CHEERS, JEERS AND WINDSWEPT BANNERS | March 21st 2008

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Fifty years ago, Stephen Hugh-Jones joined the anti-nukes march on Aldermaston, home of the British Atomic Weapons Research Establishment. In the cold and the wet, the 200 trudgers were a cheerful bunch, full of song, conviction and some spare room in a cosy sleeping-bag...

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It was 50 Easters ago: the first Aldermaston march, from central London to that Berkshire village 45 miles away--the home, as it still is, of Britain's Atomic Weapons Research Establishment. The newborn Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament reckoned that Britain should unilaterally abandon its nuclear weapons, and (after some pushing from more radical unilateralists) that those who agreed should march on Aldermaston to make that point. I was one.

We were mostly aged under 25, though not all geopolitical innocents. We were of course denounced as Soviet stooges. Of most of us, that was untrue. Indeed, Britain's tiny and truly stooge Communist Party--what was left of it, after the latest demonstration of Soviet imperialism in Hungary--was leery; both because the Soviet Union was and because, like all hard-left groupuscules, it disliked any mass action not managed by itself.

Not that "mass" was quite the word. As we left Trafalgar Square on Good Friday, amid cheers, a few jeers, windswept banners, drizzling rain and an earnest sense that we were about to change the world, we were perhaps 1,000 marchers. By nightfall, most of the grandees had retreated to their London pads. Maybe 200 of us trudged on.

I was with a contingent from Oxford, most from the student wing of the Labour Party, then in opposition. The party's leadership, unsurprisingly, did not share our views. A few lesser Labour MPs turned up temporarily. One, suspected--and decades later proven--of being an authentic Soviet stooge, tried to turn the march into an anti-American rally. His efforts evinced little but boredom. For most of us, dislike of all and anybody's nuclear weapons and deep contempt for the politics of our elders were enough.

What I remember best of the march, though, was not politics but cheerful friendliness. Put 200 young people of one mind together and whatever the weather--it was mostly vile--they'll have a good time. We talked, we bawled slogans, we sang songs, not all of them solemn: some Troskyites had one making fun of that tendency, and I was not astonished years later to learn that one of my new friends had been slung out of whatever Trot faction it was that he adhered to, for lack of socialist seriousness. One popular song was a modified Christmas carol:

God rest you merry gentlemen, while you are all in bed,
A friendly little H-bomb is cruising overhead.
It's there to kill the Russians when the rest of us are dead,
O-oh tidings of wonder and joy, etc.

Here's Gaitskell and Macmillan [Labour leader and Tory prime minister respectively] say the Russians are deterred.
From bows and arrows to battleships that what we've always heard.
We've had two wars already, now we're heading for a third,
O-oh tidings, etc.

Don't take it when they tell you that there's nothing you can do,
When Moscow is in ashes then London will be too,
And the fall-out from Leningrad will be falling out on you,
O-oh tidings, etc.

And no doubt further verses. The last two that I print here were my work, says I. But I daresay there was more collective input in them than that, and I doubt they ever made the marchers' song-book--yes, there really was one. Great verse they're not. But they expressed well what most of us firmly believed: that there was a very real risk of nuclear war and "mutually assured suicide". And that both major British parties' leaders were much too complacent about it.

In due time, Easter Monday, we reached Aldermaston. We were cold, wet and tired. We'd tramped. We'd shouldered banners billowing like mainsails. We'd slept, or tried to, in schools lent by a kindly local council. Some of us, no doubt--though crowded rooms, hard floors and single sleeping-bags aren't much help in this either--had found other marchers friendly beyond the call of anti-nuclear activism.

As we arrived, I and a tall Nigerian from Cambridge, I think, were carrying the banner of the London University Socialist Society. This was because its till-then stewards, a thin man and a small, jolly, rotund American girl, were worn out. (Whatever it may do for the brain, socialism does not always produce horny-handed banner-bearers.) The grandees rejoined us from their cars, and we were harangued by a loudspeaker van warning us that we'd been misled by the Reds and were a danger to Britain and a shame to ourselves. Wearily, we jeered it.

Had we changed the world? By our standards, no. Prime minister Harold Macmillan was unmoved. Hugh Gaitskell defied Labour's anti-nuclear wing, regardless of how vocal, large--and at the 1960 party conference theoretically triumphant--it had become. And Britain's nuclear weapons remained, as they have ever since. I doubt that without American ones they would ever have deterred a Russian nuclear attack. But I doubt too that dumping them would have saved Britain from one. Fifty world-war-free years later, I've come to accept that mutual assurance of suicide is indeed a quite effective way, albeit not the best one, of ensuring that both sides stay alive.

Yet I think our Aldermaston march and its vastly larger successors, heading in to London, not out, were right, whether or not our demands were mistaken. From about 1958, the risk and horrors of nuclear war were taken much more seriously in Britain (and America) than they had been. The fairly recent development of the rival cold-warriors' H-bombs no doubt played more of a part in that than did a couple hundred leg-weary young anti-nuclear activists. Yet if Britain's unilateralists hadn't shouted for the whole loaf, I wonder if we'd have got the small, but vital, slice of it that we did.

(Stephen Hugh-Jones is a former writer and editor for The Economist, where he wrote the Johnson column from 1992-99. He lives now in West Sussex.)