Pat Arrowsmith, the activist and co-founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), has died at the age of 93.
She was born to a middle-class family in Leamington Spa on 2 March 1930 and went on to study at Cheltenham Ladies College and the University of Cambridge. Her work as a peace campaigner began with protesting against the Vietnam war, before co-founding CND in 1958.
Kate Hudson, the general secretary of CND, who worked with Arrowsmith for many years, said she was an “inspiring and courageous woman who approached the nuclear disarmament campaign with absolute dogged determinism and enthusiasm”.
She added: “Pat had a remarkable insight into what action would make a real difference and she would pursue that vigorously, with every fibre of her being. She was as different from an armchair philosopher as it is possible to be. We will miss her very much.”
Arrowsmith’s activism frequently brought her into conflict with the authorities. She served the first of her 11 prison sentences in 1958. Her convictions included 18 months in prison for handing out leaflets at a British army base in order to encourage soldiers to refuse to serve in Northern Ireland. In 1976, during one sentence, she escaped by climbing over the fence.
In an interview with Julie Bindel in the Guardian in 2008, Arrowsmith said: “I shouldn’t have been in prison at all. I feel guilty for not trying to escape from all my prison sentences.” Amnesty International named Arrowsmith a “prisoner of conscience” twice.
Arrowsmith also sought a parliamentary career, running unsuccessfully as a candidate for the Radical Alliance, a CND fringe group, in the Fulham constituency in south London during the 1966 and 1970 general elections. She also stood as an independent socialist candidate, campaigning for Troops Out of Ireland and supported by the Trotskyist Socialist Unity party against the then prime minister, James Callaghan, in his constituency of Cardiff South-East in the 1979 general election of 1979.
Bindel said she was viewed by many involved in the struggle for gay equality as a lesbian icon. She came out in 1977 when in her Who’s Who listing, under the section for clubs of which she was a member, she named the infamous Gateways lesbian club.
She married a man in 1979 in order to fulfil conditions in her father’s will to inherit and the marriage was annulled on the same day.
As well as co-founding CND, Arrowsmith was also part of the Direct Action Committee against Nuclear War, a precursor to CND, as well as of the Committee of 100 – the civil disobedience movement led by Bertrand Russell in the early 1960s.
Writing on Twitter, Lindsey German, the convenor of Stop the War Coalition, said: “Sorry to hear of death of peace campaigner #PatArrowsmith this week. I interviewed her for my book on women and war. She was an inspiration to younger generations and one of a kind.”
