Rosie Foster Photo: Tess McMahon
Rosie Foster, who died a couple of short months after being diagnosed with cancer, was an extraordinary human being who made a deep impression.
I can’t remember when I met Rosie – it seemed she’d always been around in Leeds and I knew she had lived in Tangram Housing Co-op in the ’90s and had some involvement in Horton Women’s Holiday Centre.
Our lives properly connected after she moved to Nutclough Housing Co-op in Hebden Bridge and joined…
Narayan Desai Photo: Yann Forget
Milan Rai writes:
I met Narayan Desai, the Indian pacifist regarded by many as the last living link to Mohandas K Gandhi, at the War Resisters’ International Triennial in India in 2010 (PN 2518). That gathering was held at Gujarat University (Gujarat Vidyapith) in Ahmedabad in the state of Gujarat in India; Narayan was chancellor of the university from 2007 until late last year. Narayan led us all in a huge swirling dance to close…
Geoffrey Carnall
Geoffrey Carnall began reading Peace News as a teenager in 1939. When mainstream distributors refused to handle PN during the Second World War, he cycled round Cambridge delivering bundles of the paper. He was still delivering PN to the Edinburgh Peace and Justice Centre until a few weeks before his death. He served on the PN board during Hugh Brock’s editorship, and his numerous letters and articles have added historical perspective and considered…
I first worked with Mike on Labour Briefing in the late 1980s. For those who don’t know, Briefing was – and still is – a magazine for socialist activists in the Labour Party that began life in the early 1980s, when it played a key role in the election of Ken Livingstone as the left-wing leader of the Greater London Council. By the late 1980s, those heady days seemed far behind us, following the catastrophic defeats of the movement under Thatcher’s government. Many at this time…
David Lane, lifelong pacifist and peace activist, died in September at the age of 80 after a long, and latterly very sad, struggle with Parkinson’s.
David met his wife, Nancy, when they were both members of PYAG (Pacifist Youth Action Group) and where they were also to meet Ian Dixon, currently chair of Housmans Bookshop and Peace News Trustees. David and Ian were both conscientious objectors and served as porters at The Royal Free Hospital in London from 1952-1955.
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Roy Prockter, who died suddenly on 18 June, aged 64, from a heart attack, was a chartered accountant and an active Quaker, who made both his professional skills and his commitment to nonviolence available to a number of radical pacifist groups and organisations.
One of his main concerns was the compulsory deduction of taxes contributing towards maintaining armed forces and providing lethal weapons.
He became active in the Peace Tax Campaign (now Conscience – Taxes for…
The Quaker meeting at Pwllheli Community Centre on Saturday 3 May, following the sudden death of Arfon Rhys, was, in many ways, unusual. Never had the small local group of Friends seen so many people at a Welsh Quaker meeting. The silence was enriched when someone felt moved to speak quietly of Arfon: family, students, peace campaigners, Welsh language campaigners, colleagues and friends. By contrast, the buffet provided by allotment friends afterwards was far from quiet.
People had…
Arlo Tatum played significant roles in the US, British and international pacifist movements. Born into a Quaker family in Iowa, he politely wrote in 1941, aged 18, to the US attorney general announcing his refusal to register for the draft – US conscription – imposed in advance of US entry to the Second World War. He was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in the Federal Correctional Institution, Sandstone, Minnesota, the youngest prisoner when he entered.
A natural baritone, Arlo, on…
Labour party left-winger and committed peace activist Tony Benn was one of those dangerous figures who can start to make you believe that the system might work after all.
He was a hereditary peer who campaigned (successfully) to be allowed to go back to being a commoner – and a member of the house of commons (where he served for 50 years). He was a cabinet minister who supported workers…
Few colleagues would have known that Sheila Oakes’ father was lieutenant-general sir Robert Sturges of the royal marines, until Sheila strategically revealed the fact during a TV debate. Her opponent, general sir John Hackett, argued that peace activists were naïve. ‘I’ll have you know I’m the daughter of a general,’ Sheila retorted, and, to their great surprise, her team won the debate.
With her sharp mind, fluent powers…
On the back of his precocious autobiography Sum Total, first published when he was 23, Ray is quoted: ‘I am for the working classes, for the underdog, for the seedy and the left behind… and the England that seemed and still seems an impossible dream.’
In a dim corner of Ray’s home from home, the Hard To Find Café in Nottingham, where I attended his wake, the photographs on display told their own story: young good-looking Ray, slight of build with attempted Tony…
Howard's sudden death has left us shocked and bereaved, and with an irrational sense of outrage that he has left us so unexpectedly. He was only 63 and in the middle of helping organise next summer’s WRI conference in South Africa. He leaves a gap which others must strive to fill. It will be difficult, and the following overview and appreciation of his life as a peace activist, organiser and researcher will give some indication of the scale of the challenge.
But before reviewing his…
Known by Greenham Women and Cruisewatch as Jean Witney, this tiny woman of towering strength brought love, determination and common sense to her work as another peace woman extraordinaire. In an Oxford Mail interview, Jean once said: ‘Going to Greenham was a seminal point in my life. I don’t know what it was about the place, but you got a great positive strength from being there and…
If I’ve ever met a personification of the word ‘staunch’, I think it must have been Pat Allen. Over many decades, Pat was a linchpin of London Region CND and an indispensable part of the national CND office.
Pat was born at the beginning of the Great Depression, and his family lived on or near the bread line for most of the decade. His father had lost part of a lung due to a gas attack during the First World War. His mother, who often told him of her recollections of that war,…
Born at 155 Hither Green Lane, Lewisham, in 1916, he was brought up in the Congregational Church, and in 1935 responded to the reverend Dick Sheppard’s invitation to declare that ‘I renounce war and will never support or sanction another’, joining the Peace Pledge Union.
Having left Colfe’s Grammar School in 1932, Leslie started working at Barclay’s bank in 1935 after a brief spell working for stockbrokers in the City. He married Barbara Freeman – a shorthand typist at Barclay’s…
