PROTEST marching and sitting are so much a part of the present political scene that the memoirs of a veteran cannot fail to be of interest.
Mrs Duff tells us that her book is not an autobiography but a record of six political campaigns in which she was involved from 1945 to 1965. The outstanding ones were campaigns to capture the conscience of the Labour Party - the Bevanite Movement and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
Inevitably, it is a very personal record and the style reveals a lively voluble and swashbuckling person. The book reads as though it had been dictated at speed - sometimes too fast. Once, at least, the reader gets a firm memo: "Please note . . .", and prejudices crackle on every page.
Yet it is a candid book, candid enough to admit that the main campaigns to which she devoted so much of her energies were failures. She clearly enjoyed the battles, while they were on, with the relish of a born fighter who found more satisfaction working in a cramped cold office than she now does in a thoroughly comfortable one. The trials and discomforts of the Aldermaston marches she bore with the fortitude and joy of a martyr suffering for her faith.
It is an earnest story, and fundamentally a sad one, tinged with some bitterness, though less than might have been expected. She and her colleagues fought for a profound reformation in the Labour Party, and they failed. Almost the only politician to come out of her story with credit is the late Aneurin Bevan. Hugh Gaitskell is seen as the main villain more interested in power than in socialist principles, but (and here hindsight strengthens the condemnation) Harold Wilson appears as a trimmer, lacking in both acumen and courage.
She recalls with sadness the way in which early fighters for principle all showed great capacity for compromise. For example, she recalls John Freeman's attacks on US foreign policy and then adds immediately: "Later, of course, he became British Ambassador in Washington." (If she had written just a little later, she might have added "... and ended up as chairman of a commercial television company.") Her epitaph for Bevan reads like an epitaph for her beloved Labour Party: "Fire died with Aneurin."
It is for her work with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament that Peggy Duff is best known. Much has already been written about the movement, and her inside story adds little more than anecdotage. She usefully distinguishes three aspects of CND policy. The first was a generalised protest not only against the bomb, but against the society which had produced and used it. This policy was its strongest appeal, particularly to the young, who now express their frustration in different campaigns. Yet she recognises that it was too vague an emotion, hardly a "policy" at all. More specifically, some wanted civil disobedience campaigns and set up the Committee of One Hundred. This split the movement and divided Lord Russell, their President, from Canon Collins, the Chairman.
The third policy, closest to Mrs Duff's heart, was that of converting the Labour Party to unilateral disarmament. At the 1960 Labour Party Conference, a unilateralist motion was actually passed, but only to be reversed the next year, and the leadership never took it seriously. Thereafter though CND continued (and continues) to exist, it ceased to be a significant influence.
"I wonder where they are now?" Mrs Duff asks sadly about those who marched. Some have undoubtedly stopped worrying, and learned to live with the bomb; many have doubtless retreated into the despairing wisdom of Voltaire's Candide and now cultivate their own gardens. If they read Mrs Duff, they are unlikely to return to the streets - which are in any case already full of other marchers. Mrs Duff sees some hope in these new-style, less peaceful marches, but to this reviewer (who is not the Roy Shaw referred to in her text), she seems to be clutching at a broken reed.
"What's Left?" is the title of her final chapter, and the true answer seems to be "very little." Mrs Duff's book is finally depressing, reading like a dossier on the corrupting influence of power. Labour supporters must read it as a challenge to re-shape and revitalise their movements completely; others, if they care for the health of democracy, can scarcely read it with complacent satisfaction. In any case, someone could be writing a book on "What's Right?"
.lcPeggy Duff, life long peace campaigner, was general secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament from 1958 until 1965, and organiser of the Aldermaston Marches of the Sixties. In 1967 she resigned in protest at the Harold Wilson government's support for America's war in Vietnam. She was also general Secretary of the International Confederation for Disarmament and Peace.
