In the cool, dark belly of the Museum of London’s stores, actors Mark Rylance and Michael Culver stand between two giant shelves, deep in conversation about their friend, the peace campaigner Brian Haw.
All around them, preserved in drawers, on rails, in boxes, is Haw’s archive – items that document the 10 years he spent on Parliament Square, protesting against the Iraq war and UK foreign policy. There are more than 800 items in total: banners and posters and flags, teddy bears, tents, umbrellas and megaphones. “It’s the entire camp as it was,” says the Museum’s curator of social and working history, Vyki Sparkes. “Even the wet wipes we found in his tent.”
Joining us at the archive is Amanda Ward, a sculptor, and Culver’s wife, who in 2012 launched a campaign for a nine-foot bronze statue of Haw to be erected in Parliament Square. Despite widespread support – including that of Noam Chomsky, Ken Loach and Tony Benn – Ward’s campaign foundered against opposition from the council.
Instead, she, Culver and Rylance are now beginning a new campaign to raise the £50,000 needed for the original statue’s maquette to be stationed opposite the Imperial War Museum, a short walk from Parliament Square. The new drive coincides with the 20th anniversary of the Stop the War march.
The maquette stands 72cm high and shows Haw towards the end of his life, when, although only in his early 60s, he moved around on crutches. Ward took photographs of Haw from every angle to capture his position – propped up, yet defiant. It serves as an echo of Ivor Roberts-Jones’ 1973 statue of Winston Churchill, stationed across the Square, which shows the leader in military greatcoat, resting on a walking stick.
Haw was amused by the comparison, Ward says, though she wishes she could have shown the campaigner before his health deteriorated. “If I’d only thought of the statue earlier, when he was looking really vigorous,” she adds. “But he does look as though he’s been beaten down by the 10 years of being there.”
It was Rylance who thought of the spot opposite the Imperial War Museum.
“My hope is that people will support it,” he says of the campaign. “The people in this country who care about peace and who came out and marched, on that day before Tony Blair took us into Iraq.” He draws a folder from his bag and looks through his papers related to the Haw campaign – research, drafts of articles, Haw’s own poems and letters, showing the campaigner’s increasing despair.
“The thing I had to do eventually was turn to positive people,” Rylance says. He cites Oxford Research Group findings that have shown how little, comparatively, we spend on peaceful resolution of conflict. “If a couple are having an argument in an apartment next door, how many of us would go and sell them a knife or a gun to help them resolve their argument?” he wonders. “So why do we stand for this in international affairs?”
In the summer of 2001, Haw was a carpenter, and father of seven, who left his home in Redditch and headed to London to protest the economic sanctions against Iraq. His father had been one of the first British soldiers to enter the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the end of the second world war , and after spending time at an evangelical college in Nottingham, Haw began preaching world peace, visiting Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and travelling to the killing fields of Cambodia.
His years on Parliament Square were bleak; the pavement cold, his spot on the east side offering little shade or shelter, the traffic roaring past his small zip-up tent. He relied on donations from supporters and rarely left his protest site, save to buy food, use the public bathrooms in Westminster tube station, or to attend court appearances.
Across the course of the decade, Haw was accused of camping illegally on the grass, of obstructing the pavement, of disturbing MPs by shouting through a megaphone, and of breaching the ban on unauthorised protest. He was arrested on numerous occasions. Much of the Haw archive is made up of material that was seized by police in 2008 and kept, as evidence, until after his death from cancer in 2011. The following year, his family donated the materials to the Museum.
“The wear and tear of them is so telling, isn’t it?” says Rylance, quietly, as we peer into a drawerful of posters, turned grey and raggedy at their edges. “I just keep thinking about all the lead in the air, standing by the traffic, the pollution.”
The Museum is a non-political organisation, and while it does not gather items from all protest movements, the story of Haw’s archive meant it met the criteria for acquisition. “It changed the course of London protest history – what you’re allowed to do in Parliament Square,” explains Sparkes. “But also about a person at the heart of protest, and that’s what we’re looking for: not the what, but the who.”
Rylance was artistic director at the Globe when he began stopping by Haw’s camp on his way back to the theatre. “I remember him telling me that he would get kicked sometimes, in the night-time, in his tent,” Rylance says. He found his own beliefs chimed with those of Haw – the actor is a patron of the charity Peace Direct and the Stop the War Coalition, and a member of the Peace Pledge Union.
Culver and Haw became friends in the heat of protest. “I first met him because Caroline Lucas brought back photographs of what the depleted uranium was doing to babies in Iraq,” he says. “They were so horrific that I just went down to Parliament Square. And Brian was there. I just said ‘What are you doing here?’ And he said ‘I think the same thing as you …’ – because I had this photograph with me.”
Over the years that followed, Culver made banners for Haw, printed T-shirts, donated whatever he could, but most of all he spent time with him in Parliament Square. “Do you remember the reactions of people driving by or walking by?” asks Rylance.
“Driving by was ‘Fuck off!’ or ‘Get a job!’” Culver says.
“Was he pleased when other campaigners came?” Rylance asks.
“Oh yes, many came,” says Culver. “And agreed with him. I mean two million people marched against that fucker Blair … But the politicians go on doing it because mass murder makes money.” He sighs heavily.
“There was an article I saw yesterday about the military innovations that the arms manufacturers are excited about in Ukraine,” Rylance says, “And how brilliant the Ukrainians have been at inventing new drones and adapting old weapons and things like that … And there was not a note in the whole article about the fact these things were being used to kill people. It was just a purely economic article. I was staggered by it.”
Culver looks tearful. “You have to remember about this country, we’ve gone around the rest of the planet for the last 500 years, thieving, torturing, and murdering, and that’s how we’re the sixth richest country on the face of the planet!”
“When I live close to these truths that you’re talking [about], I can’t live there for a long time,” Rylance says. “I have to step away. But Brian stayed. Did he get any respite?”
Culver shakes his head. “I don’t think so. He was a very, very strong and very, very brave man. He survived it for as long as he could.”
The campaign to raise funds for the Brian Haw memorial runs until 13 March.
