Whether it was driving a doubledecker bus with a hole cut in the top to let climbers scale Big Ben unobserved by a passing police patrol car, or dodging barrels of nuclear waste being hurled at him in the middle of the Atlantic, Pete Wilkinson, who has died suddenly aged 78, apparently of a heart attack, showed no fear. Through nonviolent direct action or in the debating chamber, Pete, the co-founder and first director of Greenpeace UK, never lost an opportunity to point out uncomfortable truths to the powerful.
Although he had many campaigning successes, two achievements stand out – stopping the British government’s annual dumping of hundreds of tons of nuclear waste in the Atlantic, and persuading the leaders of the Antarctic treaty nations, including Margaret Thatcher, to declare Antarctica a “world park”. The 50-year moratorium on mining for oil, gold and other minerals agreed in the 1990s still stands.
While he campaigned on many environmental issues, preventing seal culls in Scotland, shielding whales from Japanese hunters, and protecting rivers and coastal waters from chemical discharges, Pete returned again and again to campaign against the nuclear industry.
In the 80s he worked tirelessly to prevent the Sellafield reprocessing works in Cumbria discharging plutonium-contaminated waste via a pipeline direct into the Irish Sea. Using a retired trawler, the Cedarlea, he led a crew of activists who defied a high court injunction banning them from attempting to block the pipeline. Greenpeace was fined £50,000 – money they did not have but was subsequently donated by the public.
The campaign to stop the dumping of nuclear waste involved all his political skills. The ban was achieved because he persuaded the nations belonging to the London convention to vote against the practice and the National Union of Seamen and the railway unions to refuse to carry and load the waste. Eventually the Thatcher government caved in and the sea-dumping ban remains.
As Guardian environment correspondent I got to know Pete well, sailing with him to Antarctica and up the Irish Sea. While he described himself as a working-class lorry driver from Deptford, south-east London, he had an amazing talent for marshalling an argument. Put a microphone in front of him and he could explain the most complex issue in a few sentences while hardly pausing for breath.
He was the second son of George Wilkinson, who worked as an engraver in a bottle factory, and Minnie (nee Cremore). Pete excelled academically and passed the 11-plus to go to Shooter’s Hill grammar school, but “could not wait” to leave at 16.
He had a series of unpromising jobs until, aged 24, a friend gave him a book about the environment that changed his life. He immediately volunteered to join a fledgling Friends of the Earth and worked for them for four years before realising, again by his own account, that they were all “toffs” and he was not going to get anywhere in the organisation.
It was 1976 and Pete decided to settle down. He married Annette Cross and became a Post Office clerk. However, a phonecall from David McTaggart, the Canadian boss of a nascent Greenpeace International, in 1978 inviting him to start the UK branch of the organisation, proved irresistible.
Pete was paid only what he would have received if he was on the dole, but threw himself into the work. With a small but growing band of inventive campaigners, he began inveighing against all the environmental injustices they saw around them. Their successes and resultant publicity meant Greenpeace eclipsed both the World Wide Fund for Nature and Friends of the Earth as the leading environmental group of the day.
Inevitably such wholehearted dedication to a cause led Pete to neglect his marriage, which broke down as a result. It also led to tactical disagreements in the organisation. Pete and some colleagues were ousted.
But McTaggart, perceiving Pete as the best campaigner he had, offered him an extraordinary task: take on the nations of the Antarctic treaty. The aim was to stop their plans for mineral extraction and turn the continent into a world park.
It was an impossible idea. It meant setting up a Greenpeace scientific camp in Antarctica – the only non-government organisation to do so – and resupplying it year after year. This would give Greenpeace the right to go to treaty meetings, seeking allies among countries such as Germany, Australia and New Zealand in order to stop the ambitions of the UK, the US and the Soviet Union to exploit the continent. Pete took on the challenge and sailed from New Zealand to the Antarctic every season from 1985 to 1990, and then, finally, in 1992.
By then the campaign had created such a worldwide tide of opinion against mining that even the UK changed its mind. The Women’s Institute had adopted Antarctica as its cause and Thatcher received 5,000 handwritten letters from WI members on the subject.
Back home again, Pete finally left Greenpeace and became a nuclear consultant – appointed to various government bodies to advise on how to deal with the nuclear waste problem, how to engage the public in the process, and to discuss what were acceptable radiation doses. He pulled off the difficult trick of being paid as a consultant while at the same time continuing to campaign against the expansion of the nuclear industry.
At this time Pete met Gaye Jerrom, a teacher. The couple moved to Peasenhall, Suffolk, in 1998 and married in 2000. They had two children, Emily and Amy. He said he had found fulfilment at last.
That did not stop his continuing working as an adviser on the government’s committee on radioactive waste management and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, and removing offshore oil installations. He also co-authored reports on the dangers of low-level radiation. In 2014 he published his autobiography, From Deptford to Antarctica: The Long Way Home.
Up to his death he was still campaigning vigorously against the proposed Sizewell C nuclear power station near his home in Suffolk – “an expensive white elephant which should never be built”.
He is survived by Gaye, Emily and Amy.
• Peter Wilkinson, environmental campaigner, born 21 November 1946; died 21 January 2025
