'What did we change? The spirit of the times'

JIM GILCHRIST meets three of Scotland's early CND supporters and asks them about their involvement, their memories – and whether they think that half a century of Ban The Bomb has really done any good

FIFTY YEARS ago on Sunday, and less than 13 years after that fateful burst of atomic destruction over Hiroshima ushered in the age of nuclear weaponry, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament came into being. It happened at a gathering of some 5,000 people in Westminster's Central Hall in London.

Just a week later, a public meeting in Edinburgh's Usher Hall, attended by 1,000 people (who battled a blizzard to be there), saw the emergence of what would become Edinburgh CND, while a smaller meeting at the city's Simpson House on 22 March saw the birth of Scottish CND.

Amid growing concerns at Britain's development of the hydrogen bomb and the Cold War proliferation of such weapons, there had been numerous initiatives, including the formation of Direct Action Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons (DAC). Bertrand Russell would leave CND in 1960 to form another direct action group, the Committee of 100.

North of the Border, in April 1957 The Scotsman carried a letter from the Edinburgh Council for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons Tests (ECANWT), which was behind the Usher Hall meeting and had been formed by concerned parents and staff of Edinburgh's Rudolph Steiner school.

The first of the great anti-nuclear protest marches, from London to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, was organised in 1958 by the DAC, with the support of CND.

By 1961, the now-annual march, changed round to start from Aldermaston and finish in London, was being run by CND and attracting as many as 150,000 people at its peak.

For that first march, the artist Gerald Holtom designed the CND logo, with its encircled semaphore signals for "N" and "D", for nuclear disarmament, now established as a universal peace symbol, not to mention fashion accessory. The accompanying slogan, "ban the bomb", marched into common vocabulary.

Fifty years on, we speak to three long-time Scottish anti-nuclear activists who recall the fears, the passions and the fun of campaigning against weapons of mass destruction.

'In a sense we were fighting, but it wasn't bitter, it was life-affirming'

MARION BLYTHMAN

THE protest songs sung by CND marchers south of the border – anthems such as The H-Bomb's Thunder – were regarded as being a bit on the sombre side by their Scottish counterparts at the Holy Loch, explains Marion Blythman, a retired educationalist who in the 1960s was involved with the Committee of 100. Blythman's late husband, Morris, aka "Thurso Berwick", was the songwriting genius behind many ban-the-bomb ditties, as often as not "workshopping" them in collaboration with fellow demonstrators, including folk singers such as Josh McRae.

"Morris's idea was (that], if you were writing a song, you should 'bawl each line into a slogan'," she explains. Thus when Captain Lanin, commander of the Proteus depot ship, contemplating canoe-borne protesters approaching his vessel, famously exclaimed "They look like a bunch of goddam eskimos", his remark boomeranged when Thurso Berwick and company wrote The Glasgow Eskimos to the tune of Marching Through Georgia (a tune already appropriated as an Orange Order anthem). And after George MacLeod, founder of the Iona Community, told an anti-Polaris meeting "you cannot spend a silver dollar when you're dead", that quickly metamorphosed into "you canny spend a dollar when you're deid", another enduring Blythman collaboration.

So the Glasgow Eskimos serenaded the Yanks and the polis alike. "The songs were cheeky but good humoured," says Blythman. Did the police agree? "I don't think they minded them at all," she laughs. "They weren't inciting anyone to violence."

Morris died in 1981, but Marion has stayed involved with the movement, she and her daughters joining anti-Trident protests at Faslane. "In a sense we were fighting, but it wasn't a bitter kind of thing, it was more…" Life-affirming? "Absolutely."

Asked how effective she thinks they were in their campaign, she muses: "Sometimes I thought we were quite near it; on the other hand, you knew perfectly well that at no particular time was the government going to take it all away. They were just dominated by the Americans.

"But what we did change was the spirit of the times. All the people who are against Faslane and so on today, and the fact that the Scottish government is now saying they're against it… that's probably something to do with the climate we set."

'There was a realisation that humankind had the power to destroy … we felt that everybody should be shocked'

DUNCAN MACINTOSH

DUNCAN Macintosh opens a big volume full of family photographs, one of which shows an early CND march through Edinburgh. He is now 63 but in this picture he appears as a diminutive, kilted figure, carrying a banner. "That was probably 1959," he says, then turns to another snap: a family picnic during one of the earliest Aldermaston marches.

The entire Macintosh family was deeply committed to banning the bomb. Duncan's father, Ronald, had been involved in the peace movement before the war – although he saw service in the Far East with the RAF – and was one of the Steiner school group involved in the formation of Edinburgh CND. Duncan's mother, Bertha, was also an active campaigner all her days (in later life she was celebrated in at least one newspaper headline as "the ban-the-bomb granny").

Macintosh, a building conservation officer with Renfrew Council, says: "I think there was a dawning realisation that humankind had the power to destroy on such a scale. We felt then that everybody should be shocked by that and I'm concerned a lot of young people today don't realise it." He remembers the reaction of douce Edinburgh to these early demonstrations. "Edinburgh was a very conservative city at that time – with a big 'C' and a little 'c' – so it was quite extraordinary to see such a very large number of respectable people carrying banners through the streets. I don't think there was any hostility; I think it was more surprise, but there were so many establishment figures (in the demonstrations], from ministers to professors, that I don't think it could be dismissed."

However, respectability didn't prevent his parents getting on the wrong side of the law. His father was one of several activists arrested (though later acquitted) in 1960 for distributing leaflets outside a cinema which was showing the nuclear apocalypse movie On the Beach; while his mother spent a night in the cells after a Holy Loch sit-down protest. "A policeman came to the door with the official notification that she had been arrested – this nice house in this nice suburb of Edinburgh," smiles Macintosh, "and in his deferential way he was so embarrassed. 'I'm so sorry, sir. I think there must have been some awful mistake, but…'"

Ask him what he thinks CND has achieved over the past half-century and Macintosh points to the nuclear non-proliferation and partial nuclear-test-ban treaties of the 1960s – "I think the dangers were reduced because we were alerting the public to them and it became a political issue." A long-time member of the Labour Party who quit after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he is optimistic about the Scottish Parliament's anti-nuclear credentials: "At last we have Holyrood and church leaders and the STUC in unity with the opinion of the Scottish people, and that's a tremendous achievement, because in the old days we were in a minority."

He recalls, still with visible emotion, the year that the Aldermaston march became so big that it converged on London's Parliament Square along two routes.

"The Scottish contingent was at the front of one of them, so we could see the point where one group came over Westminster bridge and we came down Victoria Street and the two groups met and the place was absolutely full of people. It was wonderful to feel that so many people had come together."

'The great struggle was educational … people didn't believe in radiation'

ISOBEL LINDSAY

"SMILE sweetly, dear, it'll make them feel worse." Isobel Lindsay still remembers the words of the woman beside her on Ardnadam Pier at Sandbank, during her first sit-down protest against the American nuclear presence in the Holy Loch. "It was May 1961," she recalls "the supply ship that serviced the Polaris submarines was already there, and they hadn't really managed their techniques for coping with demonstrators. So there were American sailors clambering all over us, and we were committed to non-violence. I remember this Quaker lady, who must have been in her seventies, saying that to me. I've remembered it ever since as an important approach."

Lindsay, 63, a lecturer in sociology at Strathclyde University and a long-time SNP activist and politician, went on her first CND demonstration in her already politicised mid-teens. "My father went into Hiroshima with the British forces after the bomb had been dropped, so I heard all about the devastation at first hand. This was (a situation] I was anxious to do something about."

She and Tom McAlpine, involved in the Iona Community and who would later become her husband, helped establish Lanarkshire CND in 1960, at the start of CND expansion in Scotland prompted by the arrival of Polaris.

"Whenever there seems to be a possibility of changing policy, activity is high and the mood buoyant, and there was still some hope that it might be possible to prevent the full deployment of the Holy Loch base," she recalls. "In 1964, we were naïve enough to hope that, if Labour won the election, it would be cancelled." In the event, when Harold Wilson came to power, those who had hoped to see Polaris scrapped were sadly disillusioned.

"The great struggle – and the great achievement – was educational. I remember arguing with members of the public about what nuclear weapons were. People didn't believe in radiation. We certainly educated the public, and we politicised a lot of young people in relation to war and peace issues."

Lindsay is anxious that this 50th anniversary doesn't become a cause just for nostalgia. "We're at a stage when the danger of proliferation is very serious. We lost a great opportunity after the end of the Cold War; if the nuclear powers had put an effort into fulfilling their obligations, they could have moved towards complete nuclear disarmament, but they didn't."

There has been a renewed swell of support, she says, over the proposed "son of Trident" and she is positive about the current Holyrood administration's opposition to the replacement. "There is potential there and I think many people in the peace movement have moved to support independence on this issue. There are a lot of people down south looking at what's happening here and they see Scotland as a source of hope."