Peace Pledge Union
The PPU emerged from an initiative by Hugh Richard Lawrie 'Dick' Sheppard, canon of St Paul's Cathedral, [2] in 1934, after he had published a letter in the Manchester Guardian and other newspapers, inviting men (but not women) to send him postcards pledging never to support war.
The PPU assembled several noted public figures as sponsors, including Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, Storm Jameson, Rose Macaulay, Donald Soper, Siegfried Sassoon, Reginald Sorensen, J. D. Beresford, Ursula Roberts (who wrote under the pseudonym "Susan Miles")[4] and Brigadier-General F. P. Crozier (a former army officer turned pacifist).
Like many in the 1930s, the PPU supported aspects of appeasement, with some members suggesting that Nazi Germany would cease its aggression if the territorial provisions of the Versailles Treaty were undone.
[3] Peace News editor and PPU sponsor John Middleton Murry and his supporters in the group caused considerable controversy by arguing Germany should be given control of parts of mainland Europe.
In a PPU publication, Warmongers, Clive Bell said that Germany should be permitted to "absorb" France, Poland, the Low Countries and the Balkans.
[15] After Dick Sheppard's death in October 1937, George Orwell, always hostile to pacifism, accused the PPU of "moral collapse" on the grounds that some members even joined the BUF.
From the outset it emphasised that its primary dedication was to world peace, to economic justice and racial equality," but it had "too much sympathy for the German position, often the product of ignorance and superficial thinking".
In 1950, Rebecca West, in her book The Meaning of Treason, described the PPU as "that ambiguous organisation which in the name of peace was performing many actions certain to benefit Hitler".
[21] As recently as 2017, the right-wing commentator and retired colonel Richard Kemp alleged on Good Morning Britain that the PPU were "arch-appeasers" who had supported the absorption of the Low Countries into Germany's sphere of influence.
In 1940, the PPU published a booklet called Plan of Campaign, reprinting an article by the Dutch Christian anarcho-pacifist Bart de Ligt.
In May 1940, six leading PPU activists—Alex Wood, Stuart Morris, Maurice Rowntree, John Barclay, Ronald Smith and Sidney Todd—were charged over the publication of a pacifist poster that was aimed at encouraging people of all nationalities to refuse to fight.
The charge read out in court was that they "did endeavour to cause among persons in His Majesty's Service disaffection likely to lead to breaches of their duty".
[28] In 1942, PPU General Secretary Stuart Morris was sentenced to nine months in prison for dealing with secret government documents relating to British rule in India, which he was alleged to have been planning to pass to Gandhi or others in the nonviolent wing of the Indian independence movement.
The Birmingham branch of the PPU declared, "We pacifists, while determined to resist the Nazi system, believe that nothing can justify the continuation of this slaughter and the moral degradation that it involves".
[37] However, members of PPU were well represented in the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War (DAC) founded in 1957, which organised the first of the Aldermaston marches in 1958.
[7] It has also promoted the ideas of pacifist thinkers such as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Richard B.
[41] In 2005, the PPU released an educational CD-ROM on Martin Luther King's life and work that was adopted by several British schools.
[42] In recent years, the PPU has focused on issues including Remembrance Day,[43] peace education,[44] the commemoration of World War One[45] and what they describe as the "militarisation" of British society.
[48] In 1986, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher expressed her "deep distaste" for the white poppies,[49] on allegations that they potentially diverted donations from service men, yet this stance gave them increased publicity.
[46] Members of the PPU have included: Vera Brittain, Benjamin Britten, Clifford Curzon, Alex Comfort, Eric Gill, Ben Greene, Laurence Housman, Aldous Huxley, George Lansbury, Kathleen Lonsdale, Reginald Sorensen, George MacLeod, Sybil Morrison, John Middleton Murry, Peter Pears, Max Plowman, Arthur Ponsonby, Hugh S. Roberton, Bertrand Russell, Siegfried Sassoon, Myrtle Solomon, Donald Soper, Sybil Thorndike, Michael Tippett and Wilfred Wellock.
