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My name is Zoe Perry. Today is Thursday the 15th of January 2015 and I'm here with Margaret Turner. Margaret, just before we begin can I ask you a few quick questions? Yes, certainly. Firstly your full name please? Margaret Mary Turner but I tend not to use the Mary just Margaret Turner. And your date of birth please? The 12th of June 1928.

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And your place of birth? Bolton, Lancashire. Thank you. So we are here today to talk about the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, WILP. Can you tell me a little bit about your current level of involvement with the organisation?

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Now I just read the emails and occasionally chip in with something. Two things that I have been interested in over the last 12 months were the manifesto that WILP has produced for the 100th anniversary in April and I did gather my thoughts together for that and sent them along so they would be incorporated with lots of other people's to produce this manifesto. And the other thing

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has been the trade agreement that's under discussion at the moment. It's called a partnership, not an agreement, but it's the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, TTIP. It was mentioned actually on the news this morning as being discussed in Parliament today. I'm pleased about that because it's one of the agreements that is being pushed through without

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enough discussion, without enough involvement of the people, you and me, because it will infect people's lives in the future. So I have had a little taking part in a little bit of discussion about that by email, but I don't travel to meetings any longer. But it was this concern for economic justice, for elimination of poverty, that

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brought me into WILP in the first place. I had lived in Orpington for a few years and been involved with elderly parents, but then I decided that, and I also had a new job, so for a few years I didn't do anything active. But then around about 79, 80, I was looking for involvement and I went to United Nations Association Garden Party, which I discovered was partly WILP and partly UNA,

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and I met somebody there that told me about WILP, so I decided to join. In the early years I wasn't very involved. I went to local meetings that didn't impress me very much, apart from one woman who I thought was a woman of status, she was called Nellie Weiss, W-E-I-S-S, and she is certainly well known in WILP. She had

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been very active internationally and nationally. But apart from that, I didn't know what I was doing. We just had general discussions about mildly relevant overseas matters. But then I did become more involved. I was representative on the International Committee. I represented the Orpington branch and discovered women who knew a

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lot about what we now call women's issues, about human rights and about militarism. But I didn't find much about economic justice and elimination of poverty, which were the issues that I was concerned about. However, I went along, I decided it was a worthwhile organisation, and I went to one or two overnight conferences and seminars, met women from out the UK

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who impressed me quite a lot. But I was still disappointed about the lack of action in my area of interest. But then in 1996-1997, the Jubilee 2000 campaign came into existence, and I suggested that we ought to be involved with that. And the UK president at that time was Margot Miller, who said, right, go ahead and do it. Get involved. So I did. And I further got

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confirmation. We had a seminar, an international, we called them IEC meetings, International Executive Committee meetings, in various parts of the world. But in 1997, it was in the UK, and the secretary general at that time was called Barbara Luttweiler. And at one of the group meetings there, I mentioned this Jubilee,

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what's it called, the Jubilee debt campaign. And she also said, right, go ahead, get involved. So that became my main action within the UK, except that at that time we needed a president. I mean, I could go back and talk about what had been happening on the British executive before then. Shall I do that? Go back before 1997 to the late 1980s, when I was on the exec,

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and we had some very active and committed young women. Shall I mention their names? Edwina, not Edwina Currie, Edwina Hughes, who was from New Zealand. And she was a great driver and very full of energy. And she took over the management of the office, the office helper, and sometimes secretary. And then when she moved on to New Zealand, by then she had recruited

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another young woman called Helen Harris, who continued. And together with Margo Miller. My one feeling of unease about the exec was that we didn't do enough at the exec itself. There weren't enough people going from around the country. The action on the exec was minimal, but these people were meeting every weekend on campaigning in Brighton and Aldermaston and so on. And then

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coming to the meetings with ideas, which was fine because they were good ideas. But I thought, I was uneasy about it sort of being planned outside the exec. However, there was nothing wrong with it. So I didn't worry too much. But then I had been treasurer part of the time. And I knew that the finances were dwindling all the time. But I thought my duty on the exec

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was to inform the exec, but they were the decision makers. So if they authorised me to go on drawing from our investments and using it, I did so. And at one stage, the office was moved from London to Worthing, close to Brighton. We had branches in Worthing and Brighton. And we had an office at a very low rent in the house of one of our members.

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And Helen Harris by then was the main activist in that area and our office helper running our office. With both Edwina and Helen, when I was the treasurer, we had a very good relationship before email. They would receive the checks from donations or subscriptions, post them to me, and they would get the bills and post the bills to me. So every month I had this turnover with them.

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But then by 1992, it was the first international Congress after I was free to go as a retired person. And I decided that I would pay for myself and go. And that made me, you know, it was really an eye opener because there I saw how WILP women from so many countries around the world worked together and enjoyed themselves and

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talked about the problems of their countries. I didn't have any specific responsibility. I deliberately didn't want that. But the international rep at that time was Deirdre Leask. And she impressed me very much and I got to know her at that time and travelled around Bolivia with her afterwards. But the Congress at that time, the main theme

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of the Congress was the sort of the indigenous women of the area. So we had women from various parts of Bolivia who were not necessarily WILP members. The women who were the wives of the the wives of the men who'd worked in the mines, the tin mines had been closed down, and these women were very concerned about their husbands being out of work and so on.

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So I became aware of their problems. But it certainly came back to UK with, you know, committed more heavily to WILP at that time. And I think it was just around about a couple of years before then, I retired in 88. And it was soon after that was asked if I would become the treasurer. So I think I was certainly the treasurer. Probably, I can't remember, maybe

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it was six years, we tended to do three years stints. So I would be from 1990 to 1990, from 1989 to 1992. And then I think probably from 92 to 95. Not all of that time. No, not all of that time. 1995 was the next Congress. And again, I decided to go at my own expense. And the international rep at that time was Helen Harris, who had

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just taken over from me as treasurer. So she was doing a lot of work. She was a young woman, she described herself as an unemployed graduate. So she spent her unemployment working for WILP, and not only working for WILP, but she was involved with taking a van to Eastern Europe to help the women, the wars associated with Eastern Europe at that time. So she worked very hard.

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And she went on the peace train at her own expense with a loan from her parents, we didn't pay for her, even though she was in our international rep. You've heard of the peace train, it went from Helsinki to Beijing, to one of the big women's conferences in Beijing. And we, partly to get publicity in the hope that it would pay off in bringing all

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WILP women back, we paid for two young women, two younger women to go on the peace train. One of these women later joined WILP, but the other one didn't. One of them was called Josephine Ocklow. She was a black woman who was very much involved in anti-racism. And she chose not to stay with WILP, but to concentrate her energy on anti-racist issues and black issues in the UK.

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The other was called Thalia Campbell, and her main involvement was creating banners. She'd been doing this all her life, she was sort of very artistic, and had made banners for various cooperative movement and so on. So on the peace train, she got the women there on the train to contribute to make a banner about the peace train itself. And then she later, she joined

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WILP later on, and she was our international representative for three or four years. Then in 1997, we had the International Executive Committee in the UK, as I've mentioned already, organised by Margot Miller, who had been the president of the UK when it was planned, but had given up the presidency at the end of 1996, I think. Nobody wanted to be the president,

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but Hazel Rennie was persuaded to take it on against her will. Well, she was persuaded to take it on, thinking that everything was secure and safe. But I also agreed to take over as treasurer, because I knew that Helen had been working very hard on other things. So when I eventually took over as treasurer in late 1996, I discovered that if we continued

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with an open office and paying a very small amount to an office worker, we would be in the red. So I warned the exec and was authorised by them to close the office, which by then was in Bristol. So it was rather sad that... No, I think it was in 1997 that I had to close the office.

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I'm a bit vague. It might have been 1998. It's all recorded in minutes and so on. So in 1998, I'm trying to go through this logically with my own things that I went to in international and at the same time what's happening in the UK. In 1998, there was a big, another congress in Baltimore in the US. And again, I went at my own expense

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and Thalia Campbell was our paid... We always paid for the international representative, but not for anybody else. I went and so did somebody called Betty Kaplanis from Liverpool, who was in a way my... When I was a treasurer, I considered her to be my, what you call it, assistant backup because she would check the books for me,

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not audit them, but check them. And in Baltimore, the great thing there was about debt. So I was very pleased because this was the issue that I was concerned about. And we had demonstrations around the IMF and the World Bank in Washington. From Baltimore, we had buses that took us there. So I came back sort of inspired to take that forward. But earlier in the year,

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at our own annual council, our own AGM, we hadn't been able to find a president. And I had been asked previously, but I felt I had no knowledge of specific women's affairs, human rights, or economic... I had no specialised knowledge. So I'd been reluctant, but at that stage, I thought, well, it's not me, it's the... There are other women

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in the section that are knowledgeable about all these things, about militarism and about human rights. All we need a president for is to hold it together and be an address, really. So I said I would take on the presidency if, when somebody took the treasury. Well, I wasn't going to be pulled treasurer and president. So that was a situation we had

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from the March-April exec meeting. We had no president, we had no secretary, and we had no office, paid office worker. But a woman who had been really looking forward to her retirement, been very heavily involved in work for a long, long time, and whose work is archived. She just took over the administration. I closed the office in Bristol,

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and talked to the... We had a lovely office there, which was just ideal, but we couldn't pay for it. So I talked to the manager of this community centre where it was, and Ruth Osborne took over the photocopier. That was the most modern equipment we had, and we had a contract, so we had to keep on paying for that photocopier.

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So she took it to Wales, where she lived, and housed it in the Methodist church there, and they shared the expense with us. We had to keep it going until the contract expired, and so she did that. Well, then Rosalie Hussard had joined WILPF and had agreed to be the secretary, so Ruth Osborne trained Rosalie Hussard, who lived in Orpington. During that year,

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all the office work was transferred to Rosalie Hussard's home in Petswood, Orpington. But in September 1998, by then another woman called Joan Egmore, who had been very involved with Mothers for Peace, she agreed to be the treasurer. She had no expert knowledge, but she agreed to do it, so then I became the president. And I had one or two things hanging

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over my first two or three months as president. One was that going back to the 1997 IEC, one WILPF member at a public meeting with international people, WILPF members, but also a meeting that was open to anybody non-WILPF as well, had accused one of the speakers of a black woman. The seminar had been on racism, and she said, well, she's got a chip on her

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shoulder, hasn't she? And we were aghast, but did nothing about it. And I had said to the president, because I was treasurer and was sort of in touch with people, that I would try and take it up with this woman next time I saw her. But I didn't see her. She had family problems, her husband being at home. So nothing had happened until 1998,

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when this woman had started coming to meetings again. And when Ruth Osborne and another group of women were preparing a seminar for October-November, I had nothing to do with the preparation, but I knew that this was very important to WILPF, because we had gone downhill somewhere, we needed something to bring us back to life, really. And I was very concerned that this woman

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would produce some other remark that would be so... I mean, she was a very good woman in one respect, she was concerned about international affairs, but she did have this tendency to produce very hurtful, cutting remarks. And I did not want this to happen at the seminar. So I think I handled the situation very badly, but at least she behaved well at that seminar.

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But then the rift continued for the whole of my presidency, because I expected her to apologise for that. And she was also... other people said she'd made anti-Jewish remarks and anti-lesbian remarks as well, so I was backed up with other people, but to me it was that remark about racism. So I thought she ought to... if she wouldn't apologise, I thought we ought to be able to

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eliminate her from WILPF. I mean, this is an open question. I know that other WILPF women at the time thought that freedom of speech meant she could say what she liked. However, that was a shadow that hung over me till the final end of my three years as presidency, when we did have her there and we did eventually persuade her to apologise. And she and I then made our peace

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quietly afterwards, but she didn't renew her WILPF membership. The other shadow that was hanging over me was that soon after, for a short time anyway, I received a letter saying that we had been given a grant for a project to do with militarism. And this, for me, it was out of the blue, but when I look back at the minutes, there had been a brief reference to it in the minutes

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a couple of years previously. The president at that time had applied for this grant. I mean, we're always applying for grants and usually didn't get them, but this was a grant from some European body. I can't remember the name now, but it was well known. And it meant that we had to provide office backup

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to go with this project. We had to put in our own work, our own effort as work to match the grant. And I knew that we didn't have the office facilities to do that. We didn't have the backup. So I almost turned it down. But, and I hadn't had any contact with Margo Miller for quite some time. Not that we weren't on good terms, but we weren't on close terms and she had given up the president

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herself and taken up other interests. But she was the one that had applied for this grant, so it involved some contact with her. I think she was probably upset that I nearly turned it down and then at the last minute discovered that the project was being conducted at Leeds Metropolitan University. I think that's the right word for it.

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Or Leeds. It was one of Leeds universities. And to be carried out by a young woman called Cat Euler, who was working there. So eventually I contacted the professor of the department and discovered that they could do all the office work there themselves. So we were able to accept the project and go ahead with it,

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but instead of it being done, the office work being done by one of the WILPF members with a WILPF office and this grant would help us to keep the office open, I'd closed the office and the work was done in Leeds, but the project did take place. It caused me a considerable amount of stress, but it happened, so that was it.

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And then I was able to follow up my interests on debt and coming back from the 1998 congress in Baltimore, where women had said there, oh you should contact your government and insist on having meetings with them. What I would have talked about I don't know, but I came back and wrote to the trade, whatever it was, department of trade,

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and I'm not sure whether I had a letter or a phone call saying that the trade minister at that time, whoever he was, they did not conduct interviews with individual organisations, but they worked through something called the UK trades. The names forgot me, but it turned out to be a group of organisations concerned with

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development that worked together and they were having a meeting that day. So I went along and gatecrashed that meeting. There were representatives from Oxfam, Cafford, Christian Aid, World Development Movement, War on Want, um, something else, you know. Anyway, all these there, surprised when I walked in

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and wondered what it was about, but you know, they accepted me. And then I used to go to their meetings on a regular basis and I felt very ignorant. I knew nothing about trade issues and they knew all about the finer points of these trade issues, but but realised, I realised that it was important if we wanted to get economic justice. Most of them,

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most of the these organisations had been behind the Jubilee debt campaign and which I'd been involved with for three years and which Wilk had taken up between 1997 and the year 2000, the end of the campaign. So we had, as a group, we had meetings with the government from time to time and eventually when they got used to me and knew that I wasn't undermining them in

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any way, I wasn't, that they accepted me as the woman's voice and I realised that I didn't need to be an expert on trade issues. All I needed to do was to say, have you consulted the grassroots women about this? Have you remembered that trade issues affect men differently from women and so we don't just want what men think, we want what women think. So that was the line that I had

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to plug and from that group then there came the trade justice movement and we, as Wilk, I went along to those meetings and by that time Rosalie Hazard had become president. She became, came to meetings with me and got involved and the trade justice movement issued its, after 12 months, it issued its sort of, what shall I, what's the word for it, its paper, its authentication,

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its sort of founding document, that's right, and I read it and discovered that it didn't say anything specifically about women in it, it was just general. There was nothing that I disagreed with but we went along to the first AGM at which they were accepting this, expected to accept this document and I said well we couldn't sign up to it because it didn't have

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any specific reference to women. So the man who was, I can't remember terms, I ought to remember the terms, but the man who was the lead for that, the paid employee for that, said well write an addition to it, an annex to it. So we did and that annex is still there in the founding document of the trade justice movement. It's there on the website and

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it says the things that we wanted to say, that trade affects women differently and that women should be consulted, not just the women who have reached on beyond who are at the high level but the women grassroots, they should be, somehow their view should be brought into it. So that was that. What else happened? The government then decided to, at some stage, to set up a

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a women's group, consultative women's group and I was invited to be on it and the other women there were experts in human rights, in women's issues, they were academics, they were involved in development programs in countries throughout the world. I was the only non-academic there. The chairwoman, she wasn't particularly knowledgeable herself either but she was a

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very capable chairperson and one of the things we did was produce a paper and it was to go to the government to take to some important meeting and so we criticised it and it was sort of issues about globalisation, about pros and cons and well and when we'd had our say then one of the civil servants took it away to rewrite it. When it came

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back the sense was completely different simply because there was some word that she'd either inserted or left out and it made it look as though it was a paper in favour of globalisation whereas I think I wish I could remember the terms but there was one word that she had either put in or left out.

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It could have been capitalist or it could have been economic but it changed the sense. So I sent an email around objecting very strongly to this. The chairwoman said to me at the next meeting, I didn't hear anyone, nobody else sent emails around, only me, the chairwoman at the next meeting said to me well although nobody had

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sent him an email around one or two others had told us it was biased in the wrong direction so it became an issue at the next meeting. One of the civil servants said oh I'm sorry I didn't realise I'd put in this word or taken it out or whatever but the paper had meanwhile gone to the government. Anyway we corrected it and it went back again

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and then shortly afterwards the government disbanded this consultative body. I suspect it thought it had set up a yes group that would agree with its policies, I don't know but I mean I suppose it was a money-saving device. Anyway by that time we had, oh yes, all these things, I'm going backwards and forwards in time because I think at the 1998

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congress there'd been discovered that there was a, within WILPF International, there was a group concerned with globalisation or capitalist globalisation and I joined this and I was asked if I would be a co-convener. Well again I was very ignorant but I was happy to think of myself as a person who could put into readable English ideas from women whose

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language was not English, not to produce the ideas myself and the other co-convener was a woman from the Philippines called Rosario Padilla, generally known as Cherry, a very capable woman who had been an international vice-president for a time. So the first thing that happened was that we decided to write a paper.

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Well the first thing that happened after I'd become, taken this over anyway, I didn't know what had happened before. So I gathered information from everybody and just put their ideas into English and we produced a paper about ideas about globalisation and economic justice and then Cherry said yes well if I did that she would do something from then on

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but she didn't. She was just a very busy woman, I think involved heavily in politics in the Philippines. So it seemed that I was left as the convener for this economic justice group and I struggled and struggled to get ideas from other people but I didn't have any particular strong background myself. All I think it did was kept the subject open to some extent

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and we did write more papers but they were more or less a repetition. Oh and one of the things I did do was because from time to time there were these World Trade Organization meetings in various parts of the world and so I got Dwilf to accept me as a delegate to one of these meetings but no funds, I think I paid for myself

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and I went to Cancun as a delegate and it was extremely interesting. I went to Cancun, yes partly as a Wilp delegate but because Wilp wasn't big enough to have its own delegation I went under the auspices of Women's International Coalition for Economic Justice, WICEJ, W-I-C-E-J, and I was partnered there with a woman from

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Egypt called Josephine Kamel and another woman from Canada, I think. So the three of us were delegates for this WICEJ and we shared a pass to go into the World Trade Organization meetings but in fact it was more valuable to be at meetings outside which we could all go to. If you went into the World Trade Organization itself with your pass you just saw what was

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going on there and there might be an important discussion or there might just be a handful of people and most of the meetings taking place outside. So I had two or three days travelling, joining different groups there and it was at the time it was, I don't think it was 1994, 1993, I think it was 1994 when they were trying to get through

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this document. I should have looked this up before today. The Doha Agenda, you've heard of the Doha Agenda, the Doha, it's to do with trade and it was called the Doha Agenda because one of the meetings of the World Trade Organization had taken place in Doha some years previously and they'd set up for this agenda that they wanted to force through.

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They were trying to persuade the poorer countries to sign up and go along with it and it was really a precursor of this TTIP that I mentioned. The poorer countries were having their arms twisted to sign up to it, being invited to special meetings where they were told, well if you don't do this

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other countries will go ahead and you'll be left behind and there was this sort of tension all the time. It's quite an exciting thing and at the end of the final session I happened to see a television screen dotted around all the way. You could see on a television screen what was happening in the World Trade Organization itself anyway and this screen

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showed the ending of it at which the US delegate to the World Trade Organization, the official delegate, I mean the trade representative, called somebody, Zerla, was saying you'll regret this because the poorer countries had refused to sign, it had failed and he was saying you'll regret this, we will be pushing through

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private agreements instead of world agreements and they will be much harder on you. I also went to a meeting of a group of people representing the Third World under the chairmanship of a very powerful man whose name I can't remember but a very powerful man who was conducting this meeting and they were learning that the Doha agenda had failed.

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They were absolutely exhilarated by the fact that they had resisted, had refused to sign, so it was quite an exciting meeting and I came back and reported but it wasn't really only a side issue for WILP because WILP is more concerned with militarism and human rights but it was my concern so I was glad I went.

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And so I mean all these things, I followed up, when I was president I wrote lots of letters to our government on trade issues, debt issues and so on and those are all in the archives but I was also concerned about racism and in 19... I think it was...

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Yes I'm... I'm getting a bit mixed up, I think that Cancun meeting was in the 2000s not the 1990s, I think it was more like 2004 than 1994. Going back to 1990s when Margot Miller was president we had a letter from International WILP one day from Geneva saying

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did we have any delegates who would go to... did we have anybody who were willing to go as an observer to the elections in South Africa? So I said I will go, so I was accepted. So I went as an observer to the elections in South Africa in 1994 and that also was a very exciting meeting, very...

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We met in Johannesburg initially, we had to stay at good hotels where we'd be contacted, we were told which hotel to stay at. The expenses at the Oppington Ranch paid my fare to Johannesburg and we had I think a a grant from somebody in the UK to pay for their expenses, so the hotel expenses and so on. Anyway

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I met women from various... WILP women from various countries and we had to go to a training session at Whitwaters Round University to begin with. I didn't manage the whole of it, I have too late to get through a bit, but briefly I met the other women who were involved but then most of them were sent off to different parts of South Africa

00:46:15.800 - 00:46:43.200

to observe in different places, whereas I was told to stay in Pretoria together with a woman from Canada, so the two of us were partners. We were told to stay in Johannesburg first of all until we got a message about what to do next and we had to wait at the end of a telephone for messages, but eventually we were told to go to Pretoria and stay in a certain hotel there

00:46:43.680 - 00:47:14.140

and wait there until we were contacted. So there was a lot of waiting and tension because we felt that we weren't going to be involved, we were not careful. Anyway then we did get a phone call and we were involved with a team where we were told then to go to a party first of all where we met one or two important people and then the next day to an office run by something called

00:47:14.140 - 00:47:48.780

NEON, National Election Observer something or other and there we met a woman who was responsible for the elections in Pretoria itself, a black woman, a very capable black woman, who was negotiating with all the local observers and we had to team up with two black men and when eventually we got this, after a lot of waiting, we got this team of four of us,

00:47:49.020 - 00:48:27.100

Sylvia McFadden-Jones from Canada, myself from the UK, a driver who was an election, a black man driver who was a very happy, stable, middle-aged man but also an observer and a younger, more fiery black man who was a very skilled linguist but very strongly against, I can't remember the word, the Afrikaans people.

00:48:27.100 - 00:49:02.060

So whenever we met groups of people and were accosted by Afrikaans police he pretended he didn't understand. However we had this team of four and we just went around election places in the Pretoria area about 10 to 12 a day and wrote, all we had to do was observe, not interfere, observe that things were as they should be, observe people going around to do their

00:49:02.060 - 00:49:31.460

voting, observe when boxes were filled and we observed when boxes were taken to wherever they went at the end of the day. So that was a very important experience for me and I wrote a report and that's all archived in the LSE and so on. And I gave one or two talks when I came back to England about that.

00:49:32.260 - 00:50:08.380

So where am I now? That was 1994 wasn't it? And meanwhile I've been to, yes, much later. What else did I do? I also joined somewhere around about, I've got a 10-year gap in, I think it was in the 2000s, yes, somewhere around about the early 2000s, 2003 I think, we got a message from the Hanan Awad who was the Palestinian

00:50:08.940 - 00:50:44.100

WILPF representative inviting WILPF women in general to go to a seminar in Palestine just to show solidarity really, to go on a sort of a cultural tour she called it. And so I thought I would go on that but during the time between her issuing the invitation and the event taking place the Israelis had gone into Ramallah and Jenin and various places

00:50:44.100 - 00:51:19.980

and done a lot of destruction. So in fact when we went there we were witnessing all the destruction that had taken place in these areas. The Hanan took us first of all to visit a family of Palestinians who had been evicted from their house and were living on the streets. That would have been in, where did we go to?

00:51:22.220 - 00:51:53.420

Jerusalem, yes, yes, on the outskirts. And then we went to Ramallah where we visited, had an interview with President Arafat in a building that we wouldn't have been allowed in in the UK because it was, it had been gutted, you know, part of it and we had to go up a staircase to meet him and most of the area around was demolished and he was absolutely charming,

00:51:55.000 - 00:52:33.360

very unbearable but there was an uneasy feeling that, you know, the Palestinians were not against use of violence although they had a lot of justice on their side because their property was being taken over and the water reserves were being used. You hear about these Israeli farm country where they've got produce that comes to the UK, produce that goes all over

00:52:33.360 - 00:53:00.280

the world but it's been grown at the expense of the water reserves that belong to the Palestinians as well. So we learned a lot about that, we visited Ramallah as well and WILPF had a Middle East committee, I expect there is still one that always takes particular interest in that but I decided not to join the Middle East committee,

00:53:00.480 - 00:53:34.380

I had other things to do but it was just one of the experiences that I had in WILPF. So I think if I get back to the UK I need to think about the continuing involvement with the trade justice movement and this UK trade network was the name of the body that negotiated with the UK government until I felt I couldn't really do it any longer but by that time I was pleased,

00:53:35.260 - 00:54:08.920

Sheila Triggs had become president and she continued to do these things when I decided that I couldn't face the commuting, coming back from London at commuter times and so on but I've still kept up my interest in that particular aspect of it, the economic justice side of it. What other involvement have I had recently? I did become aware that

00:54:08.920 - 00:54:39.040

when I came to Croydon that there had been a Croydon branch that had folded up many years ago and so eventually when I'd stopped doing other things I looked at the archives in Croydon and sure enough there are boxes of archives there about WILPF action in Croydon and I discovered that it folded up in 1967 because nobody would take on the job of being secretary

00:54:41.420 - 00:55:12.760

but I have visited the archives and in the Croydon museum there is a banner which just says on it WIL, they didn't put the pf4 on at the end, they used to call it the will and a picture of the world underneath and that was the Croydon WILPF banner. It's not very big, maybe one bigger than A4 is A3 I think, maybe A3 size

00:55:13.560 - 00:55:47.960

and there is an audio equipment attached and you can hear the voice of the woman who talked about her mother Barbara Duncan Smith as being a founding member of WILPF Croydon in 1917 so that is there and somewhere in this display, they called it a kiosk, it asks for follow-up, there are various other things being represented in this box and it

00:55:47.960 - 00:56:21.680

asks for follow-up and it says for WILPF there is no follow-up so I suggested follow-up that they visit WILPF websites, well I've suggested that several years ago and I discovered this year that it wasn't there and I suggested it again and I went earlier this week or last week and I got a letter either yesterday or the day before saying thank you they're renewing, they're revisiting,

00:56:22.860 - 00:56:52.520

renewing their kiosks and checking up that the websites that I'd given them were there and they will go on to that, they will be in the Croydon Museum in future so that there will be that follow-up for WILPF so that's my last bit of the WILPF stuff. I'm hoping to go to the millennium, the centenary celebrations in

00:56:52.520 - 00:57:27.420

in the Hague. I think I've said enough now really haven't I? What have I not said? Just that I've met some very, you know, very capable women, much more knowledgeable than me about the issues that that we work on but you just do what you can and that's it.

00:57:32.860 - 00:58:09.320

I can't say anything else. That's fine, that's extraordinary and very interesting. Yes, what I hadn't actually mentioned, the 1997 IEC which I have mentioned, usually after IECs or congresses in particular anyway,

00:58:10.160 - 00:58:33.700

they have what is called the Gertrude Bear Seminar for Young Women. Well Margot Miller who organised the IEC seminar, the IEC meeting in London, decided that she would, last minute, she would put on this seminar but couldn't draw enough, but it didn't need to be just for young people, it could be up for older people as well.

00:58:34.200 - 00:59:03.400

So I decided to go and Sylvia McFadyen-Jones who had been my partner in South Africa, was my guest at the time. So the two of us joined that and we visited the Oldermaston Peace Camp and spent two or three nights there and learnt about the nuclear traffic that was going in and out of that camp and the people that tracked this, tracked this traffic as it travelled through

00:59:03.400 - 00:59:35.120

England, nuclear stuff by lorries. And then we went to Menwith Hill which was the site in Yorkshire where they monitor, there was a permanent women's site there for several years where the US have got a military base there with these what look like enormous golf balls. You can see them if you travel through Yorkshire, you can see, and in other parts of the country,

00:59:35.260 - 01:00:10.180

these enormous golf balls which are the US military and according to the Menwith Hill campsite it's where they spy on the rest of the world and from Menwith Hill women, not necessarily sometimes women but you know not all the Menwith Hill campaigners are women. They have found their way in secret inside and wanted to be caught, wanted to be

01:00:11.020 - 01:00:42.740

picked up and taken to judgment procedures to create publicity but generally it doesn't get that publicity because these sites don't want the publicity because the US involvement. So they trespass deliberately and hope to be brought to justice as trespassers but after a short imprisonment they are

01:00:43.920 - 01:01:16.060

released without. I have been getting their newsletter until quite recently and I've just told them to stop now. I should have mentioned when I talked about Helen Harris Longlaunch right at the beginning, more than once, at least once, she came to accept meetings having spent the night in prison because of non-violent direct action and I think it's important that we should know

01:01:16.060 - 01:01:48.880

that also. So there have been some very brave, hard-working women who've dedicated a great deal of their lives to this. I just started when I retired. Would you like a cup of coffee or anything? I'm all right actually. I'm going to spend a penny. Of course, yeah, go ahead.

01:01:53.920 - 01:02:17.680

I'm all right. Session one ending 12 o'clock Thursday the 15th of January 2015. Zoe Perry and Margaret Turner