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.
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
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. 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)
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. Somewhat to the surprise of the Committee, there were no arrests. 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 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. (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. 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. But supporters became exhausted by the number of demonstrations they attended and would not now create a mass movement against nuclear weapons.) 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, a "public assembly" being held instead.
From 1962 onwards, the committee became increasingly radical and extended its campaigns to issues other than nuclear weapons. Peter Cadogan, an officer of the committee, said it was "trying to go in 12 directions at once", including campaigning for civil liberties in Greece, against Harold Wilson's failure to produce a promised Vietnam peace initiative and against siting London's third airport at Stansted. Diana Shelley, a member of the London Committee of 100, said that as the Committee adopted objectives other than nuclear disarmament it became "less non-violent". revelations in 1963 about the regional seats of government, a network of secret government bunkers, and later for the escape of George Blake from Wormwood Scrubs Prison.
The committee's interest in Greek politics was sparked by the banning of a march by the Greek "Bertrand Russell Committee of 100" in Easter 1963, by the expulsion of some of the British Committee of 100's members when they attempted to join the march, and by the murder of Grigoris Lambrakis, a Greek MP and peace activist. Diana Shelley said that the imprisonment of Chandler, "the force which had driven" the Committee throughout the summer, The Committee of 100, and comparable movements outside the UK (not least the Civil Rights Movement in the United States), made it a common method of social action, now familiar in environmental, animal rights and peace protests. However, non-violence, a strict principle of the committee, is rare. The committee also popularized a new method of organization derived from anarchism and hitherto unfamiliar to those in traditional political parties: without formal membership and based on decentralization and autonomous, self-selected "working groups" rather than elected executive committees.