorse unilateralism until 1960. Such was the novelty of the march in 1958, however, it seemed to confuse journalists and hamper their ability to ‘frame’ it as an event. Even official intelligence on the march was beset by inaccuracy. In a letter from Edwin Plowden to Macmillan, he mistakenly referred to the PPU and NCANWT as the host organizations.39 As Kingsley Martin observed in the New Statesman, ‘[O]‌fficial circles are confused and alarmed’ about the movement:  ‘it has no political group behind it  . . .  it is not inspired or indeed supported by the Communist Party, which is embarrassed by the obvious retort that the Soviet Union should also abandon nuclear weapons’.40 In an age of ideological bipartisanship, the emergence of a nonaligned movement possessing significant support seemed to shock and trouble opponents. Only a week prior to the opening rally of the march in Trafalgar Square, the chief constable of the Metropolitan Police claimed that he expected a gathering no larger than 1,000 demonstrators: ‘his own guess would be something in the neighbourhood of five hundred’.41 It was the type as well as the extent of support for nonaligned protest that baffled and surprised observers. Alan Brien, a journalist for the Daily Mail and Spectator, described how ‘the marchers were the sort of people who would normally



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spend Easter listening to a Beethoven concert on the Home Service, pouring dry sherry  . . .  for the neighbours, or painting Picasso designs on boiled eggs. Instead they were behaving entirely against the normal tradition of their class, their neighbourhood, and their upbringing’.42 The march negated the frames and norms that the news media had routinely employed to report protests against the Cold War. As these frames and norms lost their explanatory power, the news media turned to ones that trivialized the march and belittled it as a sincere gesture against nuclear weapons. The Daily Telegraph spoke of a ‘fantastically varied lot, in fantastically varied garb’, while the Times commented on a ‘Wide Alliance on the March to Aldermaston’.43 The march may have started with what a press statement by DAC described as an ‘act of repentance for sufferings caused . . . by our dropping and testing of nuclear bombs’, but the news coverage it received was more reminiscent of Orwellian fruit juice drinkers, nudists, sandal-​wearers and sex-​maniacs.44 So common were attempts to belittle and trivialize the marchers that the editor of the Daily Mirror felt compelled to defend them, declaring that the newspaper was not among ‘the sneerers. The right to protest is the most valuable privilege of democracy –​and the marchers used it’.45 Even the Guardian, the newspaper most supportive of the marchers and read by them, tended to resort to ridicule. It indulged ‘in a great deal of sixth form humour’, according to a letter to the editor: news reports were ‘immature and sly, with a delivery that is intended to display the skill of the author rather than an honest and sympathetic portrayal of events’.46 The predilection of the news media for human interest was anticipated by the marchers themselves and prompted both self-​censorship and exhibition depending on their perceptions of publicity. ‘We must expect for the dailies to feature photographs of weird hats and pipe-​smoking girls’, wrote one marcher in the Guardian.47 Given the commitment of television news to balance, the idiosyncrasies of the marchers were not focused on in isolation, as they often were in the press. They were juxtaposed with shots of ‘respectable’ marchers and vox pops with onlookers who were often presented as the standard-​bearers of ‘normal’ or ‘ordinary’ society (Figures 4.1 and 4.2). As demonstrated by a news report for ITN, the selection and arrangement of interviewees on or observing the march was far from representative and engendered cues about what counted as ‘normal’ political behaviour. The report included interviews with two women who joined the PPU in 1914, a mother who was anti-​political and a Communist. It concluded with an interview of two working class males who seemed to serve as the yardstick of apathetic and conventional opinion: ‘I’m not interested that

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Figure 4.1  The respectable: a family marches. Photo by Fred Ramage/​Keystone/​Getty Images.

much’, commented one as the marchers passed him. ‘They do it, they do it, that’s all.’48 In focusing on the ‘eccentrics’ of the march and contrasting them with onlookers who were deemed to be ‘normal’, television news seemed to alienate the marchers from the body of public opinion. R. M. Vernon, despite representing the ‘political fringe’ himself as a member of the League of Empire Loyalists (LEL), expressed this sentiment in a letter to the Nottingham Evening News, in which he questioned the authenticity of the marchers as citizens of Britain. ‘My last thought as we left [the march] on our way back to London’, he wrote, ‘was “Thank God, they are not the real people of Britain”.’49 The diversity of the march may have provided opportunities for mischievous journalists seeking to write it up from a humorous angle, but it also presented a picture of social and democratic change that had to be taken more seriously. As described in the Daily Express following the march in 1959: ‘the thousands who watched [it] recognised that something very different in the way of processions was marching through London’s streets’.50 Alan Brien, writing a year earlier in the Spectator, seemed equally confounded: there was ‘something . . . peculiar about suburban housewives, babes in prams, Negro students, Hampstead schoolgirls,



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Figure 4.2  The Bohemian: a beatnik takes a break. Photo by Trinity Mirror/​Mirrorpix/​ Alamy Stock Photo.

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Royal Court actors and bearded television jazz singers trudging through rain and wind during the Easter holiday to a deserted atomic station’. At the same time, the march ‘received more publicity on television and in the press than any other comparable political demonstration [that he could] remember’.51 In bringing a range of social groups into the purview of public life through newspaper, radio and television coverage, the marches resonate with a thesis of the media theorist Marshall McLuhan: that the advent and extension of mass media enhances the profiles of groups to which wider society has remained hitherto blind. These groups ‘could no longer be contained, in the political sense of limited association’, argued McLuhan in Understanding Media. ‘They were now involved in our lives, as we in theirs, thanks to the electric media.’52 The ‘otherness’ of the marchers was most striking in right wing representations. ‘My first thought on seeing them was –​Chelsea must be empty today!’, claimed R. M. Vernon: ‘I have rarely seen such a motley collection of unwashed, coffee bar, pseudo-​arty individuals in all my life.’53 The involvement of West Indian immigrants was interpreted in particular as an indication that the march was anathema and foreign. An article in the Daily Telegraph identified ‘many coloured people’ on the 1959 march:  ‘four dogs, a pony, dozens of babies and a West Indian oilcan orchestra’. ‘They don’t look English to me’, quoted an onlooker in the Times.54 The suggestion that protest was the product of ‘outsiders’, a recurring response to radical movements in modern Britain that has roots in xenophobic anxieties, became even more explicit during the international rebellion of 1968. As marchers represented a ‘new public’ and a microcosm of the social changes that were occurring on a national and global scale, they were highly contested among journalists across the political spectrum, from those who linked their actions and identities to narratives of democratic renewal to those who linked them to ones of decline. On the left, the marchers were framed as the champions of a global struggle for civil rights, building on the same tradition that had inspired the abolition of slavery and set against the arbitrary divisions of the Cold War and racial apartheid.55 This rendering stemmed in part from the public relations strategy of the organizers, who had Bayard Rustin on the platform in 1958 and Paul Robeson in 1959 and 1960. On the right, the marchers were framed as harbingers of the end of ‘England’: they were anti-​colonial, impertinent and noisy. As Alan Brien remarked, ‘[T]‌he opposition the march roused in some papers was of some import.’ The far right, ‘headed by a Daily Telegraph columnist, were thrown into a state of raving hysteria I have not seen equalled since the Irgun dynamited the King David Hotel’.56 Paul Robeson, who was active in the Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF) as well as CND, was criticized



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by the Express for his involvement in campaigns ‘whose object was to denounce the British Empire’.57 If the march organizers appealed to humanitarian narratives in which radicals were cast as imperial benefactors and reformers, then they also appealed to Whiggish ones in which they were cast as forgers of democracy in Britain.58 The CND Executive Committee was especially determined to project the marchers as heirs to the Chartists, suffragettes and hunger marchers. It often mapped ban the bomb protests onto sites of historical significance, including Kennington Common, where the Chartists assembled in 1848.59 Such incarnations of radical history and its contribution to democracy were often undermined by the sentiment that the marches were undemocratic themselves. On the 1962 march, for example, Trotskyists established a faction named ‘Let the March Decide’. Neither were prevailing versions of radical history always agreeable among organizing groups. In 1960, April Carter felt compelled ‘to get up and explain [to CND] that we weren’t like the suffragettes . . . we didn’t just want publicity . . . and that we proposed non-​violent direct action as an important political method –​ not a stunt or an individual martyrdom’.60 The route of the marches was indicative of disparities between DAC and CND over the purpose of public protest and how it should be constituted. For DAC the primary function of the march was to ‘bear witness’ and draw attention to the existence of AWRE by marching from London towards it. For CND it was to showcase the extent of public support for unilateral disarmament and to impress this on politicians by marching from AWRE to London (Figure 4.3).61 The direction of the march was therefore symbolic and signalled to the news in contrasting ways. Whereas marching towards AWRE signified an act of defiance that tested the parameters of constitutional and legitimate news, marching towards London signified one of persuasion that fell within them. The reversal of the march and shift to a media position that was more propagandistic served to enhance the importance of press and public relations. Ernest Rodker, a member of DAC who liaised with journalists on the 1958 march, was replaced by Nigel Calder, a journalist from the New Scientist who had contacts on Fleet Street. An annual report of CND described how Nigel ‘has won us many friends in Fleet Street as well as many columns of copy . . . There has been a significant change in the attitude of the press  . . .  respect and informed comment has taken the place of misrepresentation and abuse’.62 The appointment of Nigel was prompted by changes within CND that were precipitated by the 1958 march. His father, Ritchie, took over as head of publicity from J. B. Priestley, whose opposition to marching as a form of protest rendered his position untenable.63

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Figure  4.3  Capturing public support:  Trafalgar Square in Easter, 1960. Photo by Keystone Pictures USA/​Alamy Stock Photo.

The news frames through which the marches were most contested revolved around Communism and violence. As demonstrated by a police report in 1958, DAC were able to anticipate and negotiate these frames by emphasizing their commitment to nonalignment and nonviolence and by concealing the involvement of Communists. ‘No leaflets bearing the name of the Communist Party were distributed’, claimed the report. ‘There was no display of the Daily Worker or Communist posters, though there is no doubt that many Communists were supporting the demonstration.’64 If the report suggested that this suppression was the product of a conspiracy or deception, then this reiterates the power of association between Communism and nuclear disarmament in public discourse



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and the official mind. This association was cemented during the Communist-​led campaigns of the late 1940s and early 1950s, when banning the bomb became stigmatized and elicited responses among journalists and officials that were sceptical by default. As it turned out, the Communists who did participate in the 1958 march were in several cases expelled from their local branches for acting in breach of the party line.65 Despite the success of DAC in distancing the march from Communism, the news media persisted in framing it in relation to Communist dangers and elements. Such coverage was highly prejudicial. It pandered to mistaken assumptions that unilateral disarmament by Britain would simply pave the way for Russian expansionism. In the Daily Telegraph, an article entitled ‘Jive to Red Flag in Carnival Air’ exploited fears about Communism and changes in youth culture by presenting them as interwoven, focusing especially on the actions of a ‘group of howler-​haired young men’.66 The Times, meanwhile, gave prominence to the hostile opinions of anonymous spectators: ‘ “They are all Communists”, said one man. “Pro-​Russian, anyhow”, somebody amended.’67 While the newspapers opposed to unilateralism drew attention to Communist elements, those in sympathy downplayed them. The Guardian, for example, claimed that ‘obvious Communists were few –​if any’.68 For the majority of marchers, Communist news frames were negated by experience. ‘Your correspondent says that the majority of the marchers were “Communists, Trotskyists, fellow-​ travellers  . . .  and Labour extremists” ’, complained one student in a letter to the Times. ‘I am anti-​Communist . . . I marched with them, and I disagree.’69 For a wider public learning about the march through newspapers, radio and television, however, Communist news frames remained highly influential. They harmonized with most of what had been read, heard and witnessed on the subject since the late 1940s. The association between banning the bomb and Communism was almost synonymous in parts of media and public discourse. As the marches were extra-​Parliamentary protests in favour of a policy rejected by the major political parties, they were vulnerable to news coverage in which isolated acts of disorder and violence were amplified. That the news media tended to treat such protests as law and order items was demonstrated following the launch of CND at Central Hall. In contrast to the well-​attended meeting and speeches by high profile intellectuals, which were largely ignored, eight arrests that took place after the event were widely reported. CND, an organization that claimed to be nonviolent and pacifistic, was branded precisely the opposite from its inception. The Home Service News Bulletin informed listeners that ‘eight men were arrested in Downing Street . . . where . . . demonstrators were shouting

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slogans against the H-​bomb’, but made only passing reference to CND: ‘several thousand  . . .  had attended meetings  . . .  on nuclear disarmament. At one of them Lord Russell said that the damage to mankind through H-​bomb tests was far greater than most people realised’.70 The Daily Telegraph also treated the arrests as the news item and the meeting as context: ‘slogans were scrawled in whitewash . . . near the entrance of the Foreign Office and daubed in yellow paint across wrought iron-​gates at the entrance were the words . . . “Traitor’s Gate” ’.71 On the Easter Sunday of the 1958 march, a minor fracas between marchers and counter-​protestors enabled the news media to frame the protest as law and order news and deprived the anti-​nuclear movement of constructive publicity. The counter-​protest had been organized by Kennedy McWhirter, a barrister and one of three brothers involved in the Freedom Group, the well-​connected lobbying organization led by Edward Martell.72 In order to confront and counteract the public protest of the marchers, McWhirter established a separate organization, removed from the more respectable activities of the Freedom Group, entitled the Defence for Democracy Committee. In a letter to the Daily Telegraph, he explained how the Committee aimed to ‘keep faith with the dead of the world wars . . . It is anticipated that several MPs will shortly join the committee, along with a number of ‘ “Free Poles”, “Free Hungarians” and “Free Czechs” now in this country’.73 Behind this rhetoric, the real purpose of the Committee was to engage in forms of street politics similar to those of LEL and to expose the hypocrisy of violence in a nonviolent movement. ‘It is amusing to note that pacifists and disarmers are so very violent in their emotions’, claimed R.  M. Vernon after heckling the 1960 march. ‘Our [loudspeaker] van must have collected two or three pounds of tomatoes not to mention sundry bricks.’74 From a loudspeaker in his car, McWhirter accused the marchers of being ‘guilty of increasing the risk of war’. After adding that they were ‘voting with [their] feet for Soviet domination’ and ‘bringing Budapest butchery to England’, several marchers approached McWhirter and sought to remove the loudspeaker.75 By constructing their coverage of the final day of the march around the counter-​protest and the fracas, broadcasters were able to ‘balance’ cases for and against nuclear disarmament through dramatic and illustrative action and newspapers were able to dispute its legitimacy altogether.76 Since a police report concluded that ‘no arrests were made and no untoward incident occurred’, however, the reporting of the march as law and order news was disingenuous and represented an abuse of journalistic standards.77 So ‘magnified’ was the counter-​protest and the fracas in the media, one Guardian reader even wondered



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whether ‘it were some form of publicity stunt’.78 Such an act of media sabotage was certainly within the capabilities of the McWhirter brothers, whose father was a former editor and director of Northcliffe and Associated Newspapers.79 A law and order news frame, in which isolated incidents were utilized to define entire protests, was superimposed on the 1958 march as a means of discrediting it to the wider public.80 The 1958 march and the publicity it received was therefore confined to and contested between a series of opposing binaries that were built into news discourse itself. These included triviality and earnestness, decline and progress, Communism and nonalignment and violence and pacifism. The discursive power of these binaries was such that they regimented how marchers organized and performed their protests, as well as how the wider public interpreted them through newspapers, radio and television. Through the news media, then, public opinion about nuclear disarmament became entangled with public opinion about Communism and the conduct and identities of the marchers themselves. Quite often public opinion about nuclear disarmament could be decided by contextual factors that had nothing to do with arguments for or against it, such as the way in which the marchers behaved or dressed. It is for this reason that the march organizers were so determined to stress the non-​Communist and respectable character of their protests and the majority of news media were so determined to contradict it: both parties were very conscious of the way in which these categories intersected with and shaped public opinion on the nuclear issue.

Young marchers and the media As young protestors were one of the largest groups on the marches and were symbolic of social and political change, they represented a particularly important category through which public opinion about nuclear disarmament could be contested. Both the march organizers and their opponents sought to define youth and youth culture and demonstrate that the younger generation was ‘on their side’. They understood that the battle for public opinion over nuclear disarmament could be won and lost over how social groups on the marches were portrayed. It was in view of the importance of the representation of these groups that CND commissioned the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies to carry out a study into the subject during the second wave of protests in the 1980s. The subsequent report demonstrated how CND and the news media ‘fought over peace’ by contesting the public identities of young people, women and ethnic

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minorities.81 If unilateral disarmament was to become a popular policy, the report suggested, then CND also needed to realize the kind of society in which the progressive identities and rights of these groups could be realized. In order to make the most of the young protestors who swelled the ranks of the marches, the organizers sought to regulate their involvement and present them to the news media as law-​abiding, moral and non-​Communist. They offered guidance to young marchers on banners and literature, music and dance and dress and sleeping arrangements. Prior to the 1958 march, for example, the March Committee compiled an official broadside: ‘marchers and musicians are to sing only the songs on this sheet’, it instructed. ‘Other songs with political associations’ were not to be sung.82 According to Karl Dallas, a folk musician and journalist for Melody Maker, songs were banned ‘not necessarily because of their content, but because they were sung by Communist sympathisers like Pete Seeger’, who had been indicted for refusing to cooperate with the Un-​American Activities Committee a year earlier.83 It was news frames of moral permissiveness as well as Communism that organizers sought to avoid. ‘Russia doesn’t frighten’, remarked a marshall while explaining sleeping arrangements to a reporter, ‘but sex certainly does’.84 Whereas the organizers sought to present a purified picture of young marchers, their opponents in the media sought to present one that was besmirched by depravity and deviance. On the 1963 march, a Sunday Express reporter even slept among the marchers in order to find evidence of promiscuity.85 The black jeans, donkey jackets, bowler hats and long hair of a section of young marchers became especially influential in shaping the image of the anti-​nuclear movement, so much so that CND resolved on employing a dress advisor for the 1961 march. The term ‘beatnik’, widely employed in the news media to describe the subculture of young protestors who listened to New Orleans traditional jazz, did in fact imply that its devotees were traitors. It was a portmanteau of ‘Beat’ and ‘Sputnik’, devised by a San Franciscan journalist to stress the pro-​Communist bias of the Beat Generation. So shocking were beatniks in Britain that in 1960 a small group of them were invited onto Tonight to defend themselves against complaints about their long hair.86 By focusing on the dress and music of beatniks on the marches, then, the news media were able to imply that banning the bomb was removed from ‘ordinary’ society and a threat to it. A report in The Times, describing how ‘a demonstration was halted within five minutes at St Mary’s Quay, Scilly Islands’, highlights how the ‘otherness’ of beatnik protestors fed into and informed the ‘otherness’ of the anti-​nuclear cause in the public imagination.



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When seven bearded youths and a woman unfurled banners and slogans as the island steamer, Scillonian, was docking with 250 trippers from Penzance, an elderly woman walked up to a young man carrying a banner and spat in his face. Mr P. Cannon, a local taxi driver, offered to fight all the demonstrators, and a crowd of holidaymakers began to move towards the banners.87

It was a measure of how far the beatnik image damaged CND that a rival organization, the Socialist Campaign for Multilateral Disarmament, sought to emphasize the ordinariness of its campaign in its publicity. ‘This woman is not a beatnik’, claimed a caption on the poster of a mother in front of a mushroom cloud, ‘she just wants to go on living’.88 The efforts of DAC and CND to constrain the participation of young protestors in the marches was undermined by the ethos of direct action on which they had based them. The marches were not a means by which the younger generation could be passively and vicariously represented by their moral superiors and elders; they were a means by which it could be empowered. The marches enabled young protestors to engage with their public identities and values in a space that was highly mediated and charged and in a manner that was creative and immediate. As young protestors challenged how they were represented on the marches and in the media, the dynamic of ban the bomb protest was also personalized and transformed. It became less about nuclear disarmament as an abstract issue and more about the culture and identity of the protestors; a trend reinforced by the tendency of the news media to narrate the movement according to the eccentricities of those who supported it. In the view of the Freedom Group, the popularity of CND among the younger generations could be explained by the ‘awareness of young people today of publicity . . . virtually all sections of society, particularly the younger elements, now rejoice in personal publicity’.89 The tension between young protestors who sought to defy the norms and values of news coverage and organizers who sought to engage with them was embodied in the marches. John Brunner, a musician and science fiction novelist, recalled how a marshal charged with monitoring his band and ensuring ‘we remain ideologically pure’ became known as ‘the Gauleiter’.90 Such restrictions were easily bypassed. For Sue Miles, an art school student, the marches represented ‘a kind of Hampstead liberalism where girls were allowed to have their boyfriends stay overnight in the same room as them’.91 In contrast to the march organizers and older marchers, who condemned the nuclear age through earnestness and solemnity, young protestors condemned it through festivity and fun. The marches ‘identified a fundamental flaw in conventional politics’,

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according to John Minnion, a jazz trumpeter: ‘let’s live, not destroy the world. So: let’s have a good time. So: jazz and dance’.92 ‘Surely our concern at the threat of nuclear annihilation is not shown by how we dress and act’, argued one student in response to news coverage that took their festivity as a sign of insincerity, ‘but by our participation in the march at all’ (Figures 4.4 and 4.5).93 The freedom with which young protestors could express themselves was empowered by the moral and nonaligned basis of the marches as well as their roots in direct action. Just as the emphasis of the marches on morality cut across the ideological dogmas of the Cold War, their emphasis on nonalignment also opened up a space in between them. Terry Monaghan, member of the Young Communist League (YCL) and founder of the Jiving Lindy Hoppers, later described how the marches broke the formal link between ideology and culture

Figure 4.4  Dancing on the march. Photo by George Stroud/​Express/​Getty Images.



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Figure 4.5  Skiffle on the march. Photo by Keystone Pictures USA/​Alamy Stock Photo.

and gave rise to forms of cultural expression that were more authentic and fluid. Whereas the CPGB sought to impose a cultural and musical repertoire that was British, for example, the anti-​nuclear movement provided an environment that was largely free from such ideological constraints, despite the efforts of march organizers. Rather than being disciplined on a diet of Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele through the YCL, Monaghan was able to experiment with a range of dance and music through CND.94 As jazz posed problems for both American and Soviet ideologies, it represented a particularly powerful form by which young protestors could promote a nonaligned politics and confront the Cold War. In the words of Graeme Bell, an Australian musician, the contested status of jazz as a black music in the United States and a capitalist one in the USSR invested it with ‘an aura of subversive anti-​totalitarianism’.95 The perception that jazz was somehow iconoclastic was reinforced by a ban on transatlantic exchange between the Musicians’ Union and the American Federation of Musicians, which was eventually lifted in 1955, three years prior to the first march. Significantly, two of the star performers on the 1958 march, Ken Colyer and Humphrey Lyttelton, had been pioneers in defying this ban in order to bring jazz influences into Britain.96

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If jazz harmonized with marches that were anti-​ideological and nonaligned, then New Orleans trad jazz in particular harmonized with a youth culture in which active participation was prized and mass commercialism shunned. The evolution of this form of jazz in Britain was influenced especially by skiffle, which as a do-​it-​yourself (DiY) music performed with home-​made instruments possessed its own anti-​commercial credentials. Jeff Nuttall went so far as to describe it as the first popular music to ‘disdain the adult-​commercial completely’.97 When this craze was finally killed off by ‘commercial over-​exploitation’, however, ‘it left thousands of budding guitarists all geared up with nowhere to go’, according to the folk musician, Ian Campbell: ‘[M]‌any of them lengthened their straps to go into rock and rhythm and blues; others went back into pubs and started the folksong revival.’98 In this way, trad jazz interacted with popular and folk cultures in Britain that rendered it an ideal form through which young marchers could articulate their protest. It represented an authentic and self-​made music whose bands were resistant to professionalization.99 The custom of marching to jazz bands in the United States, combined with the DiY practices by which the music was made, also contributed to the utility of trad jazz as an expressive form on the Aldermaston marches. Colin Bowden, snare drummer for the Omega Brass Band, described how no marching jazz bands existed in Britain until Ken Colyer returned from a trip to New Orleans in the mid-​1950s: ‘not proper New Orleans style’ at any rate.100 The position of these bands at the head of the marches therefore created a striking aural and visual sensation. While the bands tended to project a moral message with songs such as ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ and ‘High Society’, their followers tended to project a rebellious one by appropriating the same musical forms.101 This malleability was what made trad so popular. According to Leon Rosselson, a songwriter and contributor to TW³, it made ‘people feel they could do it for themselves rather than simply listen to the radio’.102 The democratic practice of making jazz music corresponded with the democratic one of marching. As a result, the marches were incredibly liberating for young protestors, providing a DiY media environment in which they could bypass the censorship and control of their elders and ideologues. The marches pandered to an ‘urge to express yourself ’, as one student explained to the BBC: ‘you’ve got to prove you’re alive and not dead in this age of mass culture’ (The Listener, 16 May, 1963). Together, the forms of dissent and democratic practice that jazz-​playing and marching encompassed laid the basis of an entire subculture. The anti-​nuclear movement was as much the site on which this subculture converged as it was a vehicle for single issue protest. As Ian Campbell recalled, its places and spaces



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were inseparable from those of the folk revival, constituting an ‘underground movement’ that ‘throbbed with a spirit of independence’.103 The young protestors who participated on the marches were often the same ones who attended night clubs described by one frequenter as ‘dives’ of which your parents would never approve: smoke-​filled basements with subversive songs and bohemians who had scant regard for middle class conventions.104 While this subculture was the source of widespread caricature and ridicule in the press, it also interacted with media and public landscapes in ways that were more complex and fruitful. Since it represented a protest as much against commercial and established society as it did nuclear weapons, it shifted the dynamic of the movement away from single issue politics and towards identity ones. To defy their elders and ideologues and shock the news media was to contribute to the demolition of the outmoded conventions and manners for which they stood. Jeff Nuttall, for example, recalled performing an ironic rendition of Elgar’s ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ outside of the Ministry of Defence:  one that was not dissimilar to Hendrix’s ‘Star-​Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock in 1969. The development of alternative aesthetics and networks through ‘beatnik’ subculture also gave rise to creative economies, usually in areas of metropolitan London on the verge of gentrification. As Sheila Rowbotham described, no one would have thought that ‘the scruffy horde chanting “Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Slough decide now” was the advance guard of a boom in British fashion. But the Aldermaston march . . . provided a mass display for art school styles’.105 By participating in the Aldermaston marches, then, young protestors carried out new transactions between culture and politics that were to redefine the very nature of ‘protest’ itself. The role of dress and music as expressions of opposition were more central than ever before and through the media became commodified and scandalized in ways that seemed to elevate ‘identity’ as a category of protest. The increasing importance of leisure and identity politics to protest within the anti-​nuclear movement can be seen in the contrast between two events, a ‘Stars in their Eyes’ evening hosted by the Executive Committee at the Royal Festival Hall in 1959 and a Mass Rally at the Albert Hall in 1961. Where ‘Stars in their Eyes’ consisted of respectable performances by Benjamin Britten, Cecil Day-​ Lewis and Constance Cummings, the Mass Rally consisted of rowdy ones from George Melly, Humphrey Lyttleton and the Glasgow Eskimos.106 The Annual Report of CND described how the Mass Rally ‘provided something quite new in campaigning . . . under the expert direction of Joan Littlewood [the founder of the Theatre Workshop] and Sean Kenny [a stage designer]  . . .  It was a

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combination of political speeches, jazz and entertainment, decorated and lit by moving coloured lights on a screen behind the platform. Opinion was sharply divided.’107 J. B. Priestley, who ‘never marched a yard for CND’ and could not turn himself ‘into a demonstrating, banner-​carrying, slogan-​shouting man’, later admitted that the ‘sheer size and weight [of the Aldermaston marches] broke the shameful boycott of the Campaign by the press’.108 In gaining exposure for the anti-​nuclear movement and providing a more democratic interface between its supporters and the media, however, the marches also hastened tensions and redefined tendencies within it. They exacerbated internal struggles over who had the right to represent in public on the basis of age and status; they transformed the movement from a single issue to a social one with significance for identity groups; and they encouraged a preoccupation with the power of the medium over the message in protest. These developments were all accelerated and conditioned by a news media in which the politics of human interest and spectacle superseded those of abstract argument and policy. The marches therefore gave rise to new relations between protestors and the media and these shaped the evolution of radical movements in Cold War Britain. If the wider significance of the marches were to be summarized, then it was that they served to normalize marching as a democratic and public form:  a practice that was hitherto episodic and fitful became routine and ubiquitous. This ‘normalization’ was demonstrated by a letter to The Times in 1961, which referred to a picture of workers who walked to London in order to express their happiness at a pay increase. The ‘photographer’s timing was excellent’, explained the letter, ‘because . . . the theatre poster behind the leading marcher proclaims that Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be. No indeed! Fancy having to march to prove you’re happy!’109 It was as marching became a standard feature of public life that the news media began to lose interest in it as a dramatic form. As early as the autumn of 1960, students marching from London to Edinburgh felt that ‘the British have become so accustomed to mass walks that [it] has lost its value as a propaganda weapon’.110 The marches had become ‘one of those lovable British institutions’, to borrow the words from an editorial on TW³, ‘sandwiched between the distribution of the Maundy Money and Trooping of the Colour’.111 The newsworthiness of the marches depended on their novelty as a microcosm of alternative identities and styles as well as a form of protest and spectacle. Peter Sedgwick recalled how ‘people simply gawped and gaped at the first . . . marchers’:



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We were external to the public upon the pavements, and for much of the time conscious that we would be viewed and judged as an alien force. We were Adventists, witnesses like those of Jehovah, prepared to face the contumely of the world in the cause of our imperative, a many-​headed version of the little bloke with the sandwich-​board saying PREPARE TO MEET THY DOOM. And now there simply is no longer a public which is exterior to demonstration and visible mass action.112

In creating points of contact between the subaltern and the mass commercial, the marches embodied a method of protest that was in fact highly influential for other groups, including students and women. The ability of these groups to place identity at the centre of their politics –​as opposed to an abstract issue such as nuclear weapons –​stemmed in part from the anti-​nuclear movement. As one form of radical protest and identity became ‘normalized’ in public life, it was only logical that activists and demonstrators would seek to fashion other ones. In order to maintain the interest of the news media, these invariably had to become more radical: sit downs swiftly supplanted marches and rallies and acts of cultural bohemianism and rebellion became even more defiant and purposeful. These forms and styles of protest engaged and sought to subvert media norms and values in an ongoing dialogue that unfolded throughout the 1960s. The development of mass movement politics had in this way become inextricably tied to the news media and the logic it enshrined.

5

Labour and Political Communications

The mobilization of popular opinion over defence and foreign policy has repeatedly brought the Labour Party into systemic crisis throughout its history, from the First World War to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It has done so because of the ethical and structural difficulties that this area of policymaking has entailed for a party with ideological roots in pacifism and a constitution that at least aspires to democratic participation. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, it was over nuclear disarmament that the entire constitutional framework and identity of the Labour Party was challenged; between and within the federal layers of the Parliamentary Party (PLP), the constituency parties (CLPs) and trade unions and between idealized models of the party as an extra-​parliamentary movement and professionalized machine.1 The issue of nuclear disarmament, then, was embedded in constitutional tensions over the conduct of party politics. These related not only to ideology, but also to political communication and practice and its embodiment in the party infrastructure, including the balance of representation among MPs, CLPs and trade unionists on the National Executive Committee (NEC) that administered the party as a whole. At their most basic and pronounced, these tensions were manifest in the activism and righteousness of the left and the managerialism and expediency of the right. They fed into debates over whether the Annual Conference or the PLP constituted the supreme instrument of policymaking, the former offering a ‘delegate democracy’ based on the party membership and the latter a pathway to parliamentary power based on the electorate.2 When resolutions for unilateral disarmament were adopted by Conference against the wishes of Hugh Gaitksell, the leader of the PLP, in October 1960, it therefore threw into turmoil not only the defence and foreign policy of the Labour Party in opposition, but also the essential purpose and structure of the party itself. In this context, the intra-​party struggle over nuclear disarmament in the late 1950s and early 1960s seems not so much a policy dispute as a communications

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war in which conflicting forms of political practice and visions of democracy were mobilized. While this ‘communications war’ gave rise to a range of campaigns that collided across the party, it was those on its right wing that triumphed, as signified by the reversal of the resolutions of 1960 a year later. The efficacy of the right, it will be argued, stemmed from their more skilful use of campaigning techniques, as well as their exploitation of stronger affinities with broadcasters and the press. Their victory in 1961 paved the way for a more conservative conception of party democracy under Harold Wilson, the first leader of the PLP to routinely ignore the authority of Conference in the governments of 1964–​70. Although it is tempting to interpret the early 1960s as a decisive moment in the modernization of the Labour Party, a broader account of its history holds this in check. As the period prior to and beyond New Labour has demonstrated, the party did not develop towards a teleological horizon in which the supremacy of electoral politics and the PLP were ensured. Instead, its development was haphazard, shaped by cyclical tensions between its constituent elements. After all, the victory of the early 1960s would not have occurred at all, let alone in the iconic form that it did, had the left wing of the party not stimulated the right into action. The constitutional tensions that have existed within the Labour Party should therefore be seen as dialectical rather than developmental, engendering and legitimizing new ideas about the democratic mission of the party and socialism in the process. The leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, who joined CND in 1966 and became its vice president while in office, represents the latest incarnation in this struggle over the forms of democracy and political practice the Labour Party is meant to embody. On the one hand, his politics have been seen as an authentic representation of the grassroots activism that was seminal to the creation of the Labour Party in the first instance; a tonic to the mediated performances of synthetic politicians, as well as to the toxic legacy of the Blair government’s intervention in Iraq. On the other hand, his politics have also been viewed as emotional and unelectable; an example of the subordination of practical policies to moral ideals. As these competing versions of political practice have crystallized around Corbyn, the party has been brought yet again to the brink of dissolution, torn between an extra-​parliamentary base of activists who seek a party of protest and a majority of MPs who seek an electable one. In viewing political communications as heavily conditioned by constitutional and ideological tensions, this interpretation builds on and challenges the historiography of the Labour Party and the media. The ‘new political history’, which has sought to comprehend the role of communications and culture in



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electoral politics, has tended to imbue relationships between mass parties and media with a degree of coherence that they often did not possess.3 In research on the Labour Party in the interwar period, for example, a focus on centralized strategies towards the media serves to obscure the complexity of political communications that were rooted in constitutional fissures and growing pains.4 In practice, these made relations between the Labour Party and the media extremely fraught and pluralistic, with newspaper and radio coverage reflecting back on the party in ways that often pulled its public and self-​image in opposing directions. By emphasizing the significance of constitutional tensions for political communications, an attempt will be made to demonstrate how the ‘making’ of the Labour Party has in fact been driven by engagements with the media that have been conflicting and diverse as much as they have been consensual and uniform.

Unilateralism and political communications As the anti-​nuclear movement emerged in the mid-​to-​late 1950s, it exposed ideological fault lines within the Labour Party and reinforced conflicting forms of political communications and practice. The issue of nuclear disarmament aggravated what T.  E. M.  McKitterick, a Labour Party candidate in 1950 and 1951, described as a division between a ‘utopian’ left and ‘bureaucratic’ right. Whereas the utopians ‘seized on every  . . .  public project, joined every demonstration  . . .  and supported every resolution critical of the government (Conservative or Labour)’, the bureaucrats were characterized by ‘habits of caution  . . .  a pragmatic approach to politics’ and a propensity towards the ‘possible rather than the theoretically desirable’.5 The significance of nuclear disarmament for the Labour Party, therefore, lay in its potential to translate into forms of communications and practice that were divergent and conducive to distinctive traditions of party politics. As described by Philip Williams, a leading biographer of Gaitskell, the anti-​nuclear cause built upon a rich history of peace politics:  ‘the early Labour Party attracted Christian pacifists who objected to all wars, minority groups who hated British imperialism [and] Socialist Internationalists who loathed national rivalries’.6 The potential for nuclear disarmament to ignite a ‘communications war’ within the Labour Party was demographic as well as ideological, since the support bases of CND and the Labour Party overlapped considerably.7 As a result, the communications and resources of the party could within its various

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tiers be mobilized in favour of a cause to which the PLP was largely opposed, thus pre-​empting a constitutional crisis. It was Victory for Socialism (VFS), a group of rebel MPs opposed to Gaitskell and right wing ‘revisionism’, that was most active in exploiting the links between CND and the Labour Party. When NCANWT was established in June 1957, the group set up what became the Labour Advisory Committee (LAC) to CND, a coordinating body that drafted resolutions, distributed leaflets and infiltrated meetings.8 The dissemination of tactical guidance on nuclear disarmament was supported by Tribune, an influential weekly edited by Michael Foot, a leading member of CND and VFS. In publicizing the anti-​nuclear cause, the newspaper furthered the interests not only of CND through existing readers in CLPs and trade unions, but also those of the left in general, which was able to market itself in the popular imagery of a mass movement. Between 1958 and 1964, Tribune regularly described itself as ‘the paper that leads the anti-​H-​bomb campaign’ on its masthead.9 While VFS and LAC functioned as pressure groups behind the scenes, their organizing facilitated the form of noisy activism that has often been associated with the ‘utopian left’ at grassroots. Victor Feather, the assistant secretary of the Trades Union Congress, spoke of the ‘hard caucus’ of unilateralists who were active in CLPs and regularly disrupted the Labour Party’s defence meetings for regional delegates.10 For Wayland Young, defence correspondent of the Guardian and advocate of multilateral disarmament, attempts to counteract the left on such an emotional issue were almost futile. ‘To fight unilateralists is to fight someone else’s reflection in the mirror’, he argued. ‘The gross and dreadful threat of nuclear weapons will make unilateralists as long as there are human beings.’11 In comparison to the communications of the PLP, which tended to be cautious and sober on the issue of nuclear disarmament, the emotive ones of the extra-​parliamentary left were far more cathartic and compelling.12 Bill Rodgers, chairman of the Campaign for Democratic Socialism (CDS), a counter-​ campaign established after the 1960 Conference, later described how ‘motions of unilateralism had been carried because someone had stood up in a meeting and said “I want to say Mr Chairman that I think nuclear weapons are awful and for the sake of my children and grandchildren I propose a vote against nuclear weapons” and the Chairman said “Anyone against?” ’.13 The mobilization of the left over nuclear disarmament precipitated struggles not only over political communications within the Labour Party, but also over mass communications that extended beyond it. Despite its rejection of unilateralism, for example, the Guardian began to lobby the Labour leadership to modify its defence and foreign policies following the emergence of CND.



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Alistair Hetherington, its editor, stressed in his regular conversations with Gaitksell the idea of a ‘non-​nuclear club’, whereby the unilateral renunciation of nuclear weapons by Britain would prevent proliferation and tie into multilateral agreements.14 Such was the transformation of left wing opinion over nuclear disarmament that the Daily Herald, a newspaper part-​owned by the Labour Party, shifted to an editorial position to which the leadership of that party resolutely disagreed. Only eight days after CND was launched in February, it proclaimed that ‘we should refuse not only to test nuclear weapons anymore, but we should announce to the world that we will cease to manufacture them’.15 Far from simply ‘shifting’ its position in order to cater for left wing opinion, however, the Herald was also seeking to marshal it. According to Geoffrey Goodman, its industrial correspondent, the new editor, Douglas Machray, believed that the commercial prospects of the newspaper could be improved by demonstrating more political independence. ‘He wanted the Herald to be what the News Chronicle once had been.’16 To this end, Machray launched a poll in which readers were asked four questions about nuclear disarmament and received 13,000 replies, most of which declared their support for the position adopted by the newspaper.17 When it came to the mass media, however, the influence of the unilateralists was dwarfed by that of Gaitskell. Through his personal contacts in the Guardian and the Herald he was able to effectively counteract the left and further his own agenda. He was so close to Hetherington that the editor had to warn his industrial correspondent, John Cole, not to expose what Cole described as ‘the confidential nature of the relationship’.18 In spite of differences over the precise policy of disarmament, the editorial position of the newspaper was remarkably accommodating to the Labour leader. After one editorial on the subject, a record of a meeting between Gaitksell and Hetherington described how Gaitksell was ‘delighted with Monday’s leader. He would have said exactly the same himself. He said that it was “curious that you wrote that way when we haven’t been in contact lately.”(!!)’ –​the exclamation marks presumably an indication that they had been in contact frequently.19 The warmth that Gaitskell felt towards the Guardian was also evident in his reaction to John Beavan, its political correspondent, replacing Douglas Machray as editor of the Herald ahead of the Annual Conference in 1960. According to Hetherington, ‘He thought a real difference was already being made there and he believed that John was very much a Guardian man.’20 As the newspaper of the Labour Party, the Herald was even more open to pressure from Gaitskell. Following its proclamation of support for unilateralism, the newspaper acquiesced to a demand by Morgan Philips, the party secretary,

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to print a reply that reiterated the official policy the following day.21 Gaitskell even rang the chairman of the newspaper, Surrey Dane, in an attempt to prevent the poll on disarmament from being run.22 In a meeting with Machray, Gaitskell reprimanded him for departing from the party line and labelled him a pacifist. Machray responded by pulling from his pocket a bar of war medals and throwing them on the table in front of the Labour leader: ‘Pacifist, did you say, Hugh? Now show me your medals.’23 The romantic vision that Machray had for the Herald, to recast it as a champion of radical causes and traditions, was clearly beset by the governance structure of the newspaper, which remained in place until it was sold to the Mirror Group over two years later. It was in broadcasting as well as the press that Gaitskell was able to suppress the public power of the unilateralists. Between the creation of CND and the General Election in October 1959, he repeatedly requested that the BBC and ITA select only Labour MPs who had been approved in advance by central office.24 ‘They were not trying to restrict editorial freedom’, in the words of Hetherington, ‘but they simply could not have a situation in which, for example, [a left wing MP such as] Konni Zilliacus was put up to speak for the Labour Party in a foreign policy debate.’25 When the left of the Labour Party was given a platform on radio and television, their appearances were often considered detrimental. In December 1959, a voter claimed in a letter to Morgan Philips that ‘one of the biggest assets to the Tories’ in the General Election were the performances of Michael Foot and A. J. P. Taylor on Free Speech. ‘If they cannot be taken off the programme’, the voter argued, ‘it ought to be made clear that they are not speaking for the Labour Party.’26 As divisions over nuclear disarmament within the Labour Party became more apparent, the ITA were forced to reduce the episodes in which Foot and Taylor appeared to only two.27 In the words of Robert Fraser, the director general of the ITA, ‘the old basis [of Free Speech] –​the programme of eccentrics on the right and left –​ . . . eroded . . . with the sharpening of the quarrel in the Labour Party’.28

Policymaking: party and public relations In order to roll back the wave of pressure that engulfed it over nuclear disarmament, the leadership of the Labour Party modified its official policy in 1958 and 1959, a process brought about more by considerations of party and public relations than by international and military realities. The first modified statement, released in March 1958 under the title Disarmament and Nuclear



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War, deviated from the policy endorsed by Conference only five months earlier in only one respect:  it proposed that the government suspend nuclear tests as a precursor to an international summit on disarmament. Insofar as the statement suggested unilateral action by Britain on a limited basis, it was calculated to appease an emotional upsurge within the ranks of the party and split ban the bomb supporters over what effective disarmament entailed. Policymaking on disarmament therefore became inward rather than outward-​ facing: an instrument by which party and public pressures could be managed and negotiated. If such policymaking was to relax tensions within the party, then it also needed to incorporate a public element that rivalled CND. The ‘Plan for Peace’ campaign, launched by Nye Bevan and Hugh Gaitskell in Trafalgar Square a week after the Aldermaston march, served as a concomitant to the modified statement. The campaign incorporated two broader strategies. The first was to divide the left by showing that official policy had the support of its most esteemed figures, Nye Bevan among them. Since Bevan had rejected unilateralism at the 1957 Conference, claiming it would send a British foreign secretary ‘naked into the conference chamber’, he represented the ideal figure around which the campaign could be fought.29 His reputation as the darling of the left was especially exploited by Gaitskell, who described to Hetherington how ‘Nye was being very good . . . [he] was giving no trouble inside the party’.30 The second tactic was to show through extra-​parliamentary means, including the inaugural rally in Trafalgar Square on 13 April, that unilateralists did not possess a monopoly on peace. John Strachey’s pamphlet, Scrap All the H-​ bombs, was designed to discredit the perception that a passion for peace and multilateralism were irreconcilable.31 The impact of ‘Plan for Peace’ varied between the rank-​and-​file of the party and the wider public. As an exercise in reaching out to Labour voters through the press, it was highly effective. The Guardian and the Observer, both of which had called for a renewed lead on multilateral disarmament, were highly receptive and relayed its message in reverent terms. In the Guardian, for example, the partnership between Bevan and Gaitskell was hailed. ‘If Labour’s anti-​nuclear campaign is to become a crusade’, it claimed, ‘Mr Bevan is clearly the knight errant issuing the call to battle. Mr Gaitskell, with his more solid, factual speeches, is perhaps the steed.’32 The calculated significance of Bevan for the campaign was picked up by all of the reporting newspapers. In order ‘to control a mass emotional upsurge on the left’, claimed a journalist in The Times, Bevan and Gaitskell ‘set themselves in the van of the campaign for peace and against

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nuclear war’: their campaign was an attempt to ‘rally the . . . left on a programme that, far from being emotional, is capable of being strongly reasoned’.33 The ‘Plan for Peace’ campaign was well received in the press, but among activists within the party it may have served to deepen suspicions of the leadership. In the New Statesman, A. J. P. Taylor warned readers that it represented an attempt to ‘kill CND, not the bomb’: ‘[W]‌e run against the solid loyalty that is the strongest element in the Labour Movement.’34 The Trotskyists often accused of disrupting CLP meetings on defence also dismissed the campaign as a publicity stunt, branding its leaders as ‘impudent frauds [and] charlatans who fight the bomb with their mouths while in practice supporting its manufacture’.35 The hollowness of ‘Plan for Peace’ was demonstrated at its inaugural event, where demonstrators for unilateralism far outnumbered those in favour of multilateralism. On the BBC, a newscaster described the ‘black-​white-​and-​orange banners and pennants of the counter-​demonstrators’, which proclaimed ‘we go further’ and ‘no H-​bombs for Britain’.36 The disparity between the campaign’s reception in the press and among activists symbolized the growing gulf over political communications within the Labour Party; between the elite and professional contacts of the leadership and the energy and resources of the rank-​and-​file. The precedence of party and public relations over international and military realities through policymaking culminated in Disarmament and Nuclear War:  The Next Step. This statement was prompted by the conversion of the General and Municipal Workers (GMWU), usually one of the most orthodox unions in Britain, to unilateralism in June 1959. It embraced the idea of a non-​ nuclear club, which had already been articulated by intellectuals such as Baron Simon of Wythenshawe and promoted in the Guardian. As the club called upon nations outside of the United States and Russia to sign an agreement not to develop nuclear weapons, it represented another attempt to either appease or divide the unilateralists:  it was a multilateral policy based on a unilateral act.37 More immediately, The Next Step provided the rationale for an additional vote on disarmament within the GMWU, leading to the reversal of the earlier unilateralist resolution and representing a short-​term tactical victory for the Labour leadership. In making concessions to the unilateralists, however, The Next Step came across as a betrayal of principles by Gaitskell and the leadership and a muddled policy. As Gaitskell confided to Hetherington a year prior to its adoption, he thought a non-​nuclear club would lead to a ‘loss of influence’.38 Philip Noel-​ Baker, a leading expert on disarmament and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1959, regarded the modified statement as an aberration and a major step



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backwards from the one he had helped to draft in 1958. ‘I cannot believe for a moment that if the US and Russia retain their present stockpiles, China will give up her own’, he argued in a letter to Frank Beswick, the chair of the Labour Advisory Committee to CND. ‘On the contrary’, he claimed prophetically, ‘I’m sure that by 1965 at the very latest China will have a large nuclear armoury . . . If we’re now to go on the Wythenshawe line, I  am sure the results in the Party Conference and Blackpool will be quite disastrous.’39 It was because The Next Step seemed disingenuous and unworkable that Frank Cousins, leader of the largest union in Britain, the Transport and General Workers (TGWU), began to take more of a stand on disarmament. During a meeting at which the statement was negotiated by the PLP and Trades Union Congress, he made clear his concerns in his private notes: the ‘suggestions do not create a unilateral  . . .  situation, do weaken our position [and] do not in fact help the effort to establish a non-​nuclear club . . . in line with Labour Party statements’.40 The TGWU leader stressed his unwillingness to accept the policy in an exchange of letters with Gaitskell, arguing that ‘some countries are unlikely to be influenced in any way by the proposal’. ‘As this position must be well understood by [the] party leaders who are projecting the idea,’ he continued, ‘this makes the proposition appear to me to be a little unreal.’41 On this basis Cousins successfully persuaded members of his union to reject the official statement on disarmament at the TGWU conference in July and adopt the more unilateralist one he had drafted instead.42 In doing so, he effectively escalated the conflict within the Labour Party and ignited a recurring debate about who has the democratic mandate to make policy.

Intra-​party and parliamentary democracy The adoption of a more unilateralist position by the TGWU was game-​changing for the conflict over disarmament within the Labour Party and how it was reported by the news media. While the TGWU resolution was heavily defeated at the TUC in September, it opened up the prospect that unilateral disarmament could be forced on the PLP by the unions. Since the votes cast at the TUC were carried forward to the Annual Conference of the Labour Party, where they represented over half of the total vote, it was possible in theory for the unions to dictate policy to the PLP. In this way, the TGWU’s defiance of the PLP on the eve of the General Election foreshadowed a crisis of democratic legitimacy within the Labour Party. It brought two models of democracy into collision: the

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intra-​party democracy of the Labour Party itself and the parliamentary system in which it existed. In demonstrating the ultimate victory of the PLP over the extra-​parliamentary labour movement, an attempt will be made to highlight the strength of its relations with broadcasters and the press, as well as the weakness of those possessed by the unions. As the unions were unable to effectively connect with the wider public, their stand on nuclear disarmament became increasingly detached and isolated. The constitutional struggle over disarmament needs to be comprehended in the context of the history of the Labour Party, which originated as a trade union party. As the unions predated and heavily shaped the party, they guaranteed for themselves a powerful position in its constitution; one that included weighty representation in the Annual Conference and on the NEC. In the post-​war period, this representation was reinforced in a law passed by the Attlee government that changed the political levy by which trade unionists became members of the party. From being a payment to which they contracted in, the levy became one to which they contracted out, causing the proportion of contributors from trade unions to rise from 48.5 per cent in 1945 to 90.6 per cent in 1947.43 Since the number of votes at Conference was equivalent to the number of fee-​paying members, this gave trade unionists a preponderance in this forum of the party. Their power was wielded in particular through the ‘block vote’, whereby leaders of the unions could cast votes on behalf of their entire membership, who, in theory, had engaged with the relevant issues at union level. On most historic issues of defence and foreign policy, the unions and their leaders tended to be more conservative than Labour MPs; a trend consolidated in the Cold War through what was known as the Deakin, Williamson and Lawther axis. The influence of these men, leaders of three out of the ‘big six’ unions whose votes dominated the TUC and Conference, had for the most part ensured intra-​party consensus over defence and foreign policy in the post-​war period. When Cousins replaced Deakin and his immediate successor, Jock Tiffin, as leader of the TGWU in 1956, a historic shift occurred: the politics of the leader of the most powerful union in Britain were firmly to the left of most members of the PLP. After speaking in support of unilateralism in the 1956 and 1957 Conferences, the TGWU leader became a focal figure for the lobbying of the left. Canon Collins, a regular correspondent with Cousins, later explained how the ‘first aim [of CND] was to win a majority for our policy within the party . . . the second was to ensure that it returned to power’ at a General Election.44 As Cousins made his stand on disarmament, the process by which the PLP projected its image ahead of the General Election became increasingly vexed: an



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internal conflict transformed how the external image of the party was forged and manufactured. While Gaitskell did not believe that the TGWU would be able to ‘carry Labour with it’, he was aware that its contrary position ‘would hurt Labour’  in the same way that the bus strike had earlier in the year. ‘It would be used to show that Labour didn’t know what it wanted’, he informed Hetherington: ‘that its members were all at sixes and sevens’.45 The challenge of extra-​parliamentary politics for electoral credibility also presented Gaitskell with an opportunity to demonstrate his leadership credentials. Harold Macmillan even suggested that Gaitskell’s resistance to Cousins served to benefit the Labour leader electorally.46 By demonstrating public command over such challenging elements of the party, Gaitskell could showcase his strengths as a leader and enhance his vision of social democratic politics. The idea that Gaitskell harness the leadership in order to quell extra-​ parliamentary dissent and institute reforms was pushed by the liberal dailies and intensified after the General Election, the third loss in a row for Labour since 1951, each time at a widening margin.47 Hetherington and John Cole, an industrial correspondent, were particularly forthcoming about the need for change in their conversations with Gaitskell. After meeting with the Labour leader in early December, Cole found him ‘unwilling to face the question’, as he put it to Hetherington, of ‘whether the leadership –​or the part of it which thinks like Gaitskell –​ought not to make some serious attempt at educating opinion’ in the party.48 Hetherington, keen on brokering an agreement between Gaitskell and Jo Grimond, the leader of the Liberal Party, suggested shifting policymaking powers away from Conference and towards the PLP: the trade union block vote created a negative impression among the public.49 For his part, Gaitskell believed it suited the Guardian as a liberal newspaper to play on divisions between the PLP and the unions. In his view, however, the trade union leaders were a ‘much steadier element that the constituency section of the party’, despite ‘that megalomaniac Cousins’.50 When the Social Democratic Party (SDP) broke off from the Labour Party over twenty years later in March 1981, it was prompted by the CLPs rather than the unions: particularly left wing ones that had secured a motion for unilateral disarmament at the Annual Conference in January 1981.51 While defeat in the General Election was enough to focus Gaitskell on the urgent need to reform the party, this was reinforced through his correspondence with newspaper men on the left. His discussions with Hetherington and Cole coincided with and fed into a wider awakening of the revisionist right of the party at this time  –​one that pre-​empted the Campaign for Democratic Socialism, a distant forerunner of the SDP. It was in this context that the Labour

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leader submitted a list of revised aims for the party to the NEC at the beginning of 1960. The only one that raised disagreement related to Clause 4 of the party constitution; the cherished commitment to public ownership over private enterprise, not effectively revised until 1995 under Tony Blair. ‘Recognising that both public and private enterprise have a place in the economy’, stated the revised aim, the party ‘believes that further extension of common ownership should be decided from time to time in light of these objectives’.52 As all but one member of the NEC voted to include this as part of the constitution, it was carried forward to union conferences between March and July. By 1960 the debate over nuclear disarmament had become extremely value-​ laden both within the Labour Party and in the wider public. A  correlation developed between the position of a party member on defence and foreign policy and their position on intra-​party democracy and traditional socialism versus revisionism. These positions were expressed through extra-​ parliamentary practices that sought validation through Conference and professional party ones that sought it through the electorate and public opinion. The alignment of these positions exacerbated a war of communications not only within the Labour Party, but also between the news media and the unilateralists. Especially for the Guardian and the Observer, the issue of unilateral disarmament went from being a utopian ideal to a realistic one that had grave consequences for social democracy in Britain, as highlighted by the increasing hostility of their coverage in the run up to the 1960 Conference. ‘As the leader writers looked to the Labour Party conference [at Scarborough] in October’, claimed a journalist in the Observer, ‘they even spoke of the death and disintegration of the party.’53 Whatever power Gaitskell and the Labour leadership had to maintain control over the party was heavily undermined by external events. The decision taken by the Macmillan government to cancel Blue Streak, an independent missile system for British nuclear weapons, was particularly disastrous. It rendered obsolete the official policy of the Labour Party defence at a time when union conferences were about to get underway. The promise to renounce nuclear weapons for pledges of non-​proliferation was clearly meaningless if a Labour government were to have no means of delivering them. The breakdown of a summit on disarmament in Paris after the U2 incident in May made matters worse, lending credence to the perception of multilateral negotiations as futile. When the Labour leadership published a revised statement on disarmament towards the end of the conference season in late June, it represented a compromise that neither Gaitskell nor Cousins found acceptable. Foreign Policy and Defence, as it was called, argued



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that nuclear deterrence should be left to the United States through NATO, since Britain could no longer aspire to be an independent nuclear power.

Trade unions and political communications As trade unions converted to unilateralism in the spring and summer of 1960, the focus of news coverage extended beyond unilateral disarmament as a policy and towards its implications for the democratic process and the Labour Party. The power of the unions to effectively force a policy on the PLP through Conference put them under an increasing degree of scrutiny. When the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) carried a unilateralist motion in May 1960, for example, the decision was described on BBC radio as a ‘slap in the face’ to the PLP: ‘the overwhelming majority of Labour MPs are clearly opposed to unilateralism’.54 The unions were not only ill-​equipped to negotiate the rising tide of public exposure, it will be argued, but also shared with the free market press in particular a mutual antagonism that was deeply engrained and detrimental to their cause. The influence of the unions within the Labour Party was therefore disproportionate to their influence beyond it, where they struggled to exploit the forms of mass communication that governed popular opinion. If relations between unions and the press were characterized by an inherent rivalry, then this can be explained by the political economies on which they were based: the controlled market socialism of the unions and the free market liberalism of the press was never going to make for a happy marriage. As a result, it was only logical that the newspapers with which unions possessed the strongest affinities were ones that had either found routes around or struggled to survive in the free market system that dominated the industry. This included the Daily Herald, which before being taken into ownership by the Labour Party had been established as a strike sheet by the London Society of Compositors in 1911.55 In order to counteract the intrinsic hostility of the ‘free’ press, then, the unions developed a repertoire of tactics. Among the most aggressive of these was the industrial right of reply, whereby workers spoiled or refused to produce anti-​ union news, as occurred at the Daily Mail in an unofficial action that sparked the General Strike of 1926.56 The outbreak of a strike in the printing industry in 1959, the same time as the anti-​nuclear movement was gathering momentum, did stoke speculation that the printers might abuse their position to further their own political interests. The National Society of Operative Printers and Assistants (NATSOPA),

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Figure  5.1  The Printer’s Strike and the Peace Movement. © David E.  Richardson, Marx Memorial Library.

which directed its strike against the anti-​union employment practices of the newspaper and television company, D. C. Thomson, had also established the Printer’s Peace Movement two years earlier (Figure 5.1).57 Its leader, Richard W.  Briginshaw, had a history of involvement in peace activism and politics, including in the Printing and Allied Trades Anti-​Fascist Movement in the mid-​to-​late 1930s.58 It was because of the alleged power of the unions over the press that Edward Martell established the Free Press Society, an antecedent to the Freedom Group, along with a non-​unionized newspaper entitled the New Daily. The idea that NATSOPA and unionized workers were enemies of press freedom, encouraged by Martell and the far right, did in fact gain currency in sections of the mass media (Figure 5.2).59 A representative of one of Martell’s organizations even appeared on ITN, where he warned ‘that the right to continue to print must be maintained, otherwise the power of the printed word is going to pass into the hands of the printers’ leaders, who will themselves use it for their own ends’.60



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Figure  5.2  Richard Briginshaw as ‘The Reluctant Executioner’ of national dailies. © Associated Newspapers Ltd.

The negative portrayal of unions in the news media was not simply a product of deep-​seated economic tensions; ‘blue collar’ unions in particular had been slow to adapt to the burgeoning demands of news in the post-​war period. According to ethnographic research carried out by the Glasgow University Media Group in the mid-​1970s, the media and public relations of these unions was characterized by ‘low input’ and an absence of ‘professional advice on the planning of coverage or personal presentation’. They ‘expected to be approached by the media rather than to initiate contact themselves’ and as a consequence were often subjected to ‘second-​hand and garbled’ coverage.61 In the words of Geoffrey Goodman, it was habitual for union officials to ‘talk about what has happened’ rather than set the agenda.62 During the bus strike of 1959, members of the TGWU widely believed that they were the victims of unrepresentative coverage, with one busman deriding ‘the architects of villainy in the national press, twisting the story of our deliberations and decisions’. A  motion for an ‘up-​to-​date’ public relations department was nonetheless rejected at the biennial conference of 1959, despite the busman’s remark that other organizations less than half the size possessed one.63 The motion regarded such a facility as vital ‘if our side of the story is to have any impact on the general public, and indeed, on our own membership’.64 The failure of blue collar unions to be more proactive about news management

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arguably cemented their resentment towards the press, as well as their sense of public isolation.65 At the AEU Conference in May, it was even suggested that journalists be refused entry. The plea ‘we know these chaps have a job to do’ was met with the response ‘so has the hangman’.66 The contradiction between unions as a closed community and the news media as a forum for public exposure was revealed in dramatic form at the TUC in Douglas, where negative news coverage was incidentally an item for discussion.67 When the TUC voted both ways on disarmament, for and against the retention of nuclear weapons by Britain, the news media expressed shock and ridicule: the vote resonated with all their prejudices about the unsuitability of unions as agents of the democratic process and policymaking. In reference to the block votes to be carried forward to the Annual Conference at Scarborough, the cartoonist David Low depicted a ‘TUC flying millstone’ with Hugh Gaitskell as its reluctant pilot in the Guardian. Cousins, whose non-​nuclear resolution at Douglas defeated the official one, was portrayed as responsible for the crisis. In another cartoon in the Guardian entitled ‘Cousins’ Reply to the Atom Age’, Low depicted the TGWU leader as presenting Gaitskell with a medieval suit of armour with legs which pointed in opposite directions (Figures 5.3 and 5.4].68

Figure 5.3  Hugh Gaitskell and the ‘TUC flying millstone’. © David Low, Associated Newspapers Ltd.



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Figure  5.4  Frank Cousins’s ‘Reply to the Atom Age’. © David Low, Associated Newspapers Ltd.

The contradictory position on disarmament had been brought about not so much by Cousins, however, as by Bill Carron, the right wing leader of the AEU.69 In an attempt to save Gaitskell and the General Council from defeat, Carron allowed his delegates to vote for both the TGWU and official resolutions on the grounds that they were reconcilable. This manoeuvring, behind-​the-​scenes and calculated to manipulate the political machinery, was exactly the sort most journalists professed to despise: a symptom of everything that was wrong with the intervention of trade unions in policymaking. When it led to outcomes that coincided with the interests of the PLP, however, the news media tended to overlook it, as occurred when Deakin, Williamson and Lawther regularly used the block vote against the CLPs. In this case, the action of the AEU leader was barely reported. Only left wing union leaders, it seemed, could be capable of such gross violations of democratic practice.

Frank Cousins Following the rejection of the official policy on defence by the TGWU in July 1959, much of the news coverage of the conflict within the Labour Party

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centred on the leadership and personality of Frank Cousins: his motivations, mandate and technical comprehension of the issues. As a result, public perceptions of unilateralism as a policy became increasingly tied to the performance and representation of the TGWU leader in the news media. If Cousins struggled to develop a strong position beyond the trade union movement ahead of the Annual Conference in October 1960, then this was not necessarily because there was insufficient enthusiasm for unilateralism among the public: 33 per cent expressed support for such a policy in the wake of the Blue Streak crisis.70 On the contrary, the inability of Cousins to harness anti-​nuclear opinion, combined with the animosity of the news media, served to further isolate the unions and create an opening for Gaitskell to reassert his leadership. When Cousins rejected the official policy on defence in favour of his own in July 1959, he caused outrage in the Labour Party and news media and fuelled speculation about his intentions. In the words of Geoffrey Goodman, the TGWU leader was ‘bombarded by a single theme of questioning. Was he seeking to remove Gaitskell from the leadership of the Labour Party? Was the campaign against the bomb simply a pretext to “get at” Gaitskell and his style of leadership? Was it a personal vendetta?’71 Given that the actions of Cousins had severe implications for Gaitskell and the Labour Party, the idea that he was simply taking a moral stand on the most important issue of his time was widely dismissed. It had to be a subterfuge; an opportunity to attack Gaitskell, for whom his ‘dislike’ was ‘obsessional’, according to John Cole.72 As Gaitskell described to Hetherington, ‘[T]‌he wish for power was the key to Cousins’ action.’ He regarded the TGWU leader ‘a demagogue and ambitious’ who ‘was not really concerned about the details of policy or capable of thinking out any complex issues on the subject for himself ’.73 Quite often the founding assumption of press coverage on Cousins and unilateralism was that the TGWU leader was disingenuous and harboured ulterior motives. For the Guardian and the Observer, proponents of a more proactive policy on disarmament from the Labour Party, the actions of Cousins were seen as particularly reckless. In correspondence with Hetherington, Cole described how ‘Mr Cousins, I’m afraid, brings out my didactic strain. He really is the last word, both in regards to press relations and his policies’. According to Cole, Cousins had deliberately misled him about his position on disarmament. ‘I’ve searched my memory to see how I could have misunderstood him . . . He said he favoured a progressive line and that the Guardian’s was a progressive line.’ In a comment that reiterated the alignment of the Guardian with Gaitskell,



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Cole claimed that the Labour leader ‘has summed him up very shrewdly . . . He got a very rough press during the bus strike, has been completely forgotten as a public figure for most of the year, and now has a chance to make a noise again’.74 Ivan Yates, a lead writer for the Observer and founding member of the pro-​revisionist CDS, was also furious with Cousins. ‘Does he know what he’s doing? Is he determined to wreck the Labour Party?’, he asked in the guise of the influential gossip columnist Pendennis, a role usually fulfilled by Antony Sampson.75 The enmity that built up towards Cousins in sections of the press also manifested itself in intrusions into his privacy. As later described in a Sunday Times supplement, Cousins’s wariness of the press stemmed ‘from the days when they poked around his Oxford hotel during the busmen’s strike looking for evidence of lavish living’.76 The TGWU leader’s son, an employee at the Atomic Energy Authority, was forced to resign from his position, despite assurances that he was not working on the manufacture of nuclear weapons. Such was the disregard for Cousins’s family life that photographers even broke into his son’s apartment to search for evidence relating to his work.77 This sort of media treatment, illegal as well as unethical, seemed to be reserved for popular bogeymen and villains; elected politicians appeared for the most part exempt, at least until the Profumo Affair. While Gaitskell was widely known to be having an affair with Ann Fleming, wife of Ian, creator of the James Bond series, it was never acted on or publicized in the press. As it happened, it was through Mrs Fleming’s friendship with Lord Beaverbrook that Gaitskell was able to enlist the support of the Daily Express.78 The treatment of Cousins and Gaitskell as public figures was therefore markedly unequal. As a trade union leader of the left, Cousins demanded contempt and ridicule; as a leading politician of the right, Gaitskell demanded deference and respect.79 Beyond a basic dislike and distrust of Cousins, most journalists simply did not believe he should possess the democratic right to intervene in such an important area of policy. His ability to wield almost a sixth of the vote at Conference was often portrayed as an abuse of power, despite a widespread willingness to ignore this system when it worked in favour of the PLP. The occurrence of union voting in blocks, whereby the votes of an entire membership were decided in one direction or another, served to concentrate the focus on democratic inconsistencies and the role of union leaders in news coverage. It was commonplace, for example, for journalists to highlight dissent towards Cousins within his union, even though his policy on disarmament passed by ‘overwhelming’ majorities at both the 1959 and 1961 TGWU conferences.80 In

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this way, the press was able to frame unilateralism as a policy that emanated from a recalcitrant leader rather than the rank-​and-​file. By imposing their own interpretation of the Labour Party’s constitution, they determined what and who possessed a democratic entitlement. As Cousins had made his stand on the eve of a General Election, he had already been condemned as a usurper and a wrecker. Among the headlines about him were ‘Cousins Loses the Election’, ‘Cousins Goes Wrong’ and ‘Is Cousins a Danger to Britain?’81 The emergence of an anti-​Cousins climate in the news media does not excuse his shortcomings in communicating beyond the trade union movement. The TGWU leader failed to tap into the wave of enthusiasm for unilateralism in the spring of 1960. His relationship with CND, for example, remained informal and restricted to occasional appearances, such as his speech at the final rally of the Aldermaston march in 1960. Neither did he develop a working relationship with VFS, which had links with up to sixty Labour MPs in favour of unilateralism and opposed Gaitskell, whom they had demanded to resign in June 1960. According to Canon Collins, Cousins believed that ‘he would have a better chance of winning his union from behind the scenes’.82 A formal association with organizations such as CND and VFS may have jeopardized Cousin’s credibility within the TGWU, but his defiance of Gaitskell had transformed the nature of his position. Whether he liked it or not, his role as a public figure and leader within the Labour Party had expanded, along with the duties and responsibilities that it entailed. His neglect of public opinion and relations with the left were therefore a major weakness in the drive for unilateralism within the Labour Party. It was the technical as well as democratic basis on which Cousins intervened that attracted criticism from the news media. The influence of the unions on policymaking through Conference and the NEC was a source of recurring irritation for a section of the press. In Hetherington’s view, ‘[T]‌here were times when trade union leaders gave the impression of having reached policy decisions without any informed or dispassionate analysis of the facts.’83 When the GMWU temporarily converted to unilateralism in 1959, one Labour MP was scathing about the concept of membership democracy: ‘What do lavatory attendants know about nuclear weapons?’, he scoffed.84 The antipathy of liberal newspapers towards the role of unions in policymaking served to inform their coverage of the rival resolutions on defence ahead of Scarborough. Whereas the TGWU resolution was derided by the Guardian and the Observer as ‘no more than a declaration of aims and ideals’, that of the Labour Party was lauded as ‘exceptionally intelligent’ and ‘a precise statement of policy’.85 This overstated



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the credibility of the official statement and misrepresented the one drafted by Cousins. On the one hand, the official statement was highly unrealistic in its claim that a non-​nuclear Britain could veto the first-​use of nuclear weapons by the United States through NATO. On the other, the TGWU resolution was designed as a corrective, not a fully worked out policy. In failing to expand on the TGWU resolution, however, Cousins once again neglected the public duties and responsibilities that his opposition to the Labour leadership demanded. If arguments for unilateralism were to be effective, then the implications of such a policy had to be clarified rather than sidestepped. It was not enough to simply object to the official policy on defence; Cousins needed to link his rejection of nuclear weapons with a world role for Britain, much as the intellectuals of CND and the New Left had done with their romanticized ideas about Britain providing a moral lead. These ideas may have been flawed, but they at least contested the popular discourses of power and prestige in which debates about peace and disarmament in Britain took place. The abandonment of Blue Streak made Cousins’s reluctance to offer a full explanation of his position seem even more peculiar, since a non-​nuclear policy for Britain had become dependent not so much on renouncing weapons as withdrawal from NATO and neutralism:  a step not all unilateralists were willing to take. By refusing to articulate his vision of a non-​nuclear Britain, Cousins left himself open to attack. In the run up to the Annual Conference in Scarborough, his position was widely portrayed as pacifist or pro-​Communist and one that would leave Britain defenceless. An editorial in the Daily Mirror even threatened to cut ties with the Labour Party in the event of a triumph for Cousins:  the newspaper ‘will never support a party which does not believe in defending Britain’.86 The sale of the Daily Herald to the Mirror Group enhanced its already substantial influence among Labour voters. ‘Now that the Herald has achieved more independence’, claimed the Mirror, ‘it applauds the Gaitskell line’, even though it was the Gaitskellites who had sought to determine its coverage on disarmament.87 For the Guardian, Cousins was characterized not so much as Vladimir Lenin or George Lansbury, the pacifist leader of the Labour Party between 1932 and 1935, as the interwar isolationist Senator Robert Taft.88 His position amounted to ‘unavowed pacifism’: ‘the British people . . . believe in the right to defend themselves and their liberty from oppression’.89 By the Annual Conference in October, the TGWU leader and the non-​nuclear policy for which he fought had been wilfully demonized and misrepresented: he had lost almost complete control over his image in the press.

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Scarborough: Gaitskell versus Cousins It was through Gaitskell and Cousins that the spectacle of the Scarborough Conference was filtered and relayed on radio and television and in the press. The complex arguments that surrounded disarmament and the future of the Labour Party were reduced to a titanic clash between two personalities (Figure 5.5). In

Figure 5.5  Gaitskell versus Cousins. © Associated Newspapers Ltd.



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the words of ‘Cassandra’, a columnist for the Daily Mirror, the Conference was ‘the first . . . I have ever attended that needs the talents of a sports writer at the ringside. It has been verbal fisticuffs of the finest order’.90 The use of bellicose imagery to frame the Conference was particularly conducive to the reductive medium of television. A  newscaster on ITN claimed it had ‘two protagonists’ and consisted of ‘Mr Cousins’ fighting attack and Mr Gaitskell’s fighting reply’.91 As Raymond Williams later acknowledged, the danger with such coverage was that it pre-​empted ‘a response to the news before it [was] given or in the course of giving it’.92 It meant that debates over disarmament, Clause 4 and policymaking were seen through the prejudicial lenses of a personality contest:  one that Gaitskell was bound to win given the popular condemnations of Cousins. In a media climate that personalized the conflict in the Labour Party through Gaitskell and Cousins, it was difficult for the two men to present their cases in a constructive manner. Their every word was dragged into a news discourse that amplified their mutual animosity and consolidated the opposing factions they supposedly represented. Gaitskell even found it necessary to write to Hugh Greene and ask ‘whether it would be possible for the BBC . . . to be more precise and accurate about the defence controversy. It really is misleading to describe the issue as either “for or against the H-​bomb” or “for Gaitskell or for Cousins” ’.93 In a similar manner, Cousins denounced the ‘atmosphere that [had] been created by the press at [the TUC] in Douglas’. ‘We do not regard colleagues who have a different opinion to our own as bloodthirsty warmongers’, he argued. ‘Nor do we regard ourselves as pacifist or communist stooges.’94 The alignment of unilateralists, socialists and supporters of Conference on one side and multilateralists, revisionists and supporters of the PLP on the other seemed to lend itself to expression through simplistic binaries:  ones personified by Gaitskell and Cousins. So intractable was the gulf within the Labour Party that the news media found navigating around it increasingly troubling. As Robert Fraser claimed in an appraisal of Free Speech, it had become remarkably difficult for the programme editor Edgar Lustgarten to ‘secure a defensible composition for the [Labour-​ leaning] side of the panel’. After compiling a list of potential speakers from the Labour Party, Lustgarten was concerned that ‘through Mr Gaitskell’s eyes . . . [it] would count as 11 anti-​Gaitskellites out of 14’. If he alternated between one pro-​ Gaitskell and one anti-​Gaitskell figure, however, it would appear ‘rather absurd’ and ‘he would also be accused of focusing on and advertising the differences in the Labour Party’. An approach in which he ‘alternates two rebels with two loyalists’ would also be problematic, since Gaitskell could argue that this did

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not reflect ‘relative strength’. Neither would a leadership contest within the PLP clarify matters, according to Fraser: it will still be ‘held open to argument which balance –​Conference or PLP –​should be regarded’ as supreme.95 As has already been demonstrated, however, the news media deferred to the PLP rather than Conference as an instrument of democracy, promoting multilateralism over unilateralism and revisionism over traditional socialism in the process. Above all, they backed Gaitskell and maligned Cousins, with ‘newspapers as various as the Daily Mirror and the Observer devoting entire pages to influence their readers against unilateralism’, in the words of CND Bulletin.96 By the time of the debate over disarmament at Scarborough, a climate of opinion had been established that was far more favourable to Gaitskell. Between April and September, support for continuing to make nuclear weapons rose from 24 to 36 per cent, while support for giving them up decreased from 33 to 21 per cent.97 What made Gaitskell more effective in the debate, however, was his comprehension of how to utilize this public opinion and bring it to bear on the self-​enclosed forum of Conference. His speech indicated that he understood the significance of the debate went beyond the casting of intra-​party votes; it had been built up by the news media as an iconic moment in the history of the Labour Party and its place in modern democracy. In this respect, his speech was calculated to appeal to the wider public as much as the membership. While he must have known a reference to ‘unilateralists, pacifists and fellow-​travellers’ would cause uproar from the floor, for example, he also must have known it would resonate with news coverage and the popular perceptions it had served to reinforce. In the closing section of his speech, the Labour leader addressed the relationship between the wider public and the membership head on. As it was ultimately the former to which Labour MPs were beholden, it had to take precedence. ‘I do not believe that Labour MPs are prepared to act as time servers [to the unions]’, he argued in a passage that has since become legendary, ‘they are men of conscience and honour . . . There are some of us who will fight, fight and fight again to save the party we love’.98 As an example of mediated performance, Gaitskell’s speech completely dwarfed Cousin’s contribution. By contrast, the TGWU leader came across as an insular figure whose prominence in the trade union movement belied a far more modest stature in the greater pantheon of public opinion. Whereas Gaitskell had sought to connect his position on unilateralism with wider opinion and policy positions, Cousins once again seemed evasive and neglectful of his duties and responsibilities beyond Conference. In spite of ongoing calls for Cousins to answer whether a non-​nuclear defence policy entailed a withdrawal from NATO,



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for example, the best he could muster was ‘if the question is posed to me as simply saying, am I prepared to go on remaining in an organisation over which I have no control, but which can destroy us instantly, my answer is Yes, if the choice is that. But it is not that’.99 In a stronger unilateralist resolution proposed by a delegation from the AEU, the wording avoided the subject of NATO altogether. As Gaitskell argued in his speech, the selection of this resolution ahead of sixty others that openly demanded a withdrawal from NATO demonstrated that the unilateralist case was ultimately tactical: arguments and leadership were secondary.100 When the TGWU and AEU resolutions were adopted by Conference at margins less than anticipated, then, the effect was underwhelming. The success of the unilateralists appeared more an aberration than a triumph of democracy or leadership; the product of block votes carried forward from the TUC. The CLPs, which cast their votes at Conference in secret and usually represent a strong indicator of rank-​and-​file opinion, were later revealed to have voted strongly in favour of the official resolution on defence:  521 for and 260 against to cite one survey.101 According to Goodman, who sampled opinion from the floor for the Daily Herald, the faltering performance of Cousins, especially next to the commanding one of Gaitskell, was pivotal in prompting defections from the TGWU resolution.102 Such was the confidence of Gaitskell in his leadership that he appeared on BBC television the evening of the debate and effectively rejected the TGWU and AEU resolutions. His televised appeal ‘to those who, like myself, cannot accept the decision  . . .  in personal terms’ reflected his assessment of opinion both inside and beyond the party.103 On the one hand, he understood that his position within the party was far more secure than it had seemed prior to Scarborough: resolutions on party unity, the role of Conference and the revised aim on Clause 4 had all worked out in his favour.104 On the other hand, he also understood that the news media had no interest in holding him to account for non-​nuclear resolutions that were not considered electable or representative of wider opinion – an opinion that the press in particular had been instrumental in shaping against Cousins, trade unions and unilateralism as a whole.

After Scarborough: controlling the machine Whether Gaitskell was willing to accept them or not, the adoption of non-​ nuclear resolutions at Scarborough caused a crisis of legitimacy within the Labour Party. It entitled unilateralists to claim that they were the rightful heirs to the party machine, since after Scarborough they could appeal to the authority

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of Conference just as multilateralists appealed to that of the electorate. The waging of this crisis not only intensified the war over political communications and machinery within the party, it also extended it. After Scarborough, the unilateralists took their fight to the heartland of the revisionist right, targeting the key apparatus of the party machine. The multilateralists, energized by the performance of Gaitskell, took theirs to the traditional heartland of the extra-​ parliamentary left, targeting the rank-​and-​file in the CLPs and trade union branches through the Campaign for Democratic Socialism. The most important arena for control over the party was the leadership, which was traditionally contested between the end of Conference in October and the opening of Parliament in November. Given Gaitskell’s defiance of Conference, it was inevitable that he would be challenged. Anthony Greenwood, a unilateralist who commanded the support of up to fifty MPs, and Harold Wilson, a multilateralist who regarded Gaitskell’s conduct as divisive, both submitted their candidacies. Since Wilson was able to draw on support not only from unilateralist MPs, but also from MPs who were simply disenchanted with Gaitskell, Greenwood agreed to step aside. If Wilson planned to appeal to the ‘floating centre’ of the PLP, however, he was misguided. In the aftermath of Scarborough, the centre had for the most part polarized, largely in the direction of Gaitskell, who emerged as victor of the contest by 166 votes to 81. Gaitskell was also effective in preventing Wilson from developing and taking ownership of a narrative of party unity. As Hetherington described, for example, the Labour leader had taken issue with ‘John Cole’s reporting from Scarborough’, which he regarded ‘as very biased and unfair’. He thought Cole was ‘too close to [Richard] Crossman and Wilson’, both of whom were seeking to present themselves as compromise figures in party politics.105 As the PLP expressed its support for Gaitskell by reinstating him as leader and voting in a Shadow Cabinet that consisted of ten out of twelve of his allies, the unilateralists were forced to reconsider their tactics. The cause for optimism that the Scarborough Conference had provided swiftly evaporated as they realized the non-​nuclear resolutions could be meaningless:  VFS even felt it necessary to establish a ‘Scarborough Campaign Committee’ in order to combat the setting in of disillusionment among the rank-​and-​file.106 Shortly after Gaitskell’s re-​election, party activists from Cambridge also formed the ‘Conference Must Decide’ or ‘Unity’ group, which sought to pressurize Gaitskell through left wing members of the NEC. Richard Fletcher, one of its founders, described how its membership was not entirely unilateralist. The majority were more concerned ‘at the attempt to overthrow the constitution of the party’. They objected ‘to the



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party machinery being used by people opposed to the Scarborough decision. We object to these people being afforded special facilities’.107 On the back of his Scarborough speech and victory over Wilson, Gaitskell was able to exercise his leadership more aggressively and assertively, just as liberal newspapers and party revisionists had been demanding since the General Election. Only a day after the Scarborough Conference, Wayland Young wrote in the Guardian that the chief aim of the Labour leader over the next year had to be to ‘educate, educate, educate’ the party membership.108 Gaitskell, sensing that ‘a great turning against the neutralist and pacifist position was taking place’, acted ruthlessly. After agreeing to a meeting between the NEC, PLP and General Council, proposed by the Executive and focused on disarmament, he outmanoeuvred the unilateralists and ensured that the event was populated with a majority of representatives in his favour. If these machinations seemed harmful to party unity, then Gaitskell contained them by denying unilateralists access to official platforms.109 For a unilateralist such as Kingsley Martin, Gaitskell’s ‘fight, fight and fight again’ amounted to ‘the opening of a McCarthy-​style campaign to discredit his opponents’. In relation to a speech by Gaitskell in November, Martin described how unilateralists were refused the right to answer from the platform and how the press was invited to hear Gaitskell but not the ensuing discussion.110 Unlike in previous formulations of defence policy, where Gaitskell made concessions to unilateralists, in the meeting among representatives of the leadership on 24 January he made none at all, instead sticking to the policy he and his supporters preferred. Policy for Peace, as it was known, stressed the commitment of the Labour Party to defending Britain, to membership of NATO and to disarmament through multilateral agreement. The meeting recommended that the leadership endorse the policy and reject a compromise amendment proposed by Crossman and Walter Padley, leader of the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers, along with a non-​nuclear one proposed by Cousins. The endorsement of the policy by the NEC, the General Council and the PLP by the end of February set the stage for Gaitskell and his supporters to make their case on the basis of conviction rather than compromise. They were now able to take their fight to the unions in the run up to conference season.

CDS: the counter-​revolution It was through informal as well as formal channels that Gaitskell and his supporters sought to exercise control. The role of anti-​ unilateralist and

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pro-​ Gaitskell campaigns was instrumental to this end, as they operated across the federal layers of the party and were able to engage with opinion both in and beyond it with greater freedom. The Campaign for Democratic Socialism, which had roots in the General Election defeat, was particularly influential in harnessing the momentum that had been created by Gaitskell and challenging the left in the forms of politics in which it excelled: grassroots canvassing and lobbying. As described by one historian, the advent of CDS was unprecedented: ‘For the first time in Labour Party history, moderates and rightists organised.’111 In order for Gaitskell and his supporters to triumph in their communications war with the left and cast a forward-​facing image of the party, they needed to engage the rank-​and-​file and ensure that the non-​nuclear resolutions adopted at Scarborough were overturned at the next Conference. As long as these resolutions stood, the legitimacy of Gaitskell and his supporters was always going to be under threat. The launch of CDS after Scarborough was carefully crafted to appeal to both rank-​and-​file members of the Labour Party and the news media. Its founders, including four MPs and nine party members, all with backgrounds in media and politics, were able to imbue it with the image of a movement from the grassroots, despite their own lofty statuses.112 This artificial construction of grassroots authenticity, often described as ‘astroturfing’, can be seen in both the design and message of the organization. Its inaugural manifesto, for example, was produced on a duplicating machine in order to make it seem rugged and spontaneous. Its message built on Gaitskell’s speech at Scarborough, which provided a powerful myth for CDS to exploit. The real rank-​and-​file opinion, claimed the manifesto, had been hijacked by outside organizations such as CND: ‘[A]‌ll of us working in constituencies were conscious that the voices being raised were not rank-​and-​file voices. They were the voices of a loud, persistent and organised minority . . . There are people in the constituencies who take our view but thought they stood alone.’113 Through CDS, a small coterie of political and media elites based in Oxford and London had established an organization that served as champion of the underdog. The challenge that CDS posed and the image it projected were only tenable through tactical organization that skilfully negotiated the private and public spheres of party politics. As Gaitskell and the PLP would have been brought into disrepute by associating with the organization, no evidence of relations between the Labour leader and CDS exists and the identities of the four MPs, Anthony Crosland, Patrick Gordon Walker, Douglas Jay and Roy Jenkins, remained a secret at the time. Instead, it is almost certain that these MPs, members of the



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so-​called Hampstead set, informed Gaitskell of the progress of the Campaign in the privacy of his home in London. Ivan Yates, who was able to relay the message of CDS as lead writer for the Observer and radio broadcaster for the BBC, also operated behind the scenes. When CDS did make public interventions, they were incredibly effective. David Hennessy, a Conservative peer involved in television, later described how ‘the care taken in making approaches to the press became one of the features of the Campaign. Press lists were prepared, and efforts made to single out and influence [sympathetic] journalists’.114 As a result of favourable coverage, CDS attracted a stream of donations and established a permanently staffed office in London only a month after its first press conference on 18 October. In order to compete with the left in the CLPs and trade unions, CDS also forged a web of communications networks. It identified and enlisted the support of key individuals, distributing 750 copies of its manifesto among Labour MPs and potential allies. Such was the extent of its networking that the Campaign comprised over 3,000 members by the end of its first six months, which included approximately 200 Parliamentary candidates, 1,000 constituency members and 1,000 trade unionists.115 The chairman of CDS, Bill Rodgers, also launched Campaign, a monthly bulletin that he based on Tribune. In its first issue, he attempted to expose the negative implications of unilateralism for collective security:  ‘Does CND want western unilateral disarmament or just British disarmament?’, he asked.116 The revisionist right were communicating their message at grassroots with a forcefulness more often associated with the left, as well as an efficiency that arguably surpassed it. The impact of CDS on rank-​and-​file opinion, nonetheless, has been disputed and remains difficult to assess. While the organization focused its early activities on the CLPs, for example, the CLP vote for the official policy on disarmament dropped at the Annual Conference in Blackpool in October.117 The interference of the Campaign in hostile CLPs and unions tended to be counterproductive, as was demonstrated when it lobbied delegates of the TGWU at its biennial conference.118 When CDS coordinated with existing initiatives for multilateralism in the unions, however, its role was invaluable. In tandem with Bill Carron and Walter Padley, the latter of whom abandoned his compromise position in June, CDS was highly influential in reconverting the AEU and USDAW to multilateralism. Occasionally the organization left the infiltration of unions to better-​placed lobbyists. James Callaghan MP, for example, won over the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR) by secretly arranging for pro-​Gaitskell MPs to meet with NUR delegates from their area. As Hetherington put it, he was trying ‘to drive a wedge between those at Scarborough who had been pro-​unilateralist and pro-​NATO’.119

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The full significance of CDS cannot be comprehended without a consideration of how its machinations were presented to and reported by the news media. Its campaign activities secured a favourable press in the Guardian and the Observer in particular, newspapers that had long since been waging ‘for a major change in the democratic and socialist basis of the [labour] movement’, as Harold Wilson alleged during the leadership contest.120 The extent to which broadcasters and the press took up and relayed the message of CDS was remarkable. When the major unions converted to the official policy on disarmament in the summer, for example, the Daily Herald argued that ‘quiet men who hate getting up to make a speech, men who had their doubts about the way the Labour Party was going but said nothing or stayed away –​these are the men who have won the bitter struggle for control of the party’.121 At the Annual Conference at Blackpool in October, the BBC concluded its coverage by focusing on an ‘ordinary party member’ standing up because ‘no-​one was willing to do so’.122 The multilateralists not only succeeded in reversing the non-nuclear resolutions that had been adopted at Scarborough. They also refashioned the mediated narrative of the Labour Party as a whole: one in which the revisionists were presented as the true practitioners of democratic politics. The failure of CND to convert the Labour Party to unilateralism precipitated an exodus of its moderate supporters and enhanced the influence of radical organizations, especially at local level. As a member of Marylebone CND described in November 1962, the local branch had been taken over by a Communist-​ controlled committee that ‘disregarded the National CND constitution  . . .  as [was] true in many places. At the same time it . . . marginalises legitimate campaigners, quashes news of their needs and activities, and co-​operates with a politically aligned peace organization, the British Peace Council’.123 By highlighting the role of the CPGB, Gaitskell was able to discredit unilateralists from the Labour Party altogether. When a televised speech by the Labour leader was interrupted by hecklers during a May Day rally in Glasgow, for example, the secretary of Scottish Youth CND wrote to him to apologize and explain:  ‘If you ever wish’, he claimed, ‘you may know in every detail  . . .  how the Communist Party manipulated today’s events.’ Gaitskell claimed that such information would be of ‘real service’: ‘[I]‌t is important that CND supporters should realise how they have been duped . . . by Communist infiltrators.’124 After Blackpool, the role of the anti-​nuclear movement in British politics was transformed, shifting away from the Labour Party and building on the forms of extra-​parliamentary protest that had been pioneered by DAC and C100.



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The Socialist Campaign for Multilateral Disarmament In contrast to CDS, whose interest in nuclear disarmament was for the most part tactical and tied to the advancement of a revisionist agenda, the Socialist Campaign for Multilateral Disarmament was far more engaged with the ethics and technicalities of the issue. The establishment of the organization after the Scarborough Conference was designed not only to counteract unilateralists and ‘throw over outside pressure groups that seek to wreck the Party’, but also to make sure that multilateralism was taken more seriously by Gaitskell and the PLP.125 ‘Whatever the reason’, claimed its chairman, Philip Noel-​Baker, in January 1961, ‘I’ve never been able to make Hugh Gaitskell take a real interest in disarmament.’ Noel-​Baker, an active member of the United Nations Association, cited an example of how the issue had been neglected in the summer of 1960, when he urged that ‘there should be a series of UN debates’ in Parliament. ‘The only one agreed to’, he explained, ‘was disarmament: they allocated half-​a-​day, without a vote . . . and when the Order of Business allowed Private Members to raise anything else they desired before disarmament came on we were left with half an hour’.126 For Noel-​Baker, a more concerted promotion of multilateralism would serve to tap into public opinion and potentially pave the way for a Labour government to play a leading role on the international stage. As SCMD was preoccupied first of all with reversing the non-​ nuclear resolutions adopted at Scarborough, it was not until after Blackpool that it took a more proactive approach to multilateralism. In 1962, Noel-​Baker met with a group of anonymous businessmen to suggest ‘a large-​scale campaign of advertisements in the press, on television, [and] by posters’, as he described to the Archbishop of Canterbury: they had ‘spoken of raising £500,000’.127 The businessmen, which may have included the financier Isidore Jack Lyons, began by sponsoring a pilot campaign under the supervision of Margaret Gardiner, an artist and former partner of J. D. Bernal, the Communist scientist and president of the World Peace Council.128 Between September and December 1962, Gardiner aimed to mobilize ‘popular support for general and total disarmament’ in Nottingham by using ‘persuasive techniques . . . involved in selling motor cars and cereals’.129 She took out half and quarter page advertisements in the evening newspapers, deployed posters in fifty-​five sites around the city and organized talks in market squares.130 Nottingham CND assisted by canvassing, sending ‘wedding cards’ to engaged couples and printing anti-​nuclear messages on milk bottle tops. The advertisements themselves were designed and produced by

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professionals: ‘copywriters, artists, media and production men, photographers and public relations consultants’.131 In seeking to incite an emotional response to the prospect of nuclear fallout and war, the techniques employed in the campaign were not dissimilar to those of CND. The message of the adverts, which highlighted the threat of nuclear weapons to everyday life, particularly through depictions of a mother and her child, were intended to distance the campaign from the more experimental propaganda that had become associated with banning the bomb. By 1962, however, the image of the threatened mother and her child was losing its novelty. If anything, the repackaging of this image in a glossier and consumer-​ based style made it less effective than the early propaganda of NCANWT and CND. Whereas the adverts of SCMD projected this image to ordinary citizens in the visual language to which they were accustomed –​that of affluence and professional advertising –​those of CND rejected it, often sticking to stark black and white sketches that must have seemed even more shocking. The purpose of the Nottingham campaign was not only to stimulate anti-​nuclear opinion, but also to direct it towards multilateral as opposed to unilateral disarmament. In this respect, each of the three months of the campaign were arranged to correspond with a stage of advertising:  what Gardiner described as awareness of the danger, opinion forming and action required.132 In practice, the distinction between multilateral and unilateral disarmament did not mean much to ordinary citizens and was more a reflection of the arguments that had occurred within the Labour Party. As one campaigner argued in a letter to Noel-​Baker, he spoke ‘as though he thought there was a conflict between unilateralists and multilateralists . . . I’ve been a member of CND since NCANWT and have never heard one of our members oppose multilateralism’.133 According to Frank Beswick, Noel-​Baker’s emphasis on multilateral and unilateralism was a by-​product of his experience in the 1930s, when George Lansbury opposed the intervention of the League of Nations against Mussolini and the Peace Pledge Union split from the League of Nations Unions.134 In the words of Noel-​Baker, it was ‘no exaggeration to say that [Lansbury’s stand] lost us many seats in the House of Commons in the election of 1935. It certainly lost me my seat in Coventry . . . we could not possibly win the country or even a majority of the Labour Party for unilateral disarmament, even of nuclear weapons’.135 In order to ascertain the impact of the Nottingham campaign, SCMD sent questionnaires to 300 informants before and after it had been conducted. A control group of another 300 was established in Bradford, where no advertising



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took place. Whatever the impact of the campaign, it was complicated by the outbreak of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which dominated the news. Perhaps it was because of the successful resolution of the crisis that one of the results of the survey turned out to be the opposite of what had been expected: the proportion of people who believed that nuclear war would occur during their lifetime dropped by about 10 per cent in both samples. Whereas the proportion of people who believed in multilateral disarmament rose by 10 per cent in Nottingham, it rose by only 5 per cent in Bradford.136 While Gardiner used the result to suggest that a national campaign should proceed, she was unable to secure further investment.137 The advent of the Limited Test Ban Treaty and the ushering in of détente seemed to render the campaign an irrelevance. The conflict over nuclear disarmament in the Labour Party was fought through the political communications of the traditional left and revisionist right and ultimately aspired to rival versions of socialism and democracy. The revisionists, by engaging more effectively with public opinion through the news media and by carrying their fight to the rank-​and-​file, were able to reverse the tactical victory of the left at Scarborough in 1960. Their ability to do so can be ascribed in part to the news media, which was largely hostile to the trade unions and sympathetic to the leadership and authority of Gaitskell and his supporters. Relations between Gaitskell and the Guardian and Observer were actively coordinated in particular in order to marginalize the left and bolster the interests of revisionism. The news media was therefore influential in challenging perceptions of what constituted a legitimate ‘democracy’ in the Labour Party, denigrating the ‘delegate democracy’ of Conference and endorsing the parliamentary one of the PLP. Gaitskell, demonstrating his brilliance as a political communicator, was able to harness these narratives of democracy in his speech at Scarborough, galvanizing a significant section of the Labour Party to support him in the process. It was not only at the time that the news media challenged and legitimized versions of democracy in the Labour Party:  it has also done so in retrospect through popular mythology. The high drama and rhetoric of Gaitskell’s speech has lent itself to such media treatment. In an entire programme devoted to the speech on BBC Parliament fifty years later, the broadcaster Andrew Neil referred to it as a decisive moment in the democratic modernization of the Labour Party.138 The news media, both during the crisis of 1960 and ever since, has been highly influential in setting the public parameters of what counts as democracy and what does not, a role that has helped to shape the evolution and identity of the Labour Party over time.

6

Law and Order

As television enhanced the power of the public to witness demonstrations and scrutinize interactions between activists and the police, its rise served to redefine the relationship between protest and law and order in the post-​war period. For anti-​nuclear activists, it enabled them to draw attention and pose a symbolic challenge to manifestations of the ‘military industrial complex’, as well as the force employed to safeguard and underpin it. For the legal authorities, it made them more conscious of their public conduct, both in the policing of activists and in the treatment of them in the courtroom. The overall effect was to render relations between activists and legal authorities more artificial and stage-​ managed. Their encounters became highly choreographed, a ‘ritual pas-​de-​deux’ in which both sides adapted their behaviour to contest and win over key frames and values of law and order news, including ones pertaining to violence and nonviolence and civil liberty and state repression.1 The engagement of the radical wing of the anti-​nuclear movement with this field of news, it will be argued, was central to its evolution over time, with implications for the performance of protest in Britain more widely. In seeking to break stalemates with the police and remain newsworthy through innovative action, the position of violence within the movement transformed –​so much so that within a period of five years the nonviolence of DAC gave way to the anarchism of the ‘Spies for Peace’, a secret cell within C100. By focusing on the principal protests of DAC, C100 and the Spies for Peace, an attempt will be made to show how the driving force behind this transformation was news coverage and the dependence of these organizations on it. In this context, the movement evolved in relation not so much to what activists believed as to what they performed: dramatic form overrode ideological content and tactical considerations trumped ones of conscience.2 This is not to suggest ideology was unimportant. As distinct forms of action became newsworthy ideological groups with a history in them were also empowered, such as anarchists within

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C100 after the Spies for Peace had broken into and entered a Regional Seat of Government in Berkshire in 1963. The argument that news coverage exacerbates or gives rise to violence within protest movements has a long lineage in criminology and media studies, beginning in Britain with the establishment of the Centre for Mass Communication Research in Leicester in 1966.3 Since then, the relationship between news media, protest movements and violence has been seen as so symbiotic that it forms the basis of a theoretical model, where the causes of public disorder and their representation in news serve to reinforce one another in a spiralling cycle.4 In historical accounts of the post-​war period, when television became a routine feature of daily life, the significance of news coverage for violence in protest movements has been stressed repeatedly. In his groundbreaking study on the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the United States, for example, Todd Gitlin described how ‘I worked in a movement and watched it construed as something other than what I thought it was’. The news media, with its emphasis on isolated acts of disorder, ‘helped to recruit into SDS new members and backers who expected to find there what they saw on television or read in the papers’.5 As research into crime news suggests that broadcasters and newspapers in Britain had similar dispositions towards violence, it is tempting to infer that they were equally influential for the evolution of its protest movements. Just as television news accentuated the outbreak of confrontations and disruptions during protests –​drawn to the dramatic and symbolic spectacles they offered –​ crime reports in the press also ‘presented [the] details in the most sensational ways possible’ in this period.6 Whether activists and rank-​and-​file protestors sought to challenge the law or not, it was highly likely that their actions would be interpreted through the lenses and logic of crime news and that crime reporters would be assigned to their protest events. By the end of the 1960s, it has been argued that news coverage of criminal and political violence in Britain converged and became almost indistinguishable; they were both constituents of the same ‘violent society’ and causes of the same ‘moral panics’.7 When the strong ties that existed between journalists and police are also taken into account, it seems that attempts by activists to engage the news media over law and order were predestined to failure.8 The entire apparatus of the news media seemed calibrated against them. The ability of activists to advance a public agenda through law and order news may have been limited, but the increasing visibility of their protests did open up tactical opportunities and raise awareness of civil liberties. In this respect, the enlisting of news as an aid to public witness was well-​established and can



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be traced back to the role of the unstamped press in reporting the policing of Chartist disorders in the late 1830s and 1840s.9 The creation of the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), an organization dedicated to the monitoring of police powers, also came about in 1934 as a result of press reports on police infiltration of hunger strikes and was assisted in its task by the increasing use of film and photography in protest.10 As demonstrated by the suffragettes, the adaptation of film and photography by protest movements introduced a powerful dimension to public witness, enhancing not only the scale on which legal misdemeanours were exposed, but also the efficacy by which they were communicated: images of brutality against citizens protesting over moral issues could be incredibly emotive.11 The protests of DAC, C100 and the Spies for Peace were all manufactured to maximize the visual power of photojournalism and television news and expose violence as an in-​built product of state machinery, as evident in law enforcement, the authority of the courts and the sites of nuclear bases and facilities themselves. If the news served to bring out violent tendencies within protest movements, however, the value of engaging it over issues of law and order requires closer examination. Such engagement was surely futile if its chief effects and results were toxic. While a series of violent groups in Britain were able to assume positions of organizational power as their forms of action became newsworthy, they nonetheless remained in a minority and failed to radicalize on a wider scale through their practices.12 In contrast to Europe and the United States, where the shift towards violence culminated in political terrorism towards the end of the 1960s, in Britain this was not so evident.13 The value of violence was largely social rather than ideological and often accrued through association with –​rather than perpetration of  –​violent deeds. If the rank-​and-​file entertained violence, this was because it was replete with significance for their public identities. The news media used violence to construct narratives not only about law and order, but also about the identity of groups that seemed a threat to society, which in Britain were characterized by generation and race.14 As violence in the anti-​nuclear and anti-​war movements took on these broader resonances, it brought together ideologues and rank-​and-​file protestors in uneasy alliances that evolved over time in relation to news coverage. As Chapter 7 will demonstrate, the ‘radicalization’ of movements in Britain was therefore fuelled by social as well as ideological factors and the interplay between these and the news media. The relationship between media and movements over issues of law and order was significant not only for the social construction of violence and the emergence of violent methods of protest, but also for democratic expression. The constant

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need to innovate newsworthy forms of action served to expand the democratic repertoires of ordinary citizens. In the Australian context, for example, it has been argued that by the 1970s ‘a great variety of Australians had learnt to “stage contest” and to “perform disruption” ’. The ‘tools of direct democracy were now in wide circulation’, allowing ‘new performances to feed widespread political mobilization . . . [and] nurture the movements for women’s liberation, Aboriginal rights, gay liberation, and protection of the environment’.15 Through DAC, C100 and the Spies for Peace, an attempt will be made to show how anti-​nuclear organizations in Britain pre-​empted this ‘staging’ as their methods of protest began to revolve more around the tacit demands of news coverage than the ideals that they professed. As these methods were liberated from their ideological roots, they also became more adaptive and transferable; tools of action that could be brought into the orbit of identity politics or professional activism through nongovernmental organizations such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace.16

DAC and Thor missile bases The protests of DAC against US Thor missile bases, deployed in Britain following an agreement between Dwight Eisenhower and Harold Macmillan in March 1957, were seminal to the evolution of the anti-​nuclear movement. Their success in engaging the news media and eliciting debate about the role of law and order in relation to the supreme issue of nuclear weapons was transformative, prompting a reconsideration of organization and tactics within DAC and beyond. It was through these protests that the functional value of nonviolent direct action, the method practised by DAC, was highlighted and appropriated by other radical groups. In order to demonstrate the significance of these protests for the movement, it is necessary to explore the most effective and prominent of them: a campaign against a base near Swaffham in North Pickenham, Norfolk, in the winter of 1958 and 1959. Since the construction of Thor missile bases in Britain was carried out in secret –​their precise location hiding behind a D-​Notice –​the first challenge that faced DAC was to gather intelligence and identify the most suitable target.17 This preparatory stage of its campaign was vital, since the sooner the activists could locate the bases the more likely they could intervene against them before they were built and presented as a fait accompli. In denying the public right to know, the government sought to gain a tactical advantage over opponents of the bases, which in Scotland had already thwarted their construction in Aberdeenshire.18



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As described by Pat Arrowsmith, field secretary of the campaign in Norfolk, ‘the government has stolen a march on us. Even the people in the area were not aware of the rocket bases until work had actually begun’.19 As the labour required to build the bases in Aberdeenshire had been blacklisted by trade unions, the government also sought to bypass the labour movement in Norfolk: 100 non-​ unionized Irishmen were brought over to Norfolk to work on bases that took only thirteen weeks to construct. From the outset, then, the agency of DAC was highly dependent on the news media and the willingness of certain editors to act in defiance of the D-​Notice. The group was only able to learn of the location of the bases after disclosures in the Daily Herald and Tribune. By this time, the sites at Feltwell, Tuddenham, Shepherd’s Grove and Mepal were already nearing completion: only North Pickenham remained at an early stage of development. In the words of minutes from a meeting on 5 November 1958, this base, ‘being the . . . furthest from completion’, became the prime ‘target’ of a DAC ‘attack’.20 Despite the role of DAC as a ‘direct action’ group, its members were conscious of the importance of constitutional and moderate activities in their campaigns. ‘In order to arouse as much local interest as possible’, they agreed on 5 November, ‘we should lobby MPs, clergy, journalists and personalities, infiltrate trade unions, organise petitions and form delegations to consult with leaders of Parliamentary Parties, trade unions and building contractors’.21 These more conventional methods of protest served to prime key areas of public opinion before direct action against the base was undertaken:  without them direct action risked coming across as abrupt and unreasonable and stood less chance of having a meaningful impact on public opinion. From a caravan in the back garden of a local doctor sympathetic to their cause, Pat Arrowsmith and April Carter prepared for this lobbying initiative, compiling a catalogue of key contacts from Kelly’s Directory and reference books in Swaffham library. It was in the process of lobbying these key contacts that DAC sought to fashion narratives of its campaign: ones that that could be taken up and relayed by local citizens and news media. As the most pronounced of these focused on the moral obligation of the workers to abandon construction of the bases, however, it came across as emotionally exploitative and tended to cause resentment. A  leaflet entitled ‘A Challenge to You’, for example, described how work on the base would facilitate the launching of ‘a Thor rocket with nuclear warhead’, resulting in ‘instant death for thousands in the country where it is landed and death by radiation sickness for thousands more’.22 It may have been workers who had prevented the construction of the bases in Aberdeenshire, but this had emanated from within the labour movement and surrounding community and was not

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the product of outside intervention by middle class ‘do-​gooders’. In the words of Arrowsmith, the campaign to win over local opinion was ‘to no avail. True, we set many people in the area thinking, had some lively meetings . . . got a good deal of local press publicity, and even persuaded one union to pass a resolution blacking work on the base, as well as one worker to quit’.23 According to April Carter, the overall response to the campaign tended to be negative: ‘we have been assailed bitterly’, she remarked, ‘for . . . “victimising” . . . workers, for approaching trade unions [and] . . . contractors, for campaigning against rocket bases, for the wording of the petition and for existing at all!’24 The narratives that DAC fashioned were an attempt to establish dialogue not only on a local basis, however, but also on a national and international one. As another leaflet demonstrated, their campaign transcended local considerations and was concerned above all with the democratic process in Britain: ‘we were never consulted about these bases, or any part of the government’s nuclear defence policy’, it claimed –​‘we have a duty to protest’.25 In a similar manner, a leaflet describing the installation of US bases on British and European soil as a contravention of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights raised civil and humanitarian issues on a global scale.26 While these more abstract narratives were largely lost on the locals of Swaffham, they were significant once again in establishing a platform on which a greater challenge could be mounted:  one that had the potential to make national and international news. For DAC, the commissioning of Thor missile bases without wider coverage or debate was itself evidence of the futility of constitutional methods: nonviolent direct action offered a means by which these could be overcome and the building of the bases at last publicized. What form this direct action would take and whether it should involve breaking the law was the subject of debate within DAC. Its members acknowledged that while an attempt to obstruct work on the base was more likely to have an impact on the news media and public, it also endangered the participants and the nonviolent image of the group and movement. The more forceful radicals were in making their case, the more difficult it was to maintain that their actions were nonviolent and passive. Even at this early stage, the extent to which a protest should be coercive and ‘taken to’ the arbiters of nuclear bases and facilities was ambiguous and controversial. The suggestion that a march take place instead of entering the base was nonetheless dismissed by DAC in October, since the group recognized that the symbolic power of its protest and the practical challenge it represented were inextricably linked.27 As its members agreed in November, the protest ‘should be sufficiently imaginative and challenging to arouse interest, and should demonstrate the depth of the participants’ concern’.28



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In attempting to correlate the practical and symbolic elements of their action, the members of DAC were in fact revealing a sophisticated awareness of media and public relations. They anticipated that obstruction of the base would be futile in the end, yet they also anticipated that such action was imperative if they were to engage the news media. This raises questions about how far their attempts at obstruction were sincere and how far they were calculated for symbolic effect. According to Oonagh Lahr, such questions became even more pressing after the creation of C100: ‘[H]‌alf the people were convinced that . . . we were in the footsteps of Gandhi  . . .  but the other half were tactically non-​violent  . . .  they were non-​violent only because they knew it meant more sympathy from the press and . . . for public opinion.’29 What makes the campaign at North Pickenham special, however, is that it represents the precise moment when a serious dilemma between ideological and tactical motivations began to reach a crescendo; the precise moment that activists became aware of the significant media and publicity value of the nonviolent ideology and practices in which they professed to believe. The more this awareness developed, the more radical protest was manufactured as a performance, as the changing attitude of Pat Arrowsmith highlights. While she claimed that the aim of the demonstrations near Swaffham was ‘to obstruct work on the base as much as possible’, only two years later she claimed that she ‘must provoke violence. Violence must be seen to be done to me’.30 In this short time, then, the purpose of nonviolent direct action had come to be measured almost wholly by its public rather than practical effect. The nonviolent methods by which DAC intended to obstruct the base in North Pickenham, inspired by the Gandhian philosophy of satyagraha or ‘truth force’, also had a significant media and public relations dimension. They involved openness with the official authorities and police at the stage of planning, personal nonviolence during the protest and a willingness to accept legal penalties, ‘knowing that the suffering of these penalties is the best means of persuasion’, as a press release from an earlier protest put it.31 Such methods served to mitigate illegality and prompt reassessments about the relationship between law and morality, as well as the instances in which breaking the law has a moral justification. They presented the authorities and the police with dilemmas of how to enforce the law over issues of conscience and brought their management of these under public scrutiny:  sitting down in a missile base and going limp upon arrest stressed the sacrifice of the demonstrators and the force of the militarized state, whether through its judges, officials, police or soldiers.

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While members of DAC had a clear idea of the significance of nonviolent methods for news coverage and public opinion, they had to ensure that all participants in their protests comprehended and conformed to them. This was especially important in the wider social and political climate, where Gandhian nonviolence had a history of being either misrepresented by officials and politicians or misinterpreted or misconstrued by pacifists and the public. The potential, even for supporters of DAC, to confuse the purpose of the protest was demonstrated by a letter from Stephen Swingler, the Labour MP and pacifist. Only a month before the first demonstration at North Pickenham he asked why the group was ‘threatening physical force and the making of martyrs? The spectacle of pacifists making martyrs of themselves may nauseate some people . . . We may get terribly frustrated about apathy, but I’m afraid we shall get something far worse than apathy if we adopt IRA tactics’. In a reply from April Carter, it had to be explained that DAC ‘is strongly opposed to IRA tactics –​which involve violence to both people and property, and subterfuge and dishonesty’.32 If DAC were to gain sympathy for entering and obstructing the base in North Pickenham, then as much as possible it needed to engineer the behaviour and conduct of those who participated and supported as nonviolent and righteous. By doing so, it could make the actions of the protestors appear innocuous and well-​meaning and those of the authorities and police appear aggressive and forceful, a feature of nonviolent direct action that made it a useful tool for engaging the news media over issues of law and order (Figure 6.1). As a leaflet explained to supporters who were to stand outside of the base while activists entered it, the slightest deviation from advised practices could be disastrous for media and public relations:  you must ‘behave with dignity and self-​discipline in this demonstration  . . .  The incident with the car at Aldermaston  . . .  shows that even from the standpoint of publicity it is imperative for demonstrators to be strictly peaceful’.33 The maintenance of nonviolence took on an added importance because of the ‘unusual and radical nature’ of the demonstration, as a legal briefing on 25 November put it. The demonstration could ‘easily be put across as anti-​social and more irresponsible than for instance a march’ and the protestors were risking being attacked by police dogs and shot at by guards from the United States Air Force (USAF).34 The legal briefing, checked free of charge by Charles Ettinger, a local solicitor, provided protestors instructions about their conduct not only during the demonstration, but also afterwards during legal proceedings. It informed them of the offences with which they could be charged, from minor ones such as obstruction of the highway to major ones such as breach of the Official



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Figure 6.1  Nonviolence in Norfolk: protestors go limp. Photo by Keystone Pictures USA/​Alamy Stock Photo.

Secrets Act, as well as how they should respond to these in order to create the most desirable impression for the campaign.35 While it was suggested that the protestors plead guilty to charges of the offences that they planned to commit, it was also suggested that they draw attention to ‘mitigating circumstances’: ‘you may [even] plead not guilty on the grounds that you don’t recognise this country as US territory’.36 From the preparatory stages of the campaign, the entire endeavour was engineered and thought out to navigate news frames and values associated with law and order; to pre-​empt news coverage by organizing the demonstration and its aftermath in a manner that was conducive to the protestors and problematic for law enforcement. It was even anticipated that the repeated attempts to enter and obstruct work on the base would most likely lead to the incarceration of the protestors over Christmas, a slow news period with symbolic significance for conscientious objection.

The first demonstrations and news coverage Despite having been planned in open and in the knowledge of all concerned parties, the first demonstration against the base near Swaffham was remarkable

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for how far it took the news media and official authorities by surprise: nonviolent direct action on this scale and in this style seemed to represent a new and alien departure for journalists, police, soldiers and workers alike. Ironically, the demonstration was coordinated with almost military-​like precision. It began with a meeting in the market square at midday on 6 December, progressed to a march to the site of the base at 1 p.m. and culminated in nonviolent direct action at 2 p.m. The entrance of forty-​six protestors into the base was choreographed in order to amplify its symbolic appeal. After kneeling at the gates of the base to pray, the group walked in and sat around the concrete mixers, which in the words of the legal briefing was ‘the focal and most important part of the base whilst it is under construction’.37 In the fifteen or twenty minutes it took for police to arrive and remove the activists, they obstructed a lorry loading up with gravel by sitting down while workers on the site gathered to watch and throw mud and insults at them. When the activists returned to the base at 7 a.m. the next morning, they were dragged away by guards from the Royal Air Force (RAF). ‘They did this a great deal less courteously than the civilian police had the day before’, according to Arrowsmith: ‘[I]‌t took two union officials to persuade an activist who had climbed into the concrete mixer to come down. They told him they were shocked by the way in which we had been treated . . . he came down on the condition that they made the same statement in front of [the crowd] at the gates.’38 As the protestors were unable to obstruct work on the base indefinitely, they used their position within it to open dialogue with their opponents and extract concessions from them:  ‘[W]hen we made our moment by moment plans’, recalled Arrowsmith, ‘we did so quite openly.’ The decision to end the demonstration, for instance, came about as a result of a discussion that took place not only among the protestors, but also the commander of the base and journalists. While the first set of demonstrations had been carried out according to plan, the press coverage of them was largely negative and reflected misunderstandings about the form of action undertaken and the message the protestors were trying to project. As Peace News described, it tended to range from the ‘derogatory jibes’ of the popular newspapers to the ‘startled criticism’ of quality ones.39 The majority of newspapers portrayed the demonstrations as a provocation, ignoring its pretence to nonviolence and focusing on the ‘scuffle’ between the protestors and the workers. The Daily Mirror alleged that ‘fighting broke out between [the protestors] and Irish workmen and RAF personnel’, while the Daily Mail described a ‘fantastic two-​day battle’, suggesting a connection between the



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tactics of DAC and Communism under the headline ‘Mud Bath Fight’: ‘Pictures of manhandling by the police are always good propaganda, especially for our native Communists.’ The suggestion that the demonstrations were Communist-​ inspired was encouraged by an intervention by the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union, which on 7 December contacted Swaffham town hall for information about the protest. The following day the agency reported that police and RAF ‘men used extreme violence against the members of a peaceful delegation who came to protest against the transformation of their country in to an American rocket-​launching site’.40 The protestors may have remained nonviolent as the workers directed blows and insults at them, but in the press it was they who were regarded as accountable for the outbreak of hostilities: there was ‘obvious provocation’, according to the News Chronicle. ‘The demonstrators were clearly looking for trouble’, reported the Daily Mirror in another editorial, ‘and they got it’; they ‘may have even hoped that force would be used against them’, argued the Daily Mail.41 These characterizations of events at North Pickenham picked up on nascent tensions within organized pacifism over whether nonviolent direct action was truly pacifistic; ones that were given credence by the attempts of protestors to scale barbed wire in order to re-​enter the base on the second day.42 Sybil Morrison, a lifelong member of the PPU, claimed that it is violent nonviolence when it compels others to use violence in return.43 Insofar as press coverage reflected misunderstanding of the demonstrations, however, it provided a stimulus for DAC to embark on a letter-​writing campaign and educate the wider public about their methods. ‘The purpose of the demonstration was not . . . to provoke the guards’, the group stated in a letter to the Daily Express.44 They also responded to an article in the Guardian that accused them of escalating protest from ‘peaceful picketing to sabotage and physical assault’. They explained how ‘there is a vast difference between sabotage tactics involving violence against persons and property and secrecy and deceit, and non-​violent direct action, which is an open demonstration of profound personal opposition and risk’.45 Only through nonviolent direct action did the group feel it could adequately communicate their protest against the bases. ‘Responsibility for these weapons is so diffuse and the magnitude of their destructive power so incomprehensible’, claimed Arrowsmith in a letter to the News Chronicle, ‘that it is necessary to dramatise the situation in meaningful human terms.’46 As the demonstrations were designed above all to create a visual statement against the bases, it was through photography and television that they were most meaningfully conveyed.47 In a precursor to media practices employed by

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Greenpeace over a decade later, an independent film of the demonstrations was commissioned by DAC, which was later released as Rocket Site Story and extended to further events at the base on 20 December.48 As described in Chapter 3, the producers of the film, Eric Bamford and Eric Walker, were able to sell rights of the footage to ITN and used the proceeds to establish the Nuclear Disarmament Newsreel Committee. The symbolic power of demonstrations against the base was therefore manipulated not only through the marshalling of nonviolent direct action, but also through composition of the footage, which in this case provided the only record on film. The sympathetic rendering of events supplied by Bamford and Walker, which through its focus on barbed wire and the cement mixer was suggestive of military encroachment and tyranny, was televised to audiences nationwide.49 By acting in a nonviolent manner in a built environment predicated on military force, the protestors were able to project an evocative imagery that was taken up in news coverage. The front page of the London Illustrated News, for example, was devoted entirely to a photograph of the group sitting in front of the cement mixer that dominated the base, setting the courage and frailty of the protestors against the dehumanizing technology of the nuclear machine (Figure  6.2).50 Such interpretations of the demonstrations were encouraged wherever possible in journalism and writing, with Reverend Michael Scott, a close acquaintance of the editor of the Observer, David Astor, describing in the newspaper how ‘the slabs of new concrete, high wire fences and “Beware Police Dogs” notices around the sites tell you that something serious is going on in England that concerns us all’.51 Given the secrecy surrounding the bases prior to the demonstrations, their exposure must have been stunning: within the space of a news cycle public awareness transformed from a state of ignorance to one rooted in an array of menacing images and realizations. ‘In the days when television . . . forms part of the blanket of apathy which is the government’s greatest ally in deceiving the people of this country’, claimed an article in Peace News, ‘non-​violent direct action has caused the truth to break through.’52 The visual record of the demonstrations also served to contradict a written one that portrayed them as ill-​disciplined and violent:  images of protestors being dragged through the mud and jostled seemed inconsistent with claims that they were the aggressors. In this respect, the film taken by Bamford and Walker and broadcast on ITN on 7 December was especially influential. As described by Frank Allaun, the Labour MP, ‘the scenes . . . shown very clearly on television . . . aroused considerable admiration for the courage and conviction’ of the protestors.53 On 8 December, the same day that questions about the



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Figure  6.2  Exposing the ‘military-​industrial complex’. © Illustrated London News Ltd./​Mary Evans Picture Library.

demonstrations were asked in the House of Commons, ITN carried a further item on the extent and nature of the injuries inflicted on the protestors: ‘We have been manhandled more than is necessary’, claimed Arrowsmith in an interview.54 The news media, by exposing the relationship between protestors and authorities on an unprecedented level, had been elevated to the role of public watchdog: the misuse of force had become open to scrutiny as never before.

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It was a measure of the visual exposure to which the mistreatment of the protestors had been subject that the Labour MP Sidney Silverman was able to raise the issue in the Commons on 8 December. He asked George Ward, the secretary of state for air, whether his attention had been drawn to a number of detailed . . . accounts which . . . show that in the act of removing [the protestors from the base] a good deal of unnecessary violence was used; that women and elderly men were seized . . . and thrown into pools of mud, cement and water . . . and that a number of them had to be treated in hospital for the removal of pieces of cement, many of them in the eyes?

Ward replied that the activists ‘offered very violent resistance to the police  . . .  I  do not think that more force was used than necessary to remove them’.55 As eyewitness accounts and visual evidence increasingly undermined his statement, however, it had to be reworded in Hansard, the official record of Parliamentary debates: ‘very violent resistance’ was toned down to ‘a great deal of violent resistance’.56 This amendment may seem trifling, but it served to legitimize the actions of DAC and imbue the activities of the anti-​nuclear movement as a whole with renewed urgency. As Carter explained to Silverman, ‘[T]‌he questions in the House have been immensely useful . . . a discussion has been well-​publicised.’ The demonstrations at North Pickenham, designed to bypass parliamentary and traditional channels of expression, had served to instigate a debate that took place within them. CND branches urged their supporters to write to the provincial press demanding them to print corrections to the statement made by George Ward in the Commons.57 Having secured this minor victory, the members of DAC were ‘anxious’ not to appear as though they were ‘milking it’ and ruled against submitting an official complaint.58 As they had put the authorities on the back foot, however, Arrowsmith regarded it as ‘vital to “strike whilst the iron is hot” ’: ‘Last Easter it was not possible to follow up immediately with a meaningful demonstration  . . .  a golden opportunity for  . . .  expanding the movement was lost.’ A return to the base would build on the interest and support the first demonstrations had generated and reiterate the commitment of the protestors. ‘It has been decided to return on 20 December’, claimed Arrowsmith: ‘[T]he intention is to demonstrate  . . .  that we are prepared to make real personal sacrifices. . . . We will show that . . . Mr Ward’s suggestion that stronger measures would be taken were such a demonstration repeated do not deter us.’59



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The second demonstrations and news coverage Unlike in the first set of demonstrations at North Pickenham, in the second set the news media and the official authorities were far more prepared for nonviolent direct action at the base and the practical challenges and public demands it posed. ‘It was evident from the beginning that our second protest was going to be of a different calibre’, claimed one participant, Geoffrey Alexander.60 As soon as the protestors met at Victoria Embankment to catch coaches to Swaffham at 6:30 a.m. on the day of the demonstrations, for example, as soon as the protestors met at Victoria Embankment to catch coaches to Swaffham on the day of the demonstrations, they were met by officers from the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) and a Black Maria. When the CID officers threatened the coach drivers with charges of conspiracy, they withdrew their service and left the protestors to catch the train. In this second engagement with the authorities, then, the tactical manoeuvring extended far more equally to both sides from the outset, shifting to take advantage of the absence and presence of the news media as events unfolded. Following the arrival of the protestors in Swaffham at 12:15 p.m., they held a briefing, staged a meeting in the market square and marched to the base at 2 p.m., where they were met by thirty-​five police officers. The officers formed a cordon in front of the gates of the base and prevented the protestors from entering and obstructing work on the site. In view of their commitment to nonviolence and the criticism they had received in the press for scaling the barbed wire on 7 December, it was decided that the protestors would not breach the security fence around the base, which had been completed shortly after the first demonstrations.61 Instead, it was suggested that they prevent vehicles from entering and leaving the base by blocking the entrance. ‘If demonstrators are not arrested’, claimed Arrowsmith, it ‘is intended to maintain this peaceful obstruction until Christmas eve, at which time workers on the base will be quitting work for a day or two’.62 After a second attempt to obstruct work at the gates, however, forty-​five of the protestors were arrested and escorted to Swaffham Magistrates’ Court and given a week to decide whether to be bound over to keep the peace. The twenty-​two that refused were sent to Norwich and Holloway prisons, while twenty-​three decided to delay their reply.63 In contrast to the first set of demonstrations, which were attended by a small number of local journalists, the second set was attended by national and international ones, including from news agencies across Europe and the United States.64 This scaling up of media involvement was encouraged by DAC, who had invited the London correspondents of regional newspapers such as the

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Eastern Daily Press to their events from the beginning.65 The group had learned from the difficulties of local campaigning and directed their public relations towards the national and international themes of the bases and the Cold War, whether in the form of pamphlets and press conferences or the act of nonviolent direct action itself. While their return to the base seemed detrimental to local opinion –​with their speeches in the market square being interrupted by shouts of ‘Shut up’ and ‘Go back to Russia’  –​it did seem conducive to debates and solidarity on a national and international level.66 For the first time, the national press acknowledged the methods of the protestors, with The Times reporting that ‘Rocket Marchers Plead the Gandhi Tradition’ and the Guardian referring to ‘Defiance in the Gandhi Tradition’.67 The demonstrations even inspired a replica among West Germans who had seen them on television and were campaigning against another Thor missile base outside of Dortmund.68 The involvement of national and international news organizations therefore moved the campaign onto another plane, lifting it out of a local context and bringing it into a higher one in which its symbolic forms of communication were far more influential. As exposure of the demonstrations expanded and intensified, so too did the parties involved in them become more aware of the implications of their conduct for news and public opinion. In the second set of demonstrations, it was the official authorities as well as the protestors who modified their actions in order to avoid allegations of aggression and violence. In the same way that protestors refrained from breaching the security fence, for example, the police also refrained from the roughhousing in which the RAF had partaken on 7 December. The outcome of this heightened awareness was a set of demonstrations characterized by cooperation rather than discord, with each party making concessions towards their conflicting interests so as not to appear coercive or unreasonable. Whereas the protestors were briefed in private at the beginning of the first set of demonstrations, they were briefed in public at the beginning of the second: police officers were invited to listen in and exchanged Christmas wishes with the activists at the end of the protest.69 In contrast to radio and television broadcasts of the first protest, in which Arrowsmith criticized the official authorities, in those of the second one she praised them: ‘We have no complaints at all against the police. They have only done what they had to do. They have been perfectly decent.’70 The increased involvement of the news media, combined with the lessons of 6 and 7 December, therefore contributed to the manufacture of the second set of demonstrations as a news event: protestors and police alike carried out artificial roles that were predetermined by the tacit demands of news and public



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opinion. The tendency of DAC to relegate the more challenging features of its demonstrations for the purposes of publicity became even more conspicuous in it next campaign, which took place against a Thor missile base near Harrington in Northamptonshire the following summer.71 Ian Dixon, recruited to DAC at North Pickenham, described how ‘participants in the demonstration were arrested for camping on the grass verge; this was more symbolic than we wanted  . . .  this niceness [with the police can look] a bit farcical’. His recommendation that DAC ‘develop the challenging aspect of the demonstration’ was regarded as controversial, but it anticipated frustrations at the increasing ineffectiveness of nonviolent direct action as news coverage began to wane.72

Law courts and prisons The protestors at North Pickenham sought to highlight their sacrifice and sincerity by risking not only harm and violence during the demonstration, but also fines and imprisonment after them. Those who refused to be bound over to keep the peace at the summons and trial at Swaffham Magistrates’ Court on 20 and 29 December did so on the basis that they were making a public as well as personal gesture. As already mentioned, the guiding of protestors after the demonstrations was a concern for DAC before they had even taken place and the strategies employed to negotiate the legal process were formulated with care. While the group was eager to utilize trials and imprisonment as a means by which to court sympathy –​for ­example –​they were wary of appearing manipulative or overly dramatic. When Philip Cook and Frances Otter carried out a unilateral decision to go on hunger strike in Norwich prison, the group distanced themselves from the protestors and warned against such tactics ahead of the campaign at Harrington. This ‘looked too much like courting arrest [and drew] undue personal publicity’, according to their minutes, and should only be embarked on when ‘prisoners have been badly treated or where imprisonment is unjust’.73 The willingness of the protestors to suffer fines and prison for their beliefs was by itself a stimulus for considerable sympathy. ‘We owe a great deal of what is good in our society to people who hold humane beliefs strongly enough to suffer for them’ claimed an editorial in the Daily Herald:  ‘Their stubbornness is British . . . they are worthy of high respect.’74 Michael Scott elaborated on the historic significance of radicalism for democracy in the Observer: ‘Forty or more people, mostly young men and women, with rather typical-​sounding English names . . . said in effect what has been said by English men and women many

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times in past history. “We would rather forgo our liberty . . . than be party to a course which we believe is fundamentally wrong.” ’75 Neither did such coverage necessarily reflect political partisanship. ‘The avowed opponents of pacifism have been more generous than some of their colleagues’, commented Peace News.76 That twenty-​two of the protestors decided to remain in prison on Christmas day was especially effective in reaching out to consciences.77 In an episode of Any Questions on Boxing Day, the poet Charles Causley argued that ‘people who take direct action in these matters are immediately dismissed as madmen  . . .  Well I don’t accept this view . . . we should all be involved, and we shall not have a happy Christmas until we are’.78 The appearance of the protestors in court, along with their answer to the charges brought against them, afforded another opportunity by which DAC could engineer its arguments. If their moral opposition to the bases were to be seen as credible in the more formal settings of the court system, then this had to start with suitable dress. In a briefing prior to nonviolent direct action at Harrington, the group reminded protestors ‘that while thick waterproof clothing is necessary, they will appear in court in what they wear’.79 More problematic was the decision process of responding to the charge, as this had to take into account the likelihood of the resultant publicity as well as the sentence. Since the protestors had committed the charge that had been brought against them –​ the obstruction of a police officer in the discharge of his duties  –​they were advised by Charles Ettinger to plead guilty: a plea of not guilty would most likely exacerbate sentencing and public criticism. How the protestors were represented in court was also loaded with difficulty for the presentation of their case in both legal and public terms. In accordance with the advice provided by DAC and Ettinger, most of the protestors accepted an offer from Greville Janner, a young barrister, to represent them and offer pleas in mitigation on their behalf. ‘If Mr Janner does not speak for the accused’, claimed Ettinger, ‘there is a real possibility that the cases will be rushed through with in effect nothing said’. As it was permissible for a small number of protestors to make statements without legal representation, however, DAC put forward two of its most eloquent speakers, April Carter and Michael Scott, and accepted an offer from John Dennithorne, a Quaker and conscientious objector, to act as a third. While the group were conscious of including ‘statements which let the side down’, those of the nominated speakers provided an opportunity by which the group could relay its arguments in a legal context.80 In the forty-​one cases represented by Janner and the three in which the protestors represented themselves, a systematic effort was made to show the



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precedence of morality over the law in relation to nonviolent direct action against the base. The first case brought before the magistrates, for example, was that of Liesl Dales, an Austrian imprisoned during the Second World War for her involvement in an underground movement against the Nazis. The use of this case as an opening gambit was ideal, since it underlined not only the moral credentials of those on trial, but also the fact that in certain circumstances breaking the law was justifiable and even necessary. This argument was developed in the three self-​represented cases, with Carter claiming that she wanted to make a public witness in obedience to the law of conscience; Dennithorne describing a conflict between ‘my loyalty to the common law of my country and my loyalty to a higher law’; and Scott explaining his obligation to make a nonviolent protest against a great evil of his time. While the scope to elaborate on the rationale for the demonstrations was limited  –​with the magistrates demanding that Scott refrain from ‘political speech’ –​it did allow the protestors to communicate their message to the news media.81 Their court statements were featured on radio and television news and ITN interviewed Scott in order to ask him further about the relationship between the law and morality. A  subsequent poll ran by the broadcaster suggested that two-​thirds of viewers supported his actions.82 The nonviolent methods employed by DAC proved useful in exposing misdemeanours that related not only to the police and RAF, but also to the law and the legal system more widely. At the trial on 29 December, the prosecution laid a ‘complaint’ against Arrowsmith and Hugh Brock, neither of whom participated in the demonstrations nor were arrested and summoned before the court on the same day as their peers. The legal basis of the complaint stemmed from the Justices of the Peace Act of 1361, which was passed by Edward III to prevent armed soldiers from ‘disturbing the peace’ upon returning from the Hundred Years War. It was alleged that Arrowsmith and Brock were ‘disturbers of the peace’, since they had ‘organised and taken part in a trespass on air ministry property between 10 and 20 December’. As the prosecution failed to convince the magistrates that Arrowsmith and Brock had ‘taken part in’ the demonstrations, however, the complaint was rejected, even though the two protestors were required to enter into the same recognisances as their co-​defendants.83 In compelling protestors to be bound over to keep the peace before they had even broken the law, however, the fourteenth-​century statute was revealed as highly controversial  –​a danger to freedom of speech and a ruse to suppress opposition to defence and foreign policy.84 When six protestors were arrested for refusing to pledge to keep the peace ahead of demonstrations at Harrington, the press were outraged. R.  A. Butler, the home secretary, was petitioned by

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thirty-​eight MPs to release the six protestors before Christmas. They were of good character, there were constitutional dangers to preventative arrest and the statute under which they had been sentenced was designed to deal with rogues and vagabonds.85 His refusal to release the six prompted over 100 journalists and photographers to join a march to Harrington on 2 January, the day that nonviolent direct action was due to take place at the base. In negotiating the legal implications and penalties that emerged out of its actions, DAC had been highly effective. It succeeded not only in constructing its arguments around key frames and values of ‘law and order news’, but also in subjecting the legal process to a degree of scrutiny that turned editors and journalists into champions of their civil liberties.86

Nonviolent direct action and the movement The campaign at North Pickenham may have secured a significant degree of favourable publicity for the anti-​ nuclear movement, but it also intensified divisions within it and between the leaders of its moderate and radical wings. These surfaced in the New Statesman, the mouthpiece of the CND Executive Committee, which in an editorial on 3 January claimed that direct action ‘is justified in, say, South Africa or pre-​war India, where the protesting section of the public is denied constitutional expression of its opinions. But in Britain, where there are free elections and universal suffrage, it is unnecessary and dangerous.’ The adoption of methods of protest that were coercive and unconstitutional, it claimed, would result in the movement forfeiting ‘its moral and logical case against the [far] right from doing the same’.87 This assessment was based on a rather dualistic view of constitutional and direct action, as DAC stressed in its reply to the editorial on 7 January. Its members believed in the necessity of ‘constitutional propaganda’, which was ‘an integral part of [their] activities’, but also in the necessity of nonviolence and openness with the authorities: ‘this has resulted in quite friendly relations with the police (unlike the tactics of right wing extremists)’.88 Since nonviolent direct action at North Pickenham was pre-​empted by traditional campaigning  –​and traditional campaigning was enhanced as a consequence of this action  –​the idea that they were mutually exclusive was misconceived according to DAC. The group rejected the distinction between what the New Statesman described as ‘the Propagandists  –​who believe that the task of the reformer is to assist the gradual evolution of opinion –​and the



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Witnesses, who feel constrained to give full and immediate expression to their convictions’.89 As stated in their letter to the editor, Kingsley Martin, ‘many of our supporters are the most active campaigners for nuclear disarmament in their localities’.90 Neither did participants in the demonstrations make clear distinctions between anti-​nuclear organizations and methods of protest. In a survey that included thirty-​five of them, for example, the majority nominated CND rather than DAC as the organization with which they most identified.91 What was emerging, then, was a disparity between perceptions of methods of protest among the rank-​and-​file and their portrayal in sections of the news media. The left wing press, populated by leaders of CND and the Labour Party, became increasingly influential in creating false dichotomies in the movement that later fed into a stronger organizational split. The relationship between CND and DAC became even more strained in January 1959, when DAC opposed the Labour Party and ran a voter’s veto campaign during a by-​election in South West Norfolk, the area in which the base near Swaffham was located. The by-​election was brought about by the death of Sidney Dye, a Labour MP and critic of DAC, in a car crash on 9 December. For DAC, the failure of the Labour Party to deliver on its policy of opposing the bases until fresh negotiations with Russia had taken place led to the marginalization of the electorate: ordinary citizens had been ‘disenfranchised to a large extent’ on defence policy. As a result, the group ran a rather ineffectual campaign that encouraged locals to withhold their votes for candidates of parties that supported the manufacture of nuclear weapons.92 If nonviolent direct action at North Pickenham agitated socialists who felt it jeopardized their chances of winning over the Labour Party to unilateral disarmament, then the voter’s veto campaign infuriated them. Michael Foot, who argued that nonviolent direct action at North Pickenham was a valid method of protest in Tribune in mid-​January, argued that the voter’s veto was ‘a policy for ostriches and hermits’ in CND Bulletin only a month later.93 The Labour MP Edith Summerskill also resigned from CND prior to the Easter march, referring to the veto as ‘a frightful thing, an absolute negation of democracy’. ‘There is no distinction [between the methods of CND and DAC]’, she told the Daily Telegraph: ‘They all act in concert.’94 It was not only the methods employed by DAC that exacerbated tensions within the movement, however, but also the extent of the news coverage it received from them.95 As described by Barne Dallas, a CND official, ‘[T]‌here is a feeling that thousands of members of CND are doing the work that really matters (with their many meetings and door-​to-​door visits) while direct action gets all the publicity.’96 The allegation that the methods of DAC were intended

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for no other purpose than publicity-​ seeking was also widespread. While this may have been unfair on the founders of DAC, those recruited to the group during and after North Pickenham possessed a far more pragmatic interpretation of nonviolent practice: one that presaged the creation of C100. As explained by Anthony Weaver, a university lecturer and participant at North Pickenham, ‘[T]he experience . . . has shown that non-​violent resistance is a weapon of great power  . . .  Apart from anything else it is extraordinarily economical  of time. A  few hours at North Pickenham gained more publicity . . . than many months of conventional campaigning.’97 The sensitivity towards the publicity received by DAC was most acute at leadership level, where egos and personalities were involved. Canon Collins, for example, went so far as to suggest that the news media reported nonviolent direct action as a means by which to besmirch constitutional campaigns and the reputation of the movement as a whole. ‘It is hardly necessary to report on the . . . demonstration at North Pickenham’, he argued in CND Bulletin, ‘as on this occasion there was no attempt by the national press to ignore the activities of those who support nuclear disarmament.’ When the Guardian claimed that the demonstrations at North Pickenham signalled the intention of Collins to abandon methods of democratic persuasion, he issued a statement clarifying his position. ‘DAC is an entirely independent organisation . . . CND is not in favour of civil disobedience or sabotage so long as reasonable opportunities continue to exist for bringing democratic pressure on Parliament.’98 The tendency of the news media to conflate methods and organizations was not without grounds, however, as the demonstrations at North Pickenham marked the first major occasion in which Collins and Bertrand Russell contradicted one another over the future of the movement.99 In contrast to Collins, who denigrated nonviolent direct action on the basis that Britain was a ‘country with full democratic rights’, Russell recommended it on the basis that it broke ‘through the barrier of official silence and contempt’. ‘Until the press pursues a wiser policy,’ he added, ‘it is only by non-​violent direct action that public opinion can be made aware of the fact that our population is being led blindfold towards mass extinction.’100 It was out of this disagreement that latent divisions within the movement began to be pulled in countervailing directions by Collins and Russell, whose high profile and well-​connected interventions served to redefine its organizational and political make-​up and identity. The events leading up to the establishment of C100, a mass civil disobedience campaign proposed at the Partisan Coffee House in London on 27 July 1960, were



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testament to the power of the news media in shaping public and self-​perceptions of the movement through its key personalities.101 A leaked letter from Russell to a prospective signatory of C100, published in the Evening Standard, caused a media storm to which both he and Collins were central, their conflicting positions on direct action creating a pretext for mischief-​making in the news and stereotypes for movement politics.102 Whether to sit with Russell or stand with Collins became a popular catchphrase and CND and C100 themselves served as embodiments of opposing figures, distinguishable along lines of age, politics and social class. While this mediated version of the movement belied its complexity and interdependence on the ground, it played a significant role in the making of its public image and subsequent history. ‘Ask anyone when the movement began, and who began it’, suggested the anarchist Nicolas Walter: ‘Ask for the dates of the first examples of civil disobedience and direct action against the Bomb . . . In almost every case the reply will be connected to some big name or other, to the adherence of a reputable person or body to an otherwise disreputable movement.’103

C100 and nonviolence As C100 was inspired by a growing awareness of the capacity of nonviolent direct action to attract media and public attention, it was imbued with a far more tactical interpretation of this method of protest from the beginning. The report of its first working group, in which four out of the eleven members were from DAC, highlighted how the Committee marked a transitional moment for radical protest in Cold War Britain. On the one hand, it recognized that C100 was working in a tradition that had been pioneered by DAC:  it claimed that ‘the Swaffham demonstrations [had] introduced a new element at least as far as Britain is concerned’. ‘In these demonstrations, the participants  . . .  risked their lives . . . [and] accepted arrest and imprisonment as an indication of the depth of their opposition. Because their action was dramatic and unusual’, it continued, ‘they broke through the press barrier of Campaign activities.’ On the other hand, however, the report also recognized that the demonstrations at North Pickenham were insufficient, as they only ‘pointed the way to mass non-​violent action’.104 ‘If this sort of action were carried out on a mass scale’, recommended the report, ‘it could profoundly affect the whole climate of opinion in this country.’105

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What form this mass action would take and where it would occur, however, were the subjects of debate. If the purpose of C100 was to bring nonviolent direct action into high profile public spaces –​where it could be carried out by high profile public ­figures  –​then this already constituted a significant departure from the practices of DAC. In contrast to DAC, whose demonstrations were designed to draw attention to the built manifestations of the nuclear weapons programme, those of C100 were designed to gain as much publicity as possible, with the related aim of placing the authorities in a predicament through mass arrests. As the working group noted after the first sit-​down outside of the Ministry of Defence on 18 February 1961, ‘one of the great merits of [nonviolent direct action] had been its capacity to attack the image of . . . nuclear technology’. To focus on ‘the London area’, it warned, would ‘create an uneven development in the militant opposition to nuclear weapons. The Committee could not hope to succeed if it did not involve people, and particularly trade unionists, throughout the country’. Neither did the focus on London necessarily represent a more effective challenge to the state: ‘There was a limit to what could be done . . . short of a non-​violent siege of Parliament.’106 The Committee hoped to progress by complementing mass protests in London with specialized ones at nuclear facilities. The support mobilized and radicalized through mass protest could be channelled towards more meaningful confrontations in the localities. While the scaling up of demonstrations was regarded by most members of C100 as a necessity, the importance assigned to the role of challenging and symbolic aspects within them was far more controversial. As has been demonstrated, the view that nonviolent direct action was becoming too symbolic was already becoming prevalent within DAC and this only intensified after the creation of C100, an organization that was far more diverse in its ideological make-​up. The debate over challenging and symbolic action was once again anchored in the events at North Pickenham. In an article in the anarchist periodical Freedom, Nicholas Walter provided an insight into how these events were perceived through another ideological outlook that fed into C100. ‘So far as the popular press is concerned’, he wrote as the campaign faded in early 1959, the release of the imprisoned Swaffham missile demonstrators is the signal for the curtain of silence to be lowered on the whole affair. Having in the first place been responsible for a demonstration by a hundred people becoming front page headlines throughout the country, Fleet Street also decides when the time has come for the public to forget that it ever occurred.107



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In this view, the emphasis of DAC on symbolic action had been tantamount to a surrender of agency, ultimately rendering the group a victim of a capitalist press that controlled the public agenda on an issue of importance to all. Just as the creation of C100 gave rise to debates over the degree to which direct action should comprise a practical challenge, it also gave rise to ones over the meaning and practice of nonviolence.108 These tended to be resolved in favour of less cooperation with the police than had characterized the campaigns of DAC. A  resolution that the police should be sent only the official press handout of the demonstration on 17 February, for example, was accepted by twenty votes by the Committee, while ten votes were cast in favour of sending them no information at all.109 From a public relations perspective, however, the nonviolence practised by DAC had much to commend it. As a proponent of nonviolence explained in the working group, the openness of demonstrations was in this respect pivotal: preliminary announcements ‘ensured that when the actual event took place there was already a good deal of interest and sympathy, with the world press waiting to see what happened  . . .  one has much more opportunity of explaining what one is trying to do’. What was more, there was an ‘ingeniousness’ in ‘publishing at large one’s intention of committing a major “crime” ’. To do so was to establish ‘oneself as an essentially honest, law-​abiding citizen, who is only breaking the law on major issues’ and who was protected against ‘heavy sentences or really rough treatment’, which were likely ‘to arouse outcry, even from unsympathetic papers’.110

C100 demonstrations The shift in radical protest towards demonstrations that were larger, higher profile and more challenging was captured above all by the slogan ‘fill the jails’, which represented the tacit position of C100 throughout much of 1961. As protestors broke the law and evoked the sort of news coverage that would encourage others to do the same in future events, the Committee would in theory develop a mass civil disobedience campaign capable of overwhelming the authorities. Its sit-​ downs outside the Ministry of Defence on 18 February and in Parliament Square on 29 April both aspired to this model, the first involving 2,000 protestors and no arrests and the second involving 2,500 and 826 arrests (Figure 6.3). The sit-​ downs, based on cordial relations with the police in spite of the high volume of arrests in Parliament Square, were a modest success for C100, on each occasion securing extensive and favourable coverage.111 As a civil servant described in a

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Figure 6.3  A mass sit-​down outside of Whitehall. Photo by ZUMA Press, Inc./​Alamy Stock Photo.

report of the second sit-​down to R. A. Butler, the home secretary, ‘I listened to two journalists who held  . . .  that the police had blundered by making arrests and . . . that the demonstration had been such a success that the organisers would return.’112 It was between the sit-​downs in February and April, however, that patience with nonviolence began to rapidly wane. Nonviolent methods allowed ‘insufficient room for emotional behaviour’, as Johan Galtung, founder of peace and conflict studies, suggested prior to the creation of DAC:  ‘people are not content to be only instruments’.113 For C100, the first sit-​down in particular did not reflect its commitment to make a more substantive challenge to the authorities. ‘We do not forever want to be tolerated by the police’, claimed Russell in an interview after the event: ‘our movement depends on an immense public opinion and we cannot create that unless we rouse the authorities to more action than they took yesterday’. Ralph Schoenman, an American who had been involved in the initial proposals for C100 in the Partisan Coffee House, was even more explicit, ignoring the persuasive element of direct action altogether: ‘[W]‌e want to put the government in the position of either jailing thousands of people



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or abdicating.’114 If protestors were becoming frustrated with the maintenance of courteous relations for the purposes of publicity, then this was also mirrored by the authorities. The Home Office, for example, was anxious that C100 was building its support base through the sit-​downs and prior to the second one colluded with the Ministry of Works (MoW) to refuse access to Trafalgar Square on the grounds that it would be used to incite citizens to break the law: a decision that was later overturned by a Magistrates Court.115 That sections of C100 were becoming disenchanted with strict nonviolence was highlighted by the Easter march in 1961, when Schoenman directed 500–​ 600 marchers away from the final rally in Trafalgar Square and towards the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square. After following a ‘highland piper in full regalia’ to the Embassy, the marchers sat down in protest against the American Polaris missiles that had been stationed at the Holy Loch near Glasgow. While participants in this sit-​down claimed in a meeting of the working group that it had been ‘an impressive and non-​violent demonstration’, it was in fact notable for its moments of indiscipline, culminating in ‘something approaching a pitched battle’ outside West End Central police station, in the words of the Guardian.116 In contrast to the demonstrations organized by DAC and C100, where those arrested tended to be charged with obstruction, in this episode the protestors also faced the more serious charges of threatening behaviour and assault. This turn towards confrontation reflected not only growing frustrations with nonviolent methods, but also the ideological complexion of C100, in which nonviolent direct action undertook a wider range of interpretations and meanings. In the view of a Marxist such as Schoenman, for example, the significance of nonviolence was no more than instrumental –​its value was as a tool by which ends could be achieved rather than a method by which ideals could be spread. Joseph Rotblat later testified to this consequentialism, claiming that Schoenman had approached him to enquire whether it was possible to irradiate the Holy Loch and blame it on the United States.117 The attitude of most of the rank-​and-​file towards nonviolence was far more ambiguous, in part because the meaning of nonviolent practice depended on the context in which it occurred. It was for this reason that Jim Huggan refused to define the boundaries between nonviolence and violence. ‘I would say, “give me the situation and I’ll make a judgement’, he claimed, ‘but in the abstract I’d find it very hard to . . . I just know there is a line. I’m not exactly sure where it is because I’ve never actually found it.’118 The departure from nonviolent methods can also be seen as a response to the increasingly repressive measures employed by the authorities following the

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sit-​down in Parliament Square in late April. When Michael Randle applied to the MoW in June for access to Trafalgar Square in September, he had to wait two months for the outcome, which turned out to be a refusal. In the intervening period, the MoW and the Home Office had been corresponding over a strategy by which such a decision could be justified. As a MoW official explained to the Home Office, ‘[T]‌here are no real precedents for refusing permission to use the Square or for closing the Square in times of peace’, at least since the late 1880s, when demonstrations over home rule and unemployment in Ireland precipitated the need for such a Ministry in the first place. Given that C100 would ‘raise an outcry if they are denied the Square’ and that the government would ‘face Parliamentary and public criticism for denying . . . free speech’, the drafting of a well-​worded press release was vital and took place between the Home Office and the Office for Government Information. The press release referred to the intention of C100 to break the law, the high volume of arrests that had taken place at Parliament Square and the scheduling of a demonstration to commemorate the Battle of Britain on the same day.119 On the advice of the commissioner of the police of the Metropolis, the Home Office resolved on closing the Square altogether after 6 p.m. under the Public Order Act, passed in 1936 to control demonstrations by the British Union of Fascists.120 So determined was the Home Office to prevent the September sit-​down that it not only took the unprecedented step of closing the Square in peace time; it also singled out ringleaders of C100 through preventative arrest under the Justices of the Peace Act, another contentious instrument of statutory law. While the singling out of organizers became an effective means by which the state was able to weaken C100, its application on this occasion was cumbersome at best. It provided an opportunity for C100 to publicize its case ahead of the sit-​down, particularly through the example of Russell, an octogenarian whose sentencing drew cries of ‘shame’, ‘fascists’ and ‘poor old man’ from the gallery.121 ‘Our ruined, lifeless planet will continue for countless ages to circle aimlessly around the sun’, spoke Russell as he elaborated on the effects of nuclear war, ‘unredeemed by the joys and loves, the occasional wisdom and the power to create beauty which have given value to human life. It is for seeking to prevent this that we are in prison.’122 The planned sit-​down had been transformed from one that was concerned with nuclear weapons to one that was also concerned with civil liberties and freedom of speech, prompting an upsurge in donations and support for the Committee. The measures taken against C100, particularly in the aftermath of the Berlin Crisis and during the resumption of nuclear tests by the Soviet Union,



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imbued the sit-​down on 17 September with a confrontational sensibility before it had even commenced. The pretence that protestors and the police liked one another, so strictly upheld by DAC, dissipated under the logistical and psychological strain of mass resistance. In an action that coincided with a more specialized demonstration at the Holy Loch, 12,000 protestors gathered around the Square, where between 6  p.m. and 1 a.m. they sought to break the police cordon and sit-​down in front of what one participant described as ‘an impassive wall of Leica lenses’.123 The efforts of the protestors to break through the police cordon and the subsequent arrests, of which there were a total of 1,314, were floodlit by media coverage, the BBC providing rolling news as the event unravelled. The treatment of the sit-​down ‘as a major news event with special reports and interviews’ was highly controversial according to one journalist. The degree of publicity afforded those whose express intention was to break the law showed ‘complete irresponsibility for the national interest’ on behalf of both the BBC and ITN.124 In a discussion that foreshadowed debates around the need for a broadcasting ban against Irish paramilitaries, one news producer expressed concern that coverage of ‘such a widespread and organised breaking of the law’ could lead to the BBC being ‘justifiably accused of supporting this’.125 Through a combination of eyewitness accounts and news and current affairs coverage, the policing of the sit-​down, increasingly forceful after midnight, came under intense scrutiny. Lord Kilbracken, in the vicinity of the Square for almost the entirety of the event, provided a detailed assessment of police conduct in a televised interview not long afterwards, explaining how officers ‘got hold of ’ the protestors ‘by an arm or a leg, by the scruff of the neck or by the hair and dragged them the full length of the Square in the opposite direction to . . . the police lorries’.126 The predicament faced by the police might have been caused by the methods of C100, described by The Times as entailing ‘a subtle, but blatant use of force’, but the majority of newspapers agreed that policing was excessive. In the words of the Daily Telegraph, the police ‘seized’ those who were ‘making their way quietly out of the square. When they protested they were thrown to the pavements, dragged forcibly to the vans or coaches and manhandled’.127 If news coverage was sympathetic, then this stemmed in part from the subjection of journalists to the same mistreatment. A Daily Sketch reporter and cameramen from the BBC and Granada were arrested, while Daily Herald and Daily Mail reporters and an ITN crew were either assaulted or threatened with arrest and told to leave the area: the sit-​down put historic allegiances between journalists and the police under considerable pressure.128

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Such was the extent of public concern about the policing of the September sit-​down that the issue was raised in Parliament when it returned from recess a month later. In the Commons on 17 October, Anthony Greenwood called for an independent tribunal to examine misconduct and a potential ‘abuse of power’ by the commissioner for invoking the Public Order Act.129 This was supported two days later in the Lords by Lord Kilbracken, who referred to the thirty-​one allegations of violence that had been documented against the police in the NCCL publication Public Order and the Police. The call for a tribunal, endorsed by Hugh Gaitskell, came at a vulnerable period for the police, as its ‘constitutional position’ was already under review by a Royal Commission appointed a year earlier. As described by an official from the Home Office, the establishment of such a tribunal ‘might be found to constitute a particularly undesirable precedent’, especially ‘in the event of serious industrial trouble arising as a result of a pay pause or otherwise’. A similar call had been made after anti-​fascists demonstrations in Thurloe Square in 1936, where the ‘agitation’ was also ‘organised by the NCCL and  . . .  given much publicity’. In an indication of the underhand tactics that were employed against the protestors, the official stressed how it would be ‘particularly undesirable to set out before a tribunal the detailed arrangements made by the Commissioner for dealing with a threat to public order such as that posed by the Committee of 100’.130 Although the tribunal into police misconduct never materialized, the Committee had succeeded in making the news media more vigilant towards police practices, at least in the short term. In November 1963, for example, ATV broadcast a programme entitled Fair Play, which investigated allegations among protestors that detective-​sergeant Harold Challenor and officers from West End Central police station had planted bricks in their bags and fabricated evidence. At the same time, the programme also drew attention to an internal enquiry into the allegations, launched by the Metropolitan Police in October and brought under political pressure when MPs proposed that it should be carried out independently two months later. In the criminal proceedings that emerged as a result of the enquiry, detective-​sergeant Challenor was found unfit to plead and three officers were sentenced to three to four years in prison for perverting the course of justice. The evidence they had fabricated had led to the wrongful imprisonment of seventeen citizens for a combined total of fourteen years.131



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The turn towards violence Having gained support and a stream of donations from the sit-​down in September 1961, the Committee sought to take nonviolent direct action back to the missile bases.132 If the first step of mobilizing a mass civil disobedience campaign had been taken, then the next one was to channel this towards locations that had a direct connection with nuclear weapons, this time with the challenging aim of rendering the bases inoperable. To this end, a simultaneous series of events were scheduled for 9 December, which included nonviolent direct action against bases near Brize Norton, Oxford, Ruislip and Wethersfield and supporting demonstrations in Bristol, Cardiff, Manchester and York. While these events still adhered to nonviolent methods and principles  –​such as openness with the authorities and media  –​they surpassed the level of force employed in September and marked a turning point in the evolution of C100 and radical protest. Their experience illustrated that the progress of C100 could no longer be ensured through ‘openness’, as this conceded the upper hand to their opponents and by the following year lost interest for the news media. On the converse, it was through secrecy and shock tactics  –​encapsulated by the Spies for Peace that broke into and exposed RSG-​6 in Berkshire in 1963 –​that C100 sought to outmanoeuvre the state and retain newsworthiness. In returning to the bases and seeking to make them inoperable, the Committee was more likely not only to engage in violence, but also to provoke it against its members. The emphasis of such a strategy may have been on the challenging rather than symbolic element of direct action, but its significance for the interest and response of the news media grew in proportion to the higher stakes that it entailed. From one perspective, the proposals to block the entrances of the air bases and by means of ‘commandos’ invade the airfield and immobilize the aircraft were more likely to be construed and denigrated by the news media as violent. From another, the increased risk of the protestors succumbing to injustice or serious harm had the potential to cause outcry and increase the support of C100 further still. In the precarious environment of bases that were under foreign control and contained nuclear weapons, the implications of a mistake on behalf of the authorities could be severe, as correspondence between the Air Ministry and Harold Macmillan reveals. ‘The USAF have made it clear that they cannot permit the demonstrations to impair the operational capability of the bases’, claimed the Air Ministry. ‘They have said that if demonstrators

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persist in approaching sensitive areas, and disregard the orders of the [US] sentries, the latter will be compelled to open fire.’133 Unlike the September sit-​down, the measures taken against C100 were on this occasion far more calculated and considerate of media and public relations, despite being the most punitive yet. The Government Legal Service, which informed Macmillan on 6 December that ‘the time has come for the institution of serious criminal proceedings against the organisers of the demonstrations’, was aware that the purpose of having a named Committee of 100 was to protect members from being singled out and consequently sought to navigate around it. The Service did not ‘propose to charge figureheads like Lord Russell, but to try to get those really responsible’, depriving C100 of the public attention it was able to attract ahead of the September sit-​down.134 Only two days after a raid on C100 offices by Special Branch, also on 6 December, six of its leading members were arrested and charged with offences relating to the Official Secrets Act and conspiracy.135 If this was not enough of a deterrent, then the government was also able to disrupt travel to the bases by pressurizing the coach companies to withdraw their contracts. The 600 who made it to Wethersfield were met by 5,000 RAF Regiment men, 260 RAF and Women’s RAF police, 850 civil police and Special Branch officers, 75 Air Ministry constabulary men, police Alsatians and two Belvedere helicopters, all behind a 12-​foot barbed wire fence that surrounded the 6.5-​mile perimeter of the site.136 During the actions of 9 December, the Committee failed to trouble the bases, or to provoke an act of violence capable of bringing the presence of the USAF on British soil into the media spotlight. The 7,500 who participated in the events fell short not only of the 50,000 to which C100 had aspired, but also of the expectations of the authorities, especially at the key site of Wethersfield, where the Air Ministry had predicted a turnout of between 3,000 and 5,000.137 While the military and police presence at Wethersfield highlighted that C100 had become a cause for considerable concern, it largely represented a preventative measure; a buffer designed to stop protestors from reaching the USAF at the heart of the base, where they would raise issues of chain of command between the USAF and RAF and most likely get shot, triggering a media sensation in the process.138 As it happened, such precautions proved unnecessary. Only 73 arrests were made, most on charges of obstruction, with 860 arrests taking place nationwide. ‘Not one “commando” penetrated the defence screen’, reported The Times: ‘As for violence and short tempers, there was none to be seen here.’139 It was in the law courts as well as at the bases that the authorities were able to outmanoeuvre the Committee. The trial of the six arrested before the events



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on 9 December, taking place at the Old Bailey in February 1962, represented a defining moment in the history of the anti-​nuclear movement; a clash between radicals and the authorities over the meaning of democracy and the prerogatives of democratic and executive power in defence and foreign policy. The trial signified a coming together of two rival conceptions of democracy; a radical one that advocated a popular sovereignty in which the law was subordinated to the moral consent of ‘the people’, and an official one that advocated the right of the state to determine the national interest on behalf of the people, irrespective of their moral consent or not. In legal terms, this encounter between radical and official conceptions of democracy was determined by the evidence that was permitted in relation to the charge – that the accused had conspired together to enter a prohibited place, Wethersfield air base, for a purpose prejudicial to the safety and interests of the state. Here the judge, Mr Justice Havers, was careful to enforce a distinction between the ‘purpose’ of the defendants and their ‘aims’ and ‘motives’, a move that prevented the court from becoming a soapbox from which the defence could elaborate on the perils of nuclear weapons and the virtues of civil disobedience. Through this restrictive interpretation, the defence was largely stifled, the only breakthrough occurring when Pat Pottle, a defendant representing himself, was able to manipulate the director of operations at the Air Ministry into agreeing that he would ‘annihilate millions’ if the circumstances demanded it; an admission that encouraged Pottle to draw parallels with Adolf Eichmann, whose defence at the Nuremberg trials was that he was only following orders. If C100 had sought to use the court as a forum in which to disseminate ‘the facts’ about nuclear weapons, however, its efforts were largely futile. ‘The facts’ and the star witnesses called upon to publicize and verify them were denied and having been found guilty by the jury the five male defendants were sentenced to eighteen months in prison and the one female to a year. In a closing speech for the defence, Jeremy Hutchinson Queen’s Counsel explained how in his view the legal framework had been contrived to suppress a wider debate on civil disobedience and nuclear weapons. ‘How on earth, in all common sense’, he asked ‘can you consider the purpose of anybody without looking at their views on which the purpose is founded?’. ‘One begins to wonder whose case it is’, he concluded in reference to the principal witnesses of the prosecution, ‘Is it Air Commodore Magill’s [of the Air Ministry], is it Detective Inspector Stratton’s [of Special Branch], or is it the United States Air Force’s?’140 The experience of 9 December, combined with the Official Secrets trial and the restructuring of the Committee along more democratic lines in late

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1961 and 1962, all served to empower anarchistic tendencies within C100 and led to a reconfiguration of its relationship with the news media. ‘We have become a public spectacle’, argued a memorandum drafted for a meeting on 17 December 1961:  ‘a group isolated from the general body of public opinion and feeling, a rowdy show to be televised and reported in the press for the interest and amusement of the majority who are not with us’.141 After 9 December, the enthusiasm for cooperative and open methods, employed up until this stage to engage the public and stimulate debate, swiftly dwindled: a trend reinforced by the Official Secrets trial. Ruth Walter, who according to Sam Carroll had been more involved in the planning of Wethersfield than the six who were convicted, was not alone in underlining the significance of these events for shifting attitudes within C100: ‘Wethersfield changed things, certainly for me, to play a more confrontational form of direct action’.142 As C100 struggled to recapture the novelty of the demonstrations that had been front-​page news  –​and as its ‘big names’ resigned towards the end of 1962 –​its only hope of rekindling media and public attention was through more challenging forms of action: the turn from nonviolence to violence was almost complete.

Spies for Peace The increasing predominance of anarchism over pacifism in the ideological complexion of C100 was highlighted by ‘Beyond Counting Arses’, a document circulated to a Committee conference in February 1963 by eight activists associated with Solidarity, a group of socialist libertarians who had splintered from the Socialist Labour League in 1961.143 While the proposals in the document were defeated at the conference in February, it pointed towards a sea change in the methods and media and public relations of C100. It condemned the means by which the anti-​nuclear movement had so far been waged, arguing that the dependence on ‘big names’ was a substitute for proper action and ideas; that the Aldermaston marches ensured that ‘our energies are not diverted towards more “dangerous” paths’; and that the ‘fill the jails’ policy had collapsed into ‘a ritual pas-​de-​deux with the police’. In the mass sit-​downs, the document contended, ‘the Committee accepts its role, and the authorities impose their own very tangible control over how far resistance goes. (“All right son. You’ve made your point. Now walk nicely into court”)’. What the movement required, in the view of the document, was a ‘new criteria’ by which radical protest could be



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measured: the ‘yardstick of success has usually been the total column inches in the Guardian or the number of arrested arses’.144 In seeking ‘to unmask and publicise the most secret preparations of the Warfare State’, including publishing ‘the location of rocket bases’ and details of ‘what goes on in germ warfare centres’, the proposals in ‘Beyond Counting Arses’ were in fact not so far removed from those carried out by C100 and DAC. They represented an extension on the pacifistic concept of ‘public witness’, creating what was in essence a shocking form of exposé, ironically even better-​packaged for media and public consumption. From a contemporary perspective, the stress of ‘Beyond Counting Arses’ on the need to expose and publicize the secretive seems to anticipate the ethos and ideology of WikiLeaks. As described in March 1964 by Resistance, a C100  monthly, ‘[T]‌he long term objective in publishing Official Secrets is to help solve the crucial problem of inspection during general disarmament’, whereas the short-​term one ‘is to make the public aware of the large number of military targets in this country . . . by leafleting with detailed maps and holding a demonstration outside.’145 In the view of ‘Beyond Counting Arses’, the rendering of all information open and free would make the world a better place. Where the proposals in ‘Beyond Counting Arses’ deviated from those of pacifists lay in the methods by which they challenged the ‘warfare state’ and acquired information from it. These involved secrecy and violence and included exposure not only of top secret facilities and personnel, but also infiltration of armed forces and coordination with local struggles over living and work conditions. The struggle against nuclear weapons, as the authors of ‘Beyond Counting Arses’ put it, had led them to ‘realise that our opponent is the state itself ’.146 If the state was able to hide its preparations for war under D-​Notices and the Official Secrets Act, they reasoned, then they were also entitled to resort to secretive methods in their exposure of them. What had emerged was a transformed set of rules between C100 and its opponents in which contradictions between the public and the secret were exploited and played out in scandalous fashion before the news media. As news coverage of ‘Beyond Counting Arses’ demonstrated after the document was leaked, its proposals were far more newsworthy than those of the remaining pacifists and would influence the development of C100 going forward.147 The shift towards tactics of secrecy and exposure was encapsulated by the Spies for Peace, an underground cell within C100 consisting of Mike Lesser, Nicholas Walter, Ruth Walter and several individuals who remain unnamed. In February 1963, the same month that ‘Beyond Counting Arses’ proclaimed that

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‘we must give details about secret hide-​outs of “civil” defence’ and ‘the secretly kept lists of those who will be spared in the event of nuclear war’, four of its signatories travelled from London near to Warren Row in Berkshire, where in response to a tip off they visited RSG-​6. During the trip, as on another a fortnight later, they found the RSG empty, broke in and entered and took photographs, as well as duplicates of relevant documents and maps. These materials, collected so as not to leave behind clues, formed the basis of the document ‘Danger! Official Secret’, around 3,000 copies of which were sent to contacts in the movement, politics and the press.148 The document provided details of the twelve RSGs in the UK and RSG-​6 in particular, including the function they served and the personnel they would save in the event of a nuclear war, 5,000 of whom would form a ‘shadow military government’.149 Only days after ‘Danger!’ had been disseminated, a March Must Decide Committee, established by the Spies and led by Peter Cadogan, diverted 2,000 marchers to RSG-​6 during the Aldermaston march, where scuffles broke out with the police and a small minority squatted outside the entrance.150 The means by which the Spies exposed RSG-​6 made for exactly the sort of scandal that stole headlines and sold newspapers, as its collaborators were aware. While their name was in part a wisecrack at Communist-​front organizations –​ such as artists, doctors, scientists and teachers for peace –​it also tapped into the spy genre, which continued to thrive in the suspicious climate of the Cold War.151 In aspiring to become spies and to invert the function and meaning of spying, the group also acted upon and responded to media portrayals of spies and spy scandals. A year later, for example, they recommended to their supporters the docudrama Ring of Spies, a reconstruction of the Portland spy case in which five ‘resident spies’ were sentenced to between fifteen and twenty-​five years in prison for passing on information about the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment to the Soviets:  ‘Much can be learned not only of professional spying methods, but also of the methods used by Special Branch and Mi5 to track down a genuine spy.’152 That the Spies were able to acquire information about RSGs and present it in such a dramatic manner also resonated with scandal-​style reporting. The Profumo Affair, in which the war secretary was alleged to have jeopardized security by having an affair with Christine Keeler, a showgirl also consorting with a Soviet naval attaché, had broken out a month earlier and provided a rich backdrop through which the RSG revelations could be interpreted. The media and public impact of ‘Danger! Official Secret’ was heightened by the ineptitude of the official response. The ‘main matter of concern’ from the



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document might have been ‘the indication that secret information has been disclosed rather than the nature of the information’, as the Home Office explained to Macmillan, but the decision to place a D-​Notice on its contents reinforced the impression that the government did not want the public to know. After extracts from the document had been read out on Radio Prague, however, the purpose of the D-​Notice was effectively nullified and the Daily Telegraph published a transcript of the broadcast on 19 April. The humiliation for the government was not only that the scandal made it seem that it could not be trusted with sensitive information, but also that it seemed that the government did not trust citizens with this information either: a theme that fed into satirical coverage of the revelations on TW³ and in Private Eye. The humiliation was reinforced by the failure of the government to identify the culprits, which only added to the mystique and newsworthiness of the scandal. Peter Cadogan, who acted as public spokesman for the Spies, turned down an offer of £1,000 from the Daily Mail for a photograph of the back of their heads. He described how his ‘picture was on the front of the Daily Mirror’, next to a headline which read: ‘Mac in Trouble over Peace Spies’.153 In what appears to have been a common pattern in the history of the anti-​ nuclear movement, the success with which the Spies effected a media and public breakthrough served to influence its ongoing development, as well as the strategies of officialdom in dealing with it. The proposals in ‘Beyond Counting Arses’ went from being rejected at a C100 conference in February 1963 to being widely embraced and supported following the RSG revelations.154 As described in a report compiled for Macmillan and his Cabinet by a ‘Personal Security Committee’, the Spies for Peace ‘command considerable sympathy in both movements’:  in both CND and C100. Since the ‘Security Committee’ recognized that ‘there may now be a substantial security risk in employing a supporter of CND or C100’, it resolved on reassessing vetting procedures and giving governmental departments ‘the same authority to take overt action to remove Trotskyists and Anarchists from secret work as they now have to remove Communists and Fascists’.155 In this context  –​and in view of the risk that subsequent spying might expose past transgressions  –​the Spies found it increasingly difficult to ‘sift secrets from the glut of . . . information available’ and disbanded towards the end of 1964.156 By the end of 1963, three years on from the inception of C100, a total of more than 5,000 citizens had been processed through British courts for carrying out direct action over the issue of nuclear disarmament.157 For the most part, these citizens had been guided by nonviolent methods and principles, but as

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the public and tactical relevance of this pacifism waned, a minority among them increasingly turned towards violence. The cordiality, openness and self-​ restraint of the earlier demonstrations had within a short period succumbed to hostility, secrecy and a willingness to use force against both people and property. An attempt has been made to show how news and current affairs served as the key engine behind this transition, mediating the tactical struggle between demonstrators, the police and the law courts as each of these parties sought to win over public support. As the authorities learned how to deal with nonviolent direct action, its newsworthiness diminished and demonstrators had to fashion other forms of protest in order to secure the interest of broadcasters and the press. This facilitated the rise of ideological minorities who specialized in more drastic forms of action. When the actions of these groups made the headlines –​ as in the case of the RSG revelations –​it served to elevate the minority into a position of power within the movement, largely because its methods could be seen as impactful. While the purpose of this tactical escalation might have been to sustain the interest of broadcasts and the press, the news coverage it generated tended to focus on the methods of protest rather than on the issues it involved. It was the form rather than the content of single issue protest with which the news media were concerned. This preoccupation was shared by the demonstrators and in tandem with the media they continued to devise means of news creation as public attention began to shift to the Vietnam War.

7

Denouement: 1968

The year 1968 is regarded in this concluding chapter as the culmination of the creative dynamics and practices that had evolved between radical movements and the media since the late 1950s. In Britain, this became manifest in a spectacle of revolutionary imagery and rhetoric, removed from the politics of most rank-​ and-​file protestors, yet significant for the iconography of 1968 as a year of global rebellion. Through the history of radical movements and the media, it is possible to shed light on this seeming discrepancy between the style and substance of protest: between its prevailing figures and motifs and the ideological forces that underpinned it. If the relationship between movements and media had caused a disparity between image and reality, then it is necessary to examine why rank-​ and-​file protestors were willing to buy into this imagery in the late 1960s  –​ especially as they demonstrated against the Vietnam War. A key reason was that ‘revolution’ served a useful purpose for a range of social groups  –​it allowed ethnic minorities, students and women to kick back at the mirror of the media, to forge connections and imagined solidarities and to narrate their positions in terms of change and rupture from the past. Whether through immigration or collective experiences and consciousness, all these groups were seeking to articulate the difference and distinctiveness they felt in British society at this time:  ‘revolution’ provided the most powerful means possible. The imagery and rhetoric of revolution, however, marked the limits of the mass politics for which the movements against nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War had stood. To this end, the year 1968 –​as well as being the culmination of one historical phase of radicalism –​was also the beginning of a political fragmentation and realignment of another: one that involved far more caution and scepticism in negotiations with the media and mass public. In comprehending 1968 as an extension of dynamics and practices between movements and media that stemmed from the late 1950s, this chapter will engage with the same interpretative frameworks that have been utilized throughout

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this monograph, but this time in relation to the anti–​Vietnam War movement. The intention is not to provide a comprehensive assessment of that movement, which would warrant another book-​length study, but to demonstrate the weight of its inheritance and the recurrence of certain arguments and themes that were peculiar to radicalism in this period. In particular, this chapter seeks to reiterate the function and importance of mediated information, in this case on the issue of the Vietnam War; to grasp the student as an intellectual, with a media and public status transformed by egalitarian tendencies in current affairs television and participatory democracy; and to underline the role of the movement and media in constructing demonstrations and protests as revolutionary and violent. In each of these final sections, the aim is to highlight continuities in the evolution of radicalism in Cold War Britain, tracking pathways and trajectories that were linked to media coverage and that by the late 1960s had already gathered a significant degree of velocity.

Vietnam, the media and the movement As with the anti-​nuclear movement, the formation of a movement against the Vietnam War in Britain depended on  –​and reflected  –​the coordination of issue-​related information between activists and intellectuals and the news media. The currency of that information, however, was distinctive, pertaining to a conflict that in contrast to the threat posed by nuclear weapons and tests was immediate and real rather than hypothetical. Unlike nuclear-​ related information, which was highly technical and driven underground because of its value in the arms race, that relating to Vietnam was comparatively accessible and open from the moment that the United States escalated and introduced ground troops in March 1965. This can be explained in part by circumstantial factors such as the British connection to the conflict, which remained free from military involvement in spite of aid and rhetorical support for the United States from the Wilson government.1 The accessibility and openness of information about Vietnam, however, was also a product of developments in news and current affairs, including the failure of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration to manage the flow of uncensored news, especially of a graphic nature, as well as the increasing assertiveness of the BBC and ITV over the issue.2 The British connection to Vietnam may have been one step removed, but this did not render coverage of the conflict insignificant:  how Vietnam was reported had major repercussions for the Labour government and its foreign policy. This shaped the

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struggle over news and current affairs in Britain, with the movement mobilizing around information that exposed American atrocities and pressurized the Wilson government into dissociating from the United States. Since the Vietnam War did not become a regular feature of news in Britain until American escalation in 1965, the origins of a movement against it tended to derive from groups and individuals able to garner information from international contacts. While contacts through Communist networks were influential  –​with a Communist-​led British-​Vietnam Committee having been established during the First Indochina War with the French –​it was American networks that predominated. This was due not only to the reach of American news, which began to take a critical stance towards Vietnam as early as the Battle of Ap Bac in January 1963, but also to the high volume of travel between Britain and the United States.3 The role of Americans as emissaries of news to Britain gave universities a special importance as centres of information –​not only because American students tended to be critical of the conflict, but also because they tended to spend their semesters and years abroad in Britain as a result of language limitations.4 Before Vietnam had emerged as a major news item in Britain, therefore, students were already active in gathering and relaying information about the war. A  report in Easter 1964 in Wine Press, a student journal from the University of Sussex, highlights how students were engaged in the business of publicizing American atrocities and double standards from an early stage. In reference to the Buddhist crisis, another turning point in US coverage of the conflict, the journal described how ‘the US press, so horrified at the immolation of a handful of Buddhist monks [by the South Vietnamese armed forces], remained tactfully silent about the slaughter of thousands of Vietnamese peasants –​men, women, and children –​burned alive in air attacks on harmless villages with flaming jellied petrol (Napalm)’.5 In a similar manner to the anti-​nuclear movement, the use of issue-​related information to ‘provide witness’ and lift the lid on official versions of events was a common tactic among early opponents to the Vietnam War in Britain. Just as the editors of Wine Press sought to navigate the ‘triple censorship of US news dispatches’, those of another student journal, Durham Left, also railed against the Johnson administration’s attempts at ‘news management . . . a policy where the American government decide the nature and degree of news about the war which is suitable for printing in the American press’.6 The exposure and recirculation of anti-​war information was also an overriding task of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, which had been established with a focus on nuclear disarmament in spring 1963 and over a year later published an ‘Extract of Data

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compiled on the War in Vietnam’.7 As with the anti-​nuclear movement, the early activism against the Vietnam War in Britain was therefore subterranean, for the most part occurring beneath the radar of the news media and in opposition to the information propagated by the White House, the Wilson government and the Foreign Office. Through revelations of war atrocities and misdemeanours, this activism sought to open up alternative circuits of information with news organizations, compelling them to take a more independent position and creating the conditions in which a mass movement could mobilize. The role of the news media over a major issue of live news in Britain had once again become fragmented:  pressurized on one side by a movement determined to highlight US wrongdoings and on the other by an official machinery determined to obscure them. In arriving at a critical perspective on Vietnam, the news media in Britain did not need much encouragement. Unlike in the anti-​nuclear movement, where broadcasters and press had tended to resist negative coverage of nuclear issues, in the anti-​war movement they tended to embrace it: media coverage therefore anticipated developments in anti-​war activism as much as the other way around. The turn of news media in Britain against the war was to this end more a product of frustration at the failings and hypocrisies of official purveyors of information than it was the work of activists. The admission that the United States was using gas and napalm, delivered in a press release by the US Defence Department, was particularly disastrous, causing what one historian called a ‘worldwide press furore that began on 24 March [1965] and did not finally subside until August’.8 The Times admitted that ‘the whole incident  . . .  naturally hinges on one’s faith in authoritative sources’, while The Observer argued that the political impact ‘was symptomatic of spreading fears about US policy’.9 In fact, the press release set in motion a chain of events that led to the establishment of the British Committee for Peace in Vietnam (BCPV), which consisted of Labour MPs and representatives from organizations such as CND and MCF. The formation of the BCPV, however, was a product of interactions with media discourses about internationalism as well as information about Vietnam. Like CND, it envisaged a positive role for Britain in the world, drawing attention to the part played by Britain as cochair of the Geneva Agreements that brought an end to the First Indochina War in 1954 and framing the conflict as part of British responsibilities ‘East of Suez’ –​an area of foreign policy from which Harold Wilson would secure withdrawal in 1967.10 The objective of BCPV –​for Britain to negotiate an end to the war on the basis of the 1954 Agreements –​did not disguise a growing disgust at American policy, with the Committee also calling for ‘British dissociation’.11

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That media coverage of Vietnam was far bolder and more critical than it had been of nuclear weapons and tests was highlighted by current affairs broadcasting. Granada Television was once again at the forefront, pressing the boundaries of impartiality on television. By the end of 1965, its approach to current affairs was the product of particular tension with the ITA. After a World in Action programme on the pharmaceutical industry, Robert Fraser had reached a point of exasperation. ‘What you do is this’, he wrote in a letter to Denis Forman, the managing director of Granada. ‘You take a highly controversial subject. You then arrange that the critics whom you invite into the programme have a field day, and that those who are being attacked are boxed into relatively short contributions. And then you run through the programme a commentary which (I’ll eat my hat if it doesn’t) sides plainly with the critics.’12 The coverage that Granada had provided on Vietnam seemed to fall in line with this appraisal, with a programme on the escalation of the war in February having been criticized by the ITA for containing ‘a degree of partiality which should not have been there’.13 In view of these perceived transgressions, the ITA went as far as imposing upon Granada in 1965 a series of safeguarding measures, which included the moderation of programme scripts on sensitive issues. ‘The American War’, a documentary on Vietnam broadcast as part of a World Tonight special over Christmas, was subject to this vetting process, with the ITA objecting to its disproportionate coverage of the anti-​war movement in the United States. ‘The message comes through loud and clear’, argued one moderator to the Deputy Director General Frank Copplestone: ‘There are two heroes, Jeff and Jim. Both are pacifists. Government supporters speak but they appear to be saying that the war must be won, not necessarily why there is a war in the first place.’14 For Robert Fraser, the programme represented a political risk, its emphasis on the ‘anti-​war movement giving quite a false impression of the general state of American opinion and of the American case as the US government sees it –​and, for that matter, as the British Labour Government sees it’. ‘The programme could [also] . . . give the impression that the poor old Americans are the war-​makers in a world of peace’, he added, ‘as if there were no such thing as North Vietnamese aggression.’15 The management and current affairs group in Granada were inventive, however, using Gallup polls taken in the United States to demonstrate that the anti-​war movement did in fact represent a significant section of public opinion. Despite this success for Granada, however, its relations with the Authority continued to deteriorate. ‘The files are bulging’, wrote Forman in October 1966:  ‘we long for a better and easier accommodation’.16

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Whereas BBC coverage of nuclear issues had been characterized by reticence, its coverage of the Vietnam War was extremely outspoken, especially as British-​ led peace initiatives through 1965 floundered and the United States resumed bombing in 1966. An episode of A Whole Scene Going On, a topical current affairs programme aimed at those under the age of 21, was indicative of the anti-​American sentiment that had started to prevail in parts of the Corporation. The presenter of the show, Barry Fantoni from Private Eye, suggested that the position of The Green Berets at the top of the American hit parade had been manufactured by the Johnson administration in order to reinforce support for its policy on Vietnam.17 When one young viewer complained of bias in the episode, he was described in correspondence to the Director of Television Kenneth Adam as ‘an extraordinarily mixed up young man. I sometimes think we need a resident priest/​doctor/​psychiatrist to cope with such letters!’18 In Adam’s reply to the viewer, he described how over forty letters to the Corporation had praised the episode for ‘the showing up of this jingoistic song for what it is’. He went on to reiterate the words of Iain Hamilton, a literary critic who had reviewed the programme on the Home Service, taking a particular interest in the playing of The Green Berets ‘against some very nasty film sequences’. ‘Anti-​phoney?’ Hamilton had asked. ‘Yes. And fine. Anti-​war? Well, who isn’t? But who started this one anyhow? Anti-​American? Probably.’19 The most controversial intervention by the BBC on the Vietnam issue, however, occurred through a trio of Panorama episodes between April and June 1966, the first of which highlighted British complicity in the war and the prospects of further involvement. In the final episode of the three, Michael Charlton spoke damningly of American medical aid in relation to the intensification of the bombings, often over the top of film footage of injured mothers and children awaiting treatment. The episode concluded with camera shots of a village being evacuated having been captured from the Vietcong. A cart, harnessed to a team of water buffalo, was shown spilling its contents after the buffalo bolted under the racket of a helicopter overhead. ‘The Vietcong were in this village ten years’, remarked Charlton, ‘The Americans have only been here three hours.’ According to the Washington Post, ‘[T]‌his and previous reports . . . would probably qualify [Charlton] as number one man on the list if the US ever imposed an effective censorship on foreign TV operatives.’20 As a result of reading the report in the Washington Post, R. W. Komer, special assistant to President Johnson, even took it upon himself to bypass diplomatic channels and write a letter of complaint straight to the Chairman of the BBC, Lord Normanbrook. He referred to the ‘great mass of data’ that Charlton had ignored, all of which underscored

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‘President Johnson’s efforts to win “the other war” in Vietnam’.21 The impact of this letter, on the surface seeming to have the approval of President Johnson, was immense, prompting Normanbrook to consult ambassadors and diplomats on both the British and American side.22 Despite a robust reply to Komer –​in which Normanbrook claimed it ‘unrealistic to write a letter about a 50-​minute television programme on the basis of an 8-​paragraph report in a newspaper’ –​ this incident coincided with a tougher stance being taken to the BBC by both the Wilson government and the Foreign Office.23 The bombing of North Vietnam, combined with the outbreak of a severe spell of criticism and exposure in the news media, created the climate in which the more militant groups could take control of the anti-​war movement. While the organizational framework of the movement had grown out of more reformist bodies such as BCPV and CND, this no longer seemed sufficient  –​ as highlighted by demonstrations that often spilled over into violence among radicalized minorities.24 Indeed, the leadership of the BCPV and CND over the anti-​war movement was to a large degree misleading, since activists and radicals had already experienced the disappointment of reformism over nuclear disarmament. The turn towards more militant methods of protest was therefore a by-​product from the tail end of the anti-​nuclear movement, which had set the mould for future mobilizations. Peter Cadogan, at the time national secretary of C100, acknowledged the weight of this inheritance in 1968. ‘Going limp was right for 1961 and . . . all wrong for 1968’, he claimed: ‘In 1961 war was only a threat. In ‘68 Vietnam is a fact. Anger has taken over –​and so it should.’25 The rationalization and repurposing of this anger was carried out for the most part by Trotskyist organizations such as the International Marxist Group (IMG) and International Socialists. Pat Jordan, a member of IMG who became secretary of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, established in June 1966, elaborated later that summer on how this had departed from the logic of traditional peace organizations: ‘Unlike the peace movement, many of whose members don’t care which side wins as long as the war is somehow stopped, we care very much which side wins. We have come together to campaign for support for the National Liberation Front [of North Vietnam].’26 This line of thought represented a distinctive shift in the radical internationalism of Britain, moving away from the third way concept and towards one of direct solidarity with revolutionary struggles. The implications of this solidarity for the expressive tactics of the movement were profound, since it offered a means by which actions in Britain could be coordinated as news events with violent ones from abroad. As a form of identification, it also served to personalize acts of protest and render them

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more meaningful on a social level. To express solidarity through demonstrations was to share in the victimhood of Western aggression and imperialism. To do so through militancy and violence was to enter into a common struggle, seemingly significant on all levels, personal, local and global. If media coverage of the US bombings had created a climate of opinion in which the anti-​war movement could radicalize, then it also prompted the Wilson government and the Foreign Office to crack down on the broadcasters –​ the BBC especially. The Foreign Office was particularly proactive in this respect, encouraging the BBC to use ‘American material’ and proclaiming its support for US policy without approval from the Wilson government, which in the spring had been pressurized into dissociating from US actions.27 In a meeting to decide whether to televise the summary execution of a Vietcong officer, the editor of news and current affairs at the BBC warned colleagues that Sir Paul Gore-​Booth, permanent undersecretary of state at the Foreign Office, ‘continued to be worried about the Corporation’s coverage of the war in Vietnam’.28 The Foreign Office also took measures to ensure that the Russell War Crimes Tribunal, designed to establish whether the United States had committed war crimes in Vietnam, was neither hosted in Britain nor able to gain coverage for the data and images its research team had retrieved from Hanoi and Haiphong in 1966. The Tribunal, modelled on the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials in Germany, eventually took place in Stockholm, Sweden, and Roskilde, Denmark, and was for the most part derided by the news media.29 In an ITN news item on 10 May 1967, for example, the on-​the-​spot reporter described how the Tribunal was administering ‘a strange kind of justice’. ‘The Tribunal’, he added, ‘makes no pretence at being impartial and as such it has no role to play in bringing peace to Vietnam. Rather, from all we’ve heard so far, it is to be used as a sounding board for extremist sentiments.’30 While the Foreign Office was intent on preserving the special relationship with the United States, the Wilson government had an additional reason for stemming the flow of anti-​war information in the news media:  to maintain unity within the Labour Party and stifle opposition among its left wing backbenchers. The prime minister had commissioned studies into elite opinion on the war in Britain as early as the introduction of ground troops in 1965, but was particularly sensitive to news coverage that highlighted divisions within the Labour Party over Vietnam.31 In a series of informal allegations made by Wilson about BBC coverage in the run up to his re-​election in 1966, for example, he complained at the Corporation’s decision to interview Clive Jenkins, an anti-​war and trade union leader, at the Annual Conference in

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December 1965.32 The ability of Wilson to deflect the media spotlight from splits in the Labour Party may have even made it easier for him to defy the will of Conference over Vietnam. When he did so towards the end of 1967, he endured nothing close to the scrutiny Gaitskell had received seven years earlier over nuclear disarmament. He was also active in bringing the BBC to heel after a period of experimentation and independence, facilitating the replacement of Lord Normanbrook with Charles Hill as chairman in 1967. According to Robert Lusty, who served as acting chairman during the transition, the appointment was ‘like inviting Rommel to command the Eighth Army on the eve of Alamein’.33 Only a year into the tenure of Hill as chairman, the director general Hugh Greene also chose to resign.

Students as intellectuals The growing assertiveness and independence of current affairs television and news in the 1960s coincided with a parallel trend among college and university students, often over shared issues such as the Vietnam War. When these twin forces intersected and came together, they exercised a strong influence over one another and formed a powerful agent of public and social change. On the one hand, the intervention of students on issues such as Vietnam –​along with their efforts to express ‘ownership’ over fora of public debate through occupations and ‘teach-​ins’ –​served to stimulate experimentation and ideas in current affairs broadcasting. On the other hand, the increasing fixation of broadcasters with student politics, disproportionate next to those of other identifiable groups in British society, served to reinforce the role of students as leaders and spokesmen for the anti-​war movement. The upshot of this relationship between student politics and broadcasting was to democratize –​or at least give the impression of democratizing –​the concept and role of the public intellectual. As had occurred in the anti-​nuclear movement, a combination of media and social change seemed to be precipitating the rise of other public figures and groups within movement politics and wider society. The extent to which this was a meaningful democratization, however, is questionable, with television as a mass medium often failing to capture the participatory impulses of British students at the time. In the wider context, the student as a type remained very much on the receiving end of news coverage: the product of a discourse governed by older broadcasters and journalists. As the next section will demonstrate, the student became in a section of newspapers the very personification of the difficulties of the late

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1960s: an outsider symbolic of the threat that immigration and violent politics seemed to pose for postcolonial Britain. In order to comprehend the significance of student politics for current affairs broadcasting in Britain, it is necessary to reflect on the shift towards participatory democracy within colleges and universities. This was sparked by the Free Speech Movement, which began at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964 and spread thereafter to universities across the United States. The ideals of free speech and the methods used to aspire towards them, including sit-​ins and teach-​ins on university campuses, appealed to student activists in Britain, who had strong connections to American organizations such as the SDS.34 The call for greater involvement among students in the administration and governance of universities also seemed to resonate, especially in the context of the introduction of fees for overseas students and the prospect of loans replacing grants, proposed by Anthony Crosland in February 1967. The organization of students around issues of participatory democracy had taken a significant step only three months earlier, when representatives from the Union of Liberal Students, the CPGB and the National Association of Labour Student Organisations formed the Radical Student Alliance (RSA), a self-​proclaimed pressure group to the National Union of Students (NUS). The RSA was concerned in particular with the inadequacies of the NUS as a mechanism for student participation in university life, calling in its manifesto for ‘the right to complete control over their own unions and funds, without interference, [as well as the right] to elect their officers and representatives and determine their own policies’. ‘Students should have the right’, the manifesto added, ‘to effective participation in all other decisions that affect them’.35 The means through which this desire for participation was channelled, sit-​ ins and teach-​ins on university campuses, were not only newsworthy, but also seemed to prompt reconsiderations within broadcasting about current affairs formats. The resurrection in Oxford of the ‘King and Country’ debate, on this occasion over the prospect of British involvement in Vietnam, pointed towards a growing media and public interest in student opinion and its relationship to wider society. An ITN report on the debate in May 1965 described how Tariq Ali, the Pakistani-​born president of the Oxford Union, ‘had a mixed post bag these days’, quoting from a sample of both hostile and supportive letters. In an indication of how perceptions of student protest were becoming entangled with ones of immigration, one letter read, ‘Racial Act or no Racial Act, we’ll hound some of you blacks back to your mud huts or wealthy parents’. A quotation from Sir David Keir, master of Balliol, reiterated how racialized language such as this

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was common currency in media discourse at the time. ‘We’ll be listening to Eskimos and Hottentots next’, he was alleged to have claimed in the ITN report.36 Only a month later a teach-​in at Oxford, the second to take place in Britain after the first at the LSE on 11 June, demonstrated how university debates had become a prime setting in which broadcasters could convey arguments over Vietnam. The teach-​in, which was broadcast live on the Third Programme and in edited form on Gallery current affairs a day later, also involved contributions from Michael Stewart, the British foreign secretary, and Henry Cabot Lodge, the US ambassador to Vietnam. While the teach-​in pointed towards the potential of the student forum as a template for current affairs broadcasting, the issue of Vietnam remained highly politicized and sensitive, with the US State Department applying pressure to ensure that the US case was made ‘as forcibly as possible’, according to the Guardian.37 Tariq Ali, already displaying the savviness that would make him a key figure in media coverage of the 1968 demonstrations, recalled how the teach-​in ‘was totally manipulated by the BBC. A  number of speakers demolished the Foreign Secretary’s case’, he claimed, ‘but they were barely represented on the edited television programme’.38 Despite instances of discord and misrepresentation, however, it remained the case that the BBC and ITV both increasingly engaged and identified with student radicalism in this period. This engagement and identification was underpinned not only by the egalitarian ideals that a cross-​section of broadcasters and students shared, but also by the growing nexus of personal connections between them, often institutionalized in areas of television production such as The Wednesday Play.39 An episode of World Tomorrow, broadcast by Granada in 1966 and entitled ‘Students Protest’, highlighted the common values that existed between the broadcaster and student radicals when it came to participatory democracy. In an exploration of the tensions between the Radical Student Alliance and the NUS, the episode was clearly manipulated in favour of the former. Whereas the representatives of RSA, David Widgery and Terence Lacey, spoke on fourteen occasions with 214 lines, the representative of the NUS, Trevor Fisk, spoke five times and had 55 lines, only one of which was relevant to what preceded it.40 Geoffrey Martin, the president of the NUS, described how Fisk ‘was led to believe that the interviews with Mr Lacey and Mr Widgery had taken place in similar conditions to his own’. ‘Prior to the showing of the programme’, however, he learnt that ‘the two other participants had both been recorded while addressing student audiences, and that one particular sequence (showing Mr Widgery addressing students of Essex University) was deliberately faked upon the request

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of Granada’. Such was the degree of bias towards the RSA that one extract from Fisk was even aired over footage of student demonstrations.41 The personal connections between broadcasters and student radicals were at their most conspicuous within the BBC, with the relationship between the Corporation and Tariq Ali developing into a subject of controversy in the popular press in particular. In advance of Ali appearing on an episode of Man Alive in June 1968, for example, the Daily Express ran with the headline: ‘On the BBC’s payroll again tonight –​Tariq Ali’.42 This was one of a spate of appearances that followed on from les événements of May 1968, where students and workers had risen up against President Charles de Gaulle and the Fifth Republic in France. The BBC made much of the May events, most notably in a one-​off broadcast entitled Students in Revolt. This programme, produced by Anthony Smith, caused a scandal by inviting revolutionaries from across Europe into Britain and onto the BBC, expenses paid. Despite a public backlash through the press and letters of complaint, the Current Affairs Group of which Smith was a member were all behind the programme.43 Oliver Whitley, the Head of the Group, believed that ‘all five or six programmes he had seen or heard about students had been  . . .  good and valid programmes for the BBC to show’. His one reservation –​that Smith might have contacted the Home Office about the appearance of Daniel Cohn-​Bendit, one of the student leaders in France –​was dismissed by the Group. As one member put it, the advance publicity caused by such a decision would have been unhelpful. It would have provided an opportunity for ‘newspapers [that were] looking for a different sort of story’, presumably around the threat that the revolutionaries posed to law and order in Britain.44 The BBC were not entirely innocent in this regard. One programme proposal, where Ali would take up residence in rural England and demonstrate the relevance of revolutionary socialism to locals, had to be scrapped because of threats of violence. ‘The local farmers had organised what amounted to a lynch mob to burn me at the stake’, reminisced Ali in his autobiography of the 1960s.45 The stimulus that student protest seemed to have provided current affairs programmes reached its peak with University Forum, a television series in which in each episode controversial issues were discussed in the setting of a different university. In the first and what turned out to be only episode of the series in December 1968, a student audience from the University of East Anglia (UEA) debated issues such as the Biafran crisis in Nigeria, democracy and student unrest, housing and welfare and the unilateral declaration of independence in Rhodesia –​all with the Chancellor of the Exchequer Roy Jenkins.46 The attempt to harness the participatory ethos of the student body through a current affairs

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programme, however, proved unsuccessful and revealed the limits of television as a medium. An audience research report suggested that while the majority of the audience believed that such a programme could be of ‘immense value’, for the most part it was spoilt by the ‘constant interruptions from a rowdy and ill-​ mannered section of the student audience’. For a large proportion of the sample audience, the broadcast ‘only served to show how low the level of intelligence’ was among the students.47 This sentiment was echoed by the senior assistant to the vice chancellor of UEA, who claimed that ‘one has become used to answering for the long hair, bizarre dress and even the lack of manners of a rebel minority, but criticisms of their educational and intellectual standard are more disturbing’.48 In the context of this controversy and reception, Anthony Smith was forced to jettison this experiment in current affairs, blaming the press for using ‘the programme as an excuse to bash the wretched student population yet again’.49

‘Foreigners’ and revolution The anti–​ Vietnam War movement in Britain climaxed in a national demonstration on 27 October 1968, when over 100,000 set out on a march from Charing Cross, the majority destined for a rally in Hyde Park and a minority for a showdown with police outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square. This demonstration marked the pinnacle of the spiralling relationship between media and movements, with widespread fears having been constructed and spread of a systematic outbreak of violence against the authorities and even media organizations themselves. In the event, the demonstration, largely peaceful and leading to only forty-​three arrests, revealed that the escalation of movement tactics in the mirror of the media had been largely illusory. As those tactics had become more extreme over the course of the 1960s, the proportion of protestors willing to carry them out also diminished. If only a small faction had gone out with the intention of committing acts of violence on 27 October, however, then it is necessary to establish how and why a media and public discourse of revolutionary violence prevailed in the run up to the demonstration. The leaders and rank-​and-​file of the movement, along with broadcasters and the press, had all encouraged and entered into this fiction of revolution, which served to contest and reflect a wider range of concerns –​post-​war immigration principal among them. In this penultimate section, an attempt will be made to show how revolutionary violence was linked to the idea of the ‘foreigner’ in particular. On

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the one hand, it was the ‘otherness’ of immigration, student uprisings in Europe and the Vietcong with which leaders and supporters of the movement sought to identify and express solidarity. On the other hand, the ‘foreigner’ provided for the news media a harbinger of the violence of 1968: an omen of a postcolonial Britain transformed by immigration at the end of empire. The image of the October demonstration as revolutionary was a product of the dynamics between radical movements and media, which over the 1960s had gathered momentum towards extremism and violence. As each demonstration built on the drama and shock value of the last, the range of actors involved in both movements and media were left with a set of historic precedents on which to base their tactics and coverage. In the anti-​Vietnam War movement, for example, the early leadership of the BCPV and CND did not interrupt the flow of the more extreme tactics that had emerged under C100 and the Spies for Peace:  radicalization was merely articulated through traditional channels. A  two-​day vigil organized by BCPV and CND outside of the US Embassy in October 1965, for example, led to 78 arrests, while another demonstration in Trafalgar Square in March 1967 was disrupted by anarchists who hurled smoke bombs and stormed the rostrum as James Dickens, a Labour MP, appealed for peace.50 When the VSC established a solidarity position and organized its first full-​scale demonstration in October 1967, the fruits of this radicalization could gain direct expression. For one participant, this demonstration dealt a ‘death blow’ to ‘one of the oldest traditions of political demonstrations . . . that the police are inviolate . . . Police were attacked, but more importantly, demonstrators were defended: they were not permitted to be dragged away defenceless while their comrades stood around helpless’.51 This militancy was reiterated in March 1968, when between 10,000 and 20,000 convened in Grosvenor Square, leading to pitched battles with the police, around 300 arrests and 170 injuries, two-​thirds of which were inflicted on police officers.52 The March demonstration, at the time the most violent to take place in post-​war Britain, set the parameters and tone for a final phase of radicalization and sensationalism to take place between movements and media, reaching its conclusion in October (Figure  7.1). While the demonstration was a logical extension of methods and practices that were pioneered by DAC and C100, the violence it engendered was unapologetic and unvarnished. Unlike the demonstrations of DAC and C100, no attempt was made by the organizers to appeal to public sympathy over civil liberties and win over key frames of law and order news. Unlike the Spies for Peace, the use of violence against property was not simply a means by which information and news could be extracted

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Figure 7.1  March 1968: a violent demonstration. Photo by Trinity Mirror/​Mirrorpix/​ Alamy Stock Photo.

about state secrets. On the contrary, the expression of solidarity with the National Liberation Front (NLF) in Vietnam and student revolutionaries in Europe necessitated that action and violence be explicit and unqualified. The Tet Offensive, launched by the NLF against the United States in January, combined with student uprisings in West Germany and the seeds of the May events in France, provided a powerful context with which this solidarity could seek alignment. The participation of West German students in the demonstration, as well as the fact that Tariq Ali, an immigrant, was one of its leaders, made the international dimension of this solidarity all the more significant: the key device by which leaders of the movement and the news media attempted to frame revolutionary violence in 1968. In Britain, this was fuelled further by increasing tensions over race and immigration, with Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech occurring only a month after the March demonstration. The international dimension to the demonstrations of 1968 appealed to a news frame of protest in Britain that was steeped in history –​the attribution, that is, of violence to foreigners or outsiders. While the international and multicultural make-​up of the anti-​war movement was for this reason often interpreted as a portend of disorder and upheaval, the prediction of widespread violence in the run up to October was also driven by another factor: one that went

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beyond the deeds and rhetoric of the protestors. This was the fact that during a demonstration in April media organizations became the targets of potential violence themselves. The demonstration had been sparked by West German protests against the Springer Press, which through newspaper coverage of the West German student movement had encouraged an assassination attempt on one of its leaders, Rudi Dutschke. Since the Springer Press had ties to the Mirror Group and shared a headquarters in London, this became the site of a standoff between protestors and police. In turn, this also prompted Ali to establish Black Dwarf, a popular Marxist monthly named after an unstamped newspaper run by Thomas J.  Wooler in the early nineteenth century. The rationale behind the newspaper was straight from the textbook of cultural Marxism, with Ali claiming in an editorial that ‘capitalists don’t pay people to say left wing things’ and deriding the Mirror for setting ‘dockers against railwaymen . . . men against women  . . .  and Britain against foreigners’.53 In preparation for the October demonstration, the Daily Express, presumably in an act of defiance, was the only newspaper on Fleet Street not to board up its windows. Likewise, the BBC arranged for 100 police officers to surround Broadcasting House in Portland Place, as well as for duplicates of programmes to be taken to Birmingham in case of an occupation on the day of the demonstration.54 Just as the March demonstration had persuaded journalists and broadcasters of the prospects of violence, it also emboldened the leaders and supporters of the anti–​Vietnam War movement. Particularly after the May events in France, the rhetoric around violence become far more commonplace and overhyped –​ in part because of the attention it received from broadcasters and the press. For his part, Ali spoke of an invasion of the American embassy, a position from which he retreated following the formation of an Ad Hoc Committee for the October demonstration.55 In a similar manner, the RSA was supplanted by the Revolutionary Socialist Student Federation (RSSF), inspired by the May events and linking the student movement to ‘a breakdown of the legitimacy of all our institutions –​the state, the Cold War, the power relations at all levels’. ‘For the first time’, it was reported in its constitutional proposals, ‘students consider that the wider fight against capitalism also involves a fight for the control of their own life situation in the university.’56 The talk of violence among students in particular put pressure on universities and unions to respond. The Imperial College Union, for example, condemned the ‘inflammatory articles’ and ‘incitement to violence’ in Sennet, its student newspaper, ahead of the October demonstration.57 In a press release, the NUS also denounced ‘political hooligans, many of whom are not students . . . [who] want a “weekend revolution” ’. It took special issue with

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Ali, describing how along with the RSSF he had been attempting to ‘steam roller student unions into misusing student funds to support the demonstration’ and labelling him ‘a front man –​neither a student nor a leader’.58 The increasing use of revolutionary imagery and rhetoric among leaders and supporters of the anti–​Vietnam War movement occurred in tandem with news coverage that tended to give precedence to the more violent elements of protest. The upshot of this relationship, where the posturing of protestors went hand in hand with the sensationalism of news coverage, served to dominate the pre-​event coverage of the October demonstration, giving rise to a fiction of revolutionary violence. The contribution of the press to this fiction was established on 4 September, when the London Evening News published an article in response to a police raid on the headquarters of the VSC, where a diagram of a Molotov cocktail was discovered. The following day, The Times ran a subsequent article entitled ‘Militant Plot Feared in London’ on its front page, thus setting an influential precedent for pre-​event coverage. From then onwards, the framing of the October demonstration as violent became routine in the majority of national newspapers, fuelled by micro-​expressions of violence such as the use of two petrol bombs to start a fire outside the Imperial War Museum.59 The broadcasters, having given generous coverage to student protest in both national and international contexts, were at least more conscious of the implications such coverage may have for violence, whether actual or rhetorical. In an episode of Man Alive, for example, Police Inspector R. F. Gale, Raymond Williams, Tariq Ali and Patrick Wall, a Conservative MP, all debated demonstration as a form of free speech, while an episode of Talkback on 22 October addressed the responsibility of broadcasters for amplifying or encouraging outbreaks of violence.60 These public concerns about the relationship between news coverage and violence had roots in the policy discussions taking place within the BBC and ITN. As described in an in-​depth study of the October demonstration, such discussions built upon institutional memories and policy decisions of the past, stretching back to the Aldermaston marches in 1958. ‘Just as the demonstrations themselves were taking place in a context set by previous events in Britain and abroad’, claimed the authors of the study, ‘so the television coverage was planned in the context of the role television had played . . . in reporting these past events.’ Through access to the BBC and ITN, the authors were able to detail the policy issues that surrounded coverage of the demonstration, which as well as news bulletins included live footage on the ITN through two programmes called Protest. ‘The basic question’ around which policy revolved, according to the authors, ‘was whether television reporting had unwittingly taken an

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active role by influencing the way this type of event developed’. The news and current affairs groups were aware that the presence of cameras had implications for the behaviour of demonstrators, going so far as to entertain the idea that ‘each demonstration had to include more violence than earlier ones in order to maximise media coverage’. While this would explain the radicalization of the peace movement over time, the policymakers in the BBC and ITN also contended that news coverage of the demonstrations had powerful justifications. It ‘increased vertical communication  . . .  between the public and the political elite’ and the presence of cameras may have prevented ‘violence developing from either side –​police or demonstrators’.61 In order to comprehend the predominance of ‘revolution’ and ‘violence’ in the run up to the October demonstration, however, it is necessary to reflect on the social utility of this discourse at this moment in British history: why did revolution and violence offer such a powerful form of expression among groups who were unlikely to follow through with violent deeds? The discourse of revolution and violence resonated in particular with a creative strand of radicalism that was resistant to ideology and formal politics and stemmed from the arts. From the perspective of this radicalism, the roots of social change were cultural rather than narrowly ideological or political. In the words of David Laing, a member of the Cambridge Labour Club expelled from the university for drug offences, it rejected ‘remnants of the Old Left who find changes in consciousness illegitimate unless they are produced by either “rational” argument or “meaningful” action’.62 Rather, this radicalism grew out of the observation that ‘man is a welter of fears, urges, needs, aspirations, appetites and emotions’, as Jeff Nuttall put it, ‘on which the political rationale forms a mere crust’. Insofar as the fiction of revolution and violence could disturb and provoke, it served a purpose for this strand of radicalism, with Nuttall calling for ‘offensive stickers, obscene street theatre and [the use of] pop groups  . . .  to flavour the hysteria which is their stock in trade’.63 At its most politicized, this radicalism was manifest through the later protests of C100, which had links to the Situationist International, an avant-​garde art movement that had emerged out of France.64 For one of these protests, it was proposed that a 57-​year-​old grandmother, Kathleen Farr, dress up as the queen and during a rally in Trafalgar Square pretend to decorate Australian soldiers for bravery in Vietnam for ‘killing innocent children’ (Figure 7.2). This sort of iconoclasm –​designed to shock and make a statement –​could profitably draw on the spiral of ideological tendencies that gained expression within the movement and media throughout the 1960s. The last of these, the ideology of revolutionary violence, provided a useful

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Figure  7.2  Katherine Farr as the queen. Photo by Keystone Pictures USA/​Alamy Stock Photo.

pretence around which a range of groups could organize and tailor their protest as an act of communication, including groups that were completely nonpolitical. If revolutionary violence had a social utility, then this applied to issues of identity as well as this strand of cultural radicalism. The solidarity position of the anti-​war movement offered a radical means by which groups in Britain could express social difference  –​a subversive form of identification by which ethnic minorities, students and women could challenge their public and self-​ image.65 This identification with revolutionaries in Europe or the United States and Vietnam evolved in conflict with media coverage, which tended to equate such solidarity with the threat of foreign or outsider groups. As a result, the ‘foreignness’ of the October demonstration became a key frame for both the anti–​Vietnam War movement and the media –​in both cases the prime symbol of a global transformation to which Britain was subject. Just as student protestors appealed to and claimed this foreignness as a step towards a multicultural and

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postcolonial Britain, the popular press rejected it as the threat of immigration to traditional order and values. Indeed, the significance of foreignness as a news frame can be traced back to at least the spring of 1967, when the RSA had railed against the trebling of fees for overseas students, and was reinforced further after the March demonstration and the invitation of European radicals into Britain to appear on the BBC’s Students in Revolt.66 Such was the strength of this news frame, in fact, that by the October demonstration student protestors seemed to have become the very embodiment of a foreign force. The popular press used the ethnicity of Tariq Ali and Abhimanyu Manchanda, an Indian who ended up leading a splinter march to Grosvenor Square, as a means by which to narrate the otherness of the demonstrators. In a cartoon published after the demonstration in the Daily Express, a caricature of Ali is employed to illustrate the generational differences between a father and a son, one a police officer and the other a protestor (Figure 7.3).67 Ali’s ethnicity here clearly stood for what the cartoonist regarded as the alien nature of the student generation altogether. The foreigner trope, however, worked both ways, with press portrayals providing a dramatic backdrop against which social groups could react and challenge their public identities. One of the main banners on 27 October, for example, read, ‘We Are All Foreign Scum’, a reference to a speech made by Tom Iremonger, a Conservative MP who less than a week earlier had claimed in the House of Commons that ‘the British people are fed up with being trampled underfoot by foreign scum’.68 Through appropriation of  –​or

Figure 7.3  Ethnicity and protest. © Ronald ‘Carl’ Giles, Express Syndication Ltd.

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identification with –​violent types of foreignness, therefore, ethnic minorities, students and women were able to make claims about identity that were meaningful on several levels. The media and public discourse of foreignness was significant not only for perceptions about ethnicity, generation and sex, but also for ones about multicultural and postcolonial Britain as a whole. The emergence of identity politics and the onset of a crisis of Britishness in the late 1960s were part of the same social change. The relative absence of violence during the October demonstration did not prevent the news media from reporting it in such terms. Both broadcasters and the press focused on the splinter march to Grosvenor Square rather than the peaceful one to Hyde Park, with six newspapers leading with a photograph of a police constable being kicked on their front page (Figure 7.4).69 On television, according to the in-​depth study of the demonstration, the live programmes and news bulletins were composed so as to create an ‘inferential framework’ of violence: the arrangement of the commentary and film footage all served to satisfy what the authors of the study called an ‘expectation of violence’ that had been established before the event. By focusing on the violence perpetrated by a tiny minority, claimed the authors, the news coverage neglected ‘underlying

Figure 7.4  Symbolizing violence in press coverage of the October demonstration. Photo by Keystone-​France/​Gamma-​Keystone via Getty Images.

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causes’ and emptied the demonstration of its ‘radical political content’.70 For one historian of Britain in the 1960s, the reclassification of protestors as ‘hooligans’ also represented an attempt to ‘legitimise the coercive response of police and security forces’.71 The suggestion that coverage was conspired against the demonstration, however, serves to overstate the agency of broadcasters and journalists, while also overlooking the role of protestors themselves in nurturing an ‘expectation of violence’. On the one hand, the definition of the demonstration as news was already well-​ entrenched and predestined:  the outcome of a relationship between movements and media that had escalated over time and gathered pace in the volatile climate of the late 1960s. On the other hand, the ‘radical political content’ of the demonstration had become entirely wrapped up in violence. In absence of the performance of violence, it was association with violence that rendered the demonstration not only newsworthy, but also of radical significance to a range of social groups. The logic of the relationship between movements and media had by the end of 1968 reached a terminus from which it had to be reconfigured. In comparison to the starting point of that logic, when demonstrations and protests were tailored towards a constructive engagement with news frames and values over abstract issues, the end point was tailored towards an antagonistic one over issues that were personal and social. The logic, in other words, had been inverted, resulting in a dynamic between movements and media that was more fractious and revolved around identity politics. Since the relationship between movements and media in the October demonstration had been characterized by appeals to –​ and identifications with –​revolutionary violence, it could only be surpassed by the widespread willingness to perform violence itself: a step most protestors were unwilling to take. This exposed fault lines over political commitment among activist and ideological leaders and rank-​and-​file supporters, undermining the single issue movement as a form of mass mobilization in Cold War Britain. The implications for radicalism and the media were once again considerable –​ activists established NGOs whose public interventions were far more careful and controlled, while those on the far left reassessed the value of the public spectacle to their politics.72 The only group to build on the violence of 1968 were the Angry Brigade, which made its contempt for the trendiness of the late 1960s clear by bombing Biba, the bohemian fashion outlet in London.

Reflections This history of single issue movements, broadcasters and the press in Cold War Britain has demonstrated the richness of interactions between radicalism and media change for democracy. At the same time, it has also revealed that such interactions do not amount to a simple equation for progress: the participatory ethos of radicalism and the rise of television also fed into political developments and tendencies that were toxic or superficial. From one perspective, it is clear that the egalitarianism of activists, intellectuals and rank-​and-​file protestors in this period translated into creative struggles with a range of televisual forms, comedy, documentary, drama and news and current affairs included. These struggles materialized in key interventions on issues of public importance and also shaped forms of political expression both within media organizations and beyond them, contributing to the furniture of everyday democracy. From another perspective, the processes and structures of the mass media were never sufficient to capture or satisfy the participatory impulse of the movements, giving rise to politics of frustration and heightening tensions between the actors who participated in them. The evolution of the movements in response to news values that gave precedence to shock tactics and violence was particularly problematic, serving to empower ideological groups within the movement on the basis of the methods by which they protested rather than the politics behind them. This served to deepen dichotomies between ideologues and rank-​and-​file protestors within the movements and reached a pinnacle in the revolutionary violence of 1968. As the final chapter illustrated, however, this revolutionary violence cannot be dismissed, for while it was largely discursive and rhetorical it offered a powerful pretence by which the public identities of social groups could be challenged and redefined. What emerges from this study, then, is the multitude of possibilities that the anti-​nuclear and anti–​Vietnam War movements seemed to offer for social change, as well as the spectrum of areas of public life they touched upon and helped to transform. The realization of these possibilities and transformations, however, was heavily directed and influenced by the mass media. Indeed, the movements themselves can be seen as a product of media sociology, where their organizational forms and structures were shaped by the informational demands

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of the issues at stake and the public position of the intellectuals who led them. Through news discourses and selection in particular, the media also served to confer agency and power on to certain actors and trajectories within the movements, acting as an engine of social change and setting the parameters in which it could occur. This is not to suggest that radical activists and intellectuals were mere passengers: they possessed a remarkable intuition and sensitivity for the political opportunities that early television offered. In doing so, they helped to redefine how high politics were debated and managed, opening up key issues to wider accountability and the public right to know. This may have been a far stretch from the state of participatory democracy or popular sovereignty the radicals of this period envisaged or idealized, but it was through those principles that they helped to enhance democratic life in Britain. How far developments in communications media served to empower practices and traditions of participatory democracy forms the closing point of this study. The internet forces reflection on the implications of ‘new media’ for participatory democracy, yet no classical theory of statehood seems to fully account for the place of communications in the anatomy of the state and its relationship with its citizens. In fact, the ongoing expansion of means towards participation through media, combined with the narrowness by which legitimate politics is constituted and governed, represents a real crisis for contemporary democracy. The essence of this problem can be seen in the period of this study, when the public dimensions of participation began to far outweigh their constitutional or political ones, often resulting in contempt for politicians and disengagement from the parliamentary parties. What histories of radicalism and the media provide, therefore, is the opportunity to work towards a deeper understanding of participatory democracy and its problems:  one that focuses on distinctive forms of media and politics within their historical contexts and periods. The media of today may be ‘new’, in other words, but the challenges and opportunities it presents for democracy and social change has echoes and traces in the distant past, as I hope this history has shown.

Notes Introduction 1 The Times, 25 February 1958. This was adapted from the phrase ‘no taxation without representation’, which was coined prior to the American Revolution and also used by Chartists. 2 Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 3 For Raymond Williams, a cultural Marxist and lifelong supporter of CND, ‘the extension of communications has been part of the extension of democracy and the public’. He also recognized that this extension had ‘not always facilitated the distribution of interests [so much as] their integration: basically around advertising’. Raymond Williams, Communications (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), 33; also see Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–​1950 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961); Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (London: Polity Press, 1992). The implications of communications revolutions for participatory democracy and social change have been considered in relation to a range of media. See Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume I: The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2000); Volume II: The Power of Identity (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2007); Volume III: End of Millennium (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2010). 4 As Todd Gitlin put it, such a study should not be about ‘determined objects “having impacts” on each other’. On the contrary, it should seek to show how ‘an active movement and an active media . . . pressed on each other . . . in a process developing in historical time’, with consequences not only for movements, but also for democratic and public life as a whole. Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 14. 5 John Rees, The Leveller Revolution: Radical Political Organisation in England, 1640–​ 1650 (London: Verso Books, 2017); Joel H. Wiener, The War of the Unstamped: The Movement to Repeal the British Newspaper Tax, 1830–​1836 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969); Maria Dicenzo with Lucy Delap and Lela Ryan, Feminist

250

6 7

8 9 10

1 1 12

13

14

15

16

Notes Media History: Suffrage, Periodicals and the Public Sphere (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). J.B. Priestley Library (JBPL), Bradford University, Papers of Mary Ringsleben, MRL/​9, Peter Cadogan, 1968. See, for example, Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c.1958–​c.1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Asa Briggs, A History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom: Volume V: Competition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). On the 1970s, see Lawrence Black, Hugh Pemberton and Pat Thane, Reassessing 1970s Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987); Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). IT (no. 129), 4 May 1972. Matthew Hilton, James McKay, Nicholas Crowson and Jean-​François Mouhot, The Politics of Expertise: How NGOs Shaped Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Adam Lent, British Social Movements since 1945: Sex, Colour, Peace and Power (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). Jodi Burkett, Constructing Post-​imperial Britain: Britishness, ‘Race’ and the Radical British Left in the 1960s (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Camilla Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire, 1939–​1965 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Jim Tomlinson, The Politics of Decline: Understanding Post-​war Britain (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000). For an exploration of the relationship between locality and internationalism in this period, see Christopher Hill, ‘Nations of Peace: Nuclear Disarmament and the Making of National Identity in Scotland and Wales’, Twentieth Century British History 27, no. 1 (2016), 26–​50; Jonathan Hogg, ‘Cultures of Nuclear Resistance in 1980s Liverpool’, Urban History 42, no. 4 (2015), 584–​602. Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), 15; Communication Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Kathrin Fahlenbrach, ‘Protest as a Media Phenomenon’, in Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth (eds), Protest Cultures: A Companion (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016), 94–​5. Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in Hans Heinrich Gerth and Charles Wright Mills (eds), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), 77–​128.

Notes

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1  Middle Class Radicalism and the Media 1 Wiener, The War of the Unstamped, 20–​9. 2 CND News, August 1964 in Michael Foot, Dr Stangelove, I Presume (Gollancz: London, 1999). 3 Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 121–​3; John Gurney, ‘Gerrard Winstanley and the Left’, Past and Present 235, no. 1 (2017), 179–​206. 4 Holger Nehring, ‘The Meanings of “Social Democracy”: The British and West German Protests against Nuclear Weapons, 1957–​1964’, in John Callaghan and Ilaria Favretto (eds), Transitions in Social Democracy: Cultural and Ideological Problems of the Golden Age (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 194–​207. 5 Alan Sears, ‘The end of 20th century socialism?’, New Socialist, 61, summer 2007. 6 Frank Parkin, Middle Class Radicalism: The Social Bases of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966), 17. 7 Ibid., 47; Robert McKenzie and Allan Silver, Angels in Marble: Working Class Conservatives in Urban England (London: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1968). 8 Donnatella Della Porta and Mario Diani, Social Movements: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 11–​12. 9 Parkin, Middle Class, 2. 10 Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Alain Touraine, Post-​industrial Society (London: Wildwood House, 1974); Craig Calhoun, The Roots of Radicalism: Tradition, the Public Sphere and Early Nineteenth Century Social Movements (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012). 11 John Mattausch, A Commitment to Campaign: A Sociological Study of CND (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 85. 12 See Frank Prochaska, The Voluntary Impulse: Philanthropy in Modern Britain (London: Faber & Faber, 1988); Christianity and Social Service in Modern Britain: The Disinherited Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 13 See Lawrence Black, The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Vernon Bogdanor and Robert Skidelsky (eds), The Age of Affluence, 1951–​1964 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1970). 14 Sam Carroll, ‘ “Fill the Jails”: Identity, Structure and Method in the Committee of 100, 1960–​1968’, PhD diss., University of Sussex, 2010; Celia Hughes, Young Lives on the Left: Sixties Activism and the Liberation of the Self (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015).

252

Notes

15 On romantic protest, see Meredith Veldman, Fantasy, the Bomb, and the Greening of Britain: Romantic Protest, 1945–​1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 16 The Guardian, 5 December 2007. See Gurney, ‘Gerrard Winstanley’. 17 Sean Scalmer, Gandhi in the West: The Mahatma and the Rise of Radical Protest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 174. 18 Maurice Cowling, The Impact of Hitler: British Politics and British Policy, 1933–​1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 5; A. J. P. Taylor, The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792–​1939 (London: H. Hamilton, 1957). 19 Helen McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations: Democracy, Citizenship and Internationalism, c. 1918–​48 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 1. 20 Holger Nehring, ‘ “The long, long night is over”: The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, “Generation” and the Politics of Religion (1957–​1964)’, in Jane Garnett et al. (eds), Redefining Christian Britain (London: SCM Press, 2007), 138–​47. 21 Veldman, Fantasy, 117. 22 Hill, ‘Nations of Peace’. 23 Sandy Hobbs in correspondence with the author; see Glasgow Caledonian University Archives (GCUA), Papers of Sandy Hobbs, GB1847; The Mitchell Library (ML), Glasgow, Papers of the Scottish Council for Nuclear Disarmament (SCND), Dep. 215/​352; The National Library of Wales (NLW), Papers of Plaid Cymru, M331. 24 See Peter Lynch, SNP: The History of the Scottish National Party (Cardiff: Welsh Academic Press, 2013); Laura McAllister, Plaid Cymru: The Emergence of a Political Party (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 2001). 25 Stuart Hall, ‘Life and Times of the First New Left’, New Left Review 61 (January–​ February 2010), 177–​97. 26 Denis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left and the Origins of Cultural Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 3–​4. 27 Editorial, Universities and Left Review (ULR) 4 (summer 1958). 28 Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–​1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 29 Dan L. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 7. 30 Elizabeth C. Miller, Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 1–​31. 31 On printing materials and technologies, see Howard Cox and Simon Mowatt, Revolutions from Grub Street: A History of Magazine Publishing in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

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32 James Curran and Jean Seaton, Power without Responsibility: Press, Broadcasting and the Internet in Britain (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 5. 33 See Roger Luckhurst and Laurel Brake (eds), W.T. Stead: Newspaper Revolutionary (London: The British Library, 2012); Matthew Arnold, ‘Up to Easter’, Nineteenth Century (May 1887), 629–​43. For a discussion of the provenance of the term ‘new journalism’, see Graham Law and Matthew Sterenberg, ‘Old v. New Journalism and the Public Sphere; or, Habermas Encounters Dallas and Stead’, Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 16 (2013). 34 Mark Hampton, Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–​1950 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), 92–​3; Tom O’Malley, ‘ “Typically Anti-​American”? The Labour Movement, America and Broadcasting in Britain, from Beveridge to Pilkington, 1949–​62’, in Joel Wiener and Mark Hampton, Anglo-​American Media Interactions, 1850–​2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 234–​53. 35 John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–​1939 (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), 3–​22. 36 Ibid. On lower middle and working class intellectual life, see Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Christopher Hilliard, To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 37 Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom: The Birth of Broadcasting, 1896–​1927 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 53–​62. 38 Paddy Scannell, ‘Public Service Broadcasting: The History of a Concept’, in Andrew Goodwin and Garry Whannel (eds), Understanding Television (Abingdon: Routledge, 1990), 14. 39 LeMahieu, A Culture, 150. 40 Ben Harker, ‘ “The Trumpet of the Night”: Interwar Communists on BBC Radio’, History Workshop Journal 75, no. 1 (2013), 81–​100. 41 Philip Schlesinger, Putting ‘Reality’ Together (Abingdon: Routledge, 1992). 42 Report of the Broadcasting Committee 1949, Cmnd 8116 (London: HMSO, 1951). 43 Peter Black, The Mirror in the Corner: People’s Television (London: Hutchinson, 1972), 29–​30. 44 Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (London: Comedia, 1988), 45–​76. 45 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London: Penguin Books, 1957); The Way We Live Now (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996). See Michael Bailey, Ben Clarke and John K. Walton, Understanding Richard Hoggart: A Pedagogy of Hope (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2012). 46 Daily Mail, 10 September 1960. 47 Mary Whitehouse, Cleaning-​Up TV: From Protest to Participation (London, 1967), 133–​46.

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48 Anthony Crosland, ‘Mass Media’, Encounter (November 1962), 1–​13. 49 Christopher Mayhew, Dear Viewer (London: Lincolns Prager, 1953); Winston Fletcher, Powers of Persuasion: The Inside Story of British Advertising, 1951–​2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 26. 50 Hubert H. Wilson, Pressure Group (New Jersey: Secker & Warburg, 1961), 213. 51 Alan T. Peacock, Report of the Committee on Financing the BBC, Volume 1 London: HMSO, 1986); Bob Franklin (ed.), British Television Policy: A Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2001), 53–​8. 52 The Labour Party, Leisure for Living (London: The Labour Party, 1959), 37. 53 Crosland, ‘Mass Media’, 1–​13. 54 Report of the Committee on Broadcasting, Cmnd 1753 (London, HMSO, 1962). 55 University of Sussex (Sx), Common Wealth Party Archive (CWPA), Ms/​9/​2/​4/​2/​ 1, Memorandum Submitted to the Committee on Broadcasting on behalf of the National Committee of Common Wealth. 56 SxMs9/​2/​4/​2/​1, CWPA, Memorandum submitted to the Committee on Broadcasting. 57 Geoffrey Goodman, ‘Suez and Fleet Street’, http://​news.bbc.co.uk/​1/​hi/​world/​ middle_​east/​6082076.stm, date accessed: 8 July 2017; James Curran, ‘The Impact of Advertising on the British Mass Media’, Media, Culture and Society 3, no. I (1981), 43–​69. See Tony Shaw, Eden, Suez and the Mass Media: Propaganda and Persuasion during the Suez Crisis (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006). 58 Raymond Williams, ‘The Press the People Want’, ULR 5 (autumn 1958). 59 Royal Commission on the Press, 1947–​49 (London: HMSO, 1949), 85. 60 Ibid. 61 Williams, Culture and Society, 289. 62 Paddy Scannell, ‘Public Service Broadcasting and Modern Life’, in Paddy Scannell, Philip Schlesinger and Colin Sparks (eds), Culture and Power (London: Sage Publications, 1994), 317–​48. 63 BBC Written Archives Centre (WAC), Caversham, Annual Report, 1954–​55. 64 Dworkin, Cultural Marxism, 85. 65 Jon Lawrence, Electing our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 146–​69. 66 David Mercer, The Generations (London: Calder Publications, 1963), 30. 67 Dennis Potter, The Changing Forest (London: Minerva, 1996), 20. 68 Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, 169. 69 Royal Commission on the Press, 1961–​62 (London: HMSO, 1962), 56–​80. 70 Black, Political Culture, 102. 71 Television Act (Operation), House of Commons Debates, vol. 533 cc1125-​85, 23 November 1954; Bernard Sendall, Independent Television in Britain. Volume I: Origins and Foundations, 1946–​1962 (London: Macmillan & Co, 1982), 68–​84.

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72 Caroline Moorehead, Sidney Bernstein (London: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1984); Fletcher, Powers of Persuasion, 26. 73 John Finch, Michael Cox and Marjorie Giles (eds), Granada Television: The First Generation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 14. 74 SxMs9/​2/​4/​2/​1, CWPA, Memorandum submitted to the Committee of Broadcasting; Memorandum on Broadcasting, Northern Federation Council of Common Wealth; BBC WAC, Annual Report 1959/​60, Appendix IV. 75 JBPL, Papers of Richard Taylor, Commonweal Collection (Cwl), DT/​1/​1, ‘Pre-​ DAC’, 28 and29 September 1957. 76 SxMs9/​2/​4/​2/​1, CWPA, Memorandum on Broadcasting, Northern Federation Council of Common Wealth. 77 JBPL, Cwl, DT/​1/​1, ‘Pre-​DAC’, 27 and 28 September 1957. 78 Curran and Seaton, Power, 171–​88. 79 People’s History Museum (PHM), Papers of Michael Foot (MF) P4, Daily Herald, 27 June 1958. 80 Raymond East, ‘BBC’, Left Review 1, no. 12 (1935). 81 LeMahieu, A Culture, 304–​17. 82 Bournemouth University (BU), Independent Television Authority Archive (ITA), Under Fire, 583/​2/​1, Edith Hollingworth to Robert Fraser, 29 December 1956. 83 Daily Herald, 27 June 1957. 84 Christopher Booker, Neophiliacs: A Study of the Revolution in English Life in the Fifties and Sixties (New York: Harper Collins, 1970), 119. 85 Curran and Seaton, Power, 181. 86 SxMs9/​2/​4/​2/​1, CWPA, Memorandum submitted to the Committee of Broadcasting. 87 Report of the Broadcasting Committee 1949, Chapter 9. 88 Nehring, ‘The long, long night is over’, 138–​47; Colin Pritchard and Richard Taylor, The Protest Makers (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1980), 23. 89 Anthony Adamthwaite, ‘Nation Shall Speak unto Nation: The BBC’s Response to Peace and Defence Issues’, Contemporary Record 7, no. 3 (1993), 557–​77. 90 BBC WAC, R34/​513, Stuart Morris to R. D. Pendlebury, 11 March 1954. 91 Report of the Broadcasting Committee 1949, Appendix H. 92 Report of the Broadcasting Committee 1949, Paper 57, 335; see Jamie Medhurst, ‘ “Minorities with a Message”: The Beveridge Report on Broadcasting (1941–​1951) and Wales’, Twentieth Century British History 19, no. 2 (2008), 217–​33. 93 SxMs9/​2/​4/​2/​1, CWPA, Memorandum submitted to the Committee of Broadcasting. 94 BBC WAC Annual Report, 1959/​60, 7. 95 SxMs9/​2/​4/​2/​1, CWPA, Memorandum on Broadcasting, Northern Federation Council of Common Wealth.

256

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96 SxMs9/​2/​4/​2/​1, CWPA, Correspondence between the Five Point Committee and Charles Hill, 13 February 1956 and 25 March 1957, Memorandum submitted to the Committee on Broadcasting. 97 SxMs9/​2/​4/​2/​1, Memorandum submitted to the Committee on Broadcasting. 98 BBC WAC, Annual Report, 1959/​60, 99 SxMs9/​2/​4/​2/​1, CWPA, Memorandum submitted to the Committee on Broadcasting. 100 Ibid. 101 JBPL, Cwl, DT/​1/​1, ‘Pre-​DAC’, 26 January 1958. 102 Daily Worker, 5 December 1961. 103 Evening Standard, 9 December 1961. 104 Alasdair Palmer, ‘The History of the D-​Notice Committee’, in Christopher Andrew and David Dilks (eds), The Missing Dimension: Governments and Intelligence Communities in the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984); Nicholas Wilkinson, Secrecy and the Media: The Official History of the United Kingdom’s D-​Notice System (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009). 105 Report of the Broadcasting Committee, 1949, 10. 106 Broadcasting (Anticipation of Parliamentary Debates), House of Commons Debates, vol. 546 cc2315-​445, 30 November 1955. 107 Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom: Volume IV: Sound and Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 664. 108 Adamthwaite, ‘Nation Shall Speak unto Nation’, 557–​77. 109 Dominic Shellard and Steven Nicholson, The Lord Chamberlain Regrets: A History of British Theatre Censorship (London: British Library, 2004), 131–​84. 110 Editorial, Encore, May–​June 1958. 111 ‘A View from the Gods’, Encore, July–​August 1958. 112 Charles Marowitz, Tom Milne and Owen Hale, The Encore Reader: A Chronicle of the New Drama (York: Methuen, 1965), 39–​41. 113 Stuart Hall, ‘Something to Live for’, Encore, September–​October 1959. 114 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in 19th Century Europe (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2014), 7–​28. 115 Wade Matthews, The New Left, National Identity and the Break-​Up of Britain (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), 1. 116 Dan Rebellato, 1956 and All That: The Making of Modern British Drama (Abingdon: Routledge, 1999), 1–​2. 117 Marowitz, Milne and Hale, The Encore Reader, 39–​40. 118 Stuart Hall, ‘Life and Times of the First New Left’, New Left Review 61 (January–​ February 2010), 177–​96; Robin Archer et al. (eds), Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left Thirty Years On (London: Verso, 1989), 11–​38. 119 Victoria & Albert (V&A) Department of Theatre and Performance, Owen Hale Collection, GB 71 THM/​401/​1/​3, Encore, winter 1954.

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120 Gavin Stamp, Anti-​Ugly: Excursions in English Architecture and Design (London: Aurum Press, 2013), 6–​11. 121 Lindsay Anderson. ‘Free Cinema’, ULR 2 (summer 1957). 122 Ioan Davies, ‘British Cultural Marxism’, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 4, no. 3 (1991), 325. 123 Editorial, ULR 4 (summer 1958). The four editors were Stuart Hall, Raphael Samuel, Gabriel Pearson and Charles Taylor. 124 Stuart Hall, ‘Something to Live for’, Encore, September–​October 1959. 125 Raymond Williams, ‘Drama and the Left’, Encore, March–​April 1959. 126 Editorial, Encore, November–​December 1958. 127 Lindsay Anderson. ‘Free Cinema’, ULR 2 (summer 1957). 128 E. P. Thompson, ‘The New Left’, The New Reasoner 9 (summer 1959). 129 Richard Taylor, Against the Bomb: The British Peace Movement, 1958–​1965 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 121. 130 Kenneth Allsop, The Angry Decade: A Survey of the Cultural Revolt of the 1950s (London: Peter Owen, 1958), 15. 131 SxMs9/​2/​4/​2/​1, CWPA, Memorandum submitted to the Committee on Broadcasting. 132 Shaw, Eden, Suez and the Mass Media, 120. 133 Harman Grisewood, One Thing at a Time (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1968), 201. 134 Geoffrey Cox, Pioneering Television News (Luton: University of Luton Press, 1995), 121. 135 Grace Wyndham Goldie, Facing the Nation (London: The Bodley Head Ltd, 1977), 194. 136 Asa Briggs, Competition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 61–​72. 137 Robin Day, Television: A Personal Report (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1961), 10. 138 Burton Paulu, British Broadcasting (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956), 160. 139 Schlesinger, ‘Reality’, 43. 140 BU ITA, Confrontation, 5083. 141 BU ITA, Under Fire, 583/​2/​1, Robert Fraser to Bernard Sendall, 31 December 1956. 142 Goldie, Facing the Nation, 271. 143 Kurt Lewenhak in Finch, Cox and Giles, Granada Television, 204–​206. 144 Observer, 28 September 1958. 145 Goldie, Facing the Nation, 216. 146 BU ITA, Under Fire, 583/​2/​1, Bernard Sendall to Victor Peers, 9 April 1958; Robert Fraser to Bernard Sendall, 31 December 1956. 147 BU ITA, Under Fire, 583/​2/​1, E. D. O’Brien to Robert Fraser, 28 December 1956. 148 Ibid., Sidney Bernstein to Robert Fraser, 8 January 1957. 149 Daily Herald, 27 June 1957.

258

Notes

150 ITN, ‘Rochdale By-​Election’, 12 February 1958, http://​jiscmediahub.ac.uk/​, date accessed: 10 July 2012. 151 The Times, 13 February 1958. 152 Lewenhak in Finch, Cox and Giles, Granada Television, 204–​206.

2  Single Issue Movements and Information 1 JBPL, Cwl, DT/​1/​3, DAC Policy Statements and Leaflets. 2 John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald, ‘The Enduring Vitality of the Resource Mobilization Theory of Social Movements’, in Jonathan H. Turner (ed.), Handbook of Sociological Theory (New York: Springer, 2001), 533–​65; Bonnie A. Nardi and Vicki L. O’Day, Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999). 3 Yvonne A. Bennett, ‘Testament of a Minority in Wartime: The Peace Pledge Union and Vera Brittain, 1939–​1945’, PhD diss., McMaster University, 1984, 391–​2; Sybil Morrison, I Renounce War: The Story of the Peace Pledge Union (London: The Sheppard Press, 1962), 72, 90. 4 Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain 1914–​1945: The Defining of a Faith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980); Richard Overy, ‘Pacifism and the Blitz, 1940–​ 1941’, Past & Present 219, no. 1 (2013), 201–​36. 5 Richard A. Rempel, ‘The Dilemmas of British Pacifists during World War II’, The Journal of Modern History 50, no. 4 (1978), 1213–​29. 6 One World, January 1948. 7 Russian Centre of Conservation and Study of Records of Modern History, The Cominform: Minutes of the Three Conferences, 1947/​1948/​1949 (Milan: Feltrinelli Editore, 1994); Nataliia Egorova, ‘Stalin’s Foreign Policy and the Cominform’, in Francesca Gori and Silvio Pons (eds), The Soviet Union and Europe in the Cold War, 1943–​1953 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), 197–​207. 8 The National Archives (TNA), FO1110/​202 PR 2960/​17/​G, ‘Foreign Office report to the Colonial Information Policy Committee’, 3 October 1949. 9 John Jenks, British Propaganda and News Media in the Cold War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 43–​61. 10 Ibid., 47–​52. 11 BBC WAC, R1/​16, Board Minutes, 18 March 1948, 1, 15 and 29 April 1948. 12 TNA, FO371/​86758 NS1052/​85, Summary of indications regarding Soviet Foreign Policy, 25 August 1950; Phillip Deery, ‘The Dove Flies East: Whitehall, Warsaw and the 1950 World Peace Congress’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 48, no. 4 (2002), 449–​68. 13 TNA, FO953/​637 P1013/​120 Ashley-​Clark to Hoyer-​Miller, 11 September 1950; One World, August–​September 1950; Diane Kirby, ‘Ecclesiastical

Notes

259

McCarthyism: Cold War Repression in the Church of England’, Contemporary British History, 19, no. 2 (2005), 185–​201. 14 Jenks, British Propaganda, 114–​27. 15 The Observer, 12 November 1950; The Times, 2 November 1950. 16 Daily Express, 14 November 1950. 17 Hugh Wilford, The CIA, the British Left, and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003), 193–​224. 18 TNA, FO1110/​371 PR51/​132, G. Peck minute, 2 June 1951. 19 One World, August–​September, 1949; One World, June–​July 1952. 20 JBPL, CWL, DT/​1/​1, ‘Pre-​DAC’. 21 New Statesman, 2 December 1950. 22 Picture Post, 7 October 1950. 23 Editorial, ULR 1 (spring 1957). 24 Margot Heinemann, ‘1956 and the Communist Party’, in Ralph Miliband and John Saville (eds), Socialist Register (London: The Merlin Press, 1976), 50. It is estimated that 7,000 left the CPGB in 1956, almost one-​fifth of its membership. 25 Jonathan Schneer, ‘Hopes Deferred or Shattered: The British Labour Left and the Third Force Movement, 1945–​49’, The Journal of Modern History, 56, no. 2 (June 1984), 197–​226. 26 Leon Epstein, ‘The British Labour Left and U.S. Foreign Policy’, The American Political Science Review 45, no. 4 (December 1951), 974–​95. 27 Richard Crossman, Michael Foot and Ian Mikardo, Keep Left (London: New Statesman and Nation, 1947), 30–​5. 28 SxMs9/​2/​9/​14/​1, CWPA, Third Camp Conference, Hampstead, Sheet 2. 29 SxMs9/​2/​9/​14/​1, CWPA, Miscellaneous International Bodies, John C. Banks to Jeffrey Boss, 3 September 1957. 30 On British internationalism between the wars, see Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1–​13; Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 5–​6. 31 SxMs9/​2/​9/​14/​1, CWPA, Miscellaneous International Bodies, John C. Banks to Jeffrey Boss, 3 September 1957. 32 Nataša Mišković, ‘Introduction’, in Nataša Mišković, Harald Fischer-​Tiné and Nada Boškovska (eds), The Non-​Aligned Movement and the Cold War: Delhi–​Bandung–​ Belgrade (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 1–​18. 33 Anna Yates and Michael Chester, The Troublemaker: Michael Scott and His Lonely Struggle against Injustice (London: Aurum Press, 2006), 74–​87. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (BODBL), the Papers of Michael Scott, (5770) 8/​1; Michael Scott, ‘An International Peace Corps’, March 1964.

260

Notes

34 Peace News, 16 April 1954; Henry Steck, ‘The Re-​emergence of Ideological Politics in Great Britain: The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’, Political Research Quarterly 18, no. 1 (March 1965), 87–​103. 35 Hydrogen Bomb, House of Commons Debates, vol. 526 cc36–​153, 5 April 1954. 36 Peace News, 23 April 1954. 37 Peace News, 21 May 1954; Christopher Driver, The Disarmers (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1964), 27. 38 Manchester Guardian, 1 May 1954. 39 TNA, FO 371/​112383; PREM 11/​1052. The final petition of 375,000 signatories was submitted to Churchill on 31 December. 40 Lin Chun, The British New Left (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 1–​25. 41 Edward Thompson, ‘NATO, Neutralism and Survival’, ULR 4 (spring 1958); Peter Worsley, ‘Revolution in the Third World’, New Left Review 12 (November–​December 1961). 42 Lawrence Wittner, The Struggle against the Bomb: One World or None –​A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement through 1953, Volume 1 (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 80–​107; Resisting the Bomb –​A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1954–​70, Volume 2 (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 41–​60. 43 Pritchard and Taylor, Protest Makers, 78. 44 C. Wright Mills, ‘Letter to the New Left’, New Left Review 5 (September–​October 1960). 45 Taylor, Against, 121. 46 Mervyn Jones, ‘The Time is Short’, in Norman MacKenzie (ed.), Conviction (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1958), 183–​201. 47 Alfred Goldberg, ‘The Atomic Origins of the British Nuclear Deterrent’, International Affairs 40, no. 3 (July 1964), 409–​29. 48 Armed Forced (Modern Weapons), House of Commons Debates, vol. 450 c2117, 12 May 1948; TNA PREM 8/​1557. Public information about nuclear weapons was thereafter only released with the approval of the prime minister. 49 Peter Hennessy, What the Papers Never Said (London: Portcullis Press, 1985), 21–​2. 50 Ibid. 51 The Listener, 25 March 1954. 52 Hydrogen Bomb, House of Commons Debates, vol. 526 cc36–​153, 5 April 1954. 53 Geoffrey Best, Churchill: A Study in Greatness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 31; Graham Farmelo, Churchill’s Bomb: How the United States Overtook Britain in the First Nuclear Arms Race (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 2013), 377–​432. 54 The Times, 5 April 1954.

Notes

261

55 The Times, 27 March 1958. 56 Jeremy Tunstall, The Westminster Lobby Correspondents: Sociological Study of National Political Journalism (Abingdon: Routledge, 1970). 57 Daily Mirror, 2 and 6 April 1954. 58 British Library Sound Archive (BLSA), C464/​17, Tape 12, Joseph Rotblat interviewed by Katherine Thompson. Rotblat became embroiled in a legal dispute with one newspaper after they exaggerated an interview he had given on the hazards of testing. 59 BBC WAC, T16/​150/​12, Board Minutes, 22 March 1954. 60 The Listener, 15 July 1954. 61 Bertrand Russell, ‘A Prescription for the World’, The Saturday Review, 28 August 1954. 62 The Listener, 22 July 1954. 63 Adamthwaite, ‘Nation Shall Speak unto Nation’, 557–​77. 64 BBC WAC, R34/​640/​2, Propaganda/​Defence, File 2, 1955–​59. 65 The Listener, 2 April, 27 May, 30 September 1954. The decision on whether testing should continue ‘ought to be left to the scientists’, according to Frisch. ‘They are not schoolboys, hell-​bent on letting off bigger and bigger firecrackers.’ 66 BBC WAC, T32/​1.589/​1, Atoms for Peace, Grace Wyndham Goldie to James McCloy, 15 August 1955. 67 Churchill Archives Centre (CAC), The Papers of Joseph Rotblat, RTBT, K152, 1946. The train comprised of ‘diagrams, charts, photographs and simple experiments’ and attracting 123,006 paying customers and 13,000 school children. CAC, RTBT, K158, 1947. 68 BLSA, C464/​17, Tape 11, Joseph Rotblat interviewed by Katherine Thompson. 69 The Listener, 30 December 1954 70 Eileen Maloney to Bertrand Russell, 24 November 1954, in Andrew Bone, Man’s Peril, vol. 28, The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell (London: Routledge, 2003), 66–​75. 71 Ibid., Bertrand Russell to Eileen Maloney, 26 November 1954, in Bone, Man’s Peril, 66–​75. 72 BBC WAC, R9/​6/​36, Audience Research, December 1954. As an audience research report revealed, ‘to several [listeners] it was one of the most memorable broadcasts they had ever heard’. 73 BBC WAC, R19/​148, ‘Hydrogen Bomb’: 1948–​55, memo, 8 December 1954. 74 TNA, CAB 195/​13, Sir Norman Brook Notebook: Cabinet Minutes, 14 December 1954. ‘It is not right for the BBC to start educating the public on this’, claimed Harold Alexander. 75 BBC WAC, R19/​99, H-​bomb Programme, Laurence Gilliam to Nesta Pain, 3 June 1954.

262

Notes

76 Ibid., Nesta Pain to Laurence Gilliam, 31 August 1954. 77 TNA, CAB 195/​13, Sir Norman Brook Notebook, 14 December 1954. 78 WAC, R34/​997, Lord De Le Warr to Alexander Cadogan, 18 December 1954. 79 Ibid., The BBC to Lord De Le Warr, 21 December 1954. 80 Ibid., 4 January 1955. 81 Ibid., Alexander Cadogan to Lord De Le Warr, 24 January 1955. 82 Ibid., Harman Grisewood, 27 January 1955. 83 Ibid., Note of Meeting held at the Ministry of Defence, 15 February 1955. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid., Ian Jacob, 28 February 1955. 87 No entries exist under ‘nuclear weapons’ or ‘hydrogen bombs’ in the 1955 and 1956 editions of The Listener, even though several are included for 1954. 88 BBC WAC, T32/​1201/​1, Leonard Miall to Michael Barsley, 14 July 1955. 89 Ibid., Leonard Miall to Michael Barsley, 21 July 1955; R34/​997, Note of Meeting held at the Ministry of Defence, 15 February 1955. 90 BBC WAC, T32/​1201/​1, Leonard Miall to Michael Barsley, 22 July 1955. 91 BBC WAC, R34/​997, Joseph Rotblat to Nesta Pain, 30 July 1955. 92 Ibid., ‘10 Years of Nuclear Weapons’. 93 Daily Express, 14 March and 25 November 1955; 2 December 1959. For example, Pincher also wrote stories such as ‘H-​bomb Could Be Smuggled In’, ‘Nuclear Dust’ and ‘The Night the Atoms Ran Wild’. 94 Peter Hennessy, Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties (London: Penguin Books, 2007), 77. 95 Bert Hogenkamp, Film, Television and the Left, 1950–​1970 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2000), 60. 96 Ibid. 97 University of Warwick, Modern Records Centre (MRC), MSS181X/​4/​10/​4, ‘Beyond the Grapevine: A Campaigner’s Guide to Using the Media’, 1984. 98 Lorna Arnold, Britain and the H-​Bomb (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 123. 99 Wittner, Resisting the Bomb, 17. 100 Defence: Outline of Future Policy, Cmnd 124 (London: HMSO, 1957). 101 Wittner, Resisting the Bomb, 44. Polls show that opposition to tests increased from an estimated 44 to 57 per cent between April and September 1957. 102 The Times, 26 February 1958. 103 JBPL, Cwl, DAC 1/​1, 23 November 1957. 104 Taylor, Against, 7. 105 Adamthwaite, ‘Nation Shall Speak unto Nation’, 557–​77. 106 MRC, The Papers of Victor Gollancz, ND/​1/​45, The National Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons Tests pamphlet, no date.

Notes

263

107 Daily Worker, 19 March 1957, Colonial and Commonwealth Office (henceforth CO) 1036/​513, TNA. 108 JBPL, Cwl, DAC 1/​1, 7 November 1957; Papers of Hugh Brock, HBP1/​1. 109 JBPL, Cwl, DAC 1/​1, 23 November 1957; Peggy Duff, Left, Left, Left: A Personal Account of Six Campaigns, 1945–​65 (London: Alisson & Busby, 1971), 118. 110 New Statesman, 23 November 1957. 111 John B. Priestley, ‘Britain and the Nuclear Bombs’, New Statesman, 2 November 1957 112 Neil Berry, Articles of Faith: The Story of British Intellectual Journalism (London: The Waywiser Press, 2009), 118. 113 The Guardian, 31 January 1958; Edward Hyams, The New Statesman: The History of the First Fifty Years, 1913–​1963 (London: Longmans, 1963), 289. 114 BBC WAC, R51/​931/​1, Reith Lectures, George Kennan. 115 BBC WAC, T16/​150/​2, Erik Baker to Ian Jacob, 15 January 1958. 116 On women and the movement, see Jill Liddington, The Long Road to Greenham: Feminism and Anti-​militarism in Britain since 1820 (London: Virago Press, 1989). 117 Driver, Disarmers, 29–​30. 118 For a critique, see Michael Randle, ‘Non-​violent Direct Action in the 1950s and 1960s’, in Richard Taylor and Nigel Young (eds), Campaigns for Peace: British Peace Movements in the Twentieth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 131–​61. 119 Castells, Networks, 1–​18. 120 David Widgery, ‘Don’t You Hear the H-​bombs Thunder?’, in David Widgery (ed.), The Left in Britain, 1956–​1968 (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 108. 121 Manchester Guardian, 8 April 1958. 122 Holger Nehring, ‘The National Internationalists: Transnational Relations and the British and West German Protests against Nuclear Weapons, 1957–​64’, Contemporary European History 14, no. 4 (2005), 559–​82. 123 Jodi Burkett, ‘Re-​defining British Morality: “Britishness” and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 1958–​68’, Twentieth Century British History 21, no. 2 (2010), 184–​205. 124 Parkin, Middle Class Radicalism, 26. 125 BLSA, C464/​17, Tape 12, Joseph Rotblat interviewed by Katherine Thompson. 126 MRC, MSS181/​1/​1/​1, Executive committee minutes, 28 January 1958 127 TNA, INF 12/​894, Message from Donald Edwards, no date. 128 The Guardian, 22 May 1958. 129 Daily Express, 23 August 1945; Daily Express, 17 September 1952. 130 MRC, ND/​2/​1/​100, Watford and District Branch of the CND to Victor Gollancz, no date. 131 TNA, PREM 11/​2778, Harold Macmillan to Charles Hill, 24 March 1958.

264

Notes

1 32 TNA, INF 12/​894, Charles Hill to RA Butler, 9 May 1958. 133 Ibid., ‘Civil Defence Films’, 16 May 1958. 134 Brian Brivati, ‘The Campaign for Democratic Socialism’, PhD diss., Queen Mary University of London, 1992, 210. 135 New Daily, November 1963. 136 The Guardian, 27 May 1958; The Guardian, 27 August 1958; London School of Economics (LSE), CND 3/​1, Annual Report of CND, 1959; Duff, Left Left Left, 159. 137 Duncan Campbell, Secret Society [Television Series]. 138 New Statesman, 15 October 1960. 139 Lawrence Wittner, ‘The Misuse of the High-​Minded: The British Government’s First Campaign against CND’, New Blackfriars 72, no. 846 (1991), 56–​9. 140 Ibid. 141 The Times, 5 September 1958; Duff, Left Left Left, 159. 142 Driver, Disarmers, 37. 143 Phillip Levy, The Press Council: History, Procedure and Cases (London: Macmillan & Co., 1967), 64, 140, 372–​3. 144 Adamthwaite, ‘Nation Shall Speak unto Nation’, 557–​77. 145 JBPL, Cwl, DT/​1/​3, DAC Policy Statements and Leaflets.

3  Public Intellectuals 1 E. P. Thompson, ‘Socialism and the Intellectuals’, ULR 1, no. 1 (spring 1957). 2 Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 451. 3 Mervyn Jones, ‘Socialism and the Intellectuals –​One’, ULR 1, no. 2 (summer 1957); E. P. Thompson, ‘Socialism and the Intellectuals –​a Reply’, ULR 1, no. 2 (summer 1957). 4 Perry Anderson, ‘A Culture in Contraflow –​I’, New Left Review I/​180 (March–​April 1980). 5 Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850–​1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 7. 6 Taylor, Against, 35. 7 John Collins, Faith under Fire (London: Leslie Frewin, 1966), 303. 8 Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain 1945–​1951 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), 318; LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy, 335. 9 Roger Fagge, The Vision of J.B. Priestley (London: Continuum, 2012), ­chapter 3; Sian Nicholas, ‘ “Sly Demagogues” and Wartime Radio: J.B. Priestley and the BBC’, Twentieth Century British History 6, no. 3 (1995), 247–​66.

Notes

265

10 The Spectator, 13 December 1940. 11 David Garnett, The Secret History of PWE –​Political Warfare Executive 1939–​ 1945 (London: St Ermins Press, 2002); Kenneth O’Morgan, Michael Foot: A Life (London: Harper Collins, 2007); Mervyn Jones, Michael Foot (London: Victor Gollancz, 1994); James Cameron, Point of Departure: Experiment in Biography (London: Granta Books, 2006). 12 Vincent Geoghegan, Socialism and Religion: Roads to Common Wealth (London: Routledge, 2011). 13 TNA: PREM 11/​2778, Harold Macmillan to Charles Hill, 27 March 1958. 14 Andrew Rubin, Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture and the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 62. 15 Collini, Absent Minds, 420–​22. 16 Briggs, Competition, 56; The Times, 26 April 1957. 17 George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Penguin Books, 2001), ­chapter 13. 18 Ruth Dudley Edwards, Victor Gollancz: A Biography (London: Faber & Faber, 2012), ­chapter 11. 19 TNA: KV2 /​3774, Source Report, 11 September 1951. On the Society for Cultural Relations, see Emily Lygo, ‘Promoting Soviet Culture in Britain: The History of the Society for Cultural Relations between the Peoples of the British Commonwealth and the USSR, 1924–​1945’, The Modern Language Review 108, no. 2 (2013), 571–​96. 20 Matthew Hilton, Nick Crowson, Jean-​François Mouhot and James McKay, A Historical Guide to NGOs in Britain: Charities, Civil Society and the Voluntary Sector since 1945 (Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2012), 257–​8; Carl Winslow (ed.), E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays and Polemics (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014), 20. 21 Kingsley Amis, Socialism and the Intellectuals, Fabian Tract, 304 (London: Fabian Society, 1956). 22 Ibid. The Third Programme paid twenty guineas per twenty minute talk, described by Noel Annan as ‘a most welcome addition to the income of most intellectuals’. See Collini, Absent Minds, 437. 23 Thompson, ‘Socialism and the Intellectuals’; Rodney Hilton, ‘Socialism and the Intellectuals –​ Four’, ULR 1, no. 2 (summer 1957). 24 Thompson, ‘Socialism and the Intellectuals’. 25 Stuart Hall, ‘The Social Eye of the Picture Post’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies 2 (1972). 26 Cameron, Point of Departure, 281. 27 Parkin, Middle Class Radicalism, 93–​109. Cecil Day-​Lewis did write ‘Requiem for the Living’, an ironic reprise of the Requiem Mass, as a plea for the abolition of

266

Notes

nuclear weapons. It was performed on the Aldermaston march in 1958. See John Heilpern, John Osborne: A Patriot for Us (London: Vintage Books, 2007), 243. 28 Perry Anderson, ‘Components of the National Culture’, New Left Review 1/​5 (July–​August 1968). 29 Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (Rockville: ARC Manor, 2008). 30 TNA: KV2 /​3774, Source Report, 11 September 1951. 31 Daily Worker, 24 January 1952. 32 TNA: CAB129/​23, C.P. (48)8. ‘Future Foreign Publicity Policy’, 8 January 1948. 33 James Smith, British Writers and Mi5 Surveillance, 1930–​1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 17. 34 Ruud van Dijk, William Glenn Gray, Svetlana Savranskaya, Jeremi Suri and Qiang Zha, Encyclopedia of the Cold War (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 298–​9; Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature and American Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 35 Wilford, The CIA, 290. 36 Rubin, Archives of Authority, 61. 37 LSE, CND/​1, ‘Memorandum on Techniques for Nuclear Disarmament’, 26 September 1958; Jodi Burkett, ‘Direct Action and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 1958–​62’, in Matthew Hilton, Nicholas Crowson and James McKay, NGOs in Contemporary Britain: Non-​state Actors in Society and Politics since 1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 26; The Guardian, 31 January 1958. 38 Taylor, Against, 60. 39 Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles (London: Abacus, 2005), 262. 40 News Chronicle, 19 February 1958. 41 The Times, February 24 1958. 42 JBPL, The Jacquetta Hawkes Archive (JHA), gb0532haw, 13/​5, CND’s Women’s Committee and Meetings, Minutes, 29 May 1958. 43 James Curran, ‘Media and the Making of British Society, c .1700–​2000’, Media History 8, no. 2 (2002), 135–​54; Peter Black, The Daily Mail, 10 September 1960. 44 BBC WAC, R34/​640/​2, Keith Fowler to Miss Scott Moncrieff, 1 August; Miss Scott Moncrief to the Deputy Editor, 8 August. 45 Driver, Disarmers, 32; Liddington, The Long Road, 185; Taylor, Against, 21. 46 JBPL, JHA, gb0532haw, 13/​5, CND’s Women’s Committee and Meetings, Minutes, 10 April 1958. 47 Ibid., 29 May 1958. 48 Driver, Disarmers, 54. 49 JBPL, JHA, gb0532haw, 13/​5, press cutting. 50 BU, ITA Archive, 5081/​2/​1, Free Speech, List of Panellists in 1958 and 1959.

Notes

267

51 Ibid., Betty Milman to J. D. R. Cuthbert, 18 March 1957. 52 Ibid., Free Speech, Ernest Marples MP to Hugh Linstead, 14 March 1959; Bernard Sendall to Hugh Linstead, 24 April 1959. 53 TNA: PREM 11/​2778, Charles Hill to Harold Macmillan, 2 April 1958. 54 Wittner, ‘The Misuse of the High-​Minded’, 56–​9. 55 E. P. Thompson (ed.), Out of Apathy (London: Stevens and Sons, 1960), 8. 56 Humphrey Carpenter, The Angry Young Men: A Literary Comedy of the 1950s (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 200–​201. 57 Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture (London: Paladin, 1968), 52. 58 Audrey and Kit Coppard, ‘The Lively Medium?’ ULR 5 (autumn 1958). 59 Ibid. 60 BBC WAC, T32/​1, 649/​1, Ned Sherrin to the Assistant Head of Television Talks, 27 February 1962. 61 Audrey and Kit Coppard, ‘The Lively Medium?’ 62 JBPL, MRL/​3, C100 circular, 1962. 63 JBPL, JHA, gb0532haw, 13/​5, CND Bulletin, April 1958. 64 Driver, Disarmers, 54. 65 The Guardian, 31 January 1958. 66 The Guardian, 26 February 1959. 67 John Jenks, British Propaganda, 15. 68 BBC WAC, R34/​640/​2, J. A. Camacho, 9 September 1955. 69 TNA: PREM 11/​2778, Charles Hill to Harold Macmillan, 7 May 1958. 70 The National Library of Scotland (NLS), The Ritchie Calder Papers, Dep.370.92, Broadcasts and Speeches, It Can Happen Tomorrow, No. 10. ‘Fission’. 71 The Radio Times, 22 January 1958. 72 BBC WAC, T32/​1.589/​1, Atoms for Peace, James McCloy to Grace Wyndham Goldie, 31 January 1958. 73 Duff, Left Left Left, 157. Duff later recalled how a newsletter produced by sympathetic scientists was far beyond the understanding of the average campaigner. 74 Marghanita Laski, ‘The Civil Defence Workers Story’, in David Boulton (ed.), Voices from the Crowd against the H-​bomb (London: Peter Owen, 1964), 73–​7. 75 NLS, The Ritchie Calder Papers, Dep.370.92, It Can Happen Tomorrow, No. 10. ‘Fission’. 76 ‘Armchair Theatre’, http://​www.televisionheaven.co.uk/​at.htm, date accessed 11 July 2012. 77 George Brandt, British Television Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 24. 78 Daily Express, 14 March 1958 79 The Times, 11 March 1958.

268

Notes

80 MRC, MSS 157/​3/​ND/​2/​I, Victor Gollancz to Margaret Gardiner, 17 November 1961. Victor Gollancz advised Margaret Gardiner to contact Bernstein about the donation of funds for an advertising campaign against the bomb: ‘he is enormously rich and certainly in sympathy’. 81 The Times, 11 March 1958. 82 New Statesman, 2 November 1957. 83 Daily Express, 14 March 1958. 84 Black, Political Culture, 89. 85 J. B. Priestley, ‘Our New Society’, in J. B. Priestley, Thoughts in the Wilderness (New York: Harper, 1957), 120–​6. 86 Black, Political Culture, 96. 87 John B. Priestley to Edward Davison, 10 May 1958, in Roger Fagge, ‘From the “Postscripts to Admass”: J.B. Priestley and the Cold War World’, Media History 12, no. 6 (2006), 103–​15. 88 JBPL, JHA, gb0532haw, 13/​5, CND Bulletin, April 1958. 89 Phillip Purser in Granada Television, 119–​20. 90 Maurice Richardson, ‘Didactic Missile’, The Observer, 16 March 1958. 91 TNA: KV2 /​3774, John Montgomery (A.D. Peters Literary Agent) to A. M. Kheir (International Institute for Peace in Vienna), 24 April 1958. 92 The play was also performed by Unity Theatre in the early 1960s. See Charles A. Carpenter, Dramatists and the Bomb: American and British Playwrights Confront the Nuclear Age, 1945–​1964 (Greenwood Press: London, 1999), 61–​73. 93 Marghanita Laski, The Offshore Island (London: Cresset, 1959), 39, 78, 89. 94 The author in correspondence with Roger Morgan, 9 February 2016; Frederick H. Gardner, ‘The Offshore Island’, The Harvard Crimson, 16 May 1963. 95 Sanity, December 1961. 96 JBPL, HC 1/​1, Preliminary meeting held at Friends House, Euston Road, London, 22 October 1960. 97 Don Taylor, ‘An Analysis of David Mercer’s The Generations’, in Mercer, The Generations, 245. 98 LSE, CND 1/​34 (11), circular of the disarmament and strategy group, January 1964. 99 Tony Shaw, ‘The BBC, the State and Cold War Culture: The Case of Television’s The War Game (1965)’, English Historical Review 121, no. 494 (2006), 1351–​84. 100 Peter Worsley in Steck, ‘The Re-​emergence of Ideological Politics in Great Britain’, 87–​103. 101 Dennis, The Changing Forest, 46–​60. 102 The Wesker Trilogy: Chicken Soup with Barley; Roots; I’m Talking About Jerusalem (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1964), 146; Carpenter, Dramatists, 102.

Notes

269

103 Doris Lessing, ‘The Small Personal Voice’, in Tom Maschler (ed.), Declaration (London: Readers Union, 1957). 104 Rebellato, 1956, 15. 105 Taylor, ‘David Mercer’s The Generations’, 246. 106 Stuart Hall, ‘Beyond Naturalism Pure’, Encore, January–​February 1962. 107 John Osborne, Look Back in Anger (London: Faber & Faber, 1957), 85. 108 Taylor, ‘David Mercer’s The Generations’, 255. 109 Rebellato, 1956, 17. 110 Hall, ‘Beyond Naturalism Pure’. 111 Taylor, ‘David Mercer’s The Generations’, 261. 112 John Osborne, Almost a Gentleman: An Autobiography. Volume II (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), 149. 113 Frank Myers, ‘Civil Disobedience and Organisational Change: The British Committee of 100’, Political Science Quarterly 86 (1971), 92–​112. For the original signatories, see Peace News, 16 December 1960; Taylor, Against, 196–​7. 114 Osborne, Almost a Gentleman, 150. 115 Robert Bolt: Obituary, Independent, 22 October 2011; Carpenter, Dramatists. 116 Interview with Samantha Carroll in Samantha Carroll, ‘ “Fill the Jails: Identity, Structure and Method in the Committee of 100, 1960–​1968’, unpublished thesis, the University of Sussex, 2010, 186. 117 Allsop, The Angry Decade, 14. 118 Osborne, Look Back in Anger, 15–​16. 119 Ibid., 10. 120 The Guardian, 14 September 1959. 121 Roger Law, A Nasty Piece of Work (London: Booth-​Clibborn Editions, 1992), 23. 122 Stuart Hood, On Television (London: Pluto Press, 1997), 49. 123 JBPL, MRL/​3, C100 circular 1962. 124 Osborne, Look Back in Anger, 10. 125 Tribune, 23 December 1960. 126 Albert Hunt, ‘Blowing the Bloody Gaff ’ some notes on political satire, Encore, September–​October 1959. 127 Daily Mail, 5 March 1958. 128 Elizabeth Nelson, The British Counter-​Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), 43. 129 Richard Ingrams, The Life and Times of Private Eye (London: Penguin Books, 1971), 3; Humphrey Carpenter, That Was Satire That Was: The Satire Boom of the 1960s (London: Victor Gollancz, 2000), 164. 130 Harry Thompson, Peter Cook: A Biography (London: Sceptre, 1998), 82. 131 Jonathan Coe, ‘Sinking Giggling into the Sea’, London Review of Books 35, no. 14 (18 July 2013); Stephen Wagg, ‘You’ve Never Had It So Silly’, in Dominic Strinati

270

Notes

and Stephen Wagg (eds), Come on Down? Popular Media Culture in Post-​war Britain (Abingdon: Routledge, 1992), 254–​84. 132 Carpenter, That Was Satire, 49. 133 Sheila Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream (London: Allen Lane, 2001), 46. 134 Roger Wilmut, From Fringe to Flying Circus: Celebrating a Unique Generation of Comedy, 1960–​1980 (London: Eyre Methuen, 1980), 55. 135 Jonathan Coe, ‘Sinking Giggling into the Sea’; Michael Frayn, ‘Introduction’, in Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore (eds), The Complete beyond the Fringe (London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1993). 136 Coe, ‘Sinking Giggling into the Sea’. 137 John Osborne in Maschler, Declaration, 66. 138 Hall, ‘Something to Live For’. 139 Charles Marowitz, ‘The World of Paul Slickey’, Encore, September–​October 1959. 140 Hall, ‘Beyond Naturalism Pure’. 141 John Osborne, The Entertainer (London: Faber & Faber, 1959), 3. 142 Ibid. 143 Arnold Wesker, ‘To React –​to Respond’, Encore, May–​June 1959. 144 BBC WAC, T32/​1, 649/​1, Ned Sherrin to Assistant Head of Television Talks, 27 February 1962. 145 BBC WAC, R44/​1, 303/​1, Kathleen Haacke to BBC viewers, 31 October 1963; ‘Reaction to TWTWTW –​Second Series’, 28 September–​16 November 1963. In public relations for the programme, the BBC refused to entertain questions about the ‘politics of its contributors and its executives’. 146 Ibid., ‘Announcement to Press Agencies’, 13 November 1963. 147 Leslie Fielder, ‘The Un-​Angry Young Men’, Encounter, January 1958, 3–​12. 148 E. P. Thompson, ‘Socialism and the intellectuals’, Universities & Left Review 1, no. 1 (spring 1957). 149 Gareth Jenkins, ‘Why Lucky Jim Turned Right’, International Socialism, Issue 70; Dale Salwak, Interviews with Britain’s Angry Young Men (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 1984), 52. In 1967, Amis and John Braine signed a letter to The Times in support of the American position in Vietnam. 150 Andrew Blaikie, The Scots Imagination and Modern Memory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 65. 151 Anderson, ‘Free Cinema’. 152 Hogenkamp, Film, Television and the Left, 55. 153 Patrick Miller, ‘Crown Film Unit’, http://​www.screenonline.org.uk/​film/​id/​469778, date accessed: 11 July 2012. 154 Anderson, ‘Free Cinema’. 155 Ibid. 156 Hogenkamp, Film, Television and the Left, 55.

Notes

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157 William Whitebait, New Statesman, 21 February 1959; Penelope Houston, Sight and Sound 28, no. 2 (spring 1959), 89; Tribune, 27 February 1959, 11. 158 http://​www.concordmedia.co.uk/​, date accessed: 11 July 2012. 159 New York Times, 3 April 1966. 160 LSE, CND 1/​66, Peter Watkins to North West CND, 20 May 1966. 161 BBC WAC, R34/​1590, Ministry of Defence to Harman Grisewood, 9 October 1961. 162 Shaw, ‘The BBC, the State and Cold War Culture’, 1351–​84. 163 In Mercer’s Generations, for example, he attempts to interrupt and redefine the naturalism of the drama by incorporating BBC news film of a C100 demonstration in Trafalgar Square. Mercer, The Generations, 153–​4. 164 Ken Loach in Graham Fuller (ed.), Loach on Loach (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), 9–​31. 165 Peter Watkins, http://​www.mnsi.net/​~pwatkins/​warGame.htm, date accessed: 11 July 2012. 166 BBC WAC, R78/​1, 919/​1, Board Minutes, 13 March 1969. 167 BBC WAC, T16/​679/​1, Controller’s Minutes, 6 September 1965. 168 James Chapman, ‘The BBC and the Censorship of The War Game (1965)’, Journal of Contemporary History 41, no. 1 (2006), 75–​94. 169 Shaw, ‘The BBC, the State and Cold War Culture’, 1351–​84. 170 TNA: CAB 21/​5808, Burke Trend, 6 October 1965; ibid., D. Mitchell to D. J. Trevelyan, 8 September 1965. The government was so apprehensive, however, that the unprecedented step of formal intervention was not ruled out in the event that the BBC proceed with the broadcast. 171 BBC WAC, T16/​679/​1, BBC Press Office announcement, 26 November 1965. 172 BBC WAC, T16/​679/​1, Hugh Greene, 9 February 1966; T56/​264/​1, Press Cuttings. 173 LSE, CND 1/​66, Dick Nettleton, 27 May 1966. 174 Shaw, ‘The BBC, the State and Cold War Culture’, 1351–​84. 175 BBC WAC, T16/​679/​2, Peter Watkins to Kenneth Adam, 25 February 1966.

4  The Street as a Medium 1 Black Dwarf, October 1968. 2 Colin Seymour-​Ure, The British Press and Broadcasting since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 187. 3 Jo Durden-​Smith in Jonathon Green, Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground, 1961–​1971 (London: Pimlico, 1998), 245. 4 Taylor and Pritchard, Protest Makers, 57.

272

Notes

5 On ‘regimes’ see Stuart Hall, Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices (Milton Keynes: The Open University, 1977). 6 As Richard Gott argued in 1964, the anti-​nuclear movement ‘has its roots in the dissenting tradition of British history and it has associations with all the anti-​war movements of past centuries. But essentially it is something new’. Richard Gott, ‘25 Years After’, Sanity, September 1964; Nicholas Walter, ‘Damned Fools in Utopia’, New Left Review I/​13–​14 (January–​April 1962). 7 John Green, Ken Sprague: People’s Artist (London: Artery Publications, 2002). Ken Sprague and Ray Barnet were founders of Mountain and Molehill, an advertising agency that produced propaganda for left wing causes. 8 Andrew Marr, A History of Modern Britain (London: Macmillan, 2007), 182. 9 The New Daily, November 1963. 10 Driver, Disarmers, 58; Frank Myers, ‘British Peace Politics: The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Committee of 100, 1957–​1962’, unpublished dissertation, 1965, 107. 11 MRC, MSS.1818/​4/​2/​1, CND Bulletin, May 1958: ‘two of which signified the bent cross –​death of man/​the ring –​the unborn child. Combining the two signs suggests the aims of the Campaign; to overcome the threat of atomic death and disaster to the living and the unborn’. 12 MRC, MSS.1818/​4/​2/​1, CND Bulletin, May 1958. 13 BBC WAC, TV Subjects, ‘Nuclear Weapons’, Family Affairs, 5 May 1960. 14 Duff, Left Left Left, 213. 15 JBPL, MRL/​3, 1962. 16 Peace News, 1 August 1958. Hugh Brock served as chairman and Pat Arrowsmith as organizing secretary. The Committee also included Frank Allaun, Michael Randle and Walter Wolfgang. 17 JBPL, DAC/​6/​1, John Collins to Pat Arrowsmith, no date. 18 Taylor, Against, 31. 19 LSE, CND/​1, memo from Sevenoaks CND, July 1958. 20 Walter, ‘Damned Fools in Utopia’. 21 Pritchard and Taylor, Protest Makers, 76. 22 Elizabeth Nelson, The British Counter-​Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), 34. 23 LSE, CND 1/​34 (11), circular of the disarmament and strategy group, January 1964. 24 JBPL, DT/​1/​3, ‘The role of an independent Direct Action Committee against Nuclear War in the campaign for unilateral renunciation of nuclear weapons’, no date. 25 Ibid. 26 Hugh Brock, ‘Marching to Aldermaston –​Ten Years Ago’, Sanity, April 1962. 27 Driver, Disarmers, 36.

Notes

273

28 Nuttall, Bomb Culture, 21. 29 JBPL, JHA, gb0532haw, 13/​5, letter from Diane Collins, no date. 30 New Statesman, 21 June 1958. 31 Dennis Potter, The Glittering Coffin (London: Victor Gollancz, 1960), 5, 28. 32 British Library Sound Archive (BLSA), transcript number C896/​53, anonymous, interviewed by Ronald Fraser, 1984, Ronald Fraser Interviews: 1968 –​a Student Generation in Revolt. 33 John Minnion and Philip Bolsover (eds), The CND Story: The First 25 Years in the Words of the People Involved (London: Allison & Busby, 1983); Driver, Disarmers, 55, 60. 34 The Times, 13 March 1958. 35 TNA: PREM 11/​2778, Chief Whip to Harold Macmillan, 14 March 1958. The Times, ‘Mixed H-​bomb Review at Oxford’, 17 March 1958. The surveys conducted at Oxford and Cambridge Universities were not only taken from much larger samples, but were also supported by a scientific cross-​sample of non-​voters. This demonstrated only marginal deviation from the original results. Only 22 per cent of Cambridge University students were fully supportive of unilateral disarmament. The Times, 5 and12 June 1958. 36 The Times, 17 March 1958. The ban the bomb percentage ran 15–​20 points higher at women’s colleges in Oxford than it was at men’s. 37 Sheila Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World (London: Pelican Books, 1973), 3, 12. 38 Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream, 10. 39 PRO, HO 325/​149, Edwin Plowden to Harold Macmillan, 21 February 1958. 40 Hennessy, Having It So Good, 529. 41 TNA: HO 325/​149, RA Butler, 28 March 1958. 42 Daily Mail, 8 April 1958. 43 The Times, 5 April 1958; The Daily Telegraph, 5 April 1958. 44 TNA: HO 325/​149, DAC Press Statement, 10 February 1958; Orwell, Wigan Pier, 169. 45 Daily Mirror, 8 April 1958. 46 The Guardian, 7 April 1958. 47 Ibid. 48 ITN, 4 April 1958, http://​jiscmediahub.ac.uk/​, date accessed: 10 July 2012. 49 University of Bath Archives (UBA), Papers of A.K. Chesterton, C.1–​C.7, Nottingham Evening News, 23 April 1960. 50 Daily Express, 31 March 1959. 51 Spectator, 11 April 1958. 52 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (London: Routledge, 2001), 5. 53 Nottingham Evening News, 23 April 1960.

274

Notes

54 The Times, 5 April 1958; The Daily Telegraph, 18 March 1959. 55 Veldman, Fantasy, 142. 56 Spectator, 11 April 1958. 57 Daily Express, 20 April 1959. 58 Margot Finn, After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–​ 1874 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 36. 59 ‘Following the Chartists’ Route’, Sanity, March 1964; Burkett, Constructing Post-​ Imperial Britain, 84. 60 JBPL, DAC/​5/​7/​20, April Carter to Michael Randle, 18 March 1960. 61 The Guardian, 15 January 1959. 62 LSE CND/​3/​1, Annual Report of 1959; Daily Mail, 31 March 1959. The Mail led with the headline, ‘Biggest Protest of the Century?’ 63 MRC, MSS.181/​1/​1/​1, Executive committee minutes 29 June 1958. 64 TNA: HO 325/​149, Metropolitan Police Special Report, 8 April 1958. 65 Parkin, Middle Class, 80; Willie Thompson, The Good Old Cause: British Communism, 1920–​1991 (London: Pluto Press, 1992), 116. 66 The Daily Telegraph, 5 April 1958. 67 The Times, 5 April 1958. 68 The Guardian, 8 April 1958. 69 The Times, 9 April 1958. 70 BBC WAC, Home Service News Bulletin, 19 February 1958. 71 The Daily Telegraph, 18 February 1958; The Times, 19 February 1958. 72 George Thayer, The British Political Fringe (London: Anthony Blond, 1965), 66–​81. 73 The Daily Telegraph, 3 April 1958. 74 Nottingham Evening News, 23 April 1960. 75 The Times, 8 April 1958. 76 BBC WAC, Home Service News Bulletin, 8 April 1958. 77 TNA: HO 325/​149, Metropolitan Police Special Report, 8 April 1958. 78 The Guardian, 11 April, 1958. 79 See Norris McWhirter, Ross: The Story of a Shared Life (London: Churchill Press, 1976). 80 For the CND Executive Committee, the incident demonstrated ‘that support from hotheads or . . . known Communists is the kiss of death’. JBPL, JHA, gb0532haw, 13/​ 5, CND Bulletin, April 1958. 81 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Stencilled Occasional Paper, University of Birmingham, ‘ “Fighting over Peace”. Representations of CND in the Media’. Media Group no. 72. 82 JBPL, HBP/​2/​6, ‘Songs for the Aldermaston March’, April 1958. 83 Karl Dallas in the Observer, 10 August 2008; The Guardian, 15 October 2008. 84 The Daily Telegraph, 5 April 1958. 85 Driver, Disarmers, 59.

Notes

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BBC WAC, Tonight, no date, c. 1960; Minnion and Bolsover, The CND Story. The Times, 7 August 1962. JBPL, MGA/​6, leaflet, no date. The New Daily, November 1963. John Brunner, ‘Music on the March’, in Minnion and Bolsover, The CND Story, 45–​7. 91 Green, Days in the Life, 24. 92 George McKay, Circular Breathing: The Cultural Politics of Jazz in Britain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 57. 93 The Times, 9 April 1958; ITN, 7 April 1958, http://​jiscmediahub.ac.uk/​, date accessed: 10 July 2012. 94 BLSA, C122/​345–​346, Oral History of Jazz in Britain, Terry Monaghan interviewed by Andy Simons, 6 January 1999. 95 McKay, Circular Breathing, 53–​4. 96 TNA: HO 325/​149, Aldermaston March Committee, Press Statement for Release, 19 March 1958. 97 Nuttall, Bomb Culture, 40. It led to the advent of Six-​Five Special, the first television programme devoted to youth culture and music in Britain. 98 Ian Campbell, ‘Music against the Bomb’, in Minnion and Bolsover, The CND Story, 115–​17. 99 Francis Newton, The Jazz Scene (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1959), 76. 100 McKay, Circular Breathing, 62–​3. 101 Janey and Norman Buchan, supporters of Scottish CND, argued that the difference in tone between the London and the Glasgow marches was ‘nowhere better illustrated than in the songs they sang’. Whereas the songs at Aldermaston were ‘hymn-​like and aspirational’, those on the Clyde were ‘irreverent’ and ‘based on street songs’. Janey and Norman Buchan, ‘The Campaign in Scotland: Singing into Protest’, in Minnion and Bolsover, The CND Story, 52–​5. 102 The Observer, 10 August 2008. 103 The correlation is highlighted by the proliferation of folk clubs during the period in which the movement was at its height: Sing listed fifteen folk clubs in England in September 1959 and seventy-​eight in May 1962. 104 Campbell, ‘Music against the Bomb’, 115; Georgina Boyes, The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 232–​4. 105 Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream, 71–​2. 106 BLSA, John Crabbe CND Collection, C879, ‘Stars in their Eyes’, 21 September 1959. 107 LSE CND/​3/​4, Annual Report of 1962; The Mass Rally was ‘a crazy mix up of hard and soft politics’, claimed Peggy Duff, ‘but which was hard and which was soft I’m still not sure’. Duff, Left Left Left, 201. 86 87 88 89 90

276

Notes

108 New Statesman, 15 October 1960, and 28 June 1968. ‘And don’t tell me, mate, I wouldn’t stand up to be counted, because I wrote many articles, addressed meetings and spoke on radio and TV in seven or eight different countries.’ 109 The Times, 16 October 1961. 110 The Guardian, 12 September 1960. 111 David Frost and Ned Sherrin, That Was The Week That Was (London: W. H. Allen, 1963), 48. 112 Peter Sedgwick, ‘Farewell Grosvenor Square’, in Widgery (ed.), The Left, 22–​3.

5  Labour and Political Communications 1 On the Labour Party, defence and foreign policy, see Michael Gordon, Conflict and Consensus in Labour’s Foreign Policy, 1914–​1965 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1969); Richard Taylor, ‘The Labour Party and CND: 1957–​1984’, in Richard Taylor and Nigel Young (eds), Campaigns for Peace: British Peace Movements in the Twentieth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987); Rhiannon Vickers, The Labour Party and the World, Volume 1: The Evolution of Labour’s Foreign Policy, 1900–​1951 and Volume 2: The Evolution of Labour’s Foreign Policy since 1951 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003 and 2011). 2 Lewis Minkin, The Labour Party Conference (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978). 3 Black, Political Culture. For overviews of the new political history, see David M. Craig, ‘“High Politics” and the “New Political History”’, Historical Journal, 53, no. 2 (2010), 453–​75; Steven Fielding, ‘Looking for the “New Political History”’, Journal of Contemporary History 42, no. 3 (2007), 515–​24. 4 Laura Beers, Your Britain: The Media and the Making of the Labour Party (London: Harvard University Press, 2010). 5 David Hennessy, Communication and Political Power (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966), 92–​3. 6 Philip Williams, Hugh Gaitskell: A Political Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1979), 335. 7 An estimated 60 per cent of its supporters were also Labour voters. Parkin, Middle Class Radicalism, 33–​59. 8 MRC, MSS.181/​1/​1/​1, Executive committee minutes, 25 September and 17 November 1958. 9 Tribune, 14 March 1958; Mark Jenkins, Bevanism, Labour’s High Tide: The Cold War and Democratic Mass Movement (Nottingham: Spokesman, 1979), 127. 10 MRC, MSS.882/​75, TUC and Disarmament, Victor Feather to Mr Bowers, 24 April 1958. As Philip Noel-​Baker alleged, ‘[I]‌t is freely said that CND have been using the

Notes

277

irresponsible element in trade union branches, and in the CLPS, to push their view.’ Churchill College Archives Centre (CCAC), Cambridge, Papers of Philip Noel-​ Baker (NBKR), 2/​124, Philip Noel-​Baker to Thomas Williamson, 13 October 1960. 11 Guardian, 11 November 1960. 12 Williams, Hugh Gaitskell, 303. 13 Brivati, ‘The Campaign for Democratic Socialism, 1960–​1964’, 77. 14 LSE, The Papers of Alistair Hetherington (HTN), 1/​22, Note on Meeting with Mr. Gaitskell, 11 November 1958. 15 Daily Herald, 26 and 27 February 1958; Geoffrey Goodman, The Awkward Warrior. Frank Cousins: His Life and Times (London: Davis-​Poynter, 1979), 208–​10. 16 Interview with Geoffrey Goodman, 6 November 1996 in Huw Richards, The Bloody Circus: The Daily Herald and the Left (London: Photo Press, 1997), 171–​2. 17 Daily Herald, 26 and 27 February, 1 and 17 March 1958; Goodman, The Awkward Warrior, 208–​10. 18 LSE, HTN, 1, John Cole to Hetherington, 4 December 1959. 19 LSE, HTN, 1/​11, Note on Meeting with Mr Gaitskell, 9 July 1959 20 LSE, HTN, 2/​20, Note of a Meeting with Mr Gaitskell, 15 November 1960. 21 Daily Herald, 27 February 1958. 22 Goodman, The Awkward Warrior, 209. 23 Geoffrey Goodman, From Bevan to Blair: Fifty Years Reporting from the Political Frontline (London: Pluto Press, 2003), 79–​80. 24 BBC WAC, 910, Comments by Mr Hugh Gaitskell, 29 October 1958. 25 LSE, HTN, 1/​15, Note on Meeting with Mr. Gaitskell, 22 April 1959 26 The Labour History Archive and Study Centre (LHASC) People’s History Museum, Salford, Papers of the General Secretary, GS/​BIST/​29D, J. K. O Hagan to Morgan Phillips, 20 December 1959. 27 BU, ITA Archive, 5081/​2/​1, Free Speech, internal memorandum by Robert Fraser, 12 December 1960. 28 BU, ITA Archive, 5081/​2/​1, Free Speech, Robert Fraser to Edgar Lustgarten, 1 November 1960. 29 Nicklaus Thomas-​Symonds, Nye: The Political Life of Aneurin Bevan (London: I.B. Taurus, 2014), 232. 30 LSE, HTN, Note on Meeting with Mr. Gaitskell, 9 July 1959. 31 Spectator, 11 April 1958. 32 The Guardian, 14 April 1958. 33 The Times, 14 April 1958. 34 New Statesman, 21 June 1958; CWL, DAC/​5/​4/​1, Political Implications of a Voters Veto. DAC described how the campaign ‘was quietly allowed to die a natural death . . . the Labour Party was more interested in deflecting supporters from CND, a potential rival, than stopping nuclear tests’.

278

Notes

35 International Institute of Social History (IISH), Papers of Dora Russell, 357, CND, The Newsletter. 36 BBC WAC, Home Service News Bulletin, 13 April 1958; CWL, DAC/​5/​1/​1, Appeal to Labour, 1958. 37 CCAC, NBKR, 2/​123, Non-​Nuclear Club, Noel-​Baker to Wayland Young, 11 July 1959. 38 LSE, HTN, 1/​22, Note on Meeting with Mr. Gaitskell, 11 November 1958 39 CCAC, NBKR, 2/​123, Noel-​Baker to Frank Beswick, 4 June 1959. 40 MRC, Papers of Geoffrey Goodman (GG), MSS.169/​56, Copies of Frank Cousins notes on joint meeting between TUC, Labour Party, 24 June 1959. 41 MRC, Papers of Frank Cousins (FC), MSS.282/​3/​PAR/​18, Frank Cousins to Hugh Gaitskell, 26 June 1959; Goodman, The Awkward Warrior, 216; Noel-​Baker also described the statement as ‘unreal and defeatist’. CCAC, NBKR, 2/​123, Noel-​Baker to Wayland Young, 11 July 1959. 42 MRC, Papers of the TGWU, MSS.126/​T&G/​1/​4/​18, Minutes and Record of the Proceedings of the Eighteenth Biennial Delegate Conference, 6–​10 July, 1959, Villa Marina, Douglas, Isle of Mann. 43 W. C. Smith, ‘Unilateralism within the Labour Party, 1958–​1961’, unpublished MA thesis, Texas Tech University, 1970, 57–​8; Martin Harrison, Trade Unions and the Labour Party since 1945 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1960), 99–​100; George Cyriax, ‘Labour and the Unions’, Political Quarterly XXXI (July–​September 1960), 329–​31. 44 Collins, Faith under Fire, 326. 45 LSE, HTN, Note on Meeting with Mr. Gaitskell, 9 July 1959. 46 Williams, Hugh Gaitskell, 303–​12. 47 Smith, ‘Unilateralism’, 39–​40; 26 seats in 1951, 67 in 1955 and 107 in 1959. 48 LSE, HTN, 1, John Cole to Hetherington, 4 December 1959. 49 LSE, HTN, 1, Note on Meeting with Mr Gaitskell, 29 October 1959. 50 Ibid. 51 See Ivor Crewe and Anthony King, SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 52 Williams, Hugh Gaitskell, 324–​5. 53 The Observer, 11 September 1960. 54 BBC WAC, Home Service, Ivan Yates on Home and Abroad, 20 May 1960. 55 MRC, London Society of Compositors, MSS.282/​3/​PAR/​18, ‘London Society of Compositors Jubilee 1848–​1923’, 1923. The TGWU, for example, encouraged its members to buy copies of Reynold’s News. MRC, MSS.126/​T&G/​1/​4/​18, Minutes and Record, 44. 56 James Moran, NATSOPA: Seventy-​Five Years (London: Heinemann, 1964), 74–​83. On the industrial right of reply as a means of regulating the free press, see Sean Tunney, Labour and the Press: From New Left to New Labour (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2007), 67–​72.

Notes

279

57 MRC, MSS.181X14/​2/​4, CND Bulletin, August 1958; MRC, MSS.126/​T&G/​1/​4/​18, Minutes and Record, 12–​13. 58 The Printing and Allied Trades Anti-​Fascist Movement, Printers and the Fascist Menace: An Appeal to All Workers in the Trade (London: The Farleigh Press, no date). 59 Daily Mail, 6 July 1959. 60 ITN, 28 June 1959, http://​jiscmediahub.ac.uk, date accessed: 10 July 2012. 61 Glasgow University Media Group, Bad News (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976), 208–​22. 62 MRC, GG, MSS.169/​55, personal notes. 63 MRC, GG, MSS.169/​55, Article Clipping, 11 July 1959; MRC, MSS.126/​T&G/​1/​4/​ 18, Minutes and Record, 44; Nicholas Jones, Strikes and the Media: Communication and Conflict (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 3. 64 MRC, MSS.126/​T&G/​1/​4/​18, Minutes and Record, 44. 65 MRC, GG, MSS.169/​55, personal notes. 66 Ibid. 67 Trades Union Congress, Report of the Proceedings of the 92nd Annual Trade Union Congress Held at Villa Marina, Douglas, 5 September to 9 September (London, 1960), 356. 68 The Guardian, 8 and 9 September 1960. 69 Ken Coates, ‘The State of the AEU’, New Left Review I/​42 (March–​April 1967). 70 JBPL, JHA, gb0532haw, 13/​5, Gallup poll on Britain’s Nuclear Policies, September 1960. 71 Goodman, The Awkward Warrior, 264. 72 LSE, HTN, 1, John Cole to Hetherington, 4 December 1959. 73 LSE, HTN, Note on Meeting with Mr Gaitskell, 9 July 1959. 74 LSE, HTN, John Cole to Alistair Hetherington, 14 July 1959. 75 The Observer, 11 September 1960. 76 MRC, GG, MSS.169/​50, Sunday Times Supplement, 2 October 1966. 77 Goodman, The Awkward Warrior, 200–​84. 78 Brian Brivati, Hugh Gaitskell (Michigan: Richard Cohen Books, 1996), 243–​4; Andrew Lycett, Ian Fleming (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009), 295–​6. 79 The media treatment of left wing trade unionists and leaders of the PLP would form the basis of a useful study. Nick Couldry and Bart Cammaerts, Journalistic Representations of Jeremy Corbyn in the British Press: From Watchdog to Attackdog (Media@LSE Report, 2016). 80 MRC, MSS.126/​T&G/​1/​4/​18, Minutes and Record, 28; MSS.126/​T&G/​1/​4/​ 19, Minutes and Record of the Proceedings of the Nineteenth Biennial Delegate Conference, 10–​14 July, 1961, in the Dome, Brighton, Sussex, 31. 81 Goodman, The Awkward Warrior, 200–​34. 82 MRC, GG, MSS.169/​56, Canon John Collins to Geoffrey Goodman, 8 May 1974.

280

Notes

83 LSE, HTN, 1/​4, Note on Meeting with Mr Gaitskell, 29 October 1959. 84 Driver, Disarmers, 92. 85 The Observer, 26 June 1960; The Guardian, 23 June 1960. 86 Daily Mirror, 27 September 1960; Maurice Edelman, The Mirror: A Political History (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1966). 87 Daily Mirror, 16 September 1960. 88 The Guardian and Daily Mirror, 8 September; The Observer, 11 September 1960. 89 The Guardian, 12 September and 6 October 1960. 90 Daily Mirror, 3 and 6 October, 1960. 91 ITN, 5 October 1960, http://​jiscmediahub.ac.uk/​, date accessed: 10 July 2012. 92 Williams, Communications, 76–​8. 93 BBC WAC, R78/​1, 872/​1, Hugh Gaitskell to Hugh Greene, 6 September 1960. 94 TUC, the 92nd Congress, 396. 95 BU, ITA Archive, 5081/​2/​1, Free Speech, Robert Fraser to Edgar Lustgarten, 1 November 1960. 96 MRC, CND Bulletin, October 1960. ‘Most of the machinery for influencing public opinion has been used for months and years to attack the ideas of unilateralism and to uphold the general view presented by Mr Gaitskell’, claimed Michael Foot in a separate article. Daily Herald, 7 October 1960. 97 JBPL, JHA, gb0532haw, 13/​5, Gallup poll on Britain’s Nuclear Policies, September 1960; Daily Herald, 5 October 1960. According to the Daily Herald’s eve of conference poll, only a fifth of Labour voters supported unilateralism. 98 Labour Party, Report of the 59th Annual Conference Held in the Spa Grand Hall, Scarborough, October 3 to October 7, 1960 (London, 1960), 196–​202. 99 Ibid., 180. He remained ambiguous on the issue of NATO over a year later, when he was interviewed on Face to Face after the Annual Conference at Blackpool by John Freeman MRC, GG, MSS.169/​50, Frank Cousins interviewed by John Freeman, 15 October 1961. 100 Smith, ‘Unilateralism’, 80. 101 Keith Hindell and Philip Williams, ‘Scarborough and Blackpool: An Analysis’, Political Quarterly (July–​September 1962), 306–​20. 102 Goodman, The Awkward Warrior, 274. 103 BBC WAC, 910, Hugh Gaitskell to Kenneth Harris, 5 October 1960; CCAC, NBKR 2/​124, article clipping, no date. 104 Smith, ‘Unilateralism’, 83–​4. 105 LSE, HTN, 2/​20, Note of a Meeting with Mr Gaitskell, 15 November 1960. 106 Smith, ‘Unilateralism’, 96. 107 The Guardian, 14 November 1960. 108 The Guardian, 7 October 1960. 109 LSE, HTN, 2/​20, Note of a Meeting with Mr Gaitskell, 15 November 1960.

Notes

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110 New Statesman, 12 November 1960. Gaitskell also took disciplinary measures against rebel MPs in the PLP. See Eric Shaw, Discipline and Discord in the Labour Party (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 154–​6. 111 Smith, ‘Unilateralism’, 96. 112 Hennessy, Communication and Political Power, 95–​7. The thirteen included Anthony Crosland, Patrick Gordon Walker, Douglas Jay, Roy Jenkins, Bill Rodgers, Michael Shanks, Dick Taverne, Ivan Yates, Frank Pickstock, Philip Williams, Ron Owen, Brian Walden and Denis Howell. 113 CDS, ‘A Manifesto Addressed to the Labour Movement’ (London, 1960). 114 Hennessy, Communication and Political Power, 102. 115 The Times, 12 June 1961. 116 University College London (UCL), Papers of Hugh Gaitskell (GAITSKELL), C258, Campaign, no. 1, January 1960; GAITSKELL, C240, letter from W. T. Rodgers, 11 January 1961. 117 Frank Parkin, Middle Class Radicalism, 124. 118 Goodman, The Awkward Warrior, 295. 119 LSE, HTN, 2/​16, Note of a Meeting with Jim Callaghan, 10 January 1961. 120 Goodman, The Awkward Warrior, 284. 121 Daily Herald, 14 June 1961. 122 BBC WAC, 910, extract from 10 ‘o’ clock programme, 6 October 1961. 123 JBPL, CWL, Papers of Michael Randle, MR1/​6, Marylebone Independent Supporters, November 1962. 124 UCL, GAITSKELL D98.2, Hugh Gaitskell to Alan Clayton, 8 May 1962. 125 University College of London (UCL), the Papers of Hugh Gaitskell, GAITSKELL C240, circular letter from Gerry Reynolds, February 1961. 126 CCAC, NBKR, 2/​124, Noel-​Baker to James Meade, 7 January 1961. 127 JBPL, Papers of Margaret Gardiner, MGA/​11, Philip Noel-​Baker to the Archbishop of Canterbury, no date. 128 CCAC, NBKR, Correspondence with Margaret Gardiner, 5-​103-​2. 129 JBPL, MGA/​2, report on ‘the advertising campaign for disarmament’. 130 The Guardian, 23 May 1963; Nottingham Evening Post, 6 December 1962. 131 JBPL, MGA/​1, Nuclear Disarmament, Advertising and Promotion. The total cost was £6,500. 132 The Guardian, 7 December 1962. 133 CCAC, NBKR 2/​124, Frank Beswick to Noel-​Baker, 2 January 1961. 134 Ibid. 135 CCAC, NBKR 2/​124, Noel-​Baker to Frank Beswick, 15 November 1960. 136 JBPL, MGA/​2, report on ‘the advertising campaign for disarmament’. 137 The Guardian, 23 May 1963. 138 New Statesman, 4 February 2010.

282

Notes

6  Law and Order 1 JBPL, Papers of Derry Hannam (HC), 1/​5, ‘Beyond Counting Arses’, 1963. 2 Sean Scalmer, Dissent Events: Protest, the Media, and the Political Gimmick in Australia (Kensington: University of New South Wales Press, 2002), 74–​5. 3 ‘ “Effects” Debates’, in Sue Thornham, Caroline Bassett and Paul Marris (eds), Media Studies: A Reader (New York: New York University Press), 380. Notably, one of the first major case studies of the Centre focused on news coverage of the anti–​ Vietnam War demonstration on 27 October 1968. See James D. Halloran, Philip Elliott and Graham Murdock, Demonstrations and Communication: A Case Study (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970). 4 David P. Waddington, Policing Public Disorder: Theory and Practice (Portland: Willan Publishing, 2007), 18–​19. 5 Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching, 17, 30. 6 Judith Rowbotham, Kim Stevenson and Samantha Pegg (eds), Crime News in Modern Britain: Press Reporting and Responsibility (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 143. 7 Steve Chibnall, Law-​and-​Order News: An Analysis of Crime Reporting in the British Press (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977), 74–​141; Kenneth Thompson, Moral Panics (London: Routledge, 1998), 27–​30. 8 An Inquiry into the Culture, Practices and Ethics of the Press, Volume II, Part G, Lord Justice Leveson, November 2012, 741–​996. 9 Miles Taylor, ‘Rethinking the Chartists: Searching for Synthesis in the Historiography of Chartism’, Historical Journal 39 (1996), 479–​95; Clive Emsley, The English Police: A Political and Social History (London: Routledge, 1991), 61. 10 Janet Clark, ‘Sincere and Reasonable Men? The Origins of the National Council for Civil Liberties’, Twentieth Century British History 20, no. 4 (2009), 513–​37. 11 See Dicenzo, Delap and Ryan, Feminist Media History, 198. 12 JBPL, MRL/​9, Peter Cadogan, 1968. 13 On the political terrorism that emerged out of ‘the sixties’, see Gordon Carr, The Angry Brigade: A History of Britain’s First Urban Guerrilla Group (Oakland: PM Press, 2010); Simon Prince, Northern Ireland’s ’68: Civil Rights, Global Revolt and the Origins of the Troubles (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007); Varon, Bringing the War Home. 14 On crime news and race, see Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978). 15 Scalmer, Dissent Events, 74–​5. 16 For the connection between nonviolent direct action and Greenpeace, see Lawrence Wittner, ‘Nuclear Disarmament Activism in Asia and the Pacific’, The

Notes

283

Asia-​Pacific Journal (2009); ‘The Golden Rule and Resistance to Nuclear Testing in Asia and the Pacific’ The Asia-​Pacific Journal (2010). 17 BBC WAC, T16/​150/​2, D-​Notice, 28 February 1958. 18 Rocket Bases, House of Commons Debates, vol. 597 cc476–​80, 10 December 1958; Tribune, 10 January 1958. 19 JBPL, DAC/​5/​3/​7, ‘Report on Rocket Bases in East Anglia’, 31 October 1958. 20 Ibid., discussion, 5 November 1958. 21 JBPL, DAC/​1/​1, minutes, 5 November. 22 JBPL, DAC/​5/​3/​2, ‘A Challenge to You’. 23 JBPL, DAC/​5/​3/​7, ‘Report on Rocket Bases in East Anglia’, 31 October 1958. 24 JBPL, DAC/​5/​3/​2, Stephen Swingler to Pat Arrowsmith, 11 November 1958; April Carter to Stephen Swingler, 13 November 1958. 25 Ibid., ‘Join the Protest against the Rocket Bases’. 26 Ibid., ‘Demonstrators –​Will You Help?’ 27 JBPL, DAC/​1/​1, minutes, October 1958. 28 JBPL, DAC/​5/​3/​7, discussion, 5 November 1958. 29 Sam Carroll, ‘ “Fill the Jails”: Identity, Structure and Method in the Committee of 100, 1960–​1968’, PhD diss., University of Sussex, 2010, 261. 30 Ibid.; ‘Report on Rocket Bases in East Anglia’, 31 October 1958; Daily Herald, 30 November 1961; Scalmer, Gandhi, 198. 31 Scalmer, Gandhi, 142; Peace News, 18 January 1952. 32 JBPL, DAC/​5/​3/​2, Stephen Swingler to Pat Arrowsmith, 11 November 1958; April Carter to Stephen Swingler, 13 November 1958. 33 Ibid., ‘Demonstrators –​You Can Make This Demonstration a Success. Will You Help?’ 34 JBPL, DAC/​5/​3/​7, legal briefing, 25 November 1958. 35 Ibid. Less serious charges included obstruction of the highway; conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace; insulting words or insulting behaviour; obstruction of the police in the execution of their duties; assault and trespass. More serious ones included breach of the Official Secrets Act; conspiracy; and affray, riot and unlawful assembly. 36 JBPL, DAC/​5/​3/​2, briefing, 4 December 1958. 37 Taylor, Against, 128. 38 JBPL, DAC/​5/​3/​7, ‘Report on Rocket Bases in East Anglia’, 31 October 1958; DAC/​5/​3/​3–​5, letter to Sidney Silverman MP, 9 December; Daily Telegraph, 8 December 1958. 39 Peace News, 30 January 1959. 40 The Times, 24 December 1958; Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph, 8 December 1958. 41 Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and News Chronicle, 8 December 1958. 42 The Observer, 7 December 1958.

284

Notes

43 JBPL, DAC/​5/​3/​2, Geoffrey Alexander, ‘Experiences and Thoughts of Swaffham’, no date. 44 JBPL, DAC/​5/​3/​6, letter to the Daily Express, 10 December 1958. 45 Ibid., letter to The Guardian, 10 December 1958. 46 Ibid., letter to the News Chronicle, 10 December 1958. 47 Peace News, 30 January 1959. 48 Stephen Dale, McLuhan’s Children: The Greenpeace Message and the Media (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1996), 1–​10. 49 ITN, 7 December 1958. 50 London Illustrated News, 8 December 1958. 51 The Observer, 11 January 1959. 52 Peace News, 9 January 1959. 53 Peace News, 19 December 1958. 54 Reuters, reference 11233/​58, ‘England: Britons in Anti-​rocket Clash’, Reuters TV, 8 December 1958, www.itnsource.com, date accessed: 10 July 2012. 55 RAF Station, North Pickenham (Demonstration), House of Commons Debates, vol. 597 cc29–​33 29 § Mr. Dye, 8 December 1958. 56 JBPL, DAC/​5/​3/​6, letter to Lynn News and Advertiser, 10 December 1958. 57 Ibid., Salisbury CND, no date. 58 JBPL, DAC/​5/​3/​3–​5, Pat Arrowsmith to Sidney Silverman, 9 December 1958. 59 JBPL, DAC/​5/​3/​6, letter to Lynn News and Advertiser, 10 December 1958. 60 JBPL, DAC/​5/​3/​2, Geoffrey Alexander, ‘Experiences and Thoughts of Swaffham’, no date. 61 JBPL, DAC/​5/​3/​6, press release, 17 December 1958. 62 Ibid., letter to the Lynn News and Advertiser, 10 December 1958. 63 The Friend, 2 January 1959. 64 JBPL, DAC/​5/​3/​6, letter, 9 December 1958. One news editor even requested permission to accompany the activists by coach. 65 Ibid., letter from Pat Arrowsmith to April Carter, no date. 66 Peace News, 2 January 1959; Daily Express, 21 December 1958. 67 The Times and The Guardian, 21 December 1958. 68 The Times, 23 January 1959; JBPL, DAC/​1/​1, minutes, 2 February 1959. 69 JBPL, DAC/​5/​3/​2, Geoffrey Alexander, ‘Experiences and Thoughts’; Reuters, reference 11555/​58, England: ‘Missile Marchers Arrested’, 20 December 1958, www. itnsource.com, date accessed: 10 July 2012. 70 ITN, 21 December 1958. 71 JBPL, DAC/​1/​1, minutes, 7 June 1959. The Committee discovered that five missile bases were also being constructed in Northamptonshire. 72 Ibid., minutes, 4 March 1960. 73 Ibid., minutes, 5 November 1959; DAC/​5/​9/​4, briefing, no date; Reynold’s News, 11 January 1959.

Notes

285

Daily Herald, 7 January 1959. The Observer, 11 January 1959. Peace News, 29 January 1959. The Friend, 2 January 1959. The prisoners received over 2,000 Christmas cards and letters of support. 78 JBPL, DAC/​5/​3/​8, notes on the 9 ‘o’ clock news and Any Questions, 26 December 1958. 79 JBPL, DAC/​5/​9/​4, briefing, no date. 80 Ibid., ‘explanatory statements to be made in court’; ‘message for Michael Randle’. 81 The Friend, 2 January 1959. 82 Peace News, 30 January 1959. 83 The Friend, 2 January 1959. 84 The Times, 13 September 1961. ‘That this jurisdiction might be exercised against those engaged in what they considered to be a good cause in changing the law might have been unthinkable had it not been for the notable case of Lansbury v Riley (1913), in which George Lansbury had supported the Suffragette movement . . . Having been bound over to keep the peace under the statute “34 Edward III Chapter I”, he appealed on the ground that it applied only to “pillors and robbers” ’, but was treated with disdain by the Queen’s Bench Division. 85 Driver, Disarmers, 108. 86 Peace News, 30 January 1959. ‘There is a large section of the press prepared to recognise the underlying motives of an action which could so easily have been misrepresented and attacked. The months since Aldermaston have brought many personal contacts with the men of Fleet Street and I have been impressed by their sympathetic coverage of what we have been trying to do.’ 87 New Statesman, 3 January 1959. 88 JBPL, DAC/​5/​3/​6, letter to the New Statesman, 7 January 1959. 89 ‘Propagandists and Witnesses’, New Statesman, 3 January 1959. 90 JBPL, DAC/​5/​3/​6, letter to the New Statesman, 7 January 1959. 91 JBPL, DAC 5/​3/​11, questionnaire completed by activists; Peace News, 9 January 1959. As explained in Peace News, ‘[T]‌he leadership of CND could not block the appeal of direct action . . . At the grass roots, CNDers supported and often participated in DAC demonstrations.’ 92 JBPL, DAC/​5/​4/​1, ‘Political Implications of a Voters’ Veto’; DAC/​5/​3/​2–​5, letter to Sidney Dye, 8 December 1958. The by-​election revealed that both the nonviolent direct action and voter’s veto campaigns had barely a negligible effect on local opinion, with a canvass of 1,180 voters indicating that only 288 were unilateralist and only 168 were willing not to withhold their vote. In part, this reflected the difficulties of mobilizing electoral opinion on a single issue: ‘it is pigs not rockets which Mrs Kellet, [the Conservative candidate] has her eyes on’, claimed the Evening Standard on 13 March 1959; JBPL, DAC/​5/​4/​1, letter to the Guardian, no date. 74 75 76 77

286

Notes

Tribune, 16 January 1959; MRC, CND Bulletin, February 1959. Daily Telegraph, 28 March 1959; The Times, 30 March 1959. The Guardian, 15 January 1959. JBPL, DAC/​5/​3/​2, Geoffrey Alexander, ‘Experiences and Thoughts’. The Guardian, 15 January 1959. MRC, MSSi8iX/​4/​2/​8–​9, CND Bulletin, December 1958 and January 1959. BLSA, C464/​17, Tape 14, Joseph Rotblat interviewed by Katherine Thompson. According to Rotblat, Collins and Russell were divided over the methods of the campaign since its inception. 100 Yates and Chester, The Troublemaker, 201. 101 JBPL, HC/​1/​1; Ralph Schoenman, Bertrand Russell: Philosopher of the Century (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1967). Ralph Schoenman organized the first meeting. Those present included Stuart Hall, editor of NLR, Hugh Brock, editor of Peace News, Michael Scott and Alex and Sally Jacobs. 102 The Evening Standard, 28 September 1960. The letter was intended for John Connell the artist, but was delivered to John Connell the military historian. In the letter, Russell claimed that ‘[i]‌t is my conviction that the effectiveness of our Campaign is becoming dependent upon its endorsing a programme of civil disobedience’. LSE, CND 1/​15, Michael Scott, ‘Lord Russell’s Position in Regard to the Policy of CND’, 19 October 1960. Both Collins and Russell were interviewed on television the day after the letter was leaked: Bertrand Russell to CND, 31 October 1960. 103 Walter, ‘Damned Fools in Utopia’. 104 JBPL, MRL/​1, working group policy discussion, 1960. 105 Ibid. 106 JBPL, HC/​1/​1, working group proposals, 10 March 1961. 107 Nicholas Walter, Freedom, February 1959; ‘Non-​violent Resistance: Men against War’, Non Violence 63 (1963), 31. 108 JBPL, MRL/​1, working group policy discussion, 1960. The working group ‘recognised the value in both [practical and symbolic protests] so long as its supporters and the public were aware of their aims . . . There must be a close relation between our stated aims on a demonstration and what we expect to achieve . . . for the benefit of our own morale and . . . relations with the press and public’. 109 Ibid., minutes, 26 November 1960. 110 JBPL, HC/​1/​1, Hannam memo, 1 August 1960. 111 Taylor, Against, 199–​202. 112 TNA: WORK 20/​327, R. A. Butler to A. E. Coules, 19 April 1961; A. E. Coules, 5 May 1961. 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

Notes

287

1 13 JBPL, DT/​1/​1, ‘Pre-​DAC’. 114 The Guardian, 20 February 1961. 115 TNA: WORK 20/​327, R. A. Butler to A. E. Coules, 19 April 1961; A. E. Coules to R. A. Butler, 5 May 1961. 116 JBPL, HC/​1/​2, Summary of Working Group Discussion, 6 April 1961; The Guardian, 4 April 1961. 117 BLSA, C464/​17, Tape 14, Joseph Rotblat interviewed by Katherine Thompson. 118 Carroll, ‘ “Fill the Jails” ’, 110. 119 TNA: WORK20/​336, 9 June 1961 . . . P. H. Ogle-​Skan to HO; P. H Ogle-​Skan, 19 July 1961; A. W. Glanville, Home Office, to G. H. Evans (Advisor on Public Relations, Office for Government Information Services), 10 August 1961; Iain Channing, The Police and the Expansion of Public Order Law in Britain, 1829–​2014 (London: Routledge, 2015). 120 TNA: WORK20/​336, R. A. Butler to John Hope, 26 July 1961. 121 The Guardian, 13 September 1961. 122 Carroll, ‘ “Fill the Jails” ’, 332–​3. 123 CWL, MRL/​2, Paul Lewis, ‘The Big Sit-​Down’, no date; Taylor, Against, 222–​7; Carroll, ‘ “Fill the Jails” ’, 342. More than half of those taken into custody refused bail and were remanded. 124 The Recorder, 23 September 1961. 125 BBC WAC, T16/​411, Head of Television Outside Broadcasts Programmes, 13 November 1961. 126 HC Deb, 17 October 1961, vol. 646 cc155–​66. 127 Daily Telegraph, 18 September; The Times, 18 October 1961; New Statesman, 22 September 1961. 128 HL Deb, 19 October 1961, vol. 234 cc627–​54. 129 The Times, 20 October 1960; HC Deb, 17 October 1961, vol. 646 cc155–​66. 130 TNA: HO325/​180, Personal and confidential, 24 October 1961. On Thurloe Square, see Nigel Copsey, Anti-​Fascism in Britain (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). 131 Civil Liberty (special supplement to Bulletin for Jul/​August) NCCL; Mary Grigg, The Challenor Case (London: Penguin Books, 1965). The main protagonist in Clive Exton’s television drama The Boneyard, released on the Wednesday Play series in 1966, was based on Challenor. 132 Driver, Disarmers, 123. 133 TNA: PREM11/​4284, Air Ministry to PM, 5 December 1961. 134 Ibid., Law Officers’ Department to to Harold Macmillan, 6 December 1961; Ministry of Defence to Harold Macmillan, 6 December 1961. 135 The six included Helen Allegranza, Terry Chandler, Ian Dixon, Trevor Hatton, Pat Pottle and Michael Randle.

288

Notes

1 36 Driver, Disarmers, 123; The Times, 11 December 1959. 137 TNA: PREM11/​4284, Air Ministry to Harold Macmillan, 5 December 1961. 138 Ibid., Law Officers’ Department to Harold Macmillan, 6 December 1961; Ministry of Defence to Harold Macmillan, 6 December 1961. 139 The Times, 11 December 1961. 140 ‘Official England v. Radical England’, in David Boulton (ed.), Voices from the Crowd, 115–​41. 141 Driver, Disarmers, 125. 142 Carroll, ‘ “Fill the Jails” ’, 144. 143 Taylor, Against, 253. 144 JBPL, HC/​1/​5, ‘Beyond Counting Arses’, 1963. 145 JBPL, HC1/​4, Resistance, 25 March 1964. 146 JBPL, HC/​1/​5, ‘Beyond Counting Arses’, 1963. 147 Taylor, Against, 254; for example, Sunday Telegraph, 28 April 1963. 148 ‘The Spies for Peace Story’, Anarchy 29, no. 3 (1963), 197–​229. 149 TNA: PREM11/​4456 ‘Danger! Official Secret’, addressed to Harold Macmillan. 150 Ibid., Home Office memorandum, 13 April 1963. 151 The Guardian, 9 April 1966. 152 JBPL, HC/​4/​3, Resistance, 25 March 1964 153 Sam Carroll, ‘Danger! Official Secret: The Spies for Peace: Discretion and Disclosure in the Committee of 100’, History Workshop Journal 69 (2010), 158–​76; Daily Mirror, 15 April 1963. 154 Carroll, ‘ “Fill the Jails” ’, 150–​4. 155 TNA: PREM11/​4456, Letter to Harold Macmillan, 19 November 1963; CAB/​21/​ 6027, Personnel Security Committee Report; Ministerial Committee on Security to Harold Macmillan, 19 November 1963. 156 JBPL, HC/​4/​3, Resistance, 25 March 1964. 157 LSE, CND/​2008/​3/​5, ‘Regina versus the Committee of 100’, 1963.

7 Denouement: 1968 1 Sylvia Ellis, ‘Promoting Solidarity at Home and Abroad: The Goals and Tactics of the Anti-​Vietnam War Movement in Britain’, European Review of History 21, no. 4 (2014), 557–​76. 2 Caroline Page, ‘The Strategic Manipulation of American Official Propaganda during the Vietnam War, 1965–​66, and British Opinion on the War’, PhD diss., University of Reading, 1989, 155–​97. 3 Daniel C. Hallin, The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); William M. Hammond, Reporting Vietnam: Media &

Notes

289

Military at War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998); Ron Steinman, A Saigon Journal: Inside Television’s First War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002). 4 Richard I. Jobs, ‘Youth Movements: Travel, Protest, and Europe in 1968’, The American Historical Review 114, no. 2 (2009), 376–​404. 5 MRC, NUS, MSS.280 601/​L/​10, Wine Press, Easter 1964. 6 Ibid., Durham Left, November 1965. 7 Ellis, ‘Promoting Solidarity at Home and Abroad’, 557–​76. 8 Page, ‘Strategic Manipulation’, 183. 9 The Times, 24 March 1965; The Observer, 28 March 1965. 10 Hull History Centre (HHC), Papers of David Winnick, MP, U DMW/​24, unattributed letter, no date. 11 HHC, Agenda and Minutes of the British Council for Peace in Vietnam, U DYO/​ 12, notes, no date; ‘Gas and Napalm Can’t End the Dirty War in Vietnam’, Sanity, April 1965. 12 BU ITA, ‘Confrontation’, 5083, Robert Fraser to Denis Forman, 2 December 1965. 13 BU ITA, The World Tonight, What Price Peace, 5083/​2/​33, letter to Frank H. Copplestone, 22 November 1965. 14 Ibid., letter to Frank H. Copplestone, 9 and 13 December 1965. 15 Ibid., Robert Fraser to Frank H. Copplestone, 13 December 1965. 16 Ibid., Denis Forman to Bernard Sendall, 10 October 1966. 17 BBC WAC, T16/​593, TV Policy: Programme Policy, Charles Priestley, 1 April 1966. 18 Ibid., Gordon Watkins to Kenneth Adam, 12 April 1966 19 Ibid., Kenneth Adam to Charles Priestley, 13 April 1966. 20 Washington Post, 17 June 1966. 21 BBC WAC, R101/​268/​1, Panorama –​Vietnam Item, R. W. Komer to Lord Normanbrook, 18 June 1966. 22 Ibid., Lord Normanbrook to Patrick Dean, 8 July 1966; Lord Normanbrook to Hugh Greene, 8 July 1966. 23 Ibid., Draft reply, Lord Normanbrook to R. W. Komer. 24 MRC, Papers of Jack Askins, MSS.189/​V/​1/​10/​1, Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, Bulletin, no. 3 (April 1967). 25 JBPL, Papers of Mary Ringsleben, MRL/​9, Peter Cadogan, 1968. 26 MRC, Papers of Jack Askins, MSS.189/​V/​1/​10/​1, In Solidarity with Vietnam: The VSC Case, no date. 27 Page, ‘Strategic Manipulation’, 502–​24. 28 BBC WAC, T16/​593, TV Policy: Programme Policy, News and Current Affairs Meeting, 3 February 1967. 29 TNA FCO 9/​755, Bertrand Russell’s War Crimes Tribunal; New Statesman, 3 March 1967.

290

Notes

30 ITN, 10 May 1967. 31 TNA, PREM 13/​689, Vietnam: British Elite Opinion, December 1965. 32 BBC WAC, T16/​520, TV Policy, Political Broadcasts, Donald Edwards, Prime Minister’s Allegations against the BBC, April 1966. 33 Jean Seaton, ‘Politics and Television: The Case of Yesterday’s Men’, Contemporary British History 10, no. 4 (1996), 87–​107. 34 ITA, Granada Programme –​World Tomorrow, Students Protest, 5083/​2/​420, Geoffrey Martin, no date. 35 MRC, NUS, MSS.280/​57/​3, The Radical Student Alliance Manifesto; Daily Express, 4 October 1966; Morning Star, 4 October 1966. 36 ITN, 19 May 1965. 37 Nick Thomas, ‘Protests against the Vietnam War in 1960s Britain: The Relationship between Protestors and the Press’, Contemporary British History 22, no. 3 (2008), 335–​54. 38 Robert Fraser, 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 129. 39 BBC WAC, RCONT19, Tariq Ali encouragement fee for a play entitled ‘Abstain and Be Counted, no date. 40 BU ITA, Granada Programme –​World Tomorrow, Students Protest, 5083/​2/​420, M. Gillies internal memorandum, 10 March 1967. 41 Ibid., Geoffrey Martin to Charles Hill, 8 March 1967. 42 Daily Express, 18 June 1968. See BBC WAC, Twenty-​Four Hours, T58/​536/​1, Sequence: Intro: Cohn-​Bendit, July 1968. 43 BBC WAC, Students in Revolt, T32/​1, 934/​1, E.M. Cooke-​Yarborough, 13 June 1968. P. G. Harris, 13 June 1968. Antony Smith, 17 June 1968. 44 Ibid., News and Current Affairs Group meeting, 14 June 1968. 45 Tariq Ali, Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties (London: Collins, 1987), 298–​9. 46 BBC WAC, University Forum, T58/​575/​1, Content List, scheduled for 4 December 1968. 47 Ibid., Audience Research Report, 23 December 1968. 48 Ibid., John R. Wood to A. Smith, 13 December 1968. 49 Ibid., A. Smith to J. R. Wood, 9 December 1968. 50 Ellis, ‘Promoting Solidarity’, 557–​76. 51 Halloran, Elliot and Murdock, Demonstrations, 70. 52 Thomas, ‘Protests against the Vietnam War’, 335–​54. 53 Black Dwarf, May 1968. 54 Halloran, Elliot and Murdock, Demonstrations, 34. 55 Thomas, ‘Protests against the Vietnam War’, 335–​54.

Notes

291

56 MRC, NUS, MSS.280 601/​L/​10, Perspectives on Constitutional Proposals for the RSSF, Andrew Martin and Andreas Nagliati, no date. 57 MRC, NUS, MSS.280/​57/​3, Sennet Protest, October 1968. 58 Ibid., NUS Attacks Vietnam Demonstration, Press and Publicity, 23 October 1968. 59 Evening News, 4 September 1968; The Times, 5 September 1968; Halloran, Elliot and Murdock, Demonstrations, 99–​105. 60 The Guardian, 19 June 1968. See HHC, Papers of Patrick Wall, U DPW/​55/​67. 61 Halloran, Elliot and Murdock, Demonstrations, 146–​47. 62 MRC, NUS, MSS.280, 601/​L/​10, ‘Pot or Politics?’, Spartacus, 1967. 63 Peace News, 2 September 1966. 64 Carroll, ‘ “Fill the Jails” ’, 282. 65 On solidarity and personal narratives of the 1960s, see Hughes, Young Lives on the Left; Lucy Robinson, Gay Men and the Left in Post-​war Britain: How the Personal got Political (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). 66 MRC, NUS, MSS.280/​57/​3, Joint Statement, 3 February 1967. MRC, NUS, MSS.280/​57/​3, Paula Wiking Ghosh, Blitz, February 1967. 67 Daily Express, 29 October 1968. 68 Public Order Act 1936 (Amendment, HC Deb, 23 October, 1968 vol. 770 cc1290–​8). 69 Halloran, Elliot and Murdock, Demonstrations, 123. 70 Ibid., 210. 71 Mark Donnelly, Sixties Britain: Culture, Society and Politics (London: Pearson, 2005), 149. 72 Sedgwick, ‘Farewell Grosvenor Square’.

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Index 1941 Committee 86, 89 1957 Committee 28, 34, 41, 59 ABC Television 99 Acland, Richard 91 Aitken, Max 52 Aldermaston Marches 108, 113, 116, 123–​5, 241 Aldermaston Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE) 123, 130, 134, 139 Alexander, Albert Victor 52, 60 Ali, Tariq 234, 239, 241, 244 Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) 165, 168, 169, 177, 181 Amis, Kingsley 42, 84, 88, 95, 101, 114 Anderson, Lindsay 83–​4, 108, 109, 114–​16 Anderson, Perry 85, 90, 113 Anglicanism 13 Angry Brigade 3, 246 Angry Young Men 42 and resource mobilisation 49 Anti-​Ugly Action group 40 Arden, John 107 Arnold, Matthew 16 Arrowsmith, Pat 111, 191–​3, 197, 199–​202 Associated Re-​diffusion 116 Atomic Energy Research Establishment 64 Atomic Scientists Association (ASA) 64 Atoms for Peace 98 Attlee, Clement 52–​3, 56, 58, 60, 88, 161 ATV 216 Auden, Wystan Hugh 89 Bandung Conference 57 Berlin Crisis 214 Bernstein, Sidney 27, 46, 100 Bevan, Aneurin 159 Beyond the Fringe 84, 111 Birmingham University 18 Black Dwarf 240

Blair, Tony 164 Blatchford, Robert 16 Blue Streak 164, 170, 173 Booker, Christopher 30, 38 Bolt, Robert 105, 107 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 3 ‘Britishness’ 27 class 5, 15 Committee of 100 demonstrations 215 Communism 52 competition 18, 20–​1 high culture 86–​7 impartiality 30 the licence fee 32 news values 43–​4 nuclear issues 60–​9, 72 the October demonstration 241, 245 The Offshore Island 102–​3 the Pilkington Committee 21 religion 31 the royal charter 16 student politics 235–​7, 244 the Suez Crisis 43 Vietnam 226, 230–​3, 235 women 93 British Campaign for Peace in Vietnam (BCPV) 228, 231, 238 British Peace Council 51 British Union of Fascists 214 Broadcasting Committee (1949) 18, 27, 36 Brock, Hugh 59, 130, 205 Butler, R. A. 205, 212 Cadogan, Peter (activist) 3, 12, 222 Cadogan, Peter (BBC) 67–​8, 231 Calder, Nigel 139 Calder, Richard 84, 86, 89, 98–​9 Cambridge University 17, 131 Cameron, James 86, 89 Campaign for Democratic Socialism (CDS) 156, 163, 171, 178–​83

302

Index

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) the Aldermaston marches 125–​30, 145 Bulletin /​ Sanity 97, 127, 208 ‘empowered actors’ 50 Executive Committee 77, 83, 85–​92, 96, 139 Frank Cousins 172 generation 132 groups 13 middle class radicalism 9–​11 non-​alignment 56, 59 nonviolent direct action 206–​9 popular sovereignty 1, 7 propaganda 78 public meetings 92 respectability 13 Scotland 14 Vietnam 238 Women’s Committee 93 Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom 22–​3 Campbell, Ian 148–9 Carter, April 129, 139, 191, 204–​5 Castle, Barbara 80, 100 centre 42, 113 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) 18, 143 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 54, 59 Central Office of Information (COI) 35, 63 Chartism 2, 11, 12, 87, 139 Church of England 31, 53, 86 Churchill, Winston 36, 61, 86 Cohn-​Bendit, Daniel 236 Cole, G. D. R. 58 Cole, John 157, 163, 170, 178 Colyer, Ken 147 Collins, Lewis John 86–​7, 92, 97, 130, 208–​9 Comfort, Alex 90 The Committee of 100 1, 3 CND 209 cultural radicalism 242 demonstrations 211–​16 generation 11 law and order 187–​90 the new drama 83, 108 nonviolent direct action 209–​11 publicity 96–​7, 127 violence 217–​20

The Common Wealth Party (CWP) 21, 22, 27, 30–​1, 32–​3, 42, 57, 89 The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) 14, 17, 53, 59, 87, 89, 91, 115, 134, 234 Communist Bureau of Information 511 Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) 54, 90–​1 The Conservative Party 27, 95 Cook, Peter 83, 111 The Cooperative Party 23, 26, 88 Copenhagen Plan (1948) 28 Corbyn, Jeremy 154 Cousins, Frank 161, 169–​77 Cox, Geoffrey 43 Criminal Investigation Department 201 Crosland, Antony 19, 234 Crossman, Richard 90, 178–​9 Cuban Missile Crisis 185 Cultural Marxism 15, 22 D-​Notices 34–​5, 60, 190–​1, 221–​2 Daily Express 62, 69, 101, 136, 139, 171, 240 Daily Herald 23, 89, 97, 157–​8, 165, 173, 177, 191, 203, 215 Daily Mail 16, 19 102, 134–​5, 165, 196–​7, 215 Daily Mirror 62, 135, 173, 175–​6, 196–​7, 223, 240 Daily Sketch 215 Daily Telegraph 135, 138, 141, 142, 207, 215, 223 Daily Worker 29, 34, 92, 140 De Kok, Winifred 94 The Direct Action Committee against Nuclear War (DAC) the Aldermaston Marches 125–​30 the CND symbol 126 the Committee of 100, 209–​11 Communism 140 Gandhi 58 generation 11, 132 history 54 information 49 law and order 187–​90, 203–​6 press attacks 80 protest 72–​3 radicalism 13 relations with CND 206–​9 Thor missile bases 190–​203

Index Documentary Film Movement (DFM) 40, 114 Douglas-​Home, Alec 113 Dr Strangelove 112 Duff, Peggy 72 Dulles, John Foster 74 Dutschke, Rudi 240 Eden, Anthony 70 Encore 37, 39, 41, 110, 112 Encounter 91 Five Point Committee 33 Foot, Michael 7, 12, 28–​9, 46, 86, 89, 94–​5, 158 Fourteen Day Rule 36, 43 Fraser, Robert 29, 45, 95, 158, 175 Free Cinema 40–​1, 115 Frisch, Otto 64 Gaitskell, Hugh the 1959 General Election 163–​4 the Campaign for Democratic Socialism 180–​1 counter-​campaigns 159 disarmament 160 Frank Cousins 170, 174–​7 Labour leader 153, 155 links with newspapers 157–​8 Galtung, Johan 212 Gandhi, Mahatma 58, 193 General and Municipal Workers’ Union (GMWU) 160 Goldie, Grace Wyndam 43, 64 Gollancz, Victor 87–​9, 91 Goodman, Geoffrey 157, 167, 170, 177 Granada Television 27, 45, 100, 124, 229, 235–​6 Greene, Graham 86 Greene, Hugh 120, 233 Greenham Common 94 Greenpeace 73, 198 Greenwood, Anthony 178 Grierson, John 114–​15 Grisewood, Harman 43 The Guardian the Aldermaston marches 135, 141 anti-​nuclear propaganda 78–​9

303 and C100 demonstrations 213, 221 the Campaign for Democratic Socialism 182 CND’s launch 92 Communism 52 Frank Cousins 168, 170–​1 the Labour Party 156–​7, 159, 163, 172 nonviolent direct action 202, 208 unilateralism 97, 164 Vietnam 235

Haley, William 18, 52 Hall, Stuart 38–​9, 41, 55, 106, 113, 124 Harmsworth, Alfred 16 Hawkes, Jacquetta 94 Hebdige, Dick 18 Hetherington, Alistair 157, 159, 160, 163, 170, 172, 178, 181 Hill, Charles 32–​3, 45, 78, 86, 95, 97 Hobbes, Thomas 7, 34 Hoggart, Richard 18–​19, 21, 25, 26 Holtom, Gerald 126 Hood, Stuart 30, 109 Hydrogen Bomb National Committee 58 Independent Television (ITV) 8, 17, 20–​1, 28, 30, 44, 226 Independent Television Authority (ITA) 26, 29, 86, 94, 229 Independent Television News (ITN) the Aldermaston marches 134–​5 Committee of 100 demonstrations 215 and DAC demonstrations 198–​9, 205 the Labour Party 175 newscasters 44 the October demonstration 241, 245 the printers strike 166 student politics 234 the Suez Crisis 43 Information Research Department 35, 51–​3, 59 International Atomic Energy Authority 60 International Times 3 Iraq War 153 Irish Republican Army (IRA) 3, 194 Isherwood, Christopher 89 Jacob, Ian 34, 67–​9 Jenkins, Roy 236

304

Index

Johnson, Lyndon Baines 226–​7, 230–​1 Jones, Mervyn 60, 84, 103 Keep Left 56 Kennan, George 74–​5 Kennedy, Ludovic 47 Khrushchev, Nikita 74 King and Country debate 132, 234 Kristol, Irving 91 The Labour Party 5, 12, 20, 123, 162–​3, 97, 207 Lansbury, George 173, 184 Laski, Marghanita 83, 99, 102 Lasky, Melvin 91 League of Empire Loyalists (LEL) 136, 142 League of Nations Union (LNU) 12 Leavis, Frank Raymond 16, 25 Left Book Club 87 Lennox-​Boyd, Alan 43 Lessing, Doris 105–​7 Levellers 2, 12 Lewis, Cecil-​Day 89 Liberal Party 87 Lloyd, Selwyn 80 London Illustrated News 198 London School of Economics (LSE) 17, 235 Lonsdale, Kathleen 63 Lord Chamberlain 37, 40 Lucky Dragon incident 61–​2, 64, 70 Lyttelton, Humphrey 147 MacDonald, Ramsey 17 Macmillan, Harold 13, 32, 66–​8, 97, 190, 217–​18 Mandell, Barbara 93 Manhattan Project 60, 66 Martell, Edward 142, 166 Martin, Kingsley 74–​5, 90, 134, 179 Mayhew, Christopher 19 McLuhan, Marshall 138 McWhirter, Kennedy 142–​3 Mercer, David 25, 83, 103, 105–​6 Metropolitan Police 134, 216 Miall, Leonard 69 Miliband, Ralph 95 Miller, Arthur 37 Milligan, Spike 83, 110 Ministry of Information (MoI) 35, 115

Morris, Stuart 31 Morrison, Herbert 27, 100 Morrison, Sybil 197 Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF) 57, 138 National Campaign against Nuclear Weapons (NCANWT) 72–​4, 94, 134 National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) 189, 216 National Liberation Front 6, 239 National Peace Council 51, 54, 57 National Television Council (NTC) 19–​20 National Union of Students (NUS) 234, 240 National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (NVALA) 18–​19 The New Left 14, 36–​42, 48, 55, 56, 59, 173 News Chronicle 22–​3, 89, 92, 157, 197 New journalism 16 New Reasoner 40, 59 New Scientist 139 New Statesman 54, 74–​5, 101, 116, 134, 160, 206 Newman, Sydney 99 Newsprint rationing 8, 22 Noel-​Baker, Philip 160, 183–​4 Non-​Aligned Movement 57 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) 55, 57, 173, 176 Nuclear Disarmament Newsreel Committee 47, 198 Nuttall, Jeff 96, 130, 149, 242 Observer 97, 102, 159, 164, 170–​2, 176, 182, 198, 203, 228 Official Secrets Acts 34, 194–​5 One World 51 Orwell, George 87, 90 Osborne, John 38, 40–​1, 83, 99, 106–​8, 112–​13 Oxford University 17, 131, 234–​5 Pauling, Linus 80 Peace Pledge Union (PPU) 31, 51, 57–​8, 134–​5 Peace News 51, 58, 196, 198, 204 Peacock, Alan 20 Philips, Morgan 157

Index Picture Post 54, 89 Pilkington Committee on Broadcasting 21 Pincher, Chapman 69 Pirie, Antoinette 94, 99 Plaid Cymru 33 Plowden, Edwin 64, 66 Polaris missiles 13 Popular Television Association (PTA) 20, 27 Post master general 32–​3 Potter, Dennis 25, 104–​5, 131 Priestley, J. B. the Aldermaston marches 128, 130, 139, 150 CND 80, 88–​90, 92 Doomsday for Dyson 100–​2, 117 as an intellectual 83–​4 the media 86 the new drama 105, 108–​9 in the New Statesman 74 the popular front 88–​90 Private Eye 111, 223 Profumo Affair 171 Public Relations Officers (PROs) 35, 93, 117 Pugwash 65–​6 Quakerism 13, 32 Radical Student Alliance (RSA) 234, 240 Radio Caroline 34 Randle, Michael 12, 214 Redgrave, Vanessa 108 Regional Seats of Government (RSGs) 110, 217, 222 Reith, John 16 Reuters 52 Revolutionary Socialist Student Federation (RSSF) 240 Reynold’s News 23, 52, 89 Robeson, Paul 138 Rodker, Ernest 139 Rotblat, Joseph 62, 64–​5, 69, 76–​7 Rowbotham, Sheila 111, 133 Royal Air Force (RAF) 196, 202, 205, 218 Royal Commission on the Press (1949) 22–​3, 26–​7 Russell, Bertrand 34, 63, 65, 90, 92, 208–​9, 212, 214, 227 Russell War Crimes Tribunal 232

305

Sandys, Duncan 70 Schoenman, Ralph 212–​13 Scott, Michael 58, 198, 203–​5 Scott-​Moncrieff, Joanna 93 Scottish nationalism 13 Scottish National Party (SNP) 14, 33–​4 Scottish Television (STV) 98 Sedgwick, Peter 150 Seeger, Peter 144 Sendall, Bernard 46 Sherrin, Ned 96 Simon, Earnest (1st Baron Simon of Wythenshawe) 87 Socialist Campaign for Multilateral Disarmament (SCMD) 79, 145, 183–​5 Social Democratic Party (SDP) 163 Soper, Donald 100 Soviet invasion of Hungary 14, 38–​40, 56 The Spectator 134, 136–​8 Spender, Stephen 89 Spies for Peace 187, 217, 221–​3 Spitting Image 109 Springer Press 240 Stead, William Thomas 16 Steele, Harold 71, 73, 128 Strachey, John 89, 159 Suez Crisis 14, 38–​40, 43, 104 Suffragettes 2, 12, 189 The Sun 23 Sunday Pictorial 42 Taylor, Alan 12, 29, 90, 92, 94–​5, 158, 131–​2, 160 Taxes on Knowledge 15 Television Act (1954) 20, 95 Television Act (1964) 45 The Times 1, 52, 62, 71, 92, 97, 100 the Aldermaston marches 141, 144–​5, 150 CND 1, 92, 97, 100 Committee of 100 215, 218 Communism 52 Gaitskell 159 nonviolent direct action 202 nuclear weapons 62, 71 Vietnam 228, 241 That Was The Week That Was 84, 104, 113, 223 Thatcher, Margaret 79, 114

306 Third Way Group 57 Thompson, E. P. 40, 83–5, 88, 90, 114 Tonight 45, 96, 144 Trades Union Congress (TUC) 53, 113, 162–3, 168 Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU) 161–3, 167, 176–7 Tribune 28, 86, 181, 191 Trotskyists 139, 160 Under Fire 29, 45–7 Union of Democratic Control 13 United Nations 56–7 United States Air Force (USAF) 194, 217, 219 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 57, 192 Universities Left Review 40, 58–9, 83, 96, 113 Unstamped press 7 Very High Frequency (VHF) 28 Victory for Socialism (VFS) 156, 172, 178 Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC) 1, 231, 238, 241

Index Vietnam War 225–33 Voice for Nuclear Disarmament 34 Walter, Nicholas 128, 209–10 The War Game 103, 117–21 War on Want 57 War Resisters’ International 12 Warsaw Pact 55, 57 Watkins, Peter 83–4, 103 Weber, Max 5 Wednesday Play 100, 104, 119, 121, 235 Wesker, Arnold 105–6, 113 Widgery, David 76 Williams, Raymond 22–4, 26, 41, 88, 175, 241 Wilson, Colin 42 Wilson, Harold 154, 178–9, 232–3 Woman’s Hour 80, 93, 97 Workers’ Educational Association 88 World Peace Council (WPC) 51, 53 Wright Mills, Charles 59 Young Communist League (YCL) 146–7 Zilliacus, Konni 158