Pat Arrowsmith 1930 is peace activist and completing her Cambridge history degree (where she became involved in the crusade for world government), Arrowsmith turned to the social sciences, completing postgraduate qualifications in Ohio and liverpool. She began working for Liverpool’s family service unit as asocial caseworker, then as a childcare officer before a period as a nursing assistant, before being sacked for getting patients and staff to sign an anti-nuclear petition. Her natural compassion and life experiences inevitably fed into her move towards political activism
After reading a guardian article about an anti-nuclear protester planning to sail to a nuclear test zone, she decided that banning the nuclear bomb war the central issue facing her generation. In 1958 she became organizer for several anti-nuclear campaigns, including the committee of 100, the direct action committee against nuclear war (CND). She helped organize the aldermaston marches in 1958 and was intimately involved in the struggles within the anti-nuclear movement about the best tactics to adopt. She favoured direct action and was viewed as one of the radical militants of DAC. She was critical of those pacifists who allowed themselves to be distracted from campaigning about the nuclear bomb by matters such as opposing British membership of ZATO. She frequently clashed with Canon Collins of CND. During the 1960s combined her social care work with other forms of political activism, including editing the newspaper Peace News. Despite her commitment to direct activism, she also saw potential in the parliamentary route to publicise her causes: she stood frequently as a parliamentary candidate: Fulham in 1966 for Radical Alliance, Hammersmith in 1970 as an anti-Vietnam War candidate, and Cardiff in 1979 as Independent Socialist against Jim Callaghan, barracking him throughout his acceptance apeech. When she was given an entry in Who’s Who in 1976 became of CND work, she used it to highlight her sexuality.
As her range of parliamentary candidatures suggests, Arrowsmith did not confine herself solely to the anti-nuclear cause. From 1969 to 1971 she became interested in race relation, becoming a researcher for the Society of Friend Race Relations committee, and she took a range of menial hourly-paid jobs through the 1970s to fund her activism. In 1971 she joined Amnesty International as an assistant editor, a role she kept until 1994, and whilst there, formed its first trade union. Between 1958 and 1985 she was jailed eleven times, including an 18-mounth sentence for sedition after leafleting soldiers urging them not to serve in Northern Ireland (she escaped from prison several times) and was twice adopted as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty. She has been named several times in the House of Commons, including in October 1961 after she went on hunger strike in Gateside Prison and was being forcibly fed. From the outset she complained that the police were using arcane and obscure laws to jail her and other peace activists; however, when she took the British Government to the Council of Europe’s Court of Human Rights in 1975, arguing that this was contrary to her human rights, she lost her case.