Aldermarston Marches, Portable toilets, illegal radio and my first experience of police running wild

Way back in the late 50's of the last century (my God that makes me feel ancient!!!) I became involved in the Ban the Bomb movement in a very active way, which led to one or two rather curious and in one case, deeply disturbing experiences.

I attended the inaugural public meeting of CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) which took place at Central Hall Westminster I seem to recall. The organisers had hoped for a reasonable turn out for this meeting, but the numbers who pitched up caught them completely off guard. There were hundreds and hundreds of people there, way too many for the hall, so it was all held up for a while as they hurriedly arranged a big PA system so that the overflow outside on the street could hear what was being said inside the hall.

Anyhow, one of the decisions taken in that meeting was to adopt what is now universally recognised as the Peace Symbol, the circle with the upside down “Y” inside it, and also to set up an annual march between London and the Atomic Weapons establishment at Aldermarston, some 80 km from London.

We couldnt afford to make new banners when the direction of the march was reversed.....  (O:

 I took part in the first three of these marches, which each took three days of gentle marching through the countryside, in the company of many thousands of other peaceniks and were actually very enjoyable to be honest. Lots of friendly people, lots of singing, happy songs as well as the sort of dismal dirges more normally associated with such demonstrations of people's will.

And it was quite fun marching in the company of such people as Bertrand Russel and Michael Foot as well.

A sort of brief detour here. My paternal Grand Mother, a splendid woman who had been an active member of the British Communist Party since about 1895 – at that time she was also a Lady in Waiting to Queen Victoria – and had remained a member until the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956 which she could not stomach. Well in the period between the two wars, she and Russel had together climbed a mountain in Crete, which was named after her as a result of their successful attempt at reaching the peak of this mountain, so if you go to Crete, have a look at Mount Lilly and remember me..

On the third march I took part in, I was asked to volunteer to help set up the portable toilets at each night's camping areas.... So instead of walking all the way, I went in comparative luxury in a truck, and set up those dunnies each day... and then of course, the following morning, emptied them, dismantled them and set off to the next stopping point. It made a change from foot slogging all the way, and funnily enough I rather enjoyed being part of the organisation, no matter how humble my task happened to be.

Inevitably my involvement in CND brought me into contact with some rather more active individuals, who felt strongly that whilst the marches and their attendant demonstrations were worth doing, more was needed to spread the good word. So at a certain point I was approached by a couple of guys who had a moderately powerful radio transmitter at their disposal – I never actually discovered who was behind them, but I formed the opinion it was the British Communist Party.

Anyhow, they asked me if I could get my hands on some sort of a van, and would be prepared to help them make illegal radio broadcasts from the van as I drove it around to avoid being located and caught by the cops.

This rather appealed to me, so I casually asked Russ (my dad) if I could borrow his Bedford Dormobile occasionally, to which he agreed, being a nice bloke. So I duly found myself driving around various London suburbs late at night, while the two guys sat in the back and broadcast prepared tapes on the TV channel (In those days TV stopped broadcasting at about 11 pm).

Obviously I never actually heard what we were broadcasting, but they assured me it was messages about banning nuclear weapons. Not that I can imagine anyone ever listened to whatever it was we were broadcasting to be honest.

But I felt like a real resistance worker doing this.

Some time later I attended a street demonstration held by the Committee of 100, an off-shoot of CND who felt that passive resistance was a better weapon against Nuclear Weapons than simply marching and holding large public demonstrations, and these good folk took to sitting down and blocking roads and similar passive forms of protest. All very genteel in fact, but the authorities hated them with a passion.

I was not a member of this group, but I had head that for some reason they had decided to stage a street sit down in a back street in Croydon (Why I have no idea), so I went along to see what would happen, and boy did I ever see what happened.

These good folk were mostly people in late middle age or older, looked to be professional people and had a look of respectability about them. In due course after a bit of speechifying to the small crowd of onlookers, they duly sat down on the road and pavement, thus blocking it totally – not that anyone was trying to drive along this road of course.

At this point the cops turned up in force, and all the people watching very rapidly disappeared, including myself. I nipped over a high wall and sort of hid there, peering over the wall to see what would happen next.

What happened next was a real shock to me, since up till that time I had shared the general British believe that our “Bobbies” were the salt of the earth and only concerned with maintaining public order in the gentlest way possible.

The first thing that happened was that a police officer shouted through a loud hailer telling the good people sitting on the ground that they had to move, and that if they didn't move within two minutes, he would read the Riot Act, which he announced gave him more or less total power to take whatever action he felt necessary to bring the demonstration to an end rapidly and that they would all be arrested as rioters, which carried some rather long prison sentence.

At this point several of the demonstrators had second thoughts about it all, and stood up to walk away, whereupon the Officer told several of his cops to grab them and sit them down again, which they happily did, with an amazing amount of force.

The officer then read the Riot Act to the demonstrators, and then ordered his constables to remove the demonstrators and put them into the waiting Paddy Wagons.

This they did with a will. One cop taking the feet and the other taking the head of the demonstrator, and carrying them to the Paddy Wagons, but carefully dropping them on route, in such a way that their backs fell onto the edge of the pavement... thus inflicting the maximum pain and probably spinal injury, but in such a way that it would be impossible to prove that the cops had done it intentionally.

Thus systematically these cops arrested all the demonstrators and hurt every one of them in this careful and revolting manner.

By the way, as far as I know, I was the only onlooker while this was happening, as the cops had chased everyone else away before setting onto the demonstrators.

I was still pretty young, and really didnt know what, if anything I could do about this action on the part of the cops... So to my shame, I did nothing, except to revise my views on our lovely, friendly British Bobbies.