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My name is Pat Pleasance and the date today is the 15th of January, 2015. I'm about to interview Lois Evans of Liverpool. So Lois, would you like to introduce yourself with your name and details? Thank you.

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My name is Lois Evans. I was born in Bolton, Lancashire, of Horace and Ethel Bamford Quakers. So I was born into a Quaker family. When I was eight years old we moved from Bolton to the Ribble Valley between Blackburn and Preston.

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My date of birth was just six years after the end of the First World War. 1925, January 1925. Right, would you like to tell me a bit about your family? Yes, I've already said that they were Quakers.

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My father in particular, as far as the interest of this interview is concerned, was most important because during the First World War, when he was only a boy, a teenage boy, he decided he could not fight, he would not fight, for religious reasons. And so when the compulsory conscription came in, he was arrested and imprisoned

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and indeed had his 19th birthday in Dartmoor prison. And it was during his prison sentence there that he came in contact with all the very well-known and famous pacifists of the First World War. Unfortunately, his own father died while he was in Dartmoor, so that was a tragedy for him.

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So did this family background influence you as you were growing up? Well, of course, because my mother was also a Quaker from a Quaker family. And a strange situation in her own background was that although it was a Quaker family, her only brother ran away from home and joined the army,

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which was a great shock to all the family. But he was in the Lancashire Fusiliers, he was in the Grenadier Guards, and he won various medals during the First World War for carrying wounded under shell fire. That is a strange situation to have an uncle with that sort of background with regard to war

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and a father who suffered greatly because of being a conscientious objector in the same war. After the war was over, six years later, there was, of course, a huge disarmament campaign throughout this country. And my father and mother were both very much involved in the disarmament campaign. And we had a big poster in our front room window, I remember,

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to try and persuade passers-by that rearmament was not the thing to do to rid the world of war. There's a story about me, I don't know whether you want to hear it. Yes, go on. When I was three years old and I was playing with our neighbour's little girl who was the same age,

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and my enthusiasm for my parents' causes led me to say to her, do you believe in disarm? And this other child, bless her, said, I don't know. You must know. Do you believe in harming people? No. Well then, you must believe in disarm. A very good slogan for all of us grown-ups, I think.

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That's a lovely story. So, as you grew up, you obviously went to a school. Yes. And then you went to university. Yes. I went to school. My primary school was in Bolton, and that was where I taught my mother

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about the resurrection. No, I'll not go on with that story. You can obliterate that. We moved to Blackburn. I was at Blackburn Girls High School, and from there I went to Royal Holloway College, London University, to read English. I was very much conscious, I think, of being different from other people

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in my views, in my aims, my philosophy. Nevertheless, I had lots of very good friends and very close friends. It didn't make me feel alienated in any way that I didn't agree with their politics, their religion, or anything else. I was very much part of the human rights, peace, environment group, from being of the age of 18 to 21, I should say, when I was at

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university. So, I have been involved in the struggle to try to get people to live peacefully together, ever since I can remember. Yes, okay? Yes. So, you were involved in organisations apart from Welfare? Yes. Well, I wasn't involved with Welfare. I knew about it because lots of Quakers were

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involved with it, so I knew the name, I knew what the organisation was and what it was doing. I was a fellow traveller, so to speak, from a different peace group, because the Society of Friends of Quakers is known as one of the peace churches. So, I was sort of on the fringes of Welfare, ever since I can remember, and my husband's mother was a very

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active member of Welfare in Liverpool, but that's skipping a few years. So, how did you come to get involved with Welfare yourself? Oh, well, that was much, much later. I was married and with children and living in Liverpool. My husband was in the architecture department as a senior lecturer at Liverpool University.

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I was coping with the family and doing part-time teaching, etc., and because WILPF had its meetings in the Quaker meeting house, I knew quite a lot of the members of WILPF, and one in particular, that was Ethel Dransfield, that you mentioned before, put a lot of pressure onto me, you must join. Whenever she saw me at any peace meeting in

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Liverpool or any demonstration or whatever, you're not a member of WILPF yet. No, I've got enough to do, but the pressure continued and eventually I did join them. Quite a small group, there were only, oh, I should say a dozen to twenty, that sort of size of group, that met once a month and did all the sorts of things that women's peace groups do, discussing

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local politics, international affairs, campaigns, all that sort of thing we were very much involved in in Liverpool. I eventually, yes, eventually, after quite a few years, took to going to the national executive meetings with Ethel, and at that time there was Ruth Osborne, who's also known centrally, was part of the Liverpool group. I had quite a lot in common

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with Ruth because she was a geography teacher, I was an English teacher, and we were both interested in peace. She was a Methodist, I was a Quaker, you know, we'd hit it off all right. So that was how I got to starting to go to the national meetings, and we used to go in a group from the Liverpool branch. I used to drive a car full of people to the annual council.

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In those days we always had an annual weekend, annual council, very, very interesting, where people from all over the country, from different branches, met together. We usually had a theme. Current affairs played a very big part in the discussions, and we used to write letters to all and sundry, politicians, religious leaders, you name it, we wrote to it,

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persuading them that the WILPF way was the right way. So that was, also following on eventually in my part in WILPF, from the local group through the central group that met in London and at these weekend conferences, I was also then, later on, appointed to the international committee, and indeed I was at one time an international vice

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president. So that's my history within WILPF. Thank you very much for that, that really is very, very interesting. Because you can edit it, can't you? Yes. Can you tell me anything about the Liverpool branch that you knew, when it was founded or who founded it, anything about that? I don't know the exact date that it was founded, but it was after the second world war.

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The leading light, if I can put it that way, was Phyllis Tiller, whose husband was, oh, I'm not sure exactly in the education committee, a civil servant, not a politician. And of course a lot of teachers knew him, Sam Tiller was well known in Liverpool, and a lot of these women that formed the branch that I belonged to, it was already founded then

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when I joined it, had been brought together through Phyllis Tiller, through her husband Sam, who knew them as mostly primary school teachers. So that was how I knew of it, but at that time there was also a very strong group over on the Wirral, there was one at Birkenhead, there was one at West Kirby, so there was quite a strong WILPF presence in Liverpool at that time. I think,

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I'm no good on dates, but it would be in the 60s perhaps, I would think. And in Liverpool we were a group of, oh, more than a dozen, I would say, and we met regularly. Because of the background of most of the people there, I could indulge my own interest in peace education, and that was what I became what they used to call an expert, nothing to do with expert really, but it means a special

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interest in peace education, which I took up in Liverpool, and I organised six-form conferences on United Nations topics once a year in Liverpool. I think the United Nations Association still continues to have those, although I'm a member, I'm not in touch with what they're doing now. But that was one of the ways I expressed my interest, because I was also on the peace

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education committee of the Quakers in London at that same time, so it was an interest expressing itself in two different ways really. Yes, I've forgotten where I was going. I was going to ask you, what about when you were an international vice-president, what were you doing specifically at that point?

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That's a very difficult thing to say. I was being the international vice-president, attending international committee meetings. I wasn't really involved in anything specifically at that time, but when I was on the international committee, just as a member of it, I did have to do with the United Nations group in Geneva, and it was at that time,

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and again I can't tell you the exact date, that I instigated and organised a children's all the arts competition under the title of A World Without War, and children were invited through the schools, or as individuals, to produce their own thoughts in art form on their ideas of what the world would be like without war. I have a particular

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interest in one of the entries, a little boy from Birkenhead who was crippled with a child form of arthritis, and one of his treatments was to make soft clay models that helped his hands, and he, for the competition, made a little model, just as small, about six inches long by two and a half inches high perhaps,

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a model of an elephant and a tiny mouse, and he'd written a poem, and with the model that came to be entered for the competition came the words, if the world were without war, I've forgotten it, wait a minute, the strong would help the weak, the rich would help the poor,

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elephants would dance with mice, and I thought that was absolutely charming, absolutely, and I wrote to David Owen who was foreign secretary or representative at United Nations at that time, and told him about it, I went to London with it, and gave it to him, or lent it to him, and he sent it in the diplomatic bag to New York

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where it was on display at the United Nations headquarters, and it came back to me when it had been there, and I think I still have it, but being a child's clay model, it hasn't really lasted in its perfect state, but I thought that was a great thing, that a little boy crippled with arthritis could send a message to the chief peace organisation

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in the world, that children wanted a world without war, I thought that was a great thing for him, and for us, and for everybody. That little boy must have been very proud. Yes, and I think his parents, and grandparents, and teacher. And the other thing that I was involved in at international level in Geneva,

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I was on the jury, the judging panel for a children's writer, not for children writing, but people writing for children, and it was to be the best children's book, the upholding, and spreading, and encouraging ideas of peace, disarmament, and so on, and I was one of the, there was an international jury, I think there were

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four or five of us, and I was representing WILF on that, and I had the privilege of reading all the examples that were submitted by people like Black World Publishers, and various organisations they sent in, all these children's books encouraging thoughts of peace, and a particular friend of mine on the international committee was a Polish woman,

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Halina Malinowski, whose husband worked in United Nations, and Halina knew a lot of the people in the United Nations offices in Geneva, and introduced me to one of the writers. I mean, I was hugely privileged really, meeting these people, and one of the Polish submissions to that international competition actually won an

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international prize, outside WILF, this was nothing to do with WILF, that he won the prize, and I've heard it referred to, this book, and I can't think of the title of it, or his name, just at the present, but I've heard references to it on various arts discussion programmes on the radio, long after it's happened, because this is all quite a long time ago.

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Yes, I was younger then, much younger. I had more energy in those days. How did the Liverpool branch fit in with the activities on Merseyside, peace activities? Oh, we had very close relationships with other peace groups, both political groups and religious

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groups, and just single issue peace groups, like Ban the Bomb, the so-called Ban the Bomb, which was the atomic bomb, of course, how that began in Liverpool, that was the Ban the Bomb committee, long before CND, and it was quite a strong and varied group, representative of lots of different types of people and organisations, and that umbrella group, we can call it,

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when those people all came together for that particular purpose, we went on the older master marches and that sort of thing, and demonstrations in London, and so on. Out of that came a permanent committee, which was the Merseyside Peace Council, and we all joined in each other's activities and supported each other's meetings,

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and that went on for quite some time, decades, but like everybody else, we grew older, and the people who had been most active in all the organisations became unable to do as much as they had done when they were younger, so each organisation, in its own way, dwindled somewhat, and WILPF was no exception. We all got older,

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people started drawing their pensions, and so on, and it's very difficult, however enthusiastic they are, for older people to attract younger people to join them. I don't know why it is, but somehow younger people don't want to become part of a group which is older. With the best will in the world, it doesn't happen. So in the end, we still kept on meeting once a month,

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to the bitter end, when there were only five or six of us, and nobody wanted to do the chores, so I'm afraid I had to do sort of arranging the meetings, being the chairman of the meetings, writing the minutes of the meetings, and so on, and so on, and eventually it became just three of us, then two of us, and we thought the sensible thing would be to

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pool all the financial resources and send them up to London to the National Committee, and close the branch, and we all became individual members of the National Group then. So we flourished for a while, and died like a flower. Where the seeds fell, I don't know. Well, I hope there are many more seeds that are going to come up in Liverpool and Merseyside.

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Thank you very much, Lewis, that's been an absolutely delightful interview.