LONDON
LETTER
-465
portions that the Negroes have asked the Home Secretary for permission
to form a special constabulary of their own. The comments are all
obvious, and the British press has already made them about Little
Rock. But it is typical of contemporary England that the issue, which
has aroused enormous general indignation, should also be entirely non–
political. The only real concern nowadays is aroused over matters which
have nothing to do with party politics.
The other and moving example is the Aldermaston march. In the
Easter of 1958, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament organized a
protest march against atomic weapons and atomic tests. It was a
small scale affair. A couple of thousand marchers left Trafalgar Square
on Good Friday. On Easter Monday about a thousand arrived at the
Atomic Energy Authority's experimental station at Aldermaston. About
three hundred had marched all the 53 miles between. This year the
march was repeated, but in reverse, from Aldermaston back to London,
and the numbers had been multiplied roughly by ten. At least five
thousand people started, three thousand marched all the way, and
twenty thousand finished in Trafalgar Square. The marchers, who
came from all over England and from nearly every country, ate in the
fields, slept in schoolrooms, drill-halls, gymnasiums and town halls, and
they slogged through a whole day of steady rain. Sympathizers along
the way put them up and allowed them, during the day, to use their
bathrooms. The police shepherded them gently and shooed away the
one car with a loudspeaker that protested against them. A few Teddy
Boys made ribald comments as they passed. One elderly lady, unable
to reach the bar of her local when the marchers flooded
in,
accused
them of being Russians. Someone else started the rumour that they
were paid 2s.6d. a head (about 35¢) by the C.P. I am told that the
money, to date, has not been forthcoming.
But the march was, in fact, strictly non-political. No party banners
or slogans were allowed; the speeches in Trafalgar Square stuck to the
avowed subject, the Bomb; and above all, a very high percentage of
the marchers were young. And it is extraordinary the degree to which
the younger English have no politics at all. The march was simply a
moral protest. Its end was not political, hardly even useful. It was
cathartic. Blisters apart, the marchers gained nothing from their four
days on the road, except the satisfaction that if they are all blown up
by official idiocy and if their grandchildren come into the world de–
formed and sick, at least they have made a protest.
It
will have hap–
pened without their consent. In a way, the Aldermaston march was a
