Pat Arrowsmith, who has died aged 93, was a prominent direct action campaigner for peace and a range of radical causes. Best known for her role in organising the first Aldermaston march against nuclear weapons, at Easter 1958, she put her life and liberty on the line many times. She was imprisoned a dozen times and twice named a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, an organisation for which she worked from 1970 until her retirement in 1994.
She was active in the Committee of 100, founded in 1960 by Bertrand Russell and the Rev Michael Scott, which organised mass sit-downs against nuclear weapons in city centres and military bases, the Troops Out movement that campaigned from the early 1970s for British military withdrawal from Northern Ireland, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, of which she was twice a vice-president.
In 1968 she put together, and was a member of, a team that went to the Vietnam-Cambodian border to try to deter the indiscriminate US bombing of the two countries. In 1991, as the Gulf war threatened, she again got together an international team, which included herself, that parked itself defiantly in the desert between the two sides.
However, she was also aware of the need for action at a more conventional political level. She stood as the Radical Alliance candidate for Fulham, against the Labour foreign secretary, Michael Stewart, in the general elections of 1966 and 1970, and as the Socialist Unity party candidate in 1979 in Cardiff South East against the then prime minister James Callaghan.
Pat could be dauntingly single-minded. Having once decided upon a course of action, there was no deflecting her, whatever the cost to herself. In an interview in the 80s with Anthony Clare for the BBC programme In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, she described how anguished could be the decision to take up cudgels on yet another issue – perhaps a case of injustice or discrimination at work, or one in prison that would bring her into conflict with employers or colleagues, or the prison authorities.
In 1961 in Gateside prison, Greenock, for instance, she went on hunger strike in protest against the fact that the canvas bags the prisoners were required to sew up could be used as sandbags. She then suffered the pain and humiliation of being force-fed by means of a rubber tube down her throat. However, prison as such never bothered her greatly – “a cinch after Cheltenham Ladies’ college!” she said.
Pat was born in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, the youngest of three children of Margaret (nee Kingham), the daughter of Plymouth Brethren missionaries, and George Arrowsmith, an Anglican clergyman.
Both Pat’s maternal grandparents and her mother’s sister had been stoned to death in China, having been wrongly identified as Roman Catholics; her mother had escaped by having been hidden under a bed and drugged to silence by their Chinese nurse. Although Pat was an avowed atheist, something of the same missionary zeal informed her activities.
A rebel from an early age, she was expelled aged 14 from Stover school in Newton Abbot, Devon, and then came close to being expelled from Cheltenham Ladies’ college for going into the town to celebrate VE day. She went on to gain a history degree at Newnham College, Cambridge, and to Ohio University as a Fulbright scholar. Subsequently she studied for a certificate in social science at the University of Liverpool.
A variety of jobs followed, including community organiser in Chicago (1952-53), social caseworker in Liverpool and nursing assistant at a psychiatric hospital in Chester, a post from which she was sacked in 1957 for circulating a petition against nuclear weapons among the staff.
That year she was one of around 50 people who volunteered to join the Quaker Harold Steele in an attempt to sail from Japan to the vicinity of Christmas Island in the Pacific, where Britain was preparing to test its first H-bomb. The test went ahead before the seaborne intervention could be organised, but in November that year volunteers and supporters of the project met in London to consider how to capitalise on the public interest it had aroused.
The meeting set up the Committee for Direct Action Against Nuclear War – which subsequently changed its name to the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War (DAC) – with Pat as its secretary, and decided the first action should be a four-day march from London to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire the following Easter.
Boosted by widespread unease about the fall-out from nuclear tests, and by the public launch in February 1958 of CND, the demonstration was for its time a spectacular success, bringing together more than 5,000 people for the send-off from Trafalgar Square, with around 600 walking the whole 50 miles and again more than 5,000 people attending a final rally.
It was this demonstration that made Pat a public figure and gave the nascent peace movement its distinctive symbol designed by the artist Gerald Holtom.
Though middle-class by education and upbringing, she turned her back on many middle-class values and aspirations. Much of her early campaigning work was among trade unions, and this took her on to the shop-floor and into the factory canteen to urge strike action against nuclear weapons. Rather than joining the ranks of owner-occupiers, she lived modestly in a council flat in north London.
She openly declared her lesbianism, at a time when to do so was to court social ostracism. This troubled her father, who made it a condition of her accessing her inheritance that she should marry. She did so in August 1979 after he died. But her marriage was annulled on the same day and she distributed her inheritance among several of the causes she supported. She did, however, have a 14-year partnership with Wendy Butlin, a fellow member of the DAC and Committee of 100.
Pat got depressed at times, and at such times was difficult to be around. At one period she began to drink too much. Characteristically, as soon as she became aware of the problem she did not just cut back on her alcohol consumption, she gave up drinking altogether. But she was no killjoy. She laughed readily, and relished the embarrassment that some of her actions caused.
She took a keen interest in literature and the arts, and in this area, too, she was not content to be a spectator. Her flat when I visited it in the early 60s was decorated with many of her own sketches and paintings. She wrote novels and poems, and a memoir of her childhood years, entitled I Should Have Been a Hornby Train (1995) – after she was born, her older brothers were told there was a surprise awaiting them and were disconcerted to find a baby sister rather than a train set.
Her novels included Jericho (1965), about a picket at Aldermaston based on her own experience, Somewhere Like This (1970), set in a women’s prison, The Prisoner (1982) and Many Are Called (1998), based on her experience as a social worker in Liverpool.
Her non-fiction books include To Asia in Peace (1972), about the team that went to the Vietnam/Cambodian border. She published several collections of poems, some of which show the reflective, vulnerable Pat, the other side of the assertive campaigner.
She continued to take part in marches and demonstrations for as long as her health allowed and in 2016 participated in a blockade of the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Burghfield, near Aldermaston.
• Pat Arrowsmith, peace campaigner, born 2 March 1930; death announced 29 September 2023
