Fathers and Daughters, actviism leading to violence and, shattering the American Dream

American Pastoral and Arrival are two films released at the end of the same week in November 2016. I saw American Pastoral last showing on Friday 11^th Armistice day and given the thoughtful and careful review by the British Institution of film critics  Dr Mark Kermode who admitted he had  not read the Philip Roth novel on which the film is rooted, I was surprised to find that I was the only person in the film theatre when I  arrived, remaining so, enabling the use of the light of my phone to note down questions on the back of the printed e-ticket, having forgotten to return a slim notepad to the inside jacket pocket, used earlier in the day for shopping notes made on a visit to Gateshead to shop and park at Tesco’s and on to Newcastle to collect coffee and buy winkles in the Grainger Market.

Because the film covered subjects of significant personal interest I immediately ordered the novel which I have now read and confirm the appraisal of Mark Kermode that this is a good directorial debut by Ewen McGregor.  I go further and say the film provides coherence to the story and a credibility of character that the book by Philip Roth does not and at which at one level is a well written rant,  bravely  attempting to communicate how at any moment our ideas and  feelings contain all our previous and inherited experiences, but I failed to be convinced that the characters are more than the ideas, views and beliefs of the author although I accept I was confused by the narrative time framework and because of having experienced the film first.

The approach of Mr Roth has much in common with what I understand to be one of the two central themes of Arrival, a multi-dimensional sense of time and which also uses an alien visitation to explain the nature of language and communication in an engaging and entertaining way. Arrival end the first week as top box office and American Pastoral per the British Film Institute was only number 19.

I also understand that American Pastoral is one of several books by Roth in which he uses a character as his alter ego, (that is a second self, different from his normal or original personality). I do not know if this is true as I do not know Roth,  but I  will say   that the starting point of his book is the  proposition  that  many American men believed in the American Dream, that  their nation was God’s special land and the greatest, and their values and standards of the highest order  and  where for many the 1960’s was a period of great awakening, when the Hollywood image of  the second world war was shattered in Vietnam (and as I have recently presented  when covering 25 years of Miss Saigon and the worldwide belief that an entry permit enabled automatic participation in the American Dream of equal opportunity to wealth and power and where the greater the  belief, the  greater the fall). The opening section of the 400-page novel is called Paradise Remembered, followed by the Fall and concludes with Paradise Lost.

I also have a very different but in some respects more important and lasting experience, a live relay from the Royal Opera House in London of the Offenbach opera Les Contes D’Hoffmann, the Tales of Hoffmann and this was followed by two films on Sky TV, Strangerland, a film set in a contemporary  Australian small town on the edge of a desert  and where there are important similarities with American Pastoral, as they are with American Beauty, followed by the delightful Spanish film  with its English  titled Living is Easy with Eyes Closed, aimed at the Oscars best film in a language other than English and which won the  Goya in 2014 for that category and several others. To complete the cultural experience of the past week I went to see Fantastic Beasts in 3D on Friday November 18^th.  I also need to write up experiencing the stage musical The Glenn Miller Story with Tommy Steele for the second occasion, this time at the Sunderland Empire, previously, the Theatre Royal in Newcastle, and the films the Girl on the Train and Nocturnal Animals.

I also intend to make time to comment on a brilliant one off documentary about the Tyne Bridge, the moving series of  canal trips by Timothy West and his partner Prunella Scales, the remarkable Planet Earth II naturalist  the latest BBC four Saturday serial The Deep,  Humans and Westworld cover artificial intelligence,  the Missing and child  abduction and abuse,  the Young Pope -what is it about, the interesting Close to the Enemy and the yet to interest, My Mother and Other Strangers, Strictly Come Dancing, The X Factor and the never ending -The Blacklist.

One interesting and challenging aspect of the book American Pastoral is its argument that we can make the right decision choice but this can have devastating life changing consequences. I will say more about the advice a parent gives his daughter, how he responds to an initiative from his daughter, followed by his reaction to meeting an emissary from his daughter and going into the kitchen before sitting down with friends for a meal and where despite the chronology set out in the film I am still unclear of the time frame when attempting to unravel cause and effect. I will also add the appearance of something, or someone is only one aspect of its reality

The main character of the book is not its author who in the form of Nathan Zuckerman, a successful published writer who tells the story of “the Swede”, (Seymour Levov) already a legend from being a great Athlete in American Football, basketball and baseball and a veteran of the second world war and who had attended the same Jewish High school years as the story teller. Nathan admits that he idolised the Swede the American Dream) when attending the same Jewish Newark, New Jersey High School with Jerry the younger of Levov’s two sons and who as a World War II veteran of the Marines took over his father’s quality glove making factory and who married a beauty queen with success graduating from city to state to the Miss America contest staged in Atlantic City, underlining the American Dream theme. The nickname Swede and ”The Swede” remained unclear until the book discloses his name is Seymour and Swede was a  tall blond rock of  a man compared to his short in stature wife and its only towards the end of the book is there reference to their discovery in private of passionate sexuality but which they kept within the bedroom and where sex  is  part of the shattering of his idealism and where how couples present themselves when being sociable with others is very different from the image they  wish to present and have within the marriage.

It was only when reading the book that the thought occurred that that Roth had created the Swede as the American Dream to explain that he too had been an idealist who had set himself great standards to have these shattered by the realities of life. As a young man, I developed an interest in Fundamental Freudianism where everything is based to procreation desire and sex and on aggression, violence and death and on the guilt of having wishes desires which parents, family, the local community, a religion, a church and its leaders, those controlling the one’s country society has declared taboo. I have learned that Roth was brought up in the Jewish belief and cultural system which draws as strong between themselves and as Catholicism of my birth father who I never knew but became a senior priest, my birth mother and my childhood and which there are many in the Muslim world, some Protestant and other religious bodies who also attempt to divide themselves off from others in what is a spectrum of belief within and between religions and which impact on behaviour. The statement there is more which unites than divides is meaningless in this context.

At one level Seymour is presented as a conformist but in one significant passage he declares that the faith and culture of his childhood mean nothing yet it is his Catholic wife who stands up to the father in law over an inquisition about her gather and how the children will be brought up. In this film, this happens in its chronology of events, maturing and individual development, in the book it comes almost at the end. The film uses the unravelling of the story line to engage our attention in contrast to Roth who spits out the key aspects of the story and then attempts to explain leaving the reader to knit everything together and made sense as they wish from their experience.

Although Roth is a war veteran he joined too late to see the blood and guts of war and although in film  (but less I thought)  in the book uses the  black v white rioting of Newark 1967  to  bring out that he is a liberal democrat where the majority of workers at the family owned business are black, the  blood and guts of the rioting is  only alluded, and this is also true for the, Vietnam and the anti-war protests and it is the film that there is the more vivid impact of the bomb which destroys what  we  in England would called the  village store with  post office outlet. The American Dream is a device to cover those who disassociate themselves from the realities of life until it is brought home to them directly. A home break in a car accident or break down, a storm, an expected death all of which I have experienced added to which there are the floods, the earthquakes and most of all the wars and I have met no one who has experienced night after night bombings even as a very young child who not affected, in my instance it was the far of the adults as they prayed with their rosaries which communicated to me and I have still. 

Roth is also not the conformist his younger brother accuses nor is he weak in giving in to pressure from parent or daughter although he respects both parents. So, he agrees to his future wife a Catholic being questioned by the parent, something I experienced when going out with a girl for the first time at the age of 17 and she was16 and in returning to her home from the pictures and invited in and faced an inquisition from mother father (a civil servant) with a bemused older sister who I knew from a cycling club who arranged the date after her sister and come to one of our Sunday outings. My  humiliation was great because the dread question what does  your father do I could only mumble dead  because I did not know and  did not believe the cover story given to me a couple of years before,  was possibly given  an opportunity some years late, but could not cope with at that time and then was told just before I was sixty that he had been a priest, and only to learn from subsequent efforts that he had had been  number  two to a Bishop and acting for the Bishop and  awarded the  O.B.E.

Seymour’s other defiance against parental pleading was to buy a large house in the country with 100 wondering cows and a romping free bull, the Count in a solid Republican community with a Klu Klux Klan history.  Father warns about getting to and the farm to the nearest station in winter and getting to work at the business and Seymour explains about the good train services which goes on into New York with Parlour cars in the morning, the USA first class lounge dining car with bar but on two levels with a small cinema.

The more I age the more I appreciate that how others view as history or an art or entertainment experience set in costume and period, events which have understand from the perspective of having lived through the time, and sometimes with direct experience. Before starting to write I try and check my memory with the available facts.  In this instance, I had not appreciated that Newark. the largest city still in New Jersey state, is a short commuter train ride from central New York about the same distance in travel time as my former five  childhood and young adult homers in Wallington, Surrey from central London when I became an anti-war campaigner a few years before the daughter of the Swede, so the parallel comparison between the reactions of her close and extended family to mine are fresh as I have commenced to write again about my experience and its impact on the rest on my life, and my closed and extended family network.

In book with words, and film through pictures, we gain some knowledge off Newark post second world war when the town had a population of some 400000 but commenced to rapidly drop with the 1967 Race Rioting with up to 80% of the Whites leaving and the 2010 census putting the city total at about 275000. The African origin American population has also dropped from a high of 58% to 52% and with of Hispanic and Latino combining more recent populations from Portugal and Brazil to form the second largest grouping, leaving the Whites at under 25%.  The Democratic candidate for president has won the state since 2000 and did so again this year by a significant majority of the votes casts with the Green Party gaining 1%.

There were 80000 Jews living in Newark at one point, the city where Philip Roth grew up with his parents and based several of his novels many of the successful business merchants, as the Levov’s had already moved away from the city centre concentration of cold water flats, before the 1967 rioting when most pulled out. It is normal hat when first arriving ethnic groups living together in area with privately renting housing is available, quickly establishing speciality food and services, together with junior and high schools.

This is a subject where I have some direct knowledge as seventy percent of the twenty thousand predominantly Catholic population of Gibraltar were required to leave their tiny almost island homeland at the southern tip of Spain as World War II commenced and were sent and lived in neighbourhoods to a number of countries, including one part of London if they did not already have an extended family living in other countries to taken in as happened to mine, coming to England and not to the USA, or North Africa where there were other close relatives. Although I went to a Catholic school the emphasis was on integration as there was no prospect of returning to the homeland when the war ended for my birth mother and six of her seven sisters.

Going to work in central and outer London, then becoming an activist and then going into adult education, I quickly became aware of the singularity of the Jewish world even when families lived in neighbourhoods of mixed ethnicity and this culminated in my sixth decade when undertaking an assessment for allocating funding  to a business enterprise it was necessary to call at home of an applicant whose family was at one end of the Jewish belief and practice spectrum where contact was not allowed with others, and where it was evident the children  came in and out of the room just to see what someone who was not one of them was like and because the applicant was a woman and  could not be in the presence of a male without a chaperone,  her partner was present but declined to communicate directly on religious grounds. This contrasted with a girlfriend of a short time where Jewishness was not central to her being and outlook and to the number who were members or supporters of communism, socialism and activists for against weapons of mass civilian destruction.

The core of the book and film is the relationship between Seymour and his one child at that time, a girl, Merry, who becomes a verbal and direct actionist extremist as a teenager against the Vietnam War, against the system, the everyday of family life and their apparent acceptance of the way everything is. Roth is good at using a sentence to communicate an era or the context opening the second chapter with reminding that after the second world war the USA governed 200 million other people in Germany, Austria, Italy and Japan. Back home in the States and in Britain. In the book, what remains uncertain in the film. What the book, and film does not attempt to do is to explain why Merry normal adolescent rebellion against parental, school and religious authority graduated from nonviolent to violent protesting, a subject with interests me especially as later or she becomes a convert to the extreme end of non-pacifism- Janis and which influenced Gandhi in his activist approach of Satyagraha

The film Strangerland has a very different setting and time but also uses disappearance of a 15-year-old daughter (and her young brother) who appear to have gone off into the Australian desert on Walkabout just as a sandstorm engulfs the area. Walkabout remain a seminal film starring Jenny Agutter who finds herself with her young brother in the desert after their father shoots himself and where they are rescued by an aborigine boy who is undertaking his solo rites into manhood. There is moment in Strangerland where I hoped an indigenous resident would come to the aid of the family and can find both children alive. It is after the two children go missing in that we learn the facts of why the family, he is a dispensing chemist, moved into the town and an extraordinary blunder like that which Seymour Levov makes. We also experience through both films the full extent of their culpability for what happens, in part because of parental denial and the inability of the parents to intervene in a constructive way. Both mothers end up walking into the local town centres naked which says something of their sexuality and guilt although the daughters take very different routes in expressing themselves, reacting to the unbalanced marital relationships and the cultural mind set in which the parents have themselves been raised and appears to them to have accepted without questioning.

The reaction to Jerry Levov’s revelations about his brother is for Nathan to start to revisit the location of the homes, the business of the Swede and to look at press records in the local library. He meets someone he once took on a hayride who as a teenager had refused to let him undo her bra him undo her bra, not because she was sexually shy as such but because if he had become her boyfriend that he would have discovered the nature of the family set up which she did not want others to know. This quickly leads to one of the key passages in the film and which McGregor includes although in a modified version, and centres of the Freudian understanding of the sexual development of girls in relation to the attachments they have with their father seeking genuinely at times to replace their mothers as where it is also not uncommon   for a son to also say to his mother that he will marry her when grows up without understanding the implications of what he is saying.  Roth has the father responding to this situation as most fathers would at that time but also with understanding the potential impact of the rejection on the daughter and moreover also imbuing the daughter with an insight into her general behaviour of pushing things over normal limits with the consequential reactions of those involved.  The problem is that pushing to the limits allowed is normal behaviour and that this another aspect where both sets of parents are found wanting.

In Strangerland, the teenage girl is seduced by a teacher at the school with whom she had developed an emotional attachment, the crush which teenage girls and boys will develop for teachers who are themselves flattered by the attention, if they are not predators on the lookout for such a situation. Freud and several generations of Freudian enthusiasts accepted his argument that the wish of the child for the death of a parent, the death of a parent or sibling or having an embryonic sexual relationship, depending on their knowledge of marital relationships at the time can have just as strong and devastating impact on their behaviour because of guilt than had the situation developed into one of physical reality.

The different between those who think and feel and those who also act, or respond in destructive and often self-destructive ways is my main issue of interest because of my own experiences and have been undertaking research in preparation for rewriting experience in relation to opposition towards weapons of mass civilian extermination.

The first quarter  and first section of the books ends with the daughter as a  rebellious 16 year old, staying out over night with her radical friends, at constant war with her mother who sees the behaviour as adolescent rebellion against everything, using language most foul in order to bring  about  a desired reaction,  the stutter as a weapon, reminding of my own confrontations although I was able to insist on freedom to  as well as freedom from, earning  an income and with a monthly train season ticket which enabled to me to  travel to London at weekends  or stay on after work and where I cannot remember eating much if anything.   However, it is the father, in desperation, fearing his daughter is becoming more and more involved with the activities of the extremists in New York, poses the challenge to her to try and influence the local community and bringing the protesting locally, unaware of how this will be interpreted by the daughter and her friends with disastrous consequence for everyone- the law of the unintended consequence with paves the way to hell with good intentions.

Both book and film focusses on the visit of a young look University student seeking information in the glove making industry and where the Levov family business is known to provide the best handmade gloves in the country. This open the second section of the book headed The Fall. The book quickly reveals the student is an agent for the disappeared daughter whereas in the film only later is the truth self-revealed. I wondered why it was necessary for the history and nature of glove making industry to present in such detail until author explain through Seymour his opposition the approach of profit before everything and cutting corners, using the expression stealing time. The younger brother Jerry accuses his older of only knowing the business of making specialist gloves and when the market drops because of changing custom and overseas production it provides another reason for the world of Seymour to collapse further. It is only after Seymour has taken the young woman through the process of making her a pair of bespoke gloves that she reveals she is an emissary for his daughter with requests that items are brought to a secret location. Rita, the young woman, refuses to disclose where his daughter is, declares that Merry hates him and would like to see him shot.

He defends against inaccurate references to the upbringing of his daughter and she counters his attempt to challenge the accusation that his child murder by referring to the number of civilian deaths which occur because of the bombings by the USSAF and ground forces. He knew he should have reported the contact to the authorities but his wife persuaded him to continue with their only link providing her with a briefcase full of ten thousand dollars in bills. They meet for this in a hotel room where she offers herself crudely and which is also featured in the film. I had a similar experience when aged 21 or 22 with an 18/19-year-old subsequently murdered, which I rejected and which Seymour also rejects, bolts from the room and report to the FBI as I was to do to police after the death.  In the book, we move on five years and accounts of all the bombings and not coming to terms that the daughter has killed three people. Roth reflects on the course of the war and on the trial of a Black Communist Sympathetic Professor at ULCA, Angela Davis’ about the same age as Rita the girl Seymour is confronted by. Later it is Rita who writes telling him where Merry is claiming she had been under the power of Merry and acting as she had directed to the extent she pretends Seymour had used her sexually for Merry to accepted the cash and her continuing involvement.

The book looks back to how the community responded to the allegations with the highlight the disbelief that such a multi-talented school girl who never challenged authority was responsible for such deadly acts.  Someone her school mention she talked a lot about the Vietnam War, lashing out in one instance because of view expressed strongly opposed her own and one of the teachers was said by the FBI to have provided valuable information. There was incomprehension that this has happened to such a family

On the 1^st September 1973 Seymour received the letter from Rita in which she says but she cannot cope anymore and his daughter needs urgent medical help. She provides the assumed name and location in Newark advising him to wait outside until she appears. His wife had twice been in hospital because of suicidal depression and she blamed him for marrying her, for having their child when all she wanted to be was a teacher, when being pressured to become a beauty queen but where she did not reach the final ten at Miss America contest in Atlantic City. We learn that in 1969, two years after her daughter disappeared she was back in hospital coinciding with an invitation to the 20^th anniversary of leaving High School. He funded a trip to Geneva for facial surgery but this was not for him or her it is later revealed. The farm and grand house are sold and something smaller in a different area acquired, and his where several new versions of what are given, we are also taken further back in book and in film to events immediately after the bombing when he had gone to see the owners of the store and post office concession and the widow of the man killed who understood that the impact would be worse on the parents as they had a supportive family and community to help her and her child to cope.

He waits outside the Cat and Dog hospital dilapidated building where his daughter has been said to work in what had become a grim part of the city. She come unrecognisable in terms of clothing   body project and her covered face but it is her. She has become an adherent of the ancient Indian religions which I had also considered but came to quickly understand aspects   were not for me. Jainism is a total way of life based on passive inaction and a belief that all living things are beings with souls and with those who fully embrace accept poverty, chastity, truth and honesty without exception and the level of renunciation and noninvolvement which most find impossible to achieve or maintain. It is not only the opposite of what she had but what for a short while she has become. He found her condition distressing, especially her acceptance of squalor and deprivation. She had been there, close by for six months.

She tells the story of what happened after she admitted carrying out the bombing. She had spent three days at the home of the speech therapist who had arranged for her to enter an underground of places and people, some fifteen aliases in two months. She details how she became Mary Stoltz working for a year in the kitchen of an old person’s home. A minister who had befriended advised her to immediately sending to a commune in another part of the country but arriving in Chicago on her way to Oregon, she was raped, held captive and robbed. The film does not detail more, or if it does I do not remember.

She gets a casual job, was raped in another situation. She made her destination Oregon and became involved with two further bombings. She killed three people. She fell in love with a woman at the commune. The woman was married and a situation developed where she to leave. She worked in a potato field and commenced to learn Spanish planning to travel to Cuba, believing a revolution would never take place in the USA, she made her way to Florida. She had become parotid about the FBI on the lookout for her and came across an old woman begging who taught her trade and with whom she moved in until the woman died. She had commenced to learn about religions at the public library.

Hiss reaction to her story was deny she his daughter because his daughter could not have done the terrible things she had admitted.  He could not bear her as she was and pleaded with her to go with him whereas she pleaded to be left alone as she was. The book and the film then covers the impact of the riots on his factory, the neighbourhood he community. Seymour also tells his brother he has found his daughter and what she had done, the brother confronts Seymour with the reality of having become some the product of his father, the country and its system without having a separate identity with his daughter challenging in every way that she can, forcing him to accept the reality of who he is. What Roth appears to be demonstrating is that one brother has been passive, accepting what happens, until challenged in some fundamental way while the other has always been aggressive, accept my as I am or not at all with the implication that our basic inherited nature will only change when challenged by something out of the ordinary or by someone. Whether Roth had knowledge about how new humans are created, their gene structures, the neurology of the brain which I have only now commenced to learn the language to be able to understand, is a good question

But as fundamental to this, that there are significant differences to the platitude there is more that unites than divides is what seems to me the message of this book  is that education and parental upbringing should be about enabling each human being  to develop a sense of individual identity and thought process which does not accept what they given, including by parents and teachers without questioning and challenge and this today applies most of all to politicians and  mainstream media, and to experts  who  pretend objectivity, and  I also include the pure scientist in this who pontificates on subjects broader than their area of study. The phone exchange between the two brothers ends when Jerry reminds that Seymour had been an instructor in the Marines but still could not cope with the brutality of what could be human behaviour, his daughter had become a murderer and the reasons were only secondary in determining how society should treat her once guilt has been proved or in this instance admitted.

The third section of the book is headed Paradise Lost back at the time of the Watergate hearings which they would listen to and reflect on at the end of day to when they and the cows and then farm was being sold more ruminating on has been and which is also where I argue that one of the simplistic message of Arrival is a major feature of this important work of fiction because Roth repeatedly makes the point that when thinking and reacting to the present  we drawn what  has happened  before not as a chronology but in terms of relevance to our mood, our feeling, the person we have been, are and still hope to become.

But another aspect of the he books which is again explored is hate, the hate of things not understood, threatened, changing, he same kind of hate which his daughter and her associate had expressed. I now turn to two of the events mentioned in book which centre on our sexual awareness as children, of our sexuality as adults in relationships, to sex as a means for procreation, as giving and submitting to power as well of personal enjoyment plus the sense of betrayal leading to violence which can also result. I was unsure at first of why Roth included the situation where after Seymour and the daughter spends time together on a camping expedition on advice of a talking therapist she acts out the Freudian urge to replace her mother as his wife and he understandably is horrified and his responses crushes her although she has the insight and ability to communicate to admit that she tends to go too far. It his failure to understand and protect which appears to affect him more when learns she has been raped on two separate occasions. 

In Strangerland, the daughter becomes the town anybody’s who takes an interest which leads father to acts of continued aggression against the teacher who seduced her and those he finds have used in her the town. Just as it fathers who tells the daughter to protest within the community, the father in Strangerland admits at the end of the film to his wife that he had watched her go off at night with the younger brother who tends to go night walking and decided not to intervene to teach her a lesson, hence the great panic when the dust storm arrives, the son is fund barely alive   the daughter is not.  In American Pastoral, we know the daughter survives as she attended the funeral of her dad dead from prostate cancer aged 67 whereas in Strangerland we are left with the assumption she has perished from lack of water and sub alone in the desert. The audience reaction to both films, I assume American Pastoral for as mentioned I saw it alone, is to sit and working through their emotional reactions when the credits roll.  By contrast in Living is Easy with the eyes shut both the adolescent school boy who runs of from his dictatorial father and a young pregnant girl are known by the audience to be safe with prospects for a potentially good life when the film ends.

 In American Pastoral Seymour walks into the kitchen as they prepare to sit down for a meal with friends to find that the man from one of the couples is taking his wife and from her comments this is not first instance.  Later he learns she had the expensive facelift in Switzerland to please this man who she runs off and marries.  He backs off then but not when he finds that the talking therapist at the same meal with her husband had looked after his daughter for three days immediately after the bombing. She explains that because of the professional relationship she was bound by secrecy even when she knew from the TV what the girl was alleged to have done. What hurt Seymour most is that she did not tell him, the woman with whom Seymour had an extra marital affair, he later remarried with two sons. His back and white father could not understand his children in this respect, especially Jerry who has divorced three times with four wives all nurses and with an increasing gap in their age difference. What children  always find difficult to accept from their parents is the reality of life compared  the fairy stories of childhood  until he children  themselves grow  and have children of their own, and then sometimes too light they begin to see that their parents were always doing their best  but the best is too often not good  enough .I was struck  by this  thought to day when reading an article in Times by Melanie Phillips  headed Royal sense of duty may die with the Queen with the sub text that our present head of state could be the last to believe in a  higher cause than family or personal desires. I think not given the vast numbers of everyone everywhere try and balance their duty to theselves and their families with concern and activity for others.

Holy Loch 1961, Activism on Tyneside, Oral History, police investigations and statutory child abuse inquiry

Dear John (Charlton)

I am writing to congratulate on your 2009 book- Don’t’ You hear the H Bomb’s thunder?  a project jointly of the North-East Labour History Society and Merlin Press (for those circulated who are unaware of the book) and which I have only recently discovered and read. I am publishing my comments although I hope you will also pass on (unless otherwise mentioned) to those who contributed their experience of activism in regional Tyneside  with a focus on the first post WW II peace movements in the UK 1958-1965 and which involved the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Gandhi Satyagraha Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War, where I was a short time employee helping to organise the London to Holy Loch project which Peter Currell Brown devised and which I promoted while in Stafford Prison following Operation Foulness, together with the attempted mass movement of the Committee 100 and where I was also a short time member and which in part was created because of what happened to the Foulness thirteen.

While I will be rewriting at greater length my knowledge and experience and publishing on line, together with some documentation, I have decided to circulate this now for three reasons. While I am a supporter of oral testimony personal experience as an aspect of explaining, what happened in times past, and why, there are risks that without appropriate documentation collective views may become skewed because of what is presently cultural and politically fashionable even where contemporary documentation is also available. This is currently important in relation to allegations made about past crimes where there is always that problematic mixture of the lack of corroborative evidence, the nature of the investigative and judicial process in the context of the law at original time, the credibility of the complainant and other witnesses, human failure, and deliberate cover up for good and bad reasons.

I will be writing separately about recent events concerning the ill-conceived, wrongly developed and badly managed child abuse inquiry for England and Wales but where everyone needs to rally to ensure it now makes a better job of an impossible task.

The second reason is in part my own long standing interest in why do some people become activists and some move to the extreme end of the activist spectrum risking or sacrificing their own lives and some having a personal involvement in the taking of the lives of others in the name of greater social justice, ending wars and achieving peace. I did not know of the book by Philip Roth on which the film American Pastoral is based and which deals with this subject in the context of the Vietnam war and race rioting in the USA. There is also my fascination in what happens to activists when the cause is achieved or they decide to stop.

Thirdly, what impact does activism have on bringing about changes for the better and where the dramatic increases the membership of the Labour Party could bring about a Labour government at the next General Election or destroy the party depending on the approach of members of the parliamentary Labour Party and the administrative party machine over coming months. My only surprise is that the margin in favour of Leaving the European Political and Economic Community or the election of Mr Trump as the U.S.A president was not greater. The professional politicians, political advisers and media pundits still don’t get it and their recent failure puts us all at risk.

I first became interested in gaining an understanding of what happened and why when a Jesuit modern history teacher at school said that if we wanted to know what the second world war was about we should read the reports of the War Crimes Tribunal, and I persuaded the library at Wallington where I was already borrowing works of adult fiction as soon I discovered I was not restricted to the children’s section, to let me read in the reference library first what was investigated at Bergen-Belsen and then at Auschwitz.

When I returned from the film, American Pastoral, I looked at a collation of video clips which had been posted on Facebook with one of a speech by Tony Benn in the House of Commons, with Jeremy Corbyn sitting behind him, in which he explains why it is impossible for anyone who experienced the blitz to support the bombing of men, women and children who are not willingly involved in a conflict.

One of my earliest memories, and which remains vivid, is that of a V1 rocket heading in our direction in daylight as we left the house for the Anderson air raid shelter in the garden, hearing the engine cut out and knowing that it would hit the ground before reaching us. When the V 2 rockets began to fall around, and more did than anywhere in the UK because of our proximity to London’s main civilian and then military airport at Croydon, we went to stay with an aunt who lived in officer’s quarters at Catterick Camp in North Yorkshire. I also have a visual memory of the day the telegram arrived to say that one of the two sons of the eldest aunt had died in a Japanese concentration camp and when his brother returned wearing his demob suit after experiencing prisoner of war camps in North Africa, Italy and central Europe, never recovering from the experience of being freed by the Russian Army and seeing what they were doing.

After the war, I was taken to see British and American films about the war only suitable for a child if accompanied by an adult, and at sixteen I was attached to a section of six men in the Local Taxation department of the Finance Department of a large local authority where one had lost part of his leg in World War I, another had been an officer in the Royal Navy, three had been squaddies including service in North Africa and the youngest served with the Royal Air Force in Korea. It was also the time of the Suez War and petrol rationing only a couple of years after the other forms of rationing had ended. Angus Calder and one of his brothers, sons of Ritchie Calder were members of the local Youth CND wrote the important account of the People’s War.

Only a few months ago, I decided it was time to write and publish a new autobiography centred on my political interests and involvements.  I have previously privately printed but not published how I became a contemporary artist in the process of creating one work encompassing my life experience in the context of major events and developments in the world to pose the question, does any individual life matter except to those with whom we relate and communicate?

I commenced new research on my political activism with the peace movements of 1958 to 1961 and where I had been invited to join the Labour Party in 1960. My activism ended in making an oral commitment to stop activities at the Magistrate Court at Witney, Oxfordshire just before Christmas 1961, a bizarre phone call on Boxing Day which was said to have involved the Home Secretary, with the imprisonment of Mike Randle and Lord Russell in 1962 and the Cuban Missile crisis that year.  I switched from a politics and economics course at Ruskin College to a Diploma in Public and Social Administration at Oxford University and then with the help of the Home Office became a qualified child care officer following a course at Birmingham University and where during the first academic term someone who had been a close friend and worked at the Admiralty was stabbed to death in a Soho Street and who had separately gained knowledge of my role and what happened at Holy Loch in 1961.

Ten years ago, in addition to my own documentation, I examined some of the records of the Direct-Action Committee and some of the unpublished other written material at the J B Priestly Library which is part of the University of Bradford and which had been curated by Michael Randle who held an academic post for several years and who I briefly met on my visit. There are now online indexes of these records. There is one published academic work which covered these records and interviews with some of the key people by Richard Taylor, Peace Movements 1958-1965 published only in hard back and where a used copy can cost over £100. Richard with Colin Pritchard published an earlier work in 1980 covering the same period. The C.N.D Story edited by John Minion and Philip Bolsover published in 1983 includes contributions from several leading activists during the period covered and adopts a similar approach to your book. The story of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was brought more to date by Kate Hudson in her book CND- Now more than ever, published in 2005. There have been two other published books which attempt to cover the CND and Direct Action with the most well-known- The Disarmers by Christopher Driver in1964 and the most controversial of all, Mud Pie by Herb Greer also 1964. A worldwide study has also been completed by April Carter former Secretary of the D.A.C- Peace Movements 1945-1990 and about a decade ago she also published Direct Action and Democracy today.

The archives of the CND are held at the London School of Economics (Includes those of the Youth CND) and at the Modern Records Centre Warwick University)

The archives of Peace News are also held at the Peace Library at Bradford and I went through these when I visited. having worked briefly at Houseman’s 1959/1960, the ground floor and basement bookshop managed by Harry Mister above which the editorial staff prepared the newspaper at 5 Caledonian Road. N.1 just by Kings Cross station. I was not a Peace News staff man as a staged photograph of me in the publication taken during the Direct Action at Harrington in 1960 stated. I am seen with a grappling hook to scale the barbed wire but the purpose was only to sit down at the entrance. There is a six-minute newsreel video of this demonstration available from Concord Films. I was also a Peace News volunteer preparing postal copies on Wednesday evenings for sending to subscribers, part of a small group, some already activists or who became activists.

I make this point because for good and not so good reasons there has understandably been some rewriting of history to suit individual and the more general needs of changing times and personal circumstances and where it is also necessary to separate the genuine activist from the undercover media and undercover security services from several countries that were involved at the time together with the use of the agent provocateur.

The behaviour of the police at the Trafalgar Square Committee 100 action to protest Polaris was questioned by some national newspaper although the violence happened very late at night when most spectators and much of the media had departed. I monitored what happened with the wife of the London region CND and Aldermaston organiser George Clark This was a situation like Orgreave when there was political pressure on the police to react in a way. Anyone who thinks the police and the judiciary are not susceptible to political influence is living in a different dimension.

I hope the information now provided will add knowledge until I get around to my own project which came to an abrupt halt with the assassination of Jo Cox, the predictable Brexit vote, the resignations from the Shadow cabinet, forcing the re-election of the democratically elected leader and the attempted purge.

There are those, and a fellow campaigner who became the Professor of Education at Newcastle and Durham Universities, is one, who believed that the CND and Direct Action campaigns of the later 50’s and early 60’s had positive outcomes. I am of those who believe we failed just as the task of undoing the accumulated years of support for unfettered international capitalism since Margate Thatcher came to power and pursued by all governments thereafter will only be changed through a long struggle and continued sacrifice by most working people.

I urge every Labour Party Member and those who see themselves as part of the Labour and Trade union movements who have not already done so to read Dr Gaye Johnston’s e- book, available on Amazon for just over £1- “New Labour- Was the Gain worth the Pain?”  The book is based on a similar approach of yours in consulting and involving a wide range of people within the Party and Labour movement for their views on a range of related issues.

I am sending a copy of this communication to Councillor Gladys Hobson who was my boss, so to speak, at South Tyneside, in times past, and to Lord Beecham where our paths may have first crossed when he was at Oxford and I at Ruskin College, before doing so again three decades later, and to the constituency Member of Parliament for South Shields. Emma Lewell-Buck. Please pass on if you believe others mentioned in the book will find of interest, aspects of the ‘national’ story which I know something about although like many participants I was a passing small player as the majority were, many changing their positions following the Cuban crisis or following the establishment of new relationships, marriages, and extended families.

Please also pass on to Mike Down who solved something which has I have spent several years trying to remember and work out its former location, providing the name of the coffee bar- the Partisan in Soho where I worked casually clearing and cleaning tables and which enabled hearing what was going on including during a visit by Ralph Schoenman. I have not forgiven Christopher Driver for not returning the letter from Dora Russell after I had complained about the role of Ralph who interestingly reappeared during the so called Arab Spring. The long defence by Lord Russell   included at the end of the Ronald W Clark biography of how Mr Schoenman came to have such a hold is questionable.

Like Mike Down I also used to go to the Cy Laurie Club 1956-1957 on a regular basis and less frequently after that until 1959 when I became an activist. Some years ago, I met through Myspace space a couple who in the later 1950’s then attended an art college and who danced at the club while I looked on and who are still together living in Wales.

Although I only came to live in Sunderland and work for South Tyneside in 1974 everything I have learned since then confirms what you and others have written about how and why young people became politically active and supporters of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament here in the North East, and some, an involvement in the nonviolent Satyagraha campaigns of the Direct-Action Committee Against Nuclear War and mass demonstrations of the Committee 100.

It is to my shame that I only recently discovered the existence of the North East Labour History society when one of the meetings was held in association with the 2016 Durham Miners Gala and had two speakers talking about their experience of attending the adult education college located at Oxford, Ruskin College and where by coincidence I had returned from attending an annual reunion of their Fellowship and was in the process of rewriting my own experiences from 1961 to 1963 which I have circulated. I was delighted to read the four contributions from former Ruskin students in the 47^th Volume of the Journal of the Society.

I only recently went through the Internet published information about the North-East Labour History Society to find out what was already published on my present interests and discovered your book.

When I can return to rewriting my experiences and information I will put online my available documentation with commentary excluding private correspondence unless the individuals are dead, permission is gained, or the information is already separately available for public use. Because I wrote letters by hand or used a manual typewriter I do not have copies of letters I sent only those received. I have some pamphlets from the period and with each year there is an increase in the number of videos available on YouTube and Internet search engines. There is even one set of short videos prepared by the Schools Council from Newsreels as part of a                                                                                                                                                                         history study course for schools to communicate a  time of  war and peace 1939 to the Vietnam War. Peter Currell Brown who wrote Smallcreeps day was giving talks to school children in Nottinghamshire about his experiences last time I was in contact

Understandably, the police and security services are not releasing the photographs and videos taken during demonstrations or the work of their undercover people and informants although some of this will be on the records of individuals and redacted copies of the files are available under Freedom of Information now that 50 years has elapsed.

The main contribution I can immediately make is in relation to the march to Holy Loch which passed through the North East from Yorkshire on its way to Scotland and which Peter Currell Brown and I decided we wanted to do while in Stafford prison in 1960 combining the Salt marches of Gandhi (I have one of the 2000 published  original in English editions of Satyagraha published in Ahmedabad) and our then limited knowledge of the Jarrow Crusade and other hunger marches and where there is an exhibition at the Museum and Art Gallery in South Shields, and Society member Dr Matt Perry has published work and recently made a presentation  commemorating  the passing of 80 years at one of the Newcastle University public lectures.  Matt’s ongoing interest in who were the marchers and what happened to them matches one of my interests on who went to prison in the 1960’s when they did not have to, making their individual point that the possession and potential use of weapons of weapons of mass civilian extermination cannot not be justified although I believe that for the purpose of defence we need to participate and have access to ongoing research and which I assume is the reason the Americans  continue to insist as they did  in 1960 that the first strike nuclear submarine weapon base had to be located in the UK  because  they did not want a first strike within the states. The recent BB2 TV channel 2 documentaries The British Deterrent explains the background from the now released transatlantic state papers.

The other similarity with the Jarrow Crusade is that the core marchers on the Holy Loch march were also selected and on the basis that they were giving up something, a job, their family as there was concern about some becoming professional prison going activists and which played into the hands of those seeking to damage and end the then growing movement.

I wrote to Pat Arrowsmith with our project idea and this was taken up by the Direct-Action Committee and the letter is mentioned as a footnote in Gandhi and the West, Sean Scalmar, Cambridge University Press and part of the D.A.C records.

I was also influenced by having participated in two of the Youth CND organised marches from Liverpool to Hull 1960/1961 1961/1962 which included the subsequent Professor of Education previously mentioned, another who also became a Professor, with a third, a close friend who became a senior University Administrator, after spending six months on her own travelling in India and an Oxford degree at St Hilda’s during the time I was at Ruskin. There was also the daughter of a known clergyman who became a dancer at the Follies Bergere.  Individuals just joined in the core march so there may be no formal record other than the route, stop overs and provision of hospitality which included private homes where at Hull the offer of a bath, meal and bed by a member of the academic staff and his partner was very welcome.

As you mention there was a group of (selected) core marchers who walked all the way from Trafalgar Square to Holy Loch which included an embedded journalist from the Daily Mail! The intention was to gain support along the six-week march and where the extraordinary Pat Arrowsmith had undertaken preliminary work making contact re the provision places to put down the sleeping bags and provided food and drink and where she then went ahead, checking arrangements before returning after the marching day. Meetings and soap box stops were part of the project together with arousing local media interest. There is one other aspect of the march which has since been overlooked. Peter Currell Brown became a potter who loves making things and this included the canoes and kayaks, one of which was to have been pulled all the way to the Loch for the sea attempt to board a Polaris submarine and tie a Peace Flag.

There is a great photo of a flag being tied to a buoy and of the Polaris Action which had its base camp on the beach in the grounds of the Youth Hostel at Strone Point and another of a boat alongside the John Henry submarine in turn alongside the Proteus home base ship which invited the media on board to a presentation.

The march set off from Trafalgar Square at the end of the 1961 Easter weekend Aldermaston March which became so big that once the Square and surrounding pavements were filled the march went onto Hyde Park without stopping. No one has any idea of the actual numbers who came to London in support that day because the end rally was Trafalgar Square and not Hyde Park and some joined in during the central London section and went home again on reaching the Square unable to stop unless they had been told their coaches were parked around the Park. I said 250000 to one media request from the USA.

As Chief Marshal for the Holy Loch march, I had attended a meeting at the former New Scotland Yard with Aldermaston march Chief Marshal, George Clark at which we were openly introduced to representatives from other government departments and agencies as well as senior officers of the Metropolitan Police. I could give the recorded assurance that we did not intend to take direct action and deliberately break the law before reaching Holy Loch but this did not prevent the police on the day to renege on an agreement to allow two circuits of Trafalgar Square to enable core marches to join in, as we had been permitted to park a small van for our luggage, and for others to join in the first short leg that evening.

Therefore, we were moved away quickly at fast pace and some of the core marchers had to find their way to where we stayed overnight. In part police action appears to have been taken because of the huge numbers which came to London in support of the C.N.D and unknown to me the police had also gained intelligence that the Committee of 100 wanted to get in on our respective acts was planning a break away demonstration at the U.S.A embassy. My understanding is that there was a small inner group of the official planning and steering group of the Committee 100 and which in turn was set up after the first full meeting at which it was evident there were 100 different views of what we should do and when.

The Committee of 100 was a great mixture of personalities led by Ralph Schoenman  Earl Russell’s spokesman and secretary, John Osborn, Arnold Wesker, Shelagh Delaney and such like, members of the British Communist party and from the myriad factions supporting Leon Trotsky assassinated because his opposition to fascist socialism, other socialists, anarchists, syndicalists, pacifists, direct  actionists, the religious motivated and were also included those with prior associations with the British, Soviet and USA intelligence and security services. 

Michael Randle merits separate attention and I have got around to reading his book with Pat Pottle on why they helped the spy George Blake to escape from prison published in 1989 called- The Blake escape and who participated in the recent documentary with Blake who is 94 and still living in Moscow. I went out for a little while with a former girlfriend of Mike just after she had graduated and one of the reasons I went to Ruskin College instead of taking up the appointment as full time London region CND organiser is that she rejected an offer of marriage recommending Ruskin because going to the college would condense what I had to say!

I had been invited to join the Committee of 100 only after several of the first signatories had resigned on realising they were vulnerable to prosecution even if they did not participate in individual events but which they were expected to do. I resigned when it became evident that the Committee was not committed to the principles of Satyagraha and fortunately, as my name does not appear on the Wikipedia published list, I have retained the evidence of my membership and participation.

To emphasise that the march was governed by principles of transparency and of orderly participation and behaviour along the way, the police were called to take away a woman who joined the march disclosing that her four children had been taken into care. It was evident at the preliminary meeting for potential participant’s that agent provocateurs were present and those with different agendas.

There is mention in the book of Gerry Healey and the Socialist Labour League. I was asked by Harry at Peace News to man a bookstall at a national conference of the League at which Pat Arrowsmith was invited to speak. I therefore registered and listened to Pat and then stayed to hear what Gerry had to say immediately afterwards. He commenced by explaining that while the League supported the peace campaigns this did not apply to the Soviet Union where it was essential to maintain the worker’s bomb in the fight to destroy capitalism. He then reviewed their tactics of joining in workplaces and industries to create strikes as part of the process of educating and involving the working class and where he admitted there would be casualties. The plan for the coming year was to enter the machine tool industry. No one bought a book or pamphlet. Peter Fryer’s book, The Battle for Socialism is of interest in this respect. I have never worked out if the person who subsequently called at the family home was a League recruiter or from the security services with access to the list of those who had attended. A combination of my derision over retention of the worker’s bomb and the fundamentalist Catholic basis of my beliefs meant I was not immediately contacted again.

Throughout my life I have been willing to go over the top and in some instances to take the lead but only on the basis that those participating understood the risks and potential longer term implications of what we were doing. This was to lead me to resign as Chief Marshal of the Holy Loch march when it reached Glasgow.

Mention is also made in your book of the former Member of Parliament for Salford and sometime chairman of the Labour Party. On the private bus from London to Aldermaston march that year I had sat with two others who had participated in Operation Foulness and who had openly talked of their prison experience. I was called over by an older man sitting on his own who shared a tube of pastilles or wine gums and after talking about the experiences told him how I become a member of the executive of the Wallington and Labour Party at my first meeting because of a coup by the Young Socialists. It was only when we reached our destination that he disclosed he was Frank Allaun, an MP and a founder of the  Aldermaston March, and he invited me to keep in touch which I did, and later briefed him about Rackmanism housing conditions in Birmingham where I was studying for a child care qualification and working in the City Children’s department which led to Twilight zone headlines following a debate on Housing in the House of Commons and to my nearly being asked to leave the course, but where I was offered a job with the Council which I would have taken had I not already been signed up by Oxfordshire.

Mention is also made of the Labour Former Minister John Strachey and on the same bus to Aldermaston was his illegitimate son and with whom we shared the six months as unwanted guests of the specialist homes of the head of state and who also participated at Holy Loch and the Aldermaston and Liverpool to Hull marches.

At Bedford. where I had been held on remand refusing bail after the Harrington Northamptonshire Direct Action, I left to go to Scotland to organise support, food and accommodation from Glasgow, staying on an estate and at the Glasgow centre of the Iona Community. At one point, I was required by the Committee to make an urgent visit to Edinburgh where Pat Arrowsmith had persuaded other core marchers to ignore a police ban on marching down Princess Street, they were arrested and held at the police station until the substantial fines were paid.  During the period in Scotland my contact was with the office in London and not with Pat and the marchers. The money was immediately raised and after collecting a banker’s draft I arrived at the police station to be told the fines had been paid by the Scottish Union of Mine workers and everyone had been taken to their headquarters. I contacted the office was told to take a taxi, ensure the money was reimbursed and read the riot act to Pat for jeopardising the project.

Anyone who has met Pat will appreciate this was easier said than done. On arrival, I found the group including the Daily Mail journalist celebrating with bottles of whisky in the boardroom with Abe and Alec Moffat making everyone honorary members of the union. Having completed the mission, I beat a hasty retreat reporting the situation to the office in London and awaited the arrival of the marchers in Glasgow where there was a counsel of war, so to speak.

My mission to Scotland had only limited success as I was uneducated, young and inexperienced for the task and what success there was depended on the good will of others. Most memorable is the shoe maker at Clydebank who was said to be the local fixer and where when contacted the local police insisted on stopping the traffic and making available as many men as we needed to assist. At Greenock and Gourock the politicians arranged for three of their chief officers to meet me and offer to provide the accommodation, food and any other assistance necessary although I was unable to give an estimate of the numbers likely to be involved. A Liberal Party politician and supporter put on a party and his pregnant wife asked me to discouraging him from participating in the direct action. He was on the hillside overlooking one of the piers and I saw him come to join the sit down as I and others were being thrown on top of other supporters to make a pathway for USA naval personnel to access the Proteus or arrive from it. Fortunately, he was not among those arrested.

No one on the Dumbarton bank of the Clyde was prepared to meet and a Daily Express journalist warned that he been told to twist whatever I said in a negative way which he did on the front page of a Scottish edition. The executive committee of the Scottish Council for Nuclear disarmament, as it was called, were also cool and my report led to a visit by Peggy Duff.  I had been invited to attend the office of the chain fag smoking CND national secretary after being interviewed and recommended for the London region organiser’s job and all she wanted to know was if I would concentrate on campaigning within the law and it was evident she was rightly sceptical about the reassurance given. The interview for the position had taken place in a basement office of the Houseman’s Peace News building which remains a meeting place for a range of contemporary activists. The Scottish Council did give some reluctant support and I would like to think the worldwide media attention given to the Whitsun direct action led the Scottish T.U.C and Scottish Labour Party holding its own mini march and rally at Dunoon in June 1961 with Michael Foot the main speaker and where there is also a short film with a great musical soundtrack available.

A member of the Council took me to his Edinburgh club after the morning meeting where I had my first taste of pure long aged malt before I went back to Glasgow and he to the Dunoon peninsular. He also arranged for me to meet the local police chief at Dunoon where a short-hand typist took down what we proposed to do on the Loch and on land.  This led to a written warning from the Commander of the Flagship Scotland.

The situation then commenced to rapidly change as the Direct-Action Committee had joined forces with the Committee of 100 and a larger scale protest was being organised with trains hired by the Committee to bring people from London and I was asked to order as many ferries as Caledonian McBride had available and which amazing they readily agreed taking my word that there would many spectators in addition to participants.

A study of the geography of Holy Loch reveals that travelling by car or bus involved   very long journeys and the quickest way was take a Ferry from one of the many stops from places like Helensburgh and Kilcreggan and other ferry stops in addition to the route from Gourock to Dunoon and one into central Glasgow. I enjoyed little Scottish pancakes for a few pence with a coffee on early morning trips as I worked out the options and went to visit contacts, also staying for a few days at the base camp.

Pat Arrowsmith also had acquired use of a launch and an ocean going size craft like one of the Clyde Ferries and a well-known GP, Dr Rachel Pinney, whose mansion in Chelsea I later visited, had acquired a car boat which she drove up from London onto the Loch for Red Cross Rescue which proved necessary.

The problem was that the proposed action was different from what I had advised the authorities, not too great a problem as it was assumed there were one or more spies at the meeting and where in a subsequent Naval history article it was admitted the plans had been detected. The main reason why I resigned was because it was evident that people were to be allowed to participate in the sea and land action straight off the trains and ferries without preparation which then and now still I regarded as irresponsible and which became an issue as events on the day unfolded.

Leaving Glasgow upset, I went to the base camp contacting the youth hostel and arranging to be taken across the Loch from Sandbank. The early morning beautiful silence of the Loch contrasted with the presence of the Polaris supply ship and temporary nuclear weapon base.

There had been several practices runs and one of the group, the Operation Foulness prisoner who spent all six months on his own, although weekly marches were held in London to support him and those in Holloway, tied a peace flag on a Buoy which went on the front pages. On protest day, the submarine went to sea but the large supply vessel remained. The story of the American Years at Holy Loch is told by Andrene Messersmith, Argyll publishing, and which presents the US Navy perspective, in addition to that of the local community. Andrene was only a Scottish child when the then secret deal between the UK Prime Minister and USA President was negotiated.

The British Prime Minister was tricked into the base being at Holy Loch close enough to Glasgow for the city to be in peril and it was only later that the concession of somewhere more isolated was permitted. I now worry more about the two Trident births in the Gibraltar docks which the crews use for R and R. and running repairs Gibraltar is my parental homeland and with plans for it to become the Hong Kong of the Mediterranean (reference the Golden Book) although I see it more as a Berlin, given it is also the one of the online gambling capitals as well as money laundering centres of the world.  One of my uncles used to manage at Tangiers, the ferry between there, Gib, Algeciras and Ceuta (the film comedy the Captain’s Table with Sir Alec Guiness is centred on the ferry), one first cousin managed the Taxation office and another Customs. My father was the Vicar General and was awarded the OBE.

On the appointed day I decided against taking the second birth in one  of our craft  and was taken from the beach camp where four of the former Operation Foulness prisoners were involved to join the motor launch and to find that Pat and all the marshals had been arrested and taken to the Police Station at Dunoon, in a tactic which was subsequently used at Witney before Christmas that same year when there were four simultaneous Committee 100 actions organised  by local  committees and with Will Warren, also Operation Foulness, the Chief Marshall for the action to Brize Norton. Will went on to do brave peace work in Northern Ireland before his death.

One other had been in Holloway, took a job as a waitress at a hotel in the area after the Holy Loch protest, married and settled in Scotland. Another participated in one of the blocking of the piers, so in total seven of the thirteen Foulness Prisoners were directly involved. Two others, Jane, Lady Buxton and Margaret Turner published Gate Fever- The Cresset Press, on their experience in Holloway and later reformed the Prison Reform Council, with Lord Stonham the former Member of Parliament Victor Collins as President and invited me to chair a group of ex-prisoners who produced Inside Story 100 suggestions for prison reform.

Three events on that day should be mentioned. The first was that the motor launch was subjected to power hosing from the supply ship when we went alongside. We attempted to move away to avoid sinking but the water had flooded the engine compartment and we were without power.  It had been evident that special forces were monitoring events on the Loch and as we managed to move along the side of ocean going ship so we could decant protestors from the launch, a special forces unit attempted to smash a buoy between us and the ship and damaged the ship as we moved away. The ship was then taken out of the action and at this point the Red Cross car boat came to the rescue and commenced to tow us to the shore but then with the reduced numbers and with some removal of the water the engine restarted and we landed under[CS1] [CS2]  our own fuel.  Rachel Pinney gave me her home number to call when the demonstration ended and the visit to her Chelsea home was arranged. She hit the headlines subsequently and went to the USA. There is now good piece about her on Wikipedia.

Back on land I joined the sit down blocking one of the piers with crew members of the supply ship attempting to land or returning to the base vessel. They were then ordered to make their way by walking on people which understandably caused a reaction and it was necessary for me to intervene and to make the point that the naval men and police were doing their job and it was important not to provoke violence. The next tactic by the police was to remove people throwing them on top other protestors This was when the mental and physical preparation of Satyagraha is effective as you are relaxed prepared to be hurt but in fact after two or three attempts to remove me this way, the police gave up and I was not hurt.

Others were arrested and take away with a pathway created. A little later a former journalist at Peace News came to find me with a message from Pat Arrowsmith to end the blockade of the piers and to march in an orderly fashion to the Police station.  Although there were a few calls of who are you because I seemed to know what I was doing everyone assembled and waited until those from the other piers further down the loch arrived all those who wished set off for the police station where it was later reported there were some more arrests, or to get a ferry homeward. I suspect Pat’s intention was that I would accompany the march but I believed my place was to stay Lochside and ensure everyone went home.

Some supporters who had travel from afar decided to stay overnight and later when back at base camp we could see fires lit all around the loch. The number of people present had been extraordinary given the out of way location The Daily Mail journalist greeted declaring that journalists from around the world were present as the coverage was to prove.  The following morning, I went back across the loch to find out if people had the means to return to their homes but did not go to Dunoon. At some point, I went up a hillside and met the daughter of a future Labour Attorney General and Lord Chancellor together with her fiancée and who with her brother I had walked from Liverpool to Hull.

Peter said he and another at the camp proposed to go to the Iona community although later together we stayed a community in South Wales. I knew I not have any skills to earn my keep at the community where the Church and buildings were not completed until the mid-1960’s and where I visited on a holiday several decades later. I believe the community in Wales was Merthyr Tydfil where we were welcomed for a stay of a few days. Both communities where different from the shared house at Balham which played an unknowing role after I was released from prison when I commenced to understand who I had become and why and first appreciated that others could see into me what I had previously been unable to see or understand. The breakthrough occurred when one of the friends with whom I had walked from Liverpool to Hull came from Manchester where she worked to help and took me home in Balham and who also travelled to Stafford to welcome the six on our formal discharge.

At the end of the Holy Loch venture I had the means to London by train. I was paid £5 a week plus expenses. I had become adept at hitching lifts by then, once sleeping overnight in a bus shelter on Boxing day with a companion and then getting a lift with a milkman delivering for a couple of hours in the Derbyshire Peak countryside.

You mention Will Owen, the MP for Morpeth who lived in the Wallington when Parliament was sitting and his daughter attended at least one meeting of this group. As mentioned two other members were the sons of Ritchie Calder and where sadly both are dead. The daughter of the future Lord Chancellor visited to talk about the role of the Youth CND. The daughters of a local shoe maker and shop who had been a conscientious objector in WWII were also members.  The wife of Mervyn Peak who wrote Gormenghast held a social to raise funds for the small adult CND. I remember being impressed by the set of drums in the hallway of their home in Wallington, and learned that the drums belonged to one of their sons who attended the same Private Catholic school and with whom I was to establish brief contact four decades later when the book was turned into a play and performed in Newcastle at what is now Northern Stage.

A young woman who had suddenly appeared at a social event of the young socialists took an immediate interest in me and because what she disclosed about her work, a secretary at the Admiralty and her other background, I asked another member of the Executive Committee of Wallington and Beddington Labour, a Young Socialist about her and she said the first knowledge they had was from the social held to attract new members.  This aspect only became of interest again when talking with her about the Holy Loch experience and she commented with words in effect “we knew.” What surprised me is given what she had disclosed about her background that she could have the knowledge she alleged[CS3] .

By the time I commenced a full 12-month course to become a qualified child care officer at Birmingham University, I had little contact with her or anyone in the protest and direct action movements.

During the first academic term and where my place had not only been arranged by the Home Office but course fees were paid with a maintenance grant and which had to be supplanted because of the number and location of the practical experience placements involved, my care mother telephoned to say that my friend had been murdered on a Soho street and the police wished to interview me. I arranged to see the head of the course who advised me to take no action unless contacted by the police direct. However, because I believed that I had information about her private life which I considered relevant to finding her killer, I arranged to visit the police at a local station in Birmingham and provided the information which was to be passed to the investigating police force. It was not a formal statement under caution and two officers present only had telephone contact with who I now assume was the Metropolitan Police although what I believe was the home of her grandparents was still then in Surrey. The gist of what I had said was subsequently read over the phone to me by Birmingham Police and because it broadly reflected what I had said, I agreed but was not asked to physically sign.

I was not called to the Inquest but heard from my family what had been reported in the local press. It has been my understanding that the murder remained unsolved and there were reasons reinforced by my work in child care that until recently I did not consider it appropriate to make any inquiries. My mother who suffered severe memory loss with psychosis as she approached her 100 years destroyed all the press cuttings about me, and documentation about herself and me before going into residential care, so deciding that I would include something my relationship and the murder in the autobiography I used the Internet to see if press information remained on any public file.

I discovered that the police investigation papers had been sealed at National Archives for 100 years but under Freedom of Information a copy has been made available of what is recorded to have been my signed statement at Birmingham but which shows no signature and which has been made available in full with the only the redaction of the names of third parties I had mentioned. I remain in a dilemma because while the aspects of the information which led me to make the statement are not included there are continuing reasons in the interests of others not to pursue, as well as to do so.

I mention now because it demonstrates the gulf that can develop over decades between memory and written record. When I decided to investigate, I believed the person had worked for the Home Office because of the intelligence operation I assumed had taken place, forgetting that Holy Loch was sea protest as well as on land and that the official warning letter had come from the Admiralty. I had also forgotten that I had been with her at a named location in London and I had introduced her to two members of the Committee 100 who are not named[CS4] . There is also another meeting in the street when she came out of a premise next to the Two Eyes Coffee bar in Soho and to meeting her with a female friend locally who was introduced including her then place of work. Memory without supporting contemporary record must always be questioned and just not accepted because the person saying it appears genuine and even the written record without corroboration should be questioned.

An example immediately coming to mind is one when as an Area Children’s officer, I took over a team where an officer had just left and I decided to read through every file before deciding if I agreed to the transfer notes that cases could be closed, or needed to be reallocated based the departing officers stated level of recommended priorities and my knowledge of the workload of the Senior child care officer and child care officer team. I cannot now remember what it was in one file that made me decide to make a personal visit before deciding on closure. The subject of the original referral confirmed that it had been made but there had been none of the subsequent visits which had been recorded in some detail. I believed the client although the writing up was very good.

I will for now comment briefly on the related issue of the ability of child care officers past and I suspect present to keep records, to read what they and others have written and the ability of  supervisors, other professionals and their managers other managers, magistrates and counclllors to know what  information is appropriate and what questions therefore should be asked, together with my rusty memory of  courts, police, records and statements and  one national inquiry during the period 1962-2003. In Oxfordshire where I was attended courts on behalf of the county it was agreed the Juvenile Court magistrates would hear reports and question individual child care officers on children committed to the care of the local authority instead of to approved schools and these sessions were attend by the Children’s Officer and teams of officers in rotation. One got a frown of disapproval at the time and a talking to afterwards if the magistrates asked something and you did not know and could not be answered from the file. A similar approach was taken when at the London Borough of Ealing when each of the three area teams submitted summary reports on a selection of cases to a sub-committee of the Children’s Committee in rotation and where the Children’s officer, the Deputy, an ex head teacher, and the Assistant Children’s Officer attended and where first as a senior and then as an Area officer I was expected to have read the  files of the selected cases before one of the principals did the same and Councillors read and questioned the child care officer.

By the time I arrived the excuse that the files inherited from the former Middlesex Council were inadequate and unacceptable was no longer acceptable because each file had a record of relevant information with an updated summary and where regular rereading of the whole file was essential for children who had spent and were spending the greater part of their life in public care. I was only to spend a few months getting know the sixty-six councillors before warning newly appointed social workers to remember that the councillor would probably know all that there was to know about an applicant seeking assistance for an individual or family such was the nature of a stable community in the North East.

Whether one is attempting to pass the scientific research test, an academic thesis or beyond all reasonable doubt test, there is no substitute for doing the work required and getting others to check as well as judge. The other final example for now is what happened during and independent inquiry in which I participated as an expert panel member following the harrowing death of baby girl left alone by her single parent.

The local authority was negligent because it failed to recreate a missing file when it disappeared and then to do so effectively before an Inquest, a criminal trial and before the  Inquiry hearings commenced and when later in the inquiry, I asked a senior officer if I was right to assume that the boarding out register had been checked and Deputy Director did not  know the answer, the following morning it was evident that two subsequent social workers, one who became a senior and went on to be appointed by the Home Secretary to the original and what is not the statutory Jay Inquiry panel did not know as all those in the authority, the Area office, the Assistant and deputies the chief officers, the lawyers, and the chief executives did not know of the register which the department kept by law and brought to light two sets of foster parents who said they were surprised not to have been contacted before and whose evidence was most significant.

I was struck about the issue of politicians and magistrates knowing the right questions to ask if they had been provided with the right basic information at the recent meeting of the Home Affairs Select Committee when the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office was recalled to explain  why he and the present Home Secretary had been economical in  disclosing what the former Home Secretary and our Prime Minister had known, what the Home Office and present Home Secretary had known  about the situation  which developed throughout the period when Dame Goddard had chaired the Panel following scrutiny by Government and an appearance before the Home Affairs Committee. I apologise if I have misunderstood the official record of the meeting and which I watched live at the time. The Permanent Secretary appears to be saying that he was surprised that the Committee had not pressed the Home Secretary further after she stonewalled. One of the Committee Members asked how they were expected to ask the right questions if the basic information was being deliberately withheld by the Ministers and department!

I know also provide two example of where culture, establishment protectionism, the limitations of oral testimony and the need for a forensic examination of written records (and which hopefully the monster digital data consuming and analysis programmes of today have overcome) can be condensed first into one example from the Gates Inquiry. At  the request of the two other expert panel members I had spent months going through all the documentation in preparing our extended argument that had the professionals and their managers made other choices, taken different decisions, the child may well have been alive to this day and  which was different from the Chairman’s report which accurately reflected the position of the barristers, the lawyers and their clerks employed by the authorities to protect their reputations and  limit  the criticism. After the work was done, we met and went through everything line by line, word by word, and one of two made the brilliant suggestion that we should list the instances which came to more than 100, although they were of different significance individually it was their totality which we wished to communicate. The agreed document was submitted to the Commissioning authorities for onward transmission to the core participants to correct matters of fact. Unfortunately, the decision was taken not to provide us with the final version of the Chairman’s report, now a senior retired Judge, and it could be argued that the intention was to raise issues which would discredit what we had prepared although in the event the media focussed on what we had said because it fitted what they had anyway known before the Inquiry commenced.

The point will appear trivial now but we challenged in our report the oral statement by a health visitor on being questioned that she had returned to the family home later the same day of an earlier visit to check on the situation. The point the chairman made in his report was that the written record showed that two visits had been made. This was correct but if the record is closely examined it will be noted that the writing is different as is initials which indicated that someone else visited who may or may not have appreciated the situation and the background.

Twenty years later may care mother was inappropriately and unnecessarily admitted to a district general hospital against her expressed wishes and she died three weeks later from a hospital infection. Over three years, I went through the then complaints procedures of the local authority, the Family Practitioner Committee and the District General Hospital, attending meetings, bringing in a local support group in one instance, insisting on appeals, writing to Members of Parliament, one of whom was the former Foreign Secretary and candidate for the Leadership of the Labour party, having a meeting with the Deputy Chief Medical Officer at the Department of Health, agreeing to an Inquiry by the Health Ombudsman and a review  by the Deputy  Chief Ombudsman where some professionals and managers lied, some their words against mine  but where in other situations there was recorded evidence and in the end I  stopped after weighing up the pro and  cons of the options still available. When my birth mother died in her 100^th year, four years after the death of my care mother. I could obtain a copy of her GP record as I was of mine for the separate purpose of finding out if there was any record of my identity, but as anticipated there were no records on either file until several years after the creation of the National Health Service and the retirement of the GP who one must suspect destroyed the records because of what they disclosed if my birth mother had asked to do so.

I looked casually at first at the social history and care plan, prepared for my birth mother and where one had also been prepared for my care mother by the care manager, a senior manager of the Social Services Department in the area where the two-sister lived and had been appointed because of who I had been. They were excellent plans fully implemented in so far as the two independent women were prepared to accept. My mother first refused my suggestion of a walking stick in her early nineties because they were for old people, but I now use in my seventies one of the sticks they both agreed to use when going to mass on Sundays when accompanied and not go out on their own and where following her retirement as a preliminary school teacher, my birthmother insisted they went to mass every day of the week.

Now here’s the rub. I took a second look. Both had the initial M Smart but their Christian names were different and it was evident what happened is that the reports had been placed on each other’s file.  The reports were so good as case summaries that it was only if you read back into the files you realised the report and the records did not match. There is evidence, and in fairness when I met the GP he apologised four year before this and took responsibility and retired, that this was start of an alarming chain of mistakes and misunderstanding on the part of a dozen different people and where no one at any time told me what the first mistake had been. When the GP visited, he thought the person he was seeing was my birth mother and not her sister.  Returning to the 1981 Inquiry hearings the Consultant paediatrician in evidence broke down when admitting that it was only when preparing to give evidence that he read back through the file and realised for the first time what was there. He resigned and returned to his homeland.

I want to end for now with the question how come the people of Scotland have voted to bring so many Scottish Nationalist Party members to Westminster and to retain their control of the devolved Parliament knowing their united opposition to the renewal of the Trident carrying submarines when at the same time most the Parliamentary Labour Party voted for their replacement? I wonder how many of those voting for the mass extermination of human beings have been in a Blitz night after night, year after year?