Peace News (PN) is a pacifist magazine first published on 6 June 1936 to serve the peace movement in the United Kingdom. From later in 1936 to April 1961 it was the official paper of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU), and from 1990 to 2004 was co-published with War Resisters' International.
Peace News was begun by Humphrey Moore who was a Quaker and in 1933 had become editor of the National Peace Council's publications. Working with a peace group in Wood Green, London, Moore and his wife, Kathleen (playing the role of business manager), launched Peace News with a free trial issue in June 1936. With distribution through Moore’s contacts with the National Peace Council, the new magazine rapidly attracted attention. Within six weeks, Dick Sheppard, founder of the Peace Pledge Union, proposed to Moore that Peace News should become the PPU’s paper.[2][3] Early contributors to this new organ of the PPU included Mohandas Gandhi, George Lansbury, and illustrator Arthur Wragg.[3]Peace News also had a large number of women contributors, including Vera Brittain, Storm Jameson, Rose Macaulay, Ethel Mannin, Ruth Fry, Kathleen Lonsdale and Sybil Morrison.[4]
Some contributors were so sympathetic to the grievances of Nazi Germany that one sceptical member found it difficult to distinguish between letters to Peace News and those in the newspaper of the British Union of Fascists.[5] The historian Mark Gilbert has argued that "With the exception of Action, the journal of the British Union of Fascists, it is hard to think of another British newspaper which was so consistent an apologist for Nazi Germany as Peace News."[6] However, Juliet Gardiner has noted that Peace News also urged the British government to give sanctuary to Jewish refugees from Nazism.[7] The fact that some PN contributors were supporting appeasement and excusing Nazi actions caused PN contributor David Spreckley to express fears that "in their scramble for peace", they were gaining "some questionable allies".[8]
Sales of Peace News peaked at around 40,000 during the so-called Phoney War between September 1939 and May 1940. In that month in the face of demands in parliament for the banning of the paper, the printer and distributors stopped working with Peace News. However, with help from the typographer Eric Gill, Hugh Brock and many others, Moore continued to publish Peace News and arrange for distribution around the UK.[2]
Humphrey Moore’s emphasis on Peace News having a single-minded anti-war policy was increasingly being challenged. Others wanted greater emphasis on building a peaceful society once hostilities ended. In 1940 the PPU asked Moore to step aside in the post of assistant editor (which post he held until 1944), and appointed John Middleton Murry as editor.[9] By 1946 Murry had abandoned pacifism and resigned.
Hugh Brock took on the role of assistant editor of Peace News in 1946 and became editor in 1955, lasting until 1964. During his period of tenure the magazine separated from the PPU as it had widened its focus into areas not directly related to absolute pacifism.[9]Peace News in the 1940s published material from American journalist Dwight Macdonald[10] and Maurice Cranston (later to become a noted philosopher).[11]
In 1959, a gift of £5,700 from Tom Willis enabled Peace News to buy 5 Caledonian Road, London, N1. This became its office and printing press and was also shared with Housmans Bookshop.[16] It was at the Peace News office that the nuclear disarmament/peace symbol was adopted.[17] Describing the British pacifist tradition in the 1950s, David Widgery wrote "at its most likeable it was the sombre decency of Peace News, then a vegetarian tabloid with a Quaker emphasis on active witness".[18]
In 1971 it added to its masthead the words "for nonviolent revolution".[27] In 1974, the paper moved its main office to Nottingham, where it remained until 1990.[27]
In 1978, one worker at Housmans was injured after a bomb was sent to the Peace News offices, (allegedly by the neo-Nazi organisation Column 88) as part of a series of attacks on left-wing organisations (similar attacks were made on the Socialist Workers Party and Anti-Nazi League offices before this occurred).[28]
Peace News suspended publication at the end of 1987, intending to relaunch after a period of rethinking and planning. In May 1989 the paper resumed publication, but quickly ran into financial difficulties. In 1990 it became linked to War Resisters' International and was co-published as a monthly until 1999, then as a quarterly with a British-orientated Nonviolent Action published in the intervening months. Peace News came out strongly against the Iraq War while at the same time condemning Saddam Hussein.[29] In 2005, Peace News resumed monthly publication, as an independent British publication and in a tabloid format.[30]
Peace News continues to be published in tabloid-size print media and as a website by Peace News Ltd. It describes its editorial objectives as: to support and connect nonviolent and anti-militarist movements; provide a forum for such movements to develop common perspectives; take up issues suitable for campaigning; promote nonviolent, antimilitarist and pacifist analyses and strategies; stimulate thinking about the revolutionary implications of nonviolence.[35] It is currently edited by Milan Rai and Emily Johns.[36]
The Peace News archives are held at the Commonweal Collection in the J.B. Priestley Library, University of Bradford.[37]
Peace News has been associated with initiating numerous campaigns, and a number of its staff members have been arrested for taking part in peace actions. In November 1957 Hugh Brock was one of three founders of the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War, which was run from the Peace News office and involved many Peace News staff. The DAC produced the first badges with the Nuclear Disarmament/Peace symbol,[39] and organised various actions of civil disobedience against nuclear weapons and also the first of the Aldermaston Marches in Easter 1958.
In the same year Peace News criticised the attempt to ban the sex education book The Little Red Schoolbook, and reprinted extensive extracts from the publication in the magazine.[41]
In 1972 Peace News co-editor Howard Clark, after meeting activists from the Canadian Greenpeace boats, initiated the group that became London Greenpeace, at first campaigning against French nuclear tests.
In 1973 Peace News played a central role in launching the British Withdrawal from Northern Ireland Campaign (BWNIC) and in supporting the "BWNIC 14", fourteen activists, including a member of the Peace News collective, charged with "conspiracy to incite disaffection" via a leaflet "Some Information for Discontented Soldiers". After an 11-week trial, a jury acquitted the BWNIC 14 in 1975, although two members of Peace News collective were fined for helping two AWOL soldiers go to Sweden.[42]
In 1974, together with Nicholas AlberyofBIT Information Service, Peace News began publishing the Community Levy for Alternative Projects, an invitation to supply funds for, generally, fledgling alternative projects, partly targeting shops and businesses that identified with counter-cultural ideas and aspirations.[43]
In August 1974, Peace News published a special edition revealing and printing in full Colonel David Stirling's plans to establish
a strike-breaking "private army", "Great Britain 1975". By arrangement The Guardian led with this story on the day of publication, Peace News won the 1974 "Scoop of the Year" award from Granada Television.[44][45]
In 1978, Peace News, together with The Leveller magazine, revealed the identity of Colonel B, a witness in the ABC Trial. Peace News fought its conviction for "contempt of court" right up to appeal in the House of Lords, where the Lord Chief Justice's "guilty" verdict was finally overturned.[46]
In 1995, Peace News and the Campaign Against Arms Trade were jointly sued for libel by the Covert & Operational Procurement Exhibition (COPEX) for repeating allegations that the exhibition was serving as a meeting place for buyers and sellers of torture implements. The High Court struck out the case when COPEX failed to show in court and the peace groups were awarded costs.
[47]
Defence without arms : a psychologist examines non-violent resistancebyDorothy Glaiste, 1952.
Far Eastern time fuse : the Japanese Peace Treaty: what it says and what it really means by the Union of Democratic Control and Peace Pledge Union; distributed by Peace News. 1952.
Empire in crisis : a survey of conditions in the British colonies todaybyFenner Brockway, 1953.
Tyranny could not quell them : how Norway's teachers defeated Quisling during the Nazi occupation and what it means for unarmed defence today by Gene Sharp, 1958.
From Arrows to Atoms : a Catholic voice on the morality of warbyCiaran Mac an Fhaili, 1959.
Towards a non-violent society : a study of some social implications of pacifismbyJ. Allen Skinner, 1959.
^ abHarry Mister and Stephen Moore, "Brave Fighter for Peace" (obituary of Humphrey Moore). The Guardian, September 1995, p. 16.
^Gail Chester and Andrew Rigby, Articles of Peace: Celebrating Fifty Years of Peace News. Prism, 1986, pp. 131–33.
^Frank McDonough, Neville Chamberlain, Appeasement, and the British Road to War, Manchester University Press, 1998
^Mark Gilbert, "Pacifist attitudes to Nazi Germany, 1936-45", Journal of Contemporary History, January 1992, Vol. 27, pp. 493–511.
^Juilet Gardiner, The Thirties: An Intimate History. HarperPress, 2010, p. 501.
^Peace News, 10 November 1939 (p. 9), quoted in Martin Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists:the British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1854-1945 Oxford University Press, 2000 (p. 398).
^ ab"Peace News" in Peter Barberis, John McHugh & Mike Tyldesley (eds), Encyclopedia of British and Irish Political Organizations. Continuum, 2005, ISBN0-8264-5814-9 (p. 344).
^Michael Doyle, Radical Chapters: Pacifist Bookseller Roy Kepler and the Paperback Revolution.Syracuse University Press, 2012. ISBN0815610068 (p. 84).
^"Peace News-the World Pacifist Weekly" (Advertisement on back cover of pamphlet NATO: A Critical Examination of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, by Roy Sherwood, 1956).
^"C. Wright Mills: The Responsible Craftsman", Peace News 22 November 1963 and 29 November 1963. Reprinted in slightly different form in Thompsons' The Heavy Dancers (1995)
^Theodore Roszak, "Mumford and the Megamachine", Peace News, 29 December 1967.
^"Bomb Explodes at Peace News", Irish Times, 5 July 1978, p. 7.
^"...here it becomes important to make the distinction between one man and his military cronies and a population of 22.5 million people. Unless proven otherwise, all people are our allies. And just because you don't want to see 22.5 million people have their basic infrastructure bombed, or see the poor conscripts being massacred, doesn't mean you support Saddam." "No Note of Apology"Archived 10 October 2008 at the Wayback Machine, Editorial. Peace News 2450, March–May 2003. Retrieved 17 November 2011.
^Hare, A. Paul; Blumberg, Herbert H. (1 June 1978). Liberation Without Violence. Rowman & Littlefield Pub Inc. ISBN978-0874719987.
^D. Limond, The UK Edition of The Little Red Schoolbook: A paper tiger reflects, Sex Education, 14 December 2011.
^"British Withdrawal from Northern Ireland Campaign"
in Encyclopedia of British and Irish Political Organizations by Peter Barberis, John McHugh and Mike Tyldesley. London : Continuum, 2005,ISBN0-8264-5814-9 (p.330).
^Peter Shipley,Revolutionaries in Modern Britain, Bodley Head,
1976, (p. 203)
