Today is the 40th anniversary of the first CND march. Veterans of the movement met at City Hall yesterday to commemorate the event and JIM GREENHALF spoke to some of them.

Bradford's JB Priestley was one of the key figures in the CND movement but was not too keen on the first march.

According to Michael Randle, former peace studies lecturer who now lives in Bradford: "He saw the campaign as a pressure group operating within political parties rather than demonstrating in the streets."

Mr Randle, a Conscientious Objector who worked for Peace News, said Priestley was a key figure who wrote a series of articles in the New Statesman at the end of 1957 which were critical of nuclear weapons.

"That was an important stimulus to CND," he added.

The first anti-nuclear weapons march in Britain was not organised by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, but the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War which was founded in London in November 1957.

Hugh Brock, the assistant editor of Peace News, was among the organisers of that meeting in November and is credited with being one of those who suggested a mass march to Aldermaston during the coming Easter.

CND, with its famous semaphore symbols for 'N' and 'D' (Nuclear Disarmament), mushroomed out of the melting pot of political and religious ideologies which comprised British radicalism in the 1950s, embracing personalities as various as Canon John Collins, A J P Taylor the historian, Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman, Donald Soper, the Methodist Minister, and J B Priestley.

"There were about 8,000 on the first march. The weather was so bitterly cold and wet that some dropped out, but at the final rally at Aldermaston the crowd was back up to 7,000 or 8,000."

One of the speakers he remembers with admiration and affection was the late Black American civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, who had worked with the Rev Martin Luther King Jnr in Montgomery, Alabama. Rustin, one of the Freedom Riders whose campaigning eventuallybrought about de-segregation in the Southern States, went on to co-ordinate the 1963 march on Washington where Martin Luther King delivered his "I have a dream" speech.

"He was dynamic, a powerful organiser and very confident. If you argued against him you had to be sure of your reasons because he could tell you his. He was one of the speakers in Trafalgar Square who told CND that civil disobedience would be necessary," Mr Randle added.

The second march in 1959 was organised by CND. But unity against what was portrayed as mankind's common enemy - the atomic bomb - was not to last much longer than another year. In October 1960 the philosopher Bertrand Russell formed the more radical Committee of 100 (of which the late Bradford MP Bob Cryer was a member).

In 1963 President John Kennedy and Soviet General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev signed a partial Test Ban Treaty which stopped nuclear testing in the atmosphere. Within a year or two the annual march from Aldermaston stopped. Mr Randle puts this down to other issues such as the involvement of the Americans in Vietnam.

In the '80s CND was given fresh vitality by the introduction of Cruise missiles into US bases in Britain. CND, which has a Yorkshire branch, now challenges the necessity of Britain's spending on Trident.

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