Peace News (PN) was a pacifist magazine first published on 6 June 1936 to serve the peace movement in the United Kingdom. From later in 1936 to April 1961 it was the official paper of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU), and from 1990 to 2004 was co-published with War Resisters' International. Publication of the magazine has been suspended since the resignation of its entire workforce in September 2024.
History Founding and early days Peace News was begun by Humphrey Moore who was a Quaker and in 1933 had become editor of the National Peace Council's publications. Working with a peace group in Wood Green, London, Moore and his wife, Kathleen (playing the role of business manager), launched Peace News with a free trial issue in June 1936. With distribution through Moore’s contacts with the National Peace Council, the new magazine rapidly attracted attention. Within six weeks, Dick Sheppard, founder of the Peace Pledge Union, proposed to Moore that Peace News should become the PPU’s paper.Harry Mister, "Humphrey Moore 1909-1995" , Peace News No. 2395.Harry Mister and Stephen Moore, "Brave Fighter for Peace" (obituary of Humphrey Moore). The Guardian, September 1995, p. 16. Early contributors to this new organ of the PPU included Mohandas Gandhi, George Lansbury, and illustrator Arthur Wragg. Peace News also had a large number of women contributors, including Vera Brittain, Storm Jameson, Rose Macaulay, Ethel Mannin, Ruth Fry, Kathleen Lonsdale and Sybil Morrison.Gail Chester and Andrew Rigby, Articles of Peace: Celebrating Fifty Years of Peace News. Prism, 1986, pp. 131–33.
Some contributors were so sympathetic to the grievances of Nazi Germany that one sceptical member found it difficult to distinguish between letters to Peace News and those in the newspaper of the British Union of Fascists.Frank McDonough, Neville Chamberlain, Appeasement, and the British Road to War, Manchester University Press, 1998 The historian Mark Gilbert has argued that "With the exception of Action, the journal of the British Union of Fascists, it is hard to think of another British newspaper which was so consistent an apologist for Nazi Germany as Peace News."Mark Gilbert, "Pacifist attitudes to Nazi Germany, 1936-45", Journal of Contemporary History, January 1992, Vol. 27, pp. 493–511. However, Juliet Gardiner has noted that Peace News also urged the British government to give sanctuary to Jewish refugees from Nazism.Juilet Gardiner, The Thirties: An Intimate History. HarperPress, 2010, p. 501. The fact that some PN contributors were supporting appeasement and excusing Nazi actions caused PN contributor David Spreckley to express fears that "in their scramble for peace", they were gaining "some questionable allies".Peace News, 10 November 1939 (p. 9), quoted in Martin Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists:the British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1854-1945 Oxford University Press, 2000 (p. 398).
Sales of Peace News peaked at around 40,000 during the so-called Phoney War between September 1939 and May 1940. In that month in the face of demands in Parliament for the banning of the paper, the printer and distributors stopped working with Peace News. However, with help from the typographer Eric Gill, Hugh Brock and many others, Moore continued to publish Peace News and arrange for distribution around the UK.
Humphrey Moore’s emphasis on Peace News having a single-minded anti-war policy was increasingly being challenged. Others wanted greater emphasis on building a peaceful society once hostilities ended. In 1940 the PPU asked Moore to step aside into the post of assistant editor (which post he held until 1944), and appointed John Middleton Murry as editor."Peace News" in Peter Barberis, John McHugh & Mike Tyldesley (eds), Encyclopedia of British and Irish Political Organizations. Continuum, 2005, (p. 344). By 1946 Murry had abandoned pacifism and resigned.
Hugh Brock took on the role of assistant editor of Peace News in 1946 and became editor in 1955, lasting until 1964. During his period of tenure the magazine separated from the PPU as it had widened its focus into areas not directly related to absolute pacifism. Peace News in the 1940s published material from American journalist Dwight MacdonaldMichael Doyle, Radical Chapters: Pacifist Bookseller Roy Kepler and the Paperback Revolution.Syracuse University Press, 2012. (p. 84). and Maurice Cranston (later to become a noted philosopher).
From the 1940s on, Peace News began to take a strongly critical line towards British rule in Kenya.Stephen Howe, Anticolonialism in British politics: The Left and the End of Empire, 1918-1964, Clarendon Press, 1993, pp. 206, 239. The magazine also established links with African anti-colonial activists Kwame Nkrumah and Kenneth Kaunda, and "Peace News′ close involvement with the anti-apartheid struggle...led to the banning of the paper in South Africa in 1959".Chester and Rigby, p. 15. During the 1950s, Peace News contributors included such noted activists as André Trocmé, Martin Niemöller, Fenner Brockway, A. J. Muste, Richard B. Gregg, Alex Comfort, Donald Soper, Michael Scott, MPs Leslie Hale and Emrys Hughes, Muriel Lester, Wilfred Wellock,"Peace News-the World Pacifist Weekly" (Advertisement on back cover of pamphlet NATO: A Critical Examination of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, by Roy Sherwood, 1956). and Esmé Wynne-Tyson.Chester and Rigby, p. 138.
1959 to 1969
In 1959, a gift of £5,700 from Tom Willis enabled Peace News to buy 5 Caledonian Road, London, N1. This became its office and printing press and was also shared with Housmans Bookshop.Tom Willis and Emily Johns, "The man who made it all possible", Peace News, Nos. 2516 – 2517. It was at the Peace News office that the nuclear disarmament/peace symbol was adopted. Describing the British pacifist tradition in the 1950s, David Widgery wrote "at its most likeable it was the sombre decency of Peace News, then a vegetarian tabloid with a Quaker emphasis on active witness".David Widgery, "Don't You Hear The H-Bomb's Thunder?" in The Left in Britain, Penguin, 1976 (p. 100).
The magazine campaigned against nuclear weapons, often working with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.Chester and Rigby, p. 69. During this period Brock brought to Peace News "a staff of writer-activists committed to developing Gandhian nonviolent action in the anti-militarist cause", including Pat Arrowsmith, Richard Boston, April Carter, Alan Lovell, Michael Randle, Adam Roberts and the American Gene Sharp.Chester and Rigby, p. 31. Brock's successor in 1964 was Theodore Roszak.Richard K. S. Taylor, Against the Bomb: the British Peace Movement, 1958-1965. Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 118, 271. In the same year, a Caribbean Quaker and PN writer, Marion Glean, "contributed to a series of statements by post-colonial activists on 'race' in the run-up to the 1964 election, published by Theodore Roszak, editor of Peace News."Kalbir Shukra, The Changing Pattern of Black Politics in Britain. Pluto Press, 1998, p. 20.Ron Ramdin, The Making of the Black Working Class, Gower, 1987, p. 418. After the election, Glean helped bring together several activists, including David Pitt, C. L. R. James and Ranjana Ash to form the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination. Throughout the 1960s, Peace News covered issues such as opposition to the Vietnam War and the Biafran issue in the Nigerian Civil War. The magazine's coverage of the Vietnam War was notable for its support for the protests of the Vietnamese Buddhists, who it argued could become a nonviolent "Third Force" independent of both the Saigon and Hanoi governments.Chester and Rigby, p. 19. Peace News also ran lengthy analysis of left-wing thinkers, including E.P. Thompson's two-part study of C. Wright Mills"C. Wright Mills: The Responsible Craftsman", Peace News 22 November 1963 and 29 November 1963. Reprinted in slightly different form in Thompsons' The Heavy Dancers (1995) and Theodore Roszak's assessment of Lewis Mumford.Theodore Roszak, "Mumford and the Megamachine", Peace News, 29 December 1967.
1970 to 2014
In 1971 the company was re-structured with Peace News Ltd (PNL) newly created to separate the management of Peace News from that of Housmans Bookshop, while Peacenews Trustees Ltd (renamed Peace News Trustees Ltd in December 2025) continued to oversee both organisations, and in December 1971 the paper added to its masthead the words "for nonviolent revolution".
In April 1974, the paper switched from weekly to fortnightly production with a coloured cover and moved its main office to 8 Elm Avenue in Nottingham, where it remained until returning to London in 1990.
In 1978, one worker at Housmans was injured after a bomb was sent to the Peace News London office, (allegedly by the neo-Nazi organisation Column 88) as part of a series of attacks on left-wing organisations (similar attacks were made on the Socialist Workers Party and Anti-Nazi League offices before this occurred)."Bomb Explodes at Peace News", Irish Times, 5 July 1978, p. 7.
Peace News suspended publication at the end of 1987, intending to relaunch after a period of rethinking and planning. In May 1989 the paper resumed publication, but quickly ran into financial difficulties. In 1990 it became linked to War Resisters' International and was co-published as a monthly until 1999, then as a quarterly with a British-orientated Nonviolent Action published in the intervening months. Peace News came out strongly against the Iraq War in 2003 while at the same time condemning Saddam Hussein."...here it becomes important to make the distinction between one man and his military cronies and a population of 22.5 million people. Unless proven otherwise, all people are our allies. And just because you don't want to see 22.5 million people have their basic infrastructure bombed, or see the poor conscripts being massacred, doesn't mean you support Saddam." "No Note of Apology" , Editorial. Peace News 2450, March–May 2003. Retrieved 17 November 2011. In 2005, Peace News resumed monthly publication, as an independent British publication and in a tabloid format, before switching to regular bi-monthly publication in April 2014.
In June 2014, Peace News ran an article calling for a "Yes" vote in the Scottish independence referendum."Yes To Independence", Pete Ramand and James Foley. Peace News, June 2014. Retrieved 8 September 2014.
2015–2024 Peace News continued to be published in tabloid-size print media and as a website by Peace News Ltd until 2024, describing its editorial objectives in 2009 as: to support and connect nonviolent and anti-militarist movements; provide a forum for such movements to develop common perspectives; take up issues suitable for campaigning; promote nonviolent, antimilitarist and pacifist analyses and strategies; stimulate thinking about the revolutionary implications of nonviolence.peace News Editorial policy , Peace News website. Accessed February 2010. It was last edited by Milan Rai and Emily Johns.Our current staff , Peace News website. Accessed April 2010.
In 2012 Tony Benn described Peace News as "a paper that gives us hope...(it) should be widely read".Benn quoted in Housmans Peace Diary 2012, Housmans Bookshop, 2012, .
In the 2015 United Kingdom general election, Peace News endorsed voting Green as "the default position for folk who’re willing to vote at all – unless you’ve got a sitting left-wing Labour MP like John McDonnell.
In the 2019 United Kingdom general election, Peace News endorsed voting Green, Labour or Plaid Cymru.
In September 2024, it was announced by the resigning editors that Peace News magazine had been closed. This “closure” was due to a dispute between the Peace News Ltd staff and the Peacenews Trustees Ltd board, that had ended with the mass resignation of the magazine's staff.