The Committee of 100 was a British anti-war group. It was set up in 1960 with a hundred public signatories by Bertrand Russell, Ralph Schoenman, Michael Scott, and others. Its supporters used mass nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience to achieve their aims. After the parliamentary strategy of the leadership of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament suffered reverses, the committee became, historian Martin Shaw argues, the driving force of the mass movement against nuclear weapons in 1961-63.Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament https://www.agendapub.com/page/detail/the-campaign-for-nuclear-disarmament/?k=9781788217774

History

The idea of a mass civil disobedience campaign against nuclear weapons emerged early in 1960 in discussions between Ralph Schoenman (an activist in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND)), and Hugh Brock, April Carter (both of the Direct Action Committee against nuclear war), Ralph Miliband, Alan Lovell and Stuart Hall. Schoenman approached Bertrand Russell, the president of CND, with the idea. Russell resigned from the presidency of CND in order to form the Committee of 100, which was launched at a meeting in London on 22 October 1960 with a hundred signatures. Russell was elected as president and Michael Randle of the Direct Action Committee was appointed secretary.

Russell explained his reasons for setting up the Committee of 100 in an article in the New Statesman in February 1961:

Many in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, including some of its founders, supported the Committee of 100's campaign of civil disobedience and in its first year it received more in donations than CND had received in its first year. Several of the early CND's activists, including some members of its executive committee, had been supporters of the Direct Action Committee and in 1958 CND had cautiously accepted direct action as a possible method of campaigning; but, largely under the influence of Canon John Collins, the CND chairman, the CND leadership opposed any sort of unlawful protest, and the Committee of 100 was created as a separate organisation partly for that reason and partly because of personal animosity between Collins and Russell. It has been suggested that this separation weakened the campaign against nuclear weapons.

The committee's campaign tactic was to organise sit-down demonstrations, which were not to be undertaken without at least 2,000 volunteers pledging to take part. Many eminent people participated in the sit-downs but few of the 100 signatories took part in the committee's activities. Demonstrators were required to adopt a discipline of non-violence. In a briefing document the Committee of 100 said, "We ask you not to shout slogans and to avoid provocation of any sort. The demonstrations must be carried out in a quiet, orderly way. Although we want massive support for these demonstrations, we ask you to come only if you are willing to accept this non-violent discipline."Mass Resistance - Wethersfield - Ruislip, Committee of 100, 1961. Demonstrators were recommended to remain limp if arrested and to refuse to co-operate in any way until inside the police station.

At first, the Committee of 100 differed from CND only in its methods, and they had the same objectives. Within the committee, however, there were different ideas about civil disobedience, direct action and non-violence. Bertrand Russell saw mass civil disobedience merely as a way of getting publicity for the unilateralist cause. Those from the Direct Action Committee were absolute pacifists (some of them Christians) who followed Gandhi, and they regarded direct action as a way of creating a non-violent society. Ralph Schoenman and others, including the anarchists who later led the organisation, saw direct action as a sort of insurrection that could force the state to give up nuclear weapons. These factions argued among themselves about whether non-violence was a matter of principle or just a tactic and whether the Committee should limit itself to demonstrations or adopt a more thoroughgoing anarchist programme. Nicolas Walter, a prominent member of the Committee, said later that it had been an anarchist organisation from its inception and that the hundred signatories were, in effect, a front.Walter, Nicolas, Damned Fools in Utopia, PM Press, 2011.

February to September 1961

The committee's first act of civil disobedience on 18 February 1961 was a sit-down demonstration at the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall, London, to coincide with the expected arrival of on the River Clyde. (Picture) Between 1,000 and 6,000 people took part.From Protest to Resistance, a Peace News pamphlet, Mushroom Books, Nottingham, 1981, p.18 . Somewhat to the surprise of the Committee, there were no arrests. At the next sit-down demonstration, on 29 April in Parliament Square, the police arrested 826 people. There were also marches and sit-downs against nuclear testing and demonstrations at the US and Soviet embassies in London and at the Polaris submarine base.

On 17 September, Battle of Britain Day, supporters blocked the pierheads at Holy Loch and the approaches to Trafalgar Square. (Picture) The September demonstration is regarded as the high-water mark of the Committee of 100. A week before the demonstration, the hundred committee members were summoned to court without charge under the Justices of the Peace Act 1361 because they "incited members of the public to commit breaches of the peace" and were likely to continue to do so. The court bound them to a promise of good behaviour for twelve months; thirty-two, including Bertrand Russell, then aged 89, refused and chose to go to prison instead. It is estimated that 12,000 to 15,000 attended the demonstration despite the invocation of the Public Order Act 1936, which effectively made it illegal to be in the vicinity of central London that day. Several thousand sat down and there were 1,314 arrests, but no violence from demonstrators despite allegations of police brutality.

December 1961 The success of the September demonstration encouraged the committee to move from symbolic sit-down demonstrations in London to mass direct action at the places where nuclear weapons would be deployed, and they planned simultaneous demonstrations on 9 December to walk on to air force bases at Wethersfield, Ruislip, Brize Norton, Cardiff to sit on the runways and to prevent planes from taking off, and street sit-downs in Bristol, Manchester and York.Shelley, Diana, "Influx or exodus? Anarchists and the Committee of 100", Anarchy, No. 50, April 1965. By this time the authorities had begun to take the Committee of 100 more seriously. The official response had escalated from prosecution for incitement to breach of the peace to prosecution for the much more serious offences of conspiracy and incitement to breach the Official Secrets Act 1911.

To that end Special Branch raided the committee's offices at 13 Goodwin Street in Finsbury Park before the protests, seizing material and charging and arresting six of its young, leading but lesser-known organisers, the "Wethersfield Six" - Bertrand Russell said that he was equally responsible, but the authorities refused to arrest him too. The six were Ian Dixon, Terry Chandler, Trevor Hatton, Michael Randle, Pat Pottle and Helen Allegranza - in February the following year all were sentenced to eighteen months' imprisonment except Allegranza, who received twelve months.Driver, Christopher, The Disarmers: A Study in Protest, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964.Taylor, R., Against the Bomb, Oxford University Press, 1988. (Picture)

3,000 military and civilian police were mobilised at Wethersfield. 5,000 demonstrated between there and bases at Brize Norton and Ruislip, and city centre protests in Cardiff, York, Manchester and Bristol, some ~850 were arrested across all locations. It was regarded by many as a failure and it was the committee's last act of large-scale civil disobedience. There were recriminations within the committee, one internal memorandum saying that its policies had turned it into "a public spectacle, a group isolated from the general body of public opinion and feeling." Herbert Read resigned from the committee, saying that the action was "strategically foolish". The committee was weakened by the imprisonment of its officers.

The force used by the police at sit-down demonstrations surprised many of the demonstrators, which, with the committee's insistence on nonviolence and the use of pre-emptive arrests for conspiracy, discouraged many, and support dwindled.Myers, F.E., "Civil Disobedience and Organizational Change: The British Committee of 100", Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 86, No. 1. (March 1971), pp. 92-112. The committee's plan to "fill the jails" by means of mass civil disobedience, and thus compel the government to respond to their demands, was frustrated by the authorities imprisoning a few important members and ignoring the rest. The harsh sentences on the Wethersfield Six "brought home to the Committee its inadequacy when faced with the might of the State," and some of the committee's leaders were not willing to "fill the jails", mounting strenuous appeals against conviction or, in the case of Pat Pottle, going on the run.

1962–1968

By 1962, half of the original 100 signatories had resigned and had been replaced. The committee was in debt and had to face the failure of its mass civil-disobedience campaign. It was dissolved and the campaign was decentralized, thirteen regional committees, each with a hundred members, becoming responsible for organizing demonstrations, with a co-ordinating national committee. Of the regional committees, the London Committee of 100 was the most active and influential. A national magazine was launched by the London Committee in April 1963, published under the name Resistance from January 1964. Like CND, the Committee of 100 had begun with a self-appointed and unelected leadership, and, like CND, it faced pressure for greater participation by supporters. This re-organisation was intended to involve more people in decision making and to spread demonstrations throughout the country and had been anticipated in the creation of a number of subgroups in December 1961. Although Bertrand Russell opposed it, he wrote that "The Committee has found that its support, named and on file, is so extensive that regional committees are required to accommodate this strength,"Russell, B. Yours Faithfully, Bertrand Russell, Open Court, Chicago and La Salle, 2001, p. 282. But supporters became exhausted by the number of demonstrations they attended and "neither London nor the regional committees had their full complement of a hundred."

In March 1962 Russell addressed a sit-down demonstration in Parliament Square against the sentences on the Wethersfield Six. All the 1,172 protesters were arrested, but there was a growing feeling that such demonstrations were becoming an end in themselvesLondon Committee of 100, Beyond Counting Arses, 1963. Cited in Gopodway, David Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow, Liverpool University Press, 2006. and would not now create a mass movement against nuclear weapons. (Contemporary research showed that public support for the unilateralist cause actually declined in the period when the Committee of 100 was most active.Snyder, W.P., The Politics of British Defense Policy, 1945-1962, Ohio University Press, 1964, p. 61.) A sit-down of 7,000 outside the Air Ministry planned for the following September had to be called off because of lack of support,Peers, Dave, "The impasse of CND" , International Socialism, International Socialism, No. 12, Spring 1963, pp. 6–11. a "public assembly" being held instead.