The Aldermaston marches were anti-nuclear weapons demonstrations in the 1950s and 1960s, taking place on Easter weekend between the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire, England, and London, over a distance of fifty-two miles, or roughly 83 km. At their height in the early 1960s they attracted tens of thousands of people and were the highlight of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) calendar.
The first major Aldermaston march was organised by the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War (DAC) over Easter (4–7 April), 1958, when several thousand people marched for four days from Trafalgar Square, London, to the Atomic Weapons Establishment to demonstrate their opposition to nuclear weapons.[1][2] Hugh Brock, one of the organisers, records that he was one of thirty-five people to have marched to Aldermaston six years before in 1952 as part of Operation Gandhi.[3] The march took place shortly after the launch of CND, which supported it.
After 1958 the marches were organised annually, 1959–1963, by CND, which reversed their direction, i.e. from Aldermaston to London[4], thereby distinguishing their politics of campaigning at the seat of power from the emphasis of direct action at bases by DAC.
On the 1963 Aldermaston march, a group calling itself Spies for Peace distributed leaflets as the March assembled about a secret government establishment, RSG 6, that the march would pass. A large group, led by Peter Cadogan (an activist in the direct-action Committee of 100), left the march, much against the wishes of the CND leadership, to demonstrate at RSG 6. Later, when the march reached London, there were disorderly demonstrations in which anarchists were prominent.
At Easter 1964 there was only a one-day march in London, partly because of the events of 1963 and partly because the logistics of the march, which, grown beyond all expectation, had exhausted the organisers.[5] In 1965 there was a two-day march from High Wycombe. In 1972 and 2004 there were revivals of the Aldermaston march in the original direction.[6][7]
The Aldermaston March Committee for the first march comprised Hugh Brock, Pat Arrowsmith and Michael Randle from DAC plus Frank Allaun MP and Walter Wolfgang from the Labour H-Bomb Campaign.
Music was a significant part of the march, at first symbolising the difference in attitude between the CND leaders, who wanted to march in silence, and the youth on the march, who wanted to sing and play guitars. John Brunner's song, The H-bomb's Thunder became the unofficial anthem of CND.[10] Songs associated with CND and the Aldermaston march were released on an EP record, Songs from Aldermaston (1960)[11] and an LP album, Songs Against the Bomb (Topic 12001) released at about the same time. It contained: "Brother Won't you Join the Line?" (McColl and Keir, 1958); "The Crooked Cross" (McColl and Seeger, 1960); "Strontium 90" (Dallas, 1959); "Hey, Little Man" (Dallas, 1959); "Doomsday Blues" (Dallas, 1958); "The Ballad of the Five Fingers" (McColl, 1959); "There are Better Things to Do" (Seeger, 1958); "The H-Bomb's Thunder" (Brunner, 1958); "Song of Hiroshima" (Kinoshita); "Hoist the Window" (trad. arr. Hasted, 1952); "That Bomb Has Got to Go" (McColl and Seeeger, 1959); "The Dove" (trad. arr. Rosselson); and "The Family of Man" (Dallas, 1957). A new arrangement of H-bomb's Thunder was issued on a CD, Songs To Change The World (Peaksoft PEA012) in 2011.
Ewan MacColl's English text of Song of Hiroshima was sung on the Aldermaston Marches by the London Youth Choir.[12] An unofficial peace version of the National Anthem of the United Kingdom was written in 1958 by Henry Young for the first Aldermaston March and is taken from Young's collection of poems From Talk to Action: The fight for peace.