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Saturday 17th: 11:00 - 13:00 Carol Singing in Wells, outside library in Union Street.
Saturday 26th Glastonbury Frost Fair
Saturday 8th One World Fair - Wells Town Hall, 10:00 to 16:00.
Wednesday 21st Harry Patch Day: 12:30 outside Wells Museum, Cathedral Green. (Also International Day of Peace)
7th Strode College Fresher’s Fair
9th Nagasaki Day 18:30 at Glastonbury Peace Pole.
6th Hiroshima Day Marquee on Cathedral Green, Wells, during the day. Candles on the moat, Bishop’s Palace, at dusk. Pictures here
15th – 17th July Pitch at Tolpuddle Festival. Pictures here
22nd - 26th Campaign stall at Glastonbury Festival. Pictures here
Monday 23rd May AGM of Mid-Somerset CND & Peace Group. 19:30 at The Secret Meeting Rooms, Silver Street, Glastonbury BA6 8BS.
Monday 9th May Kate Hudson (National CND) delivered the first Sali Money Memorial Lecture. 19:30 at The Secret Meeting Rooms, Silver Street, Glastonbury BA6 8BS.
Saturday 27th: Trident Demo in London. Free coach departing from Glastonbury via Wells and Shepton Mallet.
Saturday 19th: 11:00 - 13:00 Carol Singing in Glastonbury
Saturday 10th: One World Fair - Wells Town Hall
Monday 20th: Harry Patch Day: outside Wells Museum, Cathedral Green at 13:00. (Also International Day of Peace)
3rd: Strode College Fresher’s Fair
6th Hiroshima Day: 70 years since 1945
17th – 19th July: Tolpuddle Festival
24th - 28th: Stall at Glastonbury Festival
18th: AGM
15th: Hustings. Wells Town Hall 19.00 - 21.00
8th: International Womens Day, Wells Town Hall, 12.00 – 16.00
9th-13th: Stall at Strode College, each day, 10.00 - 14.00
21st: Battle of the Bands, 20.00 – 23.00 The Red Brick Building Glastonbury
Congratulations to all who supported the annual carol singing in Wells in December 2014. We raised £220 for Medical Aid for Palestine.
Harry Patch is still mentioned as a “war hero”, but even on the Forces War Records site this was written in November 2014:
Harry never shot to kill, and as far as he knows he never took a German life….
The first time he went back to Belgium was in 2003, when he started crying on the coach and couldn’t bring himself to step down to place his wreath on what had been the battlefield, the memories being too much to cope with. Somebody had to do it for him….
He wrote in his autobiography, ‘Politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder.’ Throughout his last years he continually spoke out against war, and when he met Tony Blair in 2006 he expressed the opinion that no soldier should ever have been shot for cowardice in the field.
This is the first comment on the blog:
Harry - being the last soldier to survive from WW1, will always be representative of the millions of lives needlessly lost. As the man said, - ‘we were all conned’, - it was pointless. ‘Why couldn’t they have all discussed their problems round a table, which is what they did after the war?’ I attended Harry’s funeral memorial service, at Wells Cathedral …. [Harry Patch] wanted his service to represent PEACE - not WAR: a memorial to all his comrades - and foes.
P G Croft, Bristol.
September 2014. The security Think Tank Chatham House has prepared a report based on anonymous briefings with Parliamentarians in London and Edinburgh. The report suggests that “a narrow victory for the No campaign in the Scottish referendum would raise ‘major questions’ about the future of the United Kingdom ….. A large number of people voting to leave the UK - despite a No victory - could also lead to the Government being forced to relocate the Trident nuclear submarine fleet. Trident is currently based in Scotland. However Alex Salmond, the First Minister, has repeatedly said that Trident could not remain in an independent Scotland. The report said: ‘The referendum has highlighted the strong and widely felt Scottish opposition to the basing of Trident in Scotland.’ It said that one option ‘even in the event of a No vote’ was that ‘Trident might still need to be moved from Scotland’. The report warned that a vote for independence could also force the rest of the UK to let go of its Trident nuclear deterrent altogether. It said the political and technical demands of relocating Trident to England by a mooted target date of 2020 would not be possible……. ‘The additional costs of moving the nuclear submarine bases could re-open the debate over the viability of Trident …’” (Telegraph online, but the passage in bold here is excluded.)
April 2014. Secret talks with USA on future of Britain’s nuclear arsenal.
January 2014: Quaker briefing: download here