You’ll remember that at last year’s AGM we were seriously considering whether WDC/CND could keep going with the human resources we have, and decided that provided we still had a Treasurer it would be possible. Christine Bickerstaff volunteered, and dedicated hours to ordering our records and preparing for meetings, but it was always clear that her health would not enable her to do that for long. Now that we have lost Christine, without another volunteer Treasurer in view we have reluctantly decided that our AGM on 21st July will be our last.
It won’t be a total break with CND of course: many of us are individually members of the London Region and National branches and colleagues on the present Steering Group will probably, like me, want to retain some contact with our local members. It’s the pressure of meetings and Newsletter deadlines along with our other concerns and commitments that has to go.
This should be the penultimate Newsletter of a very long series. When I joined the group I’m pretty sure Don Wood was the main contact person but Joanna Bazley was on the committee. I have Don’s Poetic Thesis among my papers along with a covering letter dated April 1986 and referring to his decade of involvement. Nearly everyone on today’s list will remember Joanna and the decades when she was our Contact Person and Newsletter Editor.
When Joanna died in 2018 Maisie Carter became our Contact Person, lost last year. Since then Gill McCall gave us a good public profile with Peace Tables as long as she could; Sue Jones took responsibility for the newsletter and Ruth Crabb the finances until last year. Alex Forbes volunteered to take the Chair at the last AGM but like the rest of us has other equally demanding interests and commitments. We haven’t had our Friday Vigils since the pandemic in 2020 but we have kept the Hiroshima/Nagasaki remembrance at Rushmere Pond and been part of the Civic Ceremony on Remembrance Sunday.
It would be good to have your memories of association with this local group and your ideas for how we might retain some level of contact without the administration and the bank account. E-mail me (alisonwilliams36@btinternet.com) or William Rhind (williamrhind@hotmail.com).
Alison Williams
Sadly we have to report the death of Christine Bickerstaff, who was a staunch member of Wimbledon Disarmament Coalition/CND ever since its inception, and was particularly active in helping with our annual Fête of the Earth.
Christine was determined that WDC/CND should continue after the death of our previous Chair, Maisie Carter, telling me “I’m terrified of a nuclear war, please help keep the campaign going”, and so she volunteered as Treasurer. Christine was determined to get to our steering committee meetings, and to leaflet at sessions in Wimbledon— in particular, she helped organise our leafleting of the screenings of the film Oppenheimer last year. She was brilliant at engaging with the public, despite struggling to walk and stand at times. She was eventually persuaded to have the group meet at her house, but by then had become quite ill and gone into hospital.
In addition to her work with WDC/CND, Christine was a stalwart of several other groups: our local Merton Palestine Solidarity Campaign, frequently attending stalls to help leaflet, and the Cuba Solidarity Campaign and Amnesty International. She was well known in Wimbledon Labour Party, where she stood in the Wimbledon West by-election in November 1975 and for election as a Councillor in Dundonald ward in 2014.
Christine will be fondly remembered and greatly missed; her passion and determination certainly inspired me.
Alex Forbes
On 18th April I went to an event at the LSE Library celebrating the life of Pat Arrowsmith. I had heard of her, and indeed walked some way with her on a CND march when the police were asking all the demonstrators to walk on the pavement and she continued to doggedly march in the road. I knew her as a CND activist but had not realised that she helped to organise the first Aldermaston March in 1958. She was also very active in Northern Ireland, where she supported the prisoners in the Maze, visiting Bobby Sands. She was imprisoned several times and went on hunger strike. There was moving testimony from several campaigners who had worked with her, and it was an extremely interesting evening.
Ruth Crabb
National CND members will have received an appeal recently headed in bold capitals “NUCLEAR WAR IS LOOMING” followed by, in normal text, “our government is fuelling two major conflicts, escalating nuclear risks!” The YouGov poll report in our last issue indicated that of those Britons who think we face a world war within ten years, well over half think it’s likely to be fought with nuclear weapons.
The government’s response to the exceedingly dangerous security situation is to increase our defence budget to 2·5% of GDP and put our arms industry “on a war footing”. In the speech he gave in Warsaw on 23rd April the Prime Minister made no reference to the cost of Trident cannibalising that budget. The nuclear deterrent remains a priority that cannot be questioned.
We cannot agree with the Prime Minister that a substantial increase in military equipment amounts to a generational investment in British security and prosperity other than that of the arms companies. And labelling a few other countries as our enemies always reminds me of our own double standards. The Prime Minister did warn against “overstating the case”; we are not on the brink of war and do not seek one. So why not strengthen the means for achieving and maintaining peace?
Those of us on National CND’s e-mail list will have had a full briefing on the campaign to keep US nuclear bombs from returning to Britain at RAF Lakenheath. It is top of the organisation’s priority list for this year and getting increasing attention from the mainstream media.
The Lakenheath Alliance for Peace was launched on 26th March. This is a coalition of groups, including among others CND, Trident Ploughshares, and XR Peace. Comments on the new LAP website are dismissive or mocking: for example there’s the need to stand up to the playground bully argument, Russia has the bombs so we must have them too, and this country is screwed anyway so “probably best to flatten it and start again”.
We need persuasive responses to the first two don’t we? For a start, the facts of what nuclear weapons have done. The figures for lives lost on the days our powerful ally dropped the world’s first two atomic bombs can only be estimates. The BBC give 140,000 for Hiroshima and 74,000 for Nagasaki; hundreds of thousands lived on with painful consequences. Then there is the legacy of all the bomb tests, both on the personnel who carried them out and the American Downwinders and the indigenous people of the Pacific and Australia. The UN General Assembly last October adopted a resolution addressing the legacy of the testing. The states voting against it were Russia, North Korea, France and the UK; an unholy alliance.
Then there is the potential, should today’s nuclear bombs be dropped in anger, of a Nuclear Winter. The black smoke from all the fires could block the rays of the sun round the world for years, killing off most plant and animal life and an estimated five billion people. That number would include around 99% of those in the US, Europe, Russia and China and it would take over 10 years for anything like a normal climate to return.
Faced with the facts, we too might think it would make best sense to flatten this country —or all the nuclear weapon states— and start again; the world would be better off without them. But that is clearly not a serious option. All of those states have populations with the same human mixtures of qualities and potential. We have some reason to be ashamed of our country and the United States and much of which we can be proud. That is probably true in various ways for all countries and 193 have signed up to the UN Charter.
2024 is not the year to be bringing US nuclear weapons back to Britain. Nor should we be labelling one another as ‘enemies’ and committing vast resources to deter—or if necessary engage in— armed conflict.
It was the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, who infuriated the Israelis last October by saying the appalling Hamas attack had not come from a vacuum. And during the 2014 Israeli–Gaza war Mary Robinson and Jimmy Carter co-wrote an article pressing for the recognition of Hamas as a legitimate political actor after it agreed to denounce violence, recognise Israel and adhere to past agreements. What happened to that historical moment?
This is the time to acknowledge the history of the world’s conflicts and inequalities, to address their consequences and start the process of reparation and reconstruction. To coin a phrase, “Another world is possible.”
Our Global Neighbourhood
Nelson Mandela described “Our Global Neighbourhood”, the 1995 report of the Commission on Global Governance, as “a timely work deserving our full attention”. Just on 30 years later, I’d say it has been long forgotten by all but a few. The Defence Speech the Prime Minister gave in April was reminiscent of the 1930s, urging the need for rearmament. Churchill led that campaign at the time and after helping to reform the League of Nations into the United Nations said, “Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war” later paraphrased by Macmillan to the familiar “Jaw jaw is better than war war.”
The previous Prime Ministers were closer to the actuality of world war and the lesson to be learned. Our own follows the American lead, seeking security from the military rather than diplomacy. Of course it’s not at all easy to talk to people you profoundly disagree with and don’t trust. But surely history in the past century teaches us that unless we face up to that challenge we have no future. In the 1980s the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction had the nuclear-armed States making serious efforts at arms control. Now the two with the major arsenals are letting agreements expire while they experiment with usable nukes.
Our Global Neighbourhood starts with a line from the preamble to the UN Charter: “and for these ends… to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours”. All the UN’s member states have signed up to the Charter, written when the world was still engulfed in war, and the report describes it as “the world’s most important political document”.
The 20th century saw two world wars and two attempts to provide global collective security. Both organisations accepted the sovereignty of their member states and the League of Nations gave a veto to all members. It is thought the League failed for lack of United States membership. With today’s shifting power dynamics the veto power of the United States is perhaps chiefly responsible for the UN being called irrelevant.
Two developments in the past thirty years, away from the mindset of Realpolitik and toward that of Neighbourhood, keep me hopeful: the organisation and profile of global Civil Society and the increasing engagement of women in public life, nationally and internationally.
Alison Williams
At the beginning of March a group of Wimbledon Disarmament Coalition and CND members and friends visited Brigitte and David Birch’s home in Raynes Park. It is tucked away in a quiet corner, and when climbing the steep steps through the garden there is no immediate sign of the building so it is a lovely surprise to finally see it looking rather like a Hobbit house.
David gave us a very interesting tour of the property, which they bought in 1994 when it was in a much neglected condition. Woodworm had destroyed the windows, beams, cupboards and pillars, in fact any wood that they could. David, along with a builder, has very sympathetically restored the house as far as possible to its original state. It has been a labour of love and taken many years.
The house was designed by the Arts and Crafts architect John Sydney Brocklesby in 1927 for GH Farmer, the Advertising Manager of the Imperial Tobacco Company. Brocklesby lived in Merton Park and designed several other buildings in the area including the bandstand in John Innes Park. He wanted to build on the vision of the area that John Innes had created. The house is a late example of the Vernacular Revival style but unusually with Persian and Turkish antiques incorporated in the interior at the client’s request; for example in the living room fireplace there are tiles with inscriptions in Arabic.
The rooms are full of interesting corners, with shelves full of books, wonderful lamps and lights and lovely ornaments. Each room is a treasure trove and it was a real pleasure being shown around and learning something of the history of the house. Brigitte showed us scrapbooks that she had made of CND pamphlets, leaflets and other such ephemera that she had collected over the years.
Brigitte provided a feast of tea and cakes for us at the end of the tour which was much appreciated. Altogether £180 was raised for Wimbledon Disarmament Coalition/CND, so our thanks go to Brigitte and David for giving your time and energy to show us around. We all had a very enjoyable time and very much admired the beautiful home that you have created.
Ruth Crabb
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