Aldermaston Marches (1958): CND and the Birth of the Peace Symbol

The Aldermaston marches were protest walks against nuclear weapons that began over Easter 1958, when several thousand people marched from London to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire. The march came weeks after the founding of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and turned British opposition to the bomb into a mass movement. It also introduced a new emblem, Gerald Holtom’s circle-and-lines design, which became the international peace symbol.

Background: Britain and the H-bomb

Britain tested its first atomic bomb in 1952 and its first thermonuclear device over the Pacific in May 1957. A defence white paper that year made nuclear deterrence the centre of British strategy. At the same time, fears grew about radioactive fallout from atmospheric tests by the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain.

In November 1957 the writer J. B. Priestley published an article in the New Statesman urging Britain to give up nuclear weapons, which drew a flood of letters. On 17 February 1958 a public meeting at Central Hall, Westminster, launched the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Bertrand Russell became president and Canon John Collins chairman, with supporters including Priestley, the historian A. J. P. Taylor and the Labour politician Michael Foot. CND called for Britain to renounce nuclear weapons unilaterally.

The marchers’ destination was the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, set up in 1950 on a former Royal Air Force airfield at Aldermaston in Berkshire. It was the centre of Britain’s work on designing nuclear warheads, which made it a powerful symbol for the protesters.

The first march, Easter 1958

The march was planned by a smaller pacifist group, the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War, with activists such as Pat Arrowsmith and Hugh Brock, and CND agreed to support it. It began with a rally in Trafalgar Square on Good Friday, 4 April 1958, attended by several thousand people.

Over four days the marchers walked roughly 50 miles (80 km) west through Kensington, Hounslow, Slough and Reading in cold, wet weather, sleeping in schools and church halls. Jazz bands played along the route, and the writer John Brunner composed the song “The H-Bombs’ Thunder” for the march, which became an anthem of the movement. Numbers on the road varied from a few hundred to several thousand. On Easter Monday, 7 April, the marchers arrived at the gates of the weapons establishment, where estimates of the final crowd range from about 5,000 to 10,000.

The peace symbol

For the march, the Direct Action Committee commissioned the designer Gerald Holtom, a conscientious objector during the Second World War. In February 1958 he produced a design combining the semaphore positions for the letters N and D, for nuclear disarmament, within a circle. Holtom also described it as representing a despairing figure with arms outstretched downwards.

Around 500 of the symbols were carried on the 1958 march on cardboard placards shaped like lollipops. CND adopted the design, and because it was never copyrighted it spread rapidly, appearing in the American civil rights movement, on anti-Vietnam War protests and in the 1960s counterculture as a general sign of peace.

Later marches

From 1959 to 1963 CND organised the Easter march in the opposite direction, from Aldermaston to London, so that it ended with a mass rally in Trafalgar Square. Crowds at the final rallies of the early 1960s were estimated in the tens of thousands, with some estimates of 100,000 or more. The marches attracted students, trade unionists, Christians, jazz bands and families, and became a fixture of British political life.

In October 1960 the Labour Party conference voted for unilateral nuclear disarmament, though the decision was reversed in 1961. Some activists, impatient with marches, joined the Committee of 100 to practise civil disobedience. During the 1963 march, a group calling itself Spies for Peace distributed leaflets revealing a secret government bunker, Regional Seat of Government 6, at Warren Row near Reading, and some marchers broke away to demonstrate outside it. After the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the movement declined, but it revived strongly in the early 1980s, when protests against cruise missiles included the Greenham Common peace camp.

Timeline

• 1957, 15 May: Britain carries out its first thermonuclear weapons test in the Pacific.
• 1957, November: J. B. Priestley’s article calls for British nuclear disarmament.
• 1958, February: Gerald Holtom designs the nuclear disarmament symbol.
• 1958, 17 February: CND is launched at Central Hall, Westminster.
• 1958, 4 April: The first march sets off from Trafalgar Square.
• 1958, 7 April: Marchers reach the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston.
• 1959, March: CND’s first march from Aldermaston to London takes place over Easter.
• 1960, October: Labour Party conference votes for unilateral disarmament.

Why it matters

The first Aldermaston march showed that opposition to nuclear weapons could mobilise ordinary people in large numbers. It made CND one of the most important protest movements in post-war Britain and gave the world a symbol of peace that is still recognised everywhere.