A 20th wedding anniversary 'bucket list' trip to East Budleigh

 

In the footsteps of his ancestor, Rev Jonathan Conant with his wife Jennifer started his first ever journey to England with a tour of East Budleigh, birthplace of his ancestor Roger Conant (1592-1679). 'Visiting East Budleigh was the perfect start to our England trip,' he told us. 'Our hearts are full and our memories are vivid.' Reporter Nick Thomas told the full story at https://www.exmouthjournal.co
.uk/.../25501915.roger.../

An American anti-war cartoon and a Budleigh connection.

The anti-war cartoon pictured here, entitled ‘The Deserter’, appeared in 1916 when the USA had not yet entered World War I. It depicted Jesus facing a firing squad made up of soldiers from five different European countries who were involved in the conflict.  

Understandably, for most of its history, the USA has attempted to remain neutral rather than become involved in European wars. George Washington’s final message to the nation continued to resonate  with Americans. ‘The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connexion as possible,’ he had written in his ‘Farewell Address’ of 1796.

When World War I broke out in 1914, support for neutrality remained strong among Americans, particularly ethnic Germans and members of Irish families resentful of British rule in Ireland.

Pacifist groups such as the Woman’s Peace Party and the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM) were founded in 1915 to protest against the USA’s entry into the European war.

‘The Deserter’ was first published in The Masses, an American magazine of socialist  politics which appeared monthly between 1911 and 1917, when it was forced to close.  The cartoon was the work of Boardman Robinson, a Canadian-born American artist whose anti-war views were shared by the communist journalist John Reed, a fellow-contributor to The Masses.  In 1915 the pair had travelled to Europe, recording the chaotic events and atrocities taking place in Russia, Serbia, Macedonia and Greece for the book The War in Eastern Europe which was published the following year.    

The USA finally abandoned neutrality and entered the European conflict in 1917.

Readers curious about Massachusetts' 400-year-old link with Budleigh via Roger Conant will be fascinated to learn that Edward Thurstan, a former Budleigh resident, played a crucial role in shaping American policy and, in the words of local historian Roger Lendon, ‘probably had a hand in one of the most significant events to occur in World War I’. 

In January 1917, the German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann sent a top secret telegram in code which made it clear that Mexico would receive financial support if it attacked the USA, and would regain the states of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.  

Edward Thurstan, as British Chargé d’Affaires in Mexico City, saw that a copy of the intercepted and deciphered telegram was sent to London. It was then passed to the US ambassador in London who sent it to President Woodrow Wilson. 

On 1 March 1917, the Zimmermann telegram was released to the American press. The ensuing public outcry was one of the factors that eventually led to the declaration of war against Germany by the US Congress on 6 April 1917.

Photo of Boardman Robinson from Wikipedia 

If you are interested in the history of early America, and Roger Conant as a peacemaker in troubled times you can join the Devon Peacemaker Festival Facebook group at 

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The Salter's Song - with pics

 

East Budleigh's Maypole, Thomas Morton and Merrymount

It’s not so long ago that the tradition of maypole dancing was revived in East Budleigh. An ancient English tradition which Roger Conant’s family would have enjoyed? Unlikely. In the increasingly puritanical England of the 1640s, maypoles were condemned by the Long Parliament as ‘a Heathenish vanity, generally abused to superstition and wickedness’, and were banned outright, along with Christmas and other ‘ungodly’ practices.

Well before then, Roger would have had problems had he tried to introduce it in New England at the settlement of Naumkeag, later to become Salem.  With the arrival of Governor John Endicott and ‘godly’ Puritans in Naumkeag in 1628, such ‘pagan’ practices were viewed with horror.  Shocking news was received by Puritan leaders around that time of May Day events taking place just over 20 miles away from Plymouth Colony, in the settlement once called Merrymount and now known as the town of Quincy.

Governor William Bradford in his History of Plimoth Plantation, records his disgust on learning that the inhabitants had ‘set up a May-pole, drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting the Indian women for their consorts, dancing and frisking together (like so many fairies, or furies rather) and worse practices’. It was, he wrote, ‘as if they had anew revived & celebrated the feasts of ye Roman Goddess Flora, or ye beastly practices of ye mad Bacchanalians’. Morton was vilified by Bradford as a ‘lord of misrule’ who ‘maintained (as it were) a schoole of Athisme’.

Roger Conant is celebrated for his peaceful and friendly relationship with the indigenous people of New England. He was, according to sculptor Sir Henry Hudson Kitson who created the statue of Salem’s founder, ‘one of the very few among America's early settlers who was ever looked upon by the Indians as their true and staunch friend’.  Even more renowned for his friendships with Native Americans, Thomas Morton, founder of Merrymount, stands out as a complex and flamboyant figure.  The May Day festivities infuriated the Plymouth Puritans, not just because the Merrymount  colonists were encouraging sexual relations between Europeans and Native Americans but also because Merrymount’s growing prosperity was seen as threatening the Puritans’ trade monopoly.

When even more extravagant May Day celebrations took place around an 80-foot maypole a military offensive against the colony was led in June 1628 by Captain Myles Standish. The maypole was chopped down. Morton was arrested and put in the stocks in Plymouth before being put on trial and marooned on one of the deserted Isles of Shoals, off the coast of New Hampshire. He could have starved to death on the island had it not been for friendly Indians from the mainland who supplied him with food. Eventually he was able to escape to England. When he returned to America he was arrested and appeared before the Massachusetts Bay Court, on 7 September, 1630, before being shipped back to England where he spent a short spell in jail.  

Furious with his treatment, in 1635 Morton successfully sued the Massachusetts Bay Company, the political power behind the Plymouth Puritans. Two years later, in 1637, he published his three-volume New English Canaan, a broadside against the Plymouth Puritans. It was, according to an article published by the New England Historical Society, ‘a witty composition that praised the wisdom and humanity of the Indians and mocked the Puritans’. Morton described how in America he had encountered ‘two sortes of people, the one Christians, the other Infidels; these I found most full of humanity, and more friendly then the other.’    The New English Canaan became what is probably the first book to be banned in what is now the USA.

In our modern, liberal era there are those taking a more favourable view of Morton. Wikipedia’s profile of Merry Mount’s founder describes him as a ‘social reformer known for studying Native American culture’, and in recent times there have been plenty of more colourful opinions. ‘Today, people might call him America’s first hippie,’ writes the author of the New England Historical Society’s article quoted above. ‘Had it not been for his May Day party with a giant Maypole, Thomas Morton might have established a New England colony more tolerant, easygoing and fun than the one his dour Puritan neighbors created at Plymouth Plantation.’

American writer Ed Simon, in an article published in The Public Domain Review of 24 November 2020, goes even further. ‘The utopian Merrymount, it has long been argued, was a society built upon privileging art and poetry over industriousness and labor, and pursued a policy of intercultural harmony rather than white supremacy,’ he claims. The site of Merrymount, now an industrial area, ‘once bore witness to a strange and beautiful alternative dream of what America could have been.’

In 2011, Governor Deval Patrick proclaimed May 1 ‘Thomas Morton Day’ in Massachusetts, recognizing the achievements of Merrymount’s founder.  For many Americans, the event was long overdue: it had been planned, as historian Dr Jack Dempsey writes, ‘in honor of this intrepid and good-humored Englishman who made a success of his trading post by treating Native Americans with respect’.

Pictured is a photo of May Day in East Budleigh, along with a page of the New English Canaan, and a copy of Governor Deval Patrick’s proclamation, reproduced by Dr Jack Dempsey, who has edited the New English Canaan.

If you are interested in the history of early America, and Roger Conant as a peacemaker in troubled times you can join the Devon Peacemaker Festival Facebook group at 

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A pacifist in Budleigh Salterton: H.G. Wells (1866-1946)

Not too many Budleigh people know that a great literary figure known as ‘the father of science fiction’ stayed in the town. Even fewer know of him as a pacifist. Budleigh Salterton was renowned in the past as a favourite retirement place for military types as well as a health resort.

It was during a cycling holiday in Devon that H.G. Wells and his wife stayed in April 1897 with author George Gissing and his sister Margaret at 4 West End Villas – now 14 West Hill – in Budleigh. Ten or so years older than Wells, Gissing is thought to have been attracted to radical pacifist and anti-imperialist ideas partly derived from his reading of Russian literature, particularly from Leo Tolstoy.  Later, Wells himself is likely to have been influenced by pacifist and socialist ideas through his membership of the reformist Fabian Society.

Wells’ most famous science fiction novel The War of the Worlds anticipates the role of devastating modern weapons with the Martians’ use of heat-rays and toxic gas against humans. The novel’s publication in 1898 came at a time when the desire for world peace was in the news. On 29 August, 1898, Czar Nicholas II of Russia issued an invitation to all nations to confer over the limitation of armaments, observing that ‘the intellectual and physical strength of nations; labour and capital alike, have been unproductively consumed in building terrible engines of destruction’.

Wells' book Little Wars, published in 1913, was seemingly an explanation of rules for conducting a war game with toy soldiers. In reality it reflected the author’s view of how such activities could replace actual wars. ‘How much better is this amiable miniature than the Real Thing!’ he wrote. ‘Here is the premeditation, the thrill, the strain of accumulating victory or disaster — and no smashed nor sanguinary bodies, no shattered fine buildings nor devastated countrysides.’  

Another novel by Wells which appeared in the following year was The World Set Free. Set in 1956, it described the effects of a devastating world war fought with atomic bombs, ending with the establishment of a ‘World Republic’

As World War I approached, Wells became more and more focused on the threat to world peace posed by what he saw as German militarism.  His 99-page pamphlet The War That Will End War, published in 1914, proclaimed:  ‘This is now a war for peace. It aims straight at disarmament. It aims at a settlement that shall stop this sort of thing for ever. Every soldier who fights against Germany now is a crusader against war. This, the greatest of all wars, is not just another war — it is the last war! England, France, Italy, Belgium, Spain, and all the little countries of Europe, are heartily sick of war; the Tsar has expressed a passionate hatred of war; the most of Asia is unwarlike; the United States has no illusions about war.’

A second pamphlet, The Peace of the World, appeared in 1915. A year later saw the publication of Wells’ novel Mr Britling Sees It Through, composed ‘at a time of universal barbarism and cruelty’ in the words of Russian writer Maxim Gorky, who described the work as ‘the finest, most courageous, truthful, and humane book written in Europe in the course of this accursed war’.   

In the post-war period, on 15 April 1929, Wells delivered an address entitled The Common Sense of World Peace to the Reichstag German Parliament in Berlin. It was published by the Hogarth Press. But by 1933 the Nazis were burning his books.

H. G. Wells is pictured here one day before his 60th birthday, on the front cover of Time magazine, 20 September 1926.

If you are interested in the history of early America, and Roger Conant as a peacemaker in troubled times you can join the Devon Peacemaker Festival Facebook group at 
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Musicians for Peace and Disarmament (MPD)

A peacemaker festival incorporating a concert of suitable music could be set up independently, or it could work with an organisation like Musicians for Peace and Disarmament (MPD).

MPD was founded in 1983, the year in which cruise missiles came to Britain. It was the year in which the USA’s President Ronald Reagan declared that a nuclear conflict in Europe was not only thinkable, but winnable. 

Originally known as MANA, (Musicians Against Nuclear Arms), MPD was the brainchild of a group of musicians and music lovers who had the idea of staging concerts by professional musicians to raise funds for the peace movement. The organisation’s new name, MPD, was adopted a few years back to reflect today's wider but still urgently relevant concerns for world peace.

Over the years many leading conductors, soloists, orchestral players and chamber musicians have taken part in MPD’s regular concerts, and continue to do so, with everyone giving their services for free. At most of their concerts a speaker is invited to give a short address. 

As well as their musical activities MPD produce a quarterly newsletter. MPD's president is the distinguished guitarist John Williams and its patrons are all prominent and influential figures drawn from many different areas of the musical profession, including Michael Berkeley, Dame Emma Kirkby and Sir Simon Rattle.   

MPD is affiliated to CND and Network for Peace and membership is open to anyone with an interest in music and a desire to further the cause of peace.

The proceeds of MPD’s concerts have enabled the organisation to donate over £70,000 to the peace movement since 1983. MPD is affiliated to Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and The Network for Peace.

MPD supports organisations in the UK and worldwide who are actively working towards the cause of peace, non-violence and disarmament. Organisations/projects will be periodically shortlisted. To be considered for funding, please write detailing your proposal. Applications should be sent by email to info.mpdconcerts@gmail.com or by post to:  c/o The Chair, 37 Bolton Gardens, Teddington, TW11 9AX

 MPD’s website is at https://mpdconcerts.org/

Pictured are images for some of MPD’s concerts.

If you are interested in the history of early America, and Roger Conant as a peacemaker in troubled times you can join the Devon Peacemaker Festival Facebook group at 

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'It might have been us': a British army veteran's thoughts: Patrick Campbell (1897-1986)

 

Patrick (‘Pat’) Campbell retired to Budleigh after a career in teaching, and wrote four books.  The Ebb and Flow of Battle (1977) and In the Cannon’s Mouth (1979) were based on his experiences during World War I, when he served as Captain and Second-in-Command of 150 Army Brigade in the Royal Field Artillery. He was awarded the Military Cross, though he points out in The Ebb and Flow of Battle that the award was made based on a senior officer’s blatantly fictional account which is reproduced in the official citation. ‘I was distressed when I read it,' he tells us. 'It was not true that I had inflicted heavy casualties on the enemy.’  

The Ebb and Flow of Battle deals with events in 1918 and is not an obviously anti-war book.  However a noticeable theme is the author’s emphasis on the common humanity shared by both sides in conflict. Campbell had fought in Belgium, at Ypres and at Paschendaele during the previous year, but was struck by the more peaceful landscape of Northern France where he arrived in March after sick leave.  ‘Ypres had been all shells and shell-holes, mud and desolation, but here there was grass, and men played football only three miles from the line,’ he writes. An observation post gives him ‘a wonderful view’ over enemy-held territory.   ‘At Ypres I had never seen a living German soldier, except prisoners. Now I saw some, and it gave me a strange feeling. They were our enemies. They had to try and kill us and we had to try and kill them, but they looked like ourselves and were doing ordinary things.’ 

By August, the ebb and flow of battle finally saw the approach of victory for the Allies, but with it, the author’s keen sense of losses suffered on both sides. ‘In the evening I took the horses to water in the little river Luce, we crossed no-man’s-land, we went inside what had been enemy land in the morning. His front-line trench was full of bodies, all Germans, they were the first dead Germans I had seen for a long time, I had never seen so many in one place. The sight of them gave me no elation, as once it would have done. Satisfaction yes, we had won a great and totally unexpected victory, but elation no. In March our front-line trench must have looked like that, full of brave Jocks and South Africans.’

The similarity in scenes of slaughter is in contrast to the peaceful landscape. ‘It was a beautiful summer evening, and the little river Luce was beautiful. It was like a little river in England and the flowers growing at the water’s edge, where my horses were drinking, were English flowers. The water was so clean, the field in front of me looked utterly peaceful, but only fifty yards away there was that trench, full of dead Germans, we should see them again on our way back, the grey faces, the poor twisted bodies. They had been bayoneted by the Canadians in the morning, you can’t take prisoners in a  front-line trench in an attack. Wives, mothers, sweethearts, would not know yet, they would still be writing letters, but the letters would never be read. It might have been us.’

A month later comes a moment of sympathy for a single enemy figure spotted by chance. It comes as Campbell overlooks the ‘unspoiled country’ beyond the last line of German defences on the Western Front known as the Hindenburg Line: ‘undulating hills, villages, little woods, villages fit to live in, trees that bore leaves, a hillside without shell-holes. It was like a Promised Land,’  he muses. 

‘I saw a German cart being driven along the road behind the canal, close up to the line. I could have shot at it if I had been in communication with the battery. The man was driving furiously, he knew his danger, he must have been delayed in some way and daylight had caught him, now he was galloping back towards safety, whipping up his horse. I was probably the only Englishman who saw him, and I could do nothing . But after one moment’s regret at my impotence I felt sorry for him, I hoped he would escape, I was glad when he reached a bend in the road and was hidden from sight.’

Patrick Campbell – ‘Soldier, Schoolmaster, Writer’ – died on 26 June 1986, aged 88, and was buried alongside his wife Camilla in St Peter’s Burial Ground, on Moor Lane, Budleigh Salterton.

If you are interested in the history of early America, and Roger Conant as a peacemaker in troubled times you can join the Devon Peacemaker Festival Facebook group at 

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Professor James B. Conant, ‘Warrior Scientist’

It may seem ironic that a direct descendant of the founder of Salem, ‘City of Peace’ should have played such a prominent role in the decision to drop two atomic bombs during the closing stages of World War II. 

The first resulted in an estimated 66,000 to 140,000 deaths at Hiroshima on 6 August 1946. Eighty years ago today, a second bomb, dropped on Nagasaki is thought to have resulted in 50,000 to 100,000 deaths.  

James Bryant Conant  undertook work on several family trees in an effort to understand the hereditary forces that had helped make him who and what he was  according to his granddaughter Jennet Conant, author of the book Man of the Hour: James B. Conant, Warrior Scientist, published in 2017.   

The Devon & Exeter Gazette of 19 September 1941 recorded the visit he made to East Budleigh in search of his ancestor's home, near what is now Pear Tree Cottage on Hayes Lane. 

Born on 26 March, 1893, James Conant could trace his lineage back to Lot Conant, son of Roger and, wrote his granddaughter, ‘secretly nursed an interest in genealogy, intrigued by the idea that something of Roger’s indomitable will may have been handed down the generations’.  

He may have felt that his birthplace of Dorchester, Massachusetts, had significance; it was after all as an employee of the Dorchester Company in England that Roger had set out with his family for the New World.  

Encouraged by his science teacher, James Conant studied Chemistry at Harvard College.  During World War I, he served in the US Army, where he worked on the development of poison gases. 

Later he worked on lewisite, a gas designed as a chemical weapon, once manufactured  in the United States, Japan, Germany and the Soviet Union, which has no commercial, industrial, or scientific applications apart from deliberately injuring and killing people.

In 1933, Conant became the president of Harvard University with an egalitarian vision of education and a reformist agenda which he implemented vigorously. He was appointed to the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) in 1940, becoming its chairman in 1941. In this capacity, he oversaw vital wartime research projects, including the development of synthetic rubber and the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bombs. 

On July 16, 1945, he was among the dignitaries present at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range  for the Trinity nuclear test, the first detonation of an atomic bomb, and was part of the Interim Committee that advised President Harry S. Truman to use atomic bombs on Japan.

Conant was an architect of postwar atomic energy policy. In 1945 he went on a mission to Moscow, where he advocated international control of atomic weapons. As a war scientist, wrote his granddaughter, he knew he had much to answer for.  ‘Atomic energy’s potentialities for destruction were so awesome as to far outweigh any possible gains that might accrue from America’s technical triumph in the summer of 1945. Writing as an old man, he acknowledged that these new weapons of aggression had added to the frightful insecurity of the world, and he did not think future generations would be inclined to thank him for it. Yet the nuclear standoff had continued for years—no mean accomplishment given the number and variety of armed conflicts—which suggested that the stakes had become too high and the risks too great. Perhaps there might still be time to moderate the vicious arms race, though that remained for history to decide. The verdict of history, he wrote, has not yet been given.’

Quotes are from https://www.everand.com/book/357567218/Man-of-the-Hour-James-B-Conant-Warrior-Scientist

Photos: Atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, taken by Charles Levy; Professor James Bryant Conant, Winner William Nichols Medal, 1932 (Both from Wikipedia)  

If you are interested in the history of early America, and Roger Conant as a peacemaker in troubled times you can join the Devon Peacemaker Festival Facebook group at 

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Grave matters

Descendants of Roger Conant who plan a visit to East Budleigh sometimes ask if any graves of family members exist in All Saints’ Churchyard. Sadly there are none, although there is a Conant family grave in Sidmouth, not too far away.  

As for Roger Conant himself no grave has been found in the town that he founded, although according to the excellent Find A Grave website it is thought to have been in  Salem’s Burying Point Cemetery, also known as Charter Street Cemetery and Old Point Cemetery.

Roger died in 1679. Sadly, only two of his ten children survived him. Their burial details are either unknown or there is no trace of a grave, except for the tenth, the oddly named Exercise Conant, who died in 1722 at the grand age – for that time – of 83.  But what a distinctive and well preserved grave! 

With his wife Sarah, daughter of John and Anne Andrews, Exercise had six children born in Beverly, where Roger Conant had settled.  Later, with at least two of his sons, he moved to what became the town of Mansfield in Connecticut, where his splendid headstone can be admired in Mansfield Center Cemetery. 

Stone carving was a flourishing craft in New England and Mansfield Center Cemetery with its  18th-century gravestones, decorated with cherubim, geometric designs, and a variety of funerary symbols, is considered to be illustrative of the rich artistic tradition of funerary stone carving  in early America.  

More than 180 stones have been attributed to identifiable stone carvers, including such 18th-century masters of the craft as John Hartshorne, Obadiah Wheeler, Benjamin Collins and his son Zerubbabel, Gershom Bartlett,  John Huntington, the Manning Family, Jonathan Loomis, Aaron Haskins, Stephen Spaulding, Elijah Sikes, and John Walden.

Pictured here is Exercise Conant’s headstone in Mansfield Center Cemetery.  It is shown alongside that of Josiah Baker, who died in 1726. Made by Obadiah Wheeler, described as perhaps the most talented gravestone carver in Connecticut during the first half of the 18th century, Baker's headstone is located at Trumbull Cemetery in Lebanon, Connecticut, but resembles Exercise Conant’s in style. Could they be from the same hand? 

Photo credits: Exercise Conant headstone by Jon/Find A Grave; Josiah Baker by K. Carlini (KC)/Find A Grave.

For examples of other headstones see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansfield_Center_Cemetery

If you are interested in the history of early America, and Roger Conant as a peacemaker in troubled times you can join the Devon Peacemaker Festival Facebook group at 

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The ‘Conant Family Tree’ - East Budleigh’s 2024 Christmas Tree Festival

The ‘Conant Family Tree’ was on display as part of East Budleigh’s 2024 Christmas Tree Festival.

Salem Chapel, a former Dissenters’ place of worship, lies on the edge of East Budleigh, the village where Roger Conant was born. 

For many years, the building has hosted a Christmas Tree Festival. The first Festival proved so popular that the tradition grew rapidly, progressing from around a dozen trees to over 50 in 2016.  

The 2024 Festival’s contribution from the Roger Conant Club included a tree devoted to Roger and his descendants in New England, with ‘baubles’ showing their names and dates based on Budleigh artist John Washington’s painting ‘The Petition, 1673’.

For more about John's work, click on his website  at https://www.johnwashingtonartist.com/

If you are interested in the history of early America, and Roger Conant as a peacemaker in troubled times you can join the Devon Peacemaker Festival Facebook group at 

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A pacifist composer’s debt to Budleigh’s Richard Rodney Bennett

The oratorio Or Shall We Die? was commissioned from author Ian McEwan and composer Michael Berkeley by the London Symphony Orchestra Chorus.

Michael Berkeley, otherwise known as Baron Berkeley of Knighton, was born in 1948, son of the composer Sir Lennox Berkeley. As a chorister at Westminster Cathedral, he frequently sang in works composed or conducted by his godfather Benjamin Britten, who was noted for his pacifist views. 

Berkeley studied composition, singing, and piano at the Royal Academy of Music and in his late twenties began to concentrate exclusively on composing, studying with Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, whose East Devon upbringing in Budleigh Salterton is well known, and who had also studied under Sir Lennox Berkeley at the Royal Academy of Music. 

Along with composing, Berkeley has had a long career as a broadcaster on music. In 2013 he entered the UK's House of Lords, where he has consistently spoken in support of music and music education.    

Or Shall We Die? was first performed in 1983, the year in which US President Reagan declared that a nuclear conflict in Europe was not only thinkable, but winnable. It was the year in which cruise missiles came to Britain, and which saw the founding of the organisation Musicians for Peace and Disarmament (MANA), of which Michael Berkeley is a Patron. 

‘For more than thirty years we have been in a position unprecedented in our history to destroy ourselves as a species. There are now more than sixty thousand nuclear warheads primed and programmed for their destinations, and each year more sophisticated systems are planned and deployed,’ wrote McEwan and Berkeley at that time. 

Going on to describe the origin of Or Shall We Die?,  the pair explained: ‘This oratorio grew out of the conviction that the responsibility of the survival of our species is not limited to governments, but is collective, involving every single one of us. It is as if we had been set a simple test of maturity; we either pass it, or perish, for it seems unlikely that we can muddle through forever with this array of weapons.

‘Our manly civilisation with its emphasis on aggression, competitiveness, objectivity, the mastery of nature, will need to become more womanly if it is not to destroy itself; more compassionate, nurturing, intuitive in its best sense.’

McEwan and Berkeley acknowledge their debt in Or Shall We Die? to the ideas of the Romantic poet and artist William Blake, arguing that only if we have the strength to bind feeling to the intellect shall we survive. ‘Blake is the presiding spirit of the work,’ they write.  

Images of Lord Berkeley, top left and Sir Richard Rodney Bennett from Wikipedia

A full account of Or Shall We Die is at https://www.michaelberkeley.co.uk/works/choral_with_orchestra#or_shall_we_die

If you are interested in the history of early America, and Roger Conant as a peacemaker in troubled times you can join the Devon Peacemaker Festival Facebook group at 

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