Pat Arrowsmith’s legacy - the antinuclear activist was a peace poet too

Pat Arrowsmith, the British peace activist and notable figure in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, passed away last week at the age of 93. Obituaries have celebrated her commitment to the peace movement, noted her one-day marriage (despite being a lesbian, Arrowsmith married a man to fulfil the terms of her father’s inheritance) and mentioned the numerous prison sentences she served for protest action.

These facts of Arrowsmith’s life are part of the record. However, there is another aspect of her legacy which has been largely overlooked – her poetry.

Arrowsmith clearly valued and enjoyed writing. Her poetry was circulated in antinuclear publications and anthologies and compiled in pamphlets and books. She wrote in prison and also published novels and a memoir called I Should Have Been a Hornby Train (1992).

Her poems are sometimes deeply personal, as she considers the pressures of life as an activist. Thematically, the poetry is anti-war, anti-nuclear and environmentally aware – themes which have a renewed resonance for readers today. The poems go beyond protest songs – there is skill and craft to them.

The themes of Arrowsmith’s poetry

The same core messages spanned Arrowsmith’s poetry and activism. In both word and deed she argued that people in Britain are not protected from a nuclear strike.

In Greenhouse, a poem written in 1968 and republished in the peace poetry anthology Doves for the Seventies (1969) and in Arrowsmith’s collections On the Brink (1981) and Nine Lives (1990), she describes a greenhouse paradise which shelters its inhabitants from the world.

Glass of course is a fragile material, and the greenhouse roof is no defence against the “hail of silver bullets” which strike the panes. In the lines “how thinly screened we are; / how soon our shelter may be shattered”, the poem invites us to imagine our own vulnerability in the face of war.

Similarly, following the circulation of the civil defence pamphlet Protect and Survive, in 1980 Arrowsmith followed its advice and wrote to her landlords, Haringey Council, to request that they provide a nuclear shelter for residents of her building. This tested the protocols laid out in Protect and Survive, but she recieved no response.

Arrowsmith responded directly to Protect and Survive in her creative work too. She reused its illustrations of a man building a shelter in On The Brink (1981), alongside On Winning One’s Half Century (1980), a poem which ridicules nuclear defence advice broadcast on BBC television show Panorama.

Arrowsmith’s environment-focused antinuclear poems were ahead of their time. The 1980s brought greater interest in the environmental (and health) impact of bomb testing and nuclear waste. Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth (1982) articles, originally published in The New Yorker, were particularly influential.

Arrowsmith’s poem Rock Pool (1970) raises similar concerns, a decade before. The poem mentions “strontium”, alluding to the impact of atmospheric nuclear testing and the radioactive strontium-90 isotope (a component of fallout from nuclear testing now present throughout the environment and in our bodies).

Her other poems from this period blur the line between human cities and animal habitats, suggesting a shared vulnerability between humans and the natural world.

Arrowsmith’s reflections

In my research in British antinuclear poetry, I have identified recurring images of glass in Arrowsmith’s poetry. Glass screens, lenses, mirrors, windows and glass-like watery surfaces appear again and again. They form fragile boundaries, both there and not there. They frame and warp what is seen, inviting the reader to question their perspective.

In particular, reflective glass windows act as screens where a view and reflection are brought together to create ghostly collages around moments of self-reflection. In Coach Journey, the final poem in the collection Dark Light (2009), Arrowsmith is starkly introspective as she acknowledges the motif:

Bewitched window-panes,

Semi-transparent images,

Phantom scenery,

Are emblematic of my life,

Where truth is often overlaid, confused,

By partial falsehood,

Self-deception.

This is a startling moment of self-doubt for someone whose sense of conviction in her cause was so public, perhaps showing her discomfort with the public-facing role she had acquired. In Self View, published in Drawing to Extinction (2000), she likened watching herself on television to seeing “someone I once saw or met or knew”, separating her private self from the public activist.

In Poet in 1983 (1983), Arrowsmith questions the value in writing poetry when there is so much injustice and suffering to be put right: “When the fate / of humanity is at stake / who cares”. But in his introduction to her collection On the Brink (1981), fellow poet Adrian Mitchell drew a comparison between Arrowsmith and Wilfred Owen.

He saw them as peace poets whose work is a warning to readers: “Pat has continually warned us of the dangers we’re in and the new dangers we’re creating … she emphasises how the human race threatens itself and nature too”.

Arrowsmith’s poetry not only adds to her legacy as an activist, it builds on the tradition of peace poetry too.

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Isobel Cook does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.