Peggy Duff

Margaret Doreen Duff, usually known as Peggy Duff (February 8, 1910 – April 16, 1981) was a British political activist who was principally known for her contribution to the peace movement as the organiser of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Background

Duff was born Margaret Doreen Eames, the daughter of Frank Eames, who was a stockbroker's clerk in suburban Middlesex. She attended Hastings Secondary School for Girls, whose headmistress noted that she was "very public spirited". She then went to Bedford College, University of London, where she read English. After university she worked as a journalist and in 1933 married Bill Duff, a fellow journalist. He was killed during the Second World War while working for an armed forces' newspaper and covering an American air raid on the Burma railway. The couple had two daughters and a son (the photo-journalist Euan Duff). She started her involvement in peace campaigning in the late 1930s.

Political activism

During the war Duff joined Common Wealth, an idealistic socialist party to the left of Labour set up by Sir Richard Acland. After the 1945 election in which Common Wealth ceded its vote to the Labour Party, Duff was employed by Victor Gollancz' organization "Save Europe Now", which sent food and clothing to occupied Germany and Austria from rationed Britain, and campaigned for the repatriation of prisoners of war. From 1949 to 1955 she was business manager of "Tribune", then identified with the supporters of Aneurin Bevan.

Briefly working with Victor Gollancz again, Duff became the secretary of the "National Campaign for the Abolition of Capital Punishment", when it was set up in August 1955 (in part as a response to a number of controversial executions, including that of Ruth Ellis). In 1956 she was elected as a Labour member of St Pancras Borough Council, where she became known as Chief Whip for the Labour group. She also supported the rights of tenants of council housing, but in doing so gave the green light to controversial architectural redevelopments and 'slum clearance' programs that are often considered to have blighted the ward she served.

CND

At the Labour Party conference in 1957, Aneurin Bevan (then Shadow Foreign Secretary) astonished his supporters by denouncing demands for unilateral nuclear disarmament. Duff responded by joining with others to establish in January 1958 the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which set its aims as persuading Britain to "renounce unconditionally the use or production of nuclear weapons and refuse to allow their use by others in her defence". Duff became the Organising Secretary for the campaign, and her energy and resilience became well known to all the supporters. Canon John Collins, Chair of CND, noted that she never gave the impression of efficiency 'and seemed thoroughly slapdash', but that her work had impressive results. She organised the second and subsequent Aldermaston Marches, 1959-1963.

Later life

Duff left CND in 1965 to work for the International Confederation for Disarmament and Peace. She resigned from the Labour Party on 10 May 1967 over Harold Wilson's diplomatic support for the United States in the Vietnam war and refusal to condemn the Greek dictatorship of 'the Colonels'. In later life she wrote her memoirs, "Left, Left, Left" in 1971 and edited and wrote part of "War or Peace in the Middle East?" (1978) in which she argued for "no more blank cheques for Israel". She died of Breast cancer in University College Hospital.

Criticism and Chomsky

Bernard Levin, when reviewing "Left, Left, Left", derided Duff and the other members of CND for living in a dream world and blamed them for allowing nuclear weapons to proliferate.

A young Christopher Hitchens lamented the "lack of a single passage of political analysis" in the book, and cast doubt at Duff's claim to have decided to become a political activist after being widowed because it was "as good a way as any other of earning a living".

Noam Chomsky, a contributor to "War or Peace in the Middle East?", described Duff as "one of the people who really changed modern history". On 31 March 1995 he said:

:She is a woman, an activist, a serious intellectual, a knowledgeable and informed writer—and therefore unknown outside the universe of others who are actually engaged in the problems of the world. She has disappeared from history. She's not a "public intellectual"; she was far too important in modern history for that. She spent no time posturing before other intellectuals or inhabiting the various cocoons of the literary intellectual culture. She belongs to the same category as the SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] workers who carried out the civil rights movement in the U.S., or the dedicated Christian activists who were at the core of the solidarity movements of the '80s, or the unknown people who created the labor movements, or the other people who have mattered in history, and are therefore unknown and forgotten (if ever known in respectable ­ i.e., intellectually and morally corrupt ­ circles). . . [Duff is] typical of people who make a difference in history. She's also typical of the people in my actual milieu, since childhood, except for her unusual international prominence.

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