Malcolm Pittock
interview
Thursday 3 September 2015, Bolton
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Born 1930. His family
moved from a hamlet near Selby to Todmorden in 1939. Married in 1954, moving first to Workington,
then Crewe in 1958, a WEA tutor-organiser. Then to Aberdeen in 1963. Finally comes to Manchester and Bolton in
1974.
Always first and foremost a pacificist, anti-war as the key
to all other politics. I registered in 1948 as a conscientious objector. There was a five year postponement as I went
on to do a PhD at Manchester. I appeared before a tribunal in Manchester in 1953,
given so-called alternative service in forestry. I appealed and was given an
extension to include work in hospitals.
During that time I became an absolutist because ‘alternative service’ accepted
the principle that I ought to join
the forces.
My main argument as it has developed is to say that I was
brought up to say I must not murder anyone.
All I am doing is to take that teaching and universalise it. I would put it like this. The state maintains two incompatible values:
that while the life of its own citizens is sacred, the life of the citizens of
other states is not if the state so decrees.
As a monist I reject this dualism as being impossible to maintain
ethically and intellectually.
I was called to a magistrate’s court in Todmorden. I didn't
go. I had to be arrested and bailed. In court I was asked what are you doing
for your country? I said ‘Appearing here’
. The crown lawyer was
privately quite impressed. I got 6 months in Strangeways. Not for long. I
served most of the time in open prison. An old orphanage in Rochdale being
converted to an open prison. Most prison governors were ex army officers.
Strangeways was an exception; it had a civilian governor, Gilbert Hare. He was
always very friendly. I didn't have to have a mug shot or fingerprints taken. I
remember him saying if you've been to a boarding school - and I had - you won't
find this very different . I was in a heated dormitory, on a
sprung bed. At Ackworth, a Friends’
school, my bed was not sprung while the dormitory was usually unheated even in
the terrible winter of 1947.
GB. Are you a member of any
organisation as an absolutist? Is there anybody giving you support?
What was his name? He
did give local support. He ran mock tribunals for conscientious objectors.
Fred? He was, for a time, chair of the ILP. He was a unionist, Tobacco Workers
Union.
GB. You mentioned Korea. Harry Ratner,
a Trotskyist active in Salford, gets shouted down at Labour Party Conference
when he tries to put a ‘troops out of Korea’ motion
Yes it was pretty dreadful. I didn't take any active part in
the opposition at that time. I was opposed to it. My days of consistent campaigning belong to
the days of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Direct Action Committee
against Nuclear War it wasn't the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament that called
for the Aldermaston march, it was the Direct Action Committee against nuclear
war. Some of the personalities are still
around. I think Pat Arrowsmith she's
very much my age and of course Michael Randle.
GB. Where were you in 1958?
I had moved to Crewe. I tried to form a branch of the CND in
late 1958. We did get one going. I managed to get a debate with the
Conservative candidate for Crewe with the headmaster of the local grammar
school in the chair. The government had
used the WVS to promote the idea of civil defence. I wrote constantly to the
Crewe Chronicle and under my wife's name I wrote about the WVS. They came in a
body to the debate.
They didn't like my campaigning one little bit. In fact it was quite clear that I was being
blackballed. The WEA didn’t like my
peace activities. In particular my
participation in civil disobedience. Nor
did the Liverpool University Extra Mural Dept. I applied for a job in the ????
and received a letter telling me I wasn’t being considered – an unheard of
procedure. Since I obtained the post of
Assistant Lecturer at Aberdeen University at much the same time it was
obviously not on academic grounds. Nor
could my organising work be faulted as I was extremely conscientious. Cold War orthodoxy was particularly strong
then. So my treatment is of historic
interest. I was known as a leading
campaigner against the war. I'd been to
a non violent demonstration at Swaffham in Norfolk in December 1958 near where
there was going to be a rocket base. I got myself arrested. Unfortunately
because of my mother's health I couldn't have gone through with it and gone to
prison which I’ve always regretted. But some people did. I remember Cook and Otter. Otter was an
anarchist and he actually fasted in protest the whole fortnight. So did Cook. I thought it was a splendid
thing.
CND had a completely intelligible program but extremely
naive. It didn't realise how powerful the establishment was. They were talking
about getting their policy accepted in about six months. They would get the Labour Party Conference to
adopt a CND motion. This will mean that the Labour Party will then become
unilateralist. Well of course they did
succeed in 1960 because some unions, notably the Transport and General Workers
Union, gave support. I'd addressed the Trades Council and I addressed union
branches as well. Gaitskell said ‘Fight,
fight and fight again to save the Labour Party I love’. He never said that what he meant was ‘Fight
fight to save the weapons I love’. So they really didn't know what to do. They
thought they had succeeded and then it all fell to bits because Gaitskell
succeeded in reversing the conference decision the following year. Obviously it
continued but I saw that what you had to do was to fight against the Vietnam
War.
GB.
Manchester was a regional centre. Were you going from Crewe to the big
meetings in the Free Trade Hall?
A coach full went to one of the later ones. I remember the
first one, I think in 1958. The League
of Empire Loyalists was around at the time and would intervene when Russell was
speaking, saying ‘Bertrand Russell, you are a traitor; the League of Empire Loyalists
denounces you as a traitor’ . A very prominent campaigner who
may be forgotten was Michael Scott. He came to prominence leading a delegation
from an African tribe to the United Nations. He spoke at the Free Trade Hall
meeting, supporting the Direct Action Committee and took part in the sit down
in Swaffham. My former wife was actually
elected to the steering committee of Greater Manchester and attended meetings.
We were very much connected with Manchester. A lot of that history has been
forgotten. They did have a full time paid secretary in the early days, Harry
Zion and headquarters in Tib Lane.
The leading figure in CND in Manchester at that time was a Methodist
minister by the name of Vincent, AJ Vincent. I think he later became the acting
head of the Methodist Church. He also
became very prominent in relation to changes in the law governing the trustee
Savings Bank.
I became active on the issue of Vietnam when North Vietnam
was bombed around 1965 about the British support for it. I remember a Penguin Special. There was a university petition which was
published. We secured over 200 signatures from Aberdeen.
I haven't mentioned the Committee of 100. They [the CND
leadership] were very much in favour of constitutional action and against any
kind of direct action. I was always a
believer in direct action and I was invited to be a member of the Committee of
100. I couldn't really take part in the
meetings which were in London. So I
wasn't arrested. Some of the members,
including Russell were. This was in
connection with the Trafalgar Square sit down in September 1961.[1]
Some of the prison sentences served by members of the Direct Action Committee
were severe. Mike Randle served a year for a demo at Wetherfield and that's how
George Blake was sprung.[2]In
the end they had to charge Pottle and Randall and in the great tradition of
British juries, despite being directed by the judge to find them guilty, there
was a not guilty verdict.
GB. The first mass sit down in the
northwest was in Manchester in December 1961
Well I was against that development funnily enough because I
thought that - I've changed my mind since - direct action should be directed
towards something military or at the centre of power. The Committee of 100 was
in London. London was the centre of power, perfectly reasonable. People were
enthusiastic, sitting in the road. Well
it wasn't quite clear what they were sitting about. Just obstructing traffic.
Manchester isn't where decisions are made.
The formation of local Committees of 100 ran into the sand after a brief
period and this attempted dilution did for the Committee of 100 project... I
thought we're not going to get any further than this. There was support I might
say from Manchester University staff in the history department. A chap called
Pennington, an authority on the English Civil War was chair and there was a
Marxist historian who was a supporter of direct action. Pennington wasn't.
My position on nuclear weapons was concern whether we were
going to use them; it arose from my moral objection to their conditional use,
not the dangers of their use on us. In the Cuban missile crisis, Pat Arrowsmith
fled to Ireland because she was expecting a nuclear war. I wasn't frightened at
all. What drives me up the wall is the idea of killing. A French general argued
that the world would only be safe if everybody had nuclear weapons. Their
purpose it was claimed was to deter war, to deter attack, so when Russian
nuclear missiles were established in Cuba, the Americans should have said
'They're deterring our aggression'. It's the same now. Iran's nuclear weapons
are a threat. But ours are not! I don't understand how people don't see that
either everybody should have them or nobody should have them. They can't say
that we can have them but you can't because you're a danger and we're not.
GB. Any memories of songs or films
that were important at the time?
I don't sing and I don't chant slogans. I'm there and that's
what matters. But we did have Aldermaston songs, 'Don’t you hear the H bomb’s
thunder?' and 'If I had a hammer' and, though it wasn't a CND song, it was adapted.
'The saints go marching in'. One outstanding poem – though that was later[3]
- is Adrian Mitchell's 'Tell me lies'.
If you read it carefully, it's amazing. You know that you're trying to
protect yourself with all kinds of distractions and an increasing armoury of
lies. Later on the most influential
thinker is Noam Chomsky. I'm associated
with Peace news. Peace news is an anarchist pacifist newspaper
There was a very big universities petition about 1967 or 68.
I worked very hard to get signatures - I was working at Aberdeen University -
200 signatures or something like that.
For some time I was chair of the Committee for Peace in Vietnam. I
worked with Owen Dudley Edwards who became quite a radio personality. He wrote a column in the Irish Times. Another prominent one was Ray Newton. He's
still around and is now a Green. He was a very strong communist. He actually
drove one of those gas Russian cars . The Socialist Workers
Party I can work with - we differ on revolutionary violence - and I do work
with many members of the Socialist Workers Party. A number of them are my personal
friends. One of the people I became
aware of and worked with in Crewe - he lived somewhere near Stoke - was Raymond
Challinor, a member of the International Socialists. Ray Challinor worked in a secondary modern
school. I used to write a lot of references for him. He wanted to get out of teaching in a
secondary modern; he wanted to get into adult education. After all he ended up as head of history in
one of the new polytechnics and he has some good books to his name. He used the head of his department, I think, for
references and then somebody took him aside and told him that the head of
department have been consistently blackballing him in his references. In other words he got an anti reference which
of course prevented him from getting anywhere until he found out . He was 'Neither Washington nor Moscow but
International Socialism'. The Communist
Party was very different. Stan
Broadbridge was the treasurer of Manchester and District CND. Later he became
the general secretary of ATTI (precursor of NATFHE/UCU). He was a very strong
communist. The communists didn't mind
Soviet nuclear weapons. It was British nuclear weapons [they opposed]. In other words a lot of the communist effort
- not completely - was really forming an arm of Soviet foreign policy and this
came out on one of the Aldermaston marches.
The Russians had tested an enormous bomb - I think it was 50 megatons -
and Stan Broadbridge was defending it . That was always a
difficulty in those days and it did give grounds for propaganda against
CND. It's very difficult to make any
propaganda against the position of Stop the War or CND now. Communist support
for the Soviet Union only really started to break up with the invasion of
Czechoslovakia. Then they clearly
condemned that. That made them independent; it was the beginning of Euro
communism. Another influence on me, a figure who I regard as a forerunner of
Chomsky was C Wright Mills, 'The causes of World War II'. I also read 'The Power Elite'. He had the
same hard-hitting radicalism as Chomsky and was also a friend of EP Thompson.
GB. What about the internationalist
dimension?
Internationalism was always there. Other movements fed that into that. The
agitation against apartheid in South Africa: some people concentrated on that -
you can't do everything - but that doesn't mean they didn't support CND. The
anti-austerity movement today has fed into CND. Jeremy Corbyn's popularity was
inconceivable only a year or two ago. I
lived in Scotland- I always was in favour of Scottish nationalism. What I notice about the Scottish Nationalists
is that they are very much to the left.
They don't support foreign wars and they don't support Trident.
I would call myself a socialist anarchist which is more or
less the position of Chomsky. You need
the state for some things but it is the state - human wickedness is to a large
extent the product of the State - which gets you to believe the lies, the
propaganda. If you tell people, for instance, that the Russians are coming
- there was never any evidence
whatsoever that the Russians were coming, that they were going to occupy the
United States or Britain or Western Europe, none whatever - people believed it.
People believed Iraq had nuclear weapons despite the terrible sanctions regime
but that's because the state controls the propaganda. The BBC is supposed to be neutral. It isn't
of course - see the Glasgow Media Group.
When Andrew Marr said Blair can stand tall because they started bombing
Iraq, that's not impartial. On Newsnight,
say views range from A to Z, on Newsnight they will range from A to D. They are
always having generals and ex foreign secretaries.
GB.
About the Vietnam movement...
I wasn't on the big demonstration - I was in Aberdeen at the
time - but it was increasingly involved
with some kind of kind of minor violence which put me off. You say the Americans lost [the war in
Vietnam] but there is a counter argument that they actually won because they
ensure that Vietnam became a carrier of world capitalism just like China.
I still do some work with my old, perhaps my oldest, friend
Derek Tatton. He is the administrator of
Raymond Williams Foundation. He had
written a letter to the Crewe Chronicle, this was in the early days of CND. I
went to see him and his family. He came to my WEA classes. He joined the CND. I introduced him to the work of Raymond
Williams who was a big influence on me as well.
He was interesting because he went to a sort of Welsh equivalent of Ruskin
- College Harlech - and he managed to get into Cambridge as an adult student.
He got in on the basis of an essay he'd written. There, of course, he had
Raymond Williams as a tutor. The point
is that Raymond Williams was a railway man's son, Tatton was a railwayman's son
and he clearly favoured Derek - and this is a black mark against Williams -
apparently in Oxbridge you can farm out your research students. David Hare wrote
a very bitter article in the Guardian about how he had gone to Cambridge to be
under Raymond Williams and he was fobbed off. Derek did a PhD with the Open
University. Raymond Williams was not a supervisor;
he had no duties to Derek. Derek asked him to supervise and he did. With Derek he went beyond the call of
duty. That shows you the rapport between
the two men. He still does good work with the Raymond Williams Foundation which
is exceptionally good. We have bi annual conferences at Wortley Hall near
Sheffield and he's got things going elsewhere as well.
Additional note on Alfred, uncle by
marriage.
Alfred was married to my wife’s sister. He was one of the
so-called 'Frenchmen', those that were sent under military orders to France
with the idea that they would be broken or executed. My uncle Alfred was 21, absolutely working
class, he was a piano tuner by trade and he was a Roman Catholic at that time.
He got spat at at mass. Yet he went
through with it. They were sentenced to death by Earl Haig, a great Christian,
a great Presbyterian. He did it on religious grounds, he worked it out for
himself and he was without real support. Earl Haig was countermanded at the
last moment by Asquith. He wouldn't allow the sentences to be carried out but
Haig milked it for all it was worth. They were sentenced to be executed and
then were told it had been commuted to 10 year’s penal servitude. He did accept a couple of Home Office schemes
which enabled him and others to be released from prison but he went permanently
back inside when he found that on the last scheme, workers were not being paid
the going rate, so he refused to work for a company that wasn't going to pay
him properly. He appealed for support to
the conscientious objectors board. The
only one that supported him was Bertrand Russell. He wrote to Bertrand Russell years after and
Russell remembered him. He goes to
prison for his opposition to the war, he goes to prison again for taking
industrial action. There's a very good
example of the two sources of objection to the war. I was very familiar with
him. He refused to fire watch in the
Second World War. Later he became
registered blind. But before this his sight was very bad indeed. There was a botched operation on his eyes so
he couldn't possibly have been any good as a fire watcher but he never pleaded
he would be no good at it, he did it on principle.
SUPPLEMENTARY
The policy
of the Direct Action Committee. was not only to sit down at rocket bases, which
were often under construction at the time, but to picket such bases for weeks
at a time and to try to persuade those looking for work on the base not to seek
it, suggesting alternative employment. The DAC also tried to promote strike
action by the unions and Pat Arrowsmith worked for several weeks in the North
West promoting strike action against nuclear weapons and she did, I think,
actually get a number of workmen to absent themselves from work on a particular
day - but it was hardly strike action. If you read Lewis Grassic Gibbon's novel
Grey Granite (the third novel in The Scots Quair, ) you will find a good
fictional account of an attempt to encourage strike action in relation to a
particular international situation which had no direct bearing on the workers' economic
interests and its complete failure. The fact that in relation of the West’s
attempt to intervene in the civil war in Russia, workers did take industrial
action to stop it, has led campaigners to believe that it could happen again.
But it never has — not in this country at any rate.
Another
tactic adopted by Direct Action Committee was to encourage voters to abstain
from voting for pro nuclear weapons Parliamentary candidates. This was a
complete failure — but I remember the Voters’ Veto campaign well.
As far as
the Campaign in Crewe was concerned, we did try to carry our message to the
ordinary workers: I addressed the Trades Council and several Union branches,
and whenever marchers or other campaigners came through Crewe, we tried to
ensure that they addressed workers at the large locomotive works in their
dinner hour. This stress on workers' action faded away after 1961 and the formation
of the Committee of 100, with which the Direct Action Committee merged.
I forgot to
mention the high point of the Committee of 100 after which decline set in very
rapidly as the committee split into local committees. It was September 1961
when two demonstrations were organised more or less on the same day, one
against Polaris at Holy Loch (though I am not sure whether it involved Direct
Action) while the other was a huge sitdown in Trafalgar Square. Fifty or so of
the Committee had been arrested prior to this demonstration including Bertrand
Russell and were imprisoned
My friend
Derek Tatton, ( whom you can get in touch with ) went to the Holy Loch
demonstration and there remembers meeting AS Neil, the well known educationist.
Indeed, one of the features of the September demonstration was the number of
celebrities that were involved. I was arrested along with a student who later
became Professor Sir Adam Roberts at I think Oxford and a pillar of the establishment,
who actually supported the invasion of Iraq, and wrote a paper for a
Parliamentary committee justifying it on tortuous and completely spurious 'Legal’
grounds. Bizarrely this pillar of the Establishment was once the Editor of
Peace News! I was told that there was a special chair in the square for
Augustus John and the author of ‘Look back in Anger’ sent a message of support.
When I appeared at the magistrates court after my own arrest, I distinctly remembered
noting that one of my co- defendants was Doris Lessing (I recognised her from
her photograph) Then I remember — I think they were arrested for being members
of the Committee of 100 — both Arnold Wesker and Robert BoIt being imprisoned
and Bolt having to yield since he was writing the screenplay for Lawrence of Arabia
and I think the film company wanted it completed, but the authorities wouldn't
let him work in prison.
In those
early days campaigners thought that if public figures were converted to the
cause of unilateralism, they would stay that way. But experience was to show that
was far from being the case. Professor Sir Adam Roberts was only an extreme
example of what was to happen increasingly.
But there
was something about those days which could lead to the totally unexpected and
unrepeatable. I remember purchasing a rail ticket for the short journey to Holy
Loch, And what did it say on the ticket? 'Anti Polaris D.' British Rail had
issued a special ticket for protesters.' It is a small point, but I cannot
think of anything more remote from what would be possible today.
[1]
See Supplementary Note below.
[2]
See ‘The Blake Escape: How We Freed George Blake - and Why’, Michael Randle and
Pat Pottle, 1989
[3]
First read publicly in Trafalgar Square in 1964 , see http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2008/dec/22/adrian-mitchell-vietnam
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