Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Foot’s elevation to the Labour leadership set the seal on an extraordinarily successful year for CND. It had already staged rallies in Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester and York, but the highlight was a massive ‘Protest and Survive’ march to Trafalgar Square on 26 October. Only a year earlier, CND had been delighted with crowds of a few hundred. Now it attracted an estimated 80,000 people, including yet more Buddhist monks, a delegation from Plaid Cymru, the Devizes branch of Friends of the Earth and a group called ‘Pimlico School Kids Against the Bomb’, as well as people wearing gas masks and ‘bloodstained bandages’. ‘It was a fantastic day,’ wrote Tony Benn:

  I am not a descriptive writer but everything about it was thrilling. There were fourteen columns – the national column first, then Scotland and Wales, then East Anglia, and so on, right the way through. There was a huge balloon in the sky shaped like a hydrogen bomb with a mushroom cloud, and there was a children’s puppet theatre. It had this element of gaiety and festivity about it, and there were tens of thousands of young people …

  It has been a really exciting day. The old CND is back, stronger, more determined, more united, with the Labour Party altering its view on nuclear disarmament.

  As if that were not excitement enough, Benn also found time to speak at a CND festival at the Bristol Corn Exchange. Newbury’s Joan Ruddock made what he thought a ‘good speech’, but the star attraction was the actress Julie Christie, who earned ‘huge applause’. Afterwards, Benn travelled back to London with her, which was evidently a great treat. ‘She likes farm life and is a dedicated sort of socialist,’ he wrote enthusiastically. ‘We talked about Vanessa Redgrave and Jane Fonda, and whether they suffered for their views.’17

  Nine days after the march in London, the Americans handed CND its biggest gift of all. ‘Reagan has beaten Carter in the American presidential election,’ Benn wrote on 4 November, ‘and it is a dark day for the western world.’ The peace movement had long flirted with outright anti-Americanism, but Ronald Reagan made everything ten times worse. To many British observers, he seemed a walking parody, a Western gunslinger with his finger poised on the nuclear button. Reagan’s hawkish policies, warned the Guardian, were ‘misconceived to the point of peril’, and could easily provoke a Soviet overreaction. It was dreadful, agreed the novelist Caroline Blackwood, to have an American president who genuinely believed that he was going to heaven and therefore viewed ‘nuclear war with a certain nonchalance’. But it was a CND poster that put it best, advertising a new production of Gone with the Wind (‘The Film to End All Films – The most EXPLOSIVE love story ever’). The picture shows a rugged Reagan sweeping Mrs Thatcher off her feet, while in the background a mushroom cloud rises into the sky. ‘She promised to follow him to the end of the earth,’ reads the tagline. ‘He promised to organise it!’18

  In reality, all this was based on a complete misapprehension. Despite his anti-Communist rhetoric, Reagan had a profound horror of nuclear weapons and dreamed that one day he would be able to get rid of them. The historian John Lewis Gaddis calls him ‘the only nuclear abolitionist ever to have been president of the United States’. But very few people realized that at the time. As Reagan closed in on the presidency, a poll for Panorama found that 48 per cent of people believed a nuclear war was likely in their lifetime, while 70 per cent thought the threat had increased in the last twelve months. Two days after his victory, the Mirror ran what it called a ‘shock issue’: ‘Britain and the Bomb! Will it keep the peace? Is YOUR home a target? What warning will we get? Would ANYONE survive?’ Page after page hammered home the threat of disaster, from a spine-chilling profile of the Cambridgeshire village of Molesworth (‘In Moscow’s Sights: The Doomsday Village’) to an unsettling picture of an entire family dressed in gas masks and radiation suits (‘Enter the Nuclear Family’). ‘Britain is Europe’s number one target,’ explained a cheerful piece by CND’s Bruce Kent. Unless the government immediately disarmed, it would find itself heading ‘down the road to a national suicide built on the willingness to commit mass murder’.19

  By the autumn of 1980 this kind of talk was everywhere. In the next few years publishers rushed out so many predictions of a Third World War – War Plan UK, Defended to Death, London After the Bomb, The Fate of the Earth – that a collector could have used them to build a fallout refuge. Conservative novelists often imagined a future under Soviet occupation: in Kingsley Amis’s Russian Hide and Seek (1980), the Russian conquerors have become the aristocracy in a feudal Britain; while in Ted Allbeury’s All Our Tomorrows (1982), moral permissiveness, trade union militancy and – of course! – French treachery have fatally undermined Britain’s defences. But many visions of the future were even bleaker, such as Russell Hoban’s brilliantly strange Riddley Walker (1980). Set in southern England, 2,000 years after a nuclear war, it depicts a neo-medieval society where the language has decayed to the point of unintelligibility. In the past, says the narrator, men and women lived in cities of magic and machines. But then, one day, ‘there come a flash of lite then bigger nor the woal worl and it ternt the nite to day. Then every thing gone black. Nothing only nite for years on end. Playgs kilt people off and naminals nor there wernt nothing growit in the groun.’20

  If Riddley Walker was the most inventive version of a post-nuclear Britain, the most unsettling was surely Raymond Briggs’s When the Wind Blows, published in 1982. A milkman’s son who had studied at art college, Briggs was one of the best-known children’s writers in the land, having won enormous acclaim for Father Christmas (1973) and The Snowman (1978). His latest book used the same child-friendly style, which is one of the things that makes it so moving. The characters, based on Briggs’s parents, are James and Hilda Bloggs, a gentle working-class couple who build their own fallout shelter as war approaches. The book’s terrible power lies in the contrast between their naive optimism – their nostalgia for the Second World War, their unquestioning faith in the government – and the increasingly dreadful reality of their plight. In one awful moment, they misunderstand the Protect and Survive instructions, leave their shelter and go wandering about, exposing themselves to fallout. When they smell ‘roast meat’, they assume their neighbours are cooking dinner; in fact, the smell comes from their neighbours’ burning bodies. In the book’s final scene, they lie in their shelter, dying of radiation sickness, praying quietly together, before the story fades into blankness. It is hard to think of any other book of the decade that packs such a punch. But Briggs made no apology for being such a pessimist. ‘How can you be anything else’, he asked, ‘when you’re writing about a nuclear war?’21

  Even in When the Wind Blows, there are moments of blackly comic humour, and on television some writers tried to squeeze every last laugh from the prospect of Armageddon. In the fourth episode of The Young Ones (November 1982), an unexploded atomic bomb falls into the students’ house. ‘I’m going to consult the incredibly helpful Protect and Survive manual!’ says Nigel Planer’s Neil, to the hilarity of the studio audience. And in one episode of Only Fools and Horses, ‘The Russians are Coming!’ (October 1981), Rodney Trotter persuades his brother Del to build their own fallout shelter. As Rodney explains, ‘It only takes one little rumble in the Middle East, then missiles are gonna start flying.’ After the brothers have put their shelter together, Del is heartened by the thought that they have a head start over their neighbours. ‘When the alarm bells start ringing and the missiles start firing, and all the people are rushing about like mad mice trying to find somewhere to hide, we’ll be tucked up in our own little nuclear shelter,’ he says happily. ‘If they started dropping the bomb on us now, we’d be as safe as houses, brother, safe as houses!’ The camera pulls back to show where they have built it – on the roof of their Peckham tower block.

  There were very few laughs, though, in the nuclear-themed pop music of the early 1980s, which was saturated in images of annihilation. No doubt this partly reflected the New Romantics’ fascination with all things German. Nowhere was youth culture mor
e overtly anti-nuclear than in West Germany, and British acts were hurrying to catch up. A good example was UB40’s ‘The Earth Dies Screaming’, all abandoned highways and ‘bodies hanging limp’, released in the autumn of 1980. Another was Kate Bush’s typically iconoclastic single ‘Breathing’, released a few months earlier. Here she imagines herself a foetus in the womb, breathing in fallout after a ‘bright light’ in the sky. The nuclear explosion in the second half of her video was considered too controversial for Top of the Pops. It did appear, though, on BBC1’s early-evening magazine show Nationwide. As Bush earnestly told the programme’s Hugh Scully, people should be ‘very concerned about looking after each other [rather] than destroying each other’ – a message with which no viewer could possibly have disagreed.22

  The most memorable nuclear-themed song of the year, though, was Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s sublime ‘Enola Gay’, one of the few hits of the decade to have been researched in the library. The band’s creative force, Andy McCluskey, was fascinated by old aeroplanes and had long wanted to write something about the plane that dropped the first atom bomb on Hiroshima. Some of his bandmates were very dubious, and the BBC refused to play it on children’s programmes such as Multi-Coloured Swap Shop. Even OMD’s keyboardist Paul Humphreys felt ‘uneasy’ to have recorded a ‘bright, perky pop song about a nuclear holocaust’. But it was, he admitted, ‘insanely catchy’. In Britain it peaked at number eight; in Italy and Spain it reached number one, and it sold 5 million copies in all. As readers of a certain age will know, you merely have to hear the synthesizer hook, the musical equivalent of one of Proust’s madeleines, to be catapulted back to the 1980s.23

  By the beginning of 1981 CND had reached a level of popularity unimaginable only two or three years earlier. When, in mid-January, it arranged a torchlight procession in Newcastle, the organizers hoped for about 500 people. But despite the freezing weather more than 2,000 marched across the Tyne Bridge to hear speeches in the City Hall. Among them was Melvyn Bragg, who was struck by the ebullience of the crowd: the punks, the ‘ghoulishly made-up quartet carrying a coffin with “Protest and Survive” daubed on its side’, the children excitedly holding their torches, the ‘solid core of people in their twenties and thirties, heavily wrapped up against the icy night’.

  To Bragg, it appeared that few of the marchers had been to such an event before. One of the organizers told him that they had done ‘very little evangelising. They come to us.’ Among the speakers were feminists and clergymen, trade unionists and Labour MPs. One promised to sing a song about ‘Maggie Thatcher and the wonders she’s achieved’, and then left the stage, never to return. Another, the New Statesman journalist Duncan Campbell, cheered the crowd with the news that in the event of a nuclear war, ‘two out of three people on Tyneside would be killed instantly’. But although it went on for two hours, even the youngest stayed to the end, ‘clearly glad to have been there’. Afterwards, somebody put on John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. And then, wrote Bragg, ‘the hundreds who were drifting away paused in the City Hall to listen, quietly, to what seemed an alternative anthem’.24

  By now, with tens of thousands of people estimated to be signing up every month, CND had been transformed from a hobbyists’ club to a nationwide movement. Even Sir Geoffrey Howe’s 21-year-old son Alec, in his final year at the University of York, joined the crusade, becoming the press officer for his local CND branch. At one point there was a plan for Alec to lead a march through the streets of York, dressed as Ronald Reagan and leading a female student, dressed as Mrs Thatcher, by a leash around her neck. Fortunately for his father, who might have found this hard to explain to his next-door neighbour, this part of the proceedings was dropped, although Alec still went on the march.25

  But CND’s momentum survived unchecked. At Easter there were rallies everywhere from Newcastle to Plymouth. In June the largest peace rally in Scottish history brought more than 10,000 people to Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Park. And then, at the end of the month, came an event that became part of pop-cultural legend, as CND joined forces with Hawkwind, New Order and Aswad at the Glastonbury Festival. In a special marquee, Peter Watkins’s film The War Game (1965) played on a continuous loop, while from the Pyramid Stage, decorated with a huge CND logo, Bruce Kent and E. P. Thompson lectured the crowds. The festival was a triumph, attracting a then-record crowd of 24,000 people and making a £20,000 profit. At last, the unilateralist movement had broken free of the beard, the duffel coat and the folk revival. Nuclear disarmament was not merely popular; it was cool.26

  In October, CND held another London rally, scheduled to coincide with similar events in Paris, Rome, Brussels and Helsinki. This time the crowds were bigger than the organizers’ wildest dreams. ‘The Embankment,’ wrote one onlooker, ‘was a mile long jam of multi-coloured hairstyles and banners’. The usual suspects were all in evidence: ‘punks … anarchists … feminist poets … theatre groups … a boy with purple hair’, as well as a lot of people ‘wearing green anoraks and sensible shoes, huddled round thermos flasks and talking about Solidarnosc and “what I mean by Socialism”’. Not even Tony Benn, who gave a blistering speech urging the British people to ‘stand up to the Pentagon as the Poles had to the Kremlin’, had ever seen such enthusiasm. ‘There must have been a quarter of a million people there,’ he wrote afterwards. ‘I have never seen such a crowd in any one place in Britain before.’27

  When CND held its annual conference that November, the mood was a mixture of apocalyptic pessimism and ecstatic excitement. Even veteran activists thought it the most colourful meeting anybody could remember, complete with badges (‘Morris Dancers Against the Bomb’) and carols (‘O Little Town of Newbury, How Still Your Ruins Lie’). In an ominous sign of things to come, it was also the most divided, thanks to the noisy participation of the Trotskyist left. But for the time being the moderates held sway, with Joan Ruddock prevailing in the election for a new chairman. From Fleet Street’s perspective, CND could not have made a better choice. The Times admired her ‘dimpled smile and soft Welsh voice’, while the Mirror described her as a ‘beautifully intact lady of 38, with model’s legs and a great amount of femininity’, her ‘fine, dark eyebrows arched with passion’. ‘She was an ideal choice for the leading role in CND: intelligent, smart and good-looking,’ admitted her future antagonist, Michael Heseltine. ‘If anyone was to articulate effectively the inherent fears which so many share of the menace of nuclear devastation, she was the person to do it.’28

  Under Ruddock, CND reached its all-time peak. Because the organization was so decentralized, nobody ever knew exactly how many people joined in the early 1980s. National membership was around 50,000 in late 1982, but local membership may have reached half a million. The list of affiliated peace groups was endless, from Scientists Against Nuclear Arms to Babies Against the Bomb. There were women’s groups and professional groups, Communists and Quakers, environmentalists and pacifists. The movement was ‘now so diverse and widespread’, remarked The Times, ‘that it can scarcely be called by any single name such as “the peace movement”’. Even the Church of England was flirting with unilateralism. In the autumn of 1982, a working party produced a report, The Church and the Bomb, urging Britain to renounce nuclear weapons. The Church Times called it a ‘first-class essay in moral theology’; the experts at the Daily Express considered it ‘mushy theological waffle’. The General Synod sided with the Express, and rejected it by a clear majority.29

  Although Cruise and Reagan were major factors in CND’s success, there was a strong anti-Thatcher element, too. These were years of tremendous enthusiasm on the left, years of marching and joining, singing and protesting. Nuclear disarmament was the fashionable cause of the day, just as environmentalism had been the cause of the early 1970s. And, at first, support seemed so resilient that not even the Falklands War could dent it. When CND held its next London rally on 6 June 1982, British troops were fighting their way towards Port Stanley. Yet even the Conservatives’ mole in the crowds, Pe
ter Shipley, was impressed by the turnout, which he put at about 150,000 people. The crowd, he reported, was dominated by people who already belonged to peace groups, the ‘extreme left’, religious groups, environmentalists and ‘miscellaneous gay, feminists and punks’. There was a ‘rather folksy, relaxed atmosphere … the archetypal Guardian reading parents eating their nut cutlet picnics under the trees while the children watched a Punch (President Reagan) and Judy (Mrs Thatcher) sideshow.’ But trade unionists and ethnic minorities seemed ‘noticeably absent … CND still seems a very middle-class movement.’30

  By now CND had drawn so close to the Labour left that, to the untrained eye, they had become practically indistinguishable. In particular, the unilateralist movement had the enthusiastic support of dozens of Labour-controlled local authorities, which had declared themselves ‘nuclear-free zones’. The first, in November 1980, was Manchester, which asked the government not to position nuclear weapons inside the city boundaries, launched a public information campaign to spread the gospel of disarmament and refused to take part in civil defence exercises. By the following February there were forty-two nuclear-free zones nationwide, including Liverpool, Bristol and several London boroughs, and a year later the total had reached 150. Even very small councils got in on the act. In March 1982 the parish council in Coppull, a Lancashire village with a population of less than 8,000, declared itself a nuclear-free zone. ‘There are no nuclear installations in Coppull’, a spokesman said, ‘and we don’t want any.’ If the Pentagon had secretly identified Coppull as the cornerstone of the West’s nuclear defences, declared the Guardian, ‘they had better think again’. They hadn’t.31