Martin Levy - Ban the Bomb!

No, I didn’t leave as a result of falling out with dad. It was rather the other way around. We fell out to some extent because I decided to leave the farm. By that point I simply felt happier growing vegetables than working with animals, and here we’re back to Dr Kerr and vegetarianism again. My dad was certainly angry and upset when I decided to leave, and actually I was upset too to see how much distress my decision was causing him. I remember writing a letter to my mother saying this.

In Limpsfield I took lodgings with a woman and worked at a nearby market garden for a short period, then came home at Christmas. My dad was so keen to get me back that he said that I could plough up a field and do what I liked with it and not have anything to do with the animals. I agreed to that and came back to the farm for a time. But that arrangement didn’t really work because I was still part of the farm team, and the idea of cultivating and growing stuff separate from the others just wasn’t practical. Anyway, I still had my peace work to think about. In fact, it was about that time that I became involved with the Pacifist Youth Action Group.

Oh, tell me about that?

This was a group I joined with other young conscientious objectors, including David Graham and Ian Dixon, both of whom I’ve already mentioned, and Chris Farley. I don’t know whether it was formally affiliated to the PPU, but it was certainly in line with their policies. We used to have regular pickets outside the prisons where they were holding conscientious objectors, and I travelled by train to London on one or two occasions to join in. And then some of these same people were involved in speaking at Speaker’s Corner at Hyde Park. There was a young woman too, Carol Taylor from Manchester, who died I think recently. She became Carol Fitz-Gibbon and a very well-known educationalist. She was a brilliant speaker. A small woman and very feisty. She would get a big crowd. There was one occasion: a heckler there was really getting us down, saying things like, ‘Warfare? It’s just cannibalism.’ And she said, ‘It’s not cannibalism. Because they don’t eat the bodies!’

Talking of oratory, were there any other speakers who particularly impressed you at this time? The Methodist churchman Donald Soper, for instance?

Soper had the reputation of being an outstanding orator. He spoke regularly at Tower Hill as well as at Speakers’ Corner, though I don’t think he ever spoke from our platform and I didn’t myself hear him speak in public. He appeared frequently on the radio programme, ‘Question Time’. He also joined the Direct Action Committee. Most of us then were virtually unknown and he was one of the ‘names’. He even came and sat down with us at Aldermaston at the end of the first Aldermaston march, in 1958, though we weren’t causing an obstruction and so didn’t risk arrest.

Can you tell me something about the background of the people you’ve mentioned in the Pacifist Youth Action Group? For some reason, I imagine that most of them were a bit Oxbridge.

Well, certainly neither Ian Dixon nor David Graham were Oxbridge. Ian was born and brought up here in Yorkshire, in Hipperholme I think. I don’t know what Chris Farley’s background was. He may have been public school; I don’t know.

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