Committee of 100; Mary Ringsleben

Mary Ringsleben was an original signatory of the Committee of 100, which was founded on the initiative of Ralph Schoenman and Bertrand Russell in October 1960. The Committee called for a mass movement of civil disobedience against British government policy on nuclear weapons. Its members saw a need for more radical methods than those used by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, especially following the defeat of the Labour Party in the 1959 general election. In this sense, the Committee of 100 was the successor of the Direct Action Committee, which disbanded in June 1961 after the Holy Loch demonstration. The Committee of 100 aimed to use non violent direct action on a mass scale, something the DAC had never managed to sustain. Bertrand Russell resigned as president of CND to take on the presidency of the Committee of 100 and Rev. Michael Scott became chairman.

Many leading DAC activists joined the Committee of 100, including Michael Randle, who returned from Ghana to become its first secretary, and April Carter, who sat with Randle on the working group. Mary Ringsleben was another of these. Based in Leeds, she was an organiser of the Northern Direct Action Committee, alongside Francis Deutsch in Hull. The Northern DAC was important for the successful demonstration at RAF Finningley V-bomber base near Doncaster which it organised in July 1960. Combining a vigil at the base with a 10-mile walk from Finningley to Doncaster, the demonstration received an unusually high level of support from the local CND group, trade unionists and labour activists, and local church ministers.

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