Abolishing War: One Man's Attempt Nicholas Gillett
£15.00 What a book! Packed with anecdotes, and often discursive, this book is a veritable pot-pourri of fascinations. Nicholas is never afraid to venture stories and opinions on anything germane to peace, which, for him, is a hugely inclusive term. On page 12 he is telling us about inventions by members of his family, which have included a clockwork machine for producing Latin verse which featured in an exhibition of interventions 'which can never have any use'~ By page 325 he is recounting how Gandhi made a pair of sandals for the South African General Smuts, which via his mother, Nicholas ended up wearing. He muses whether wearing these shoes influenced him to marry later into the Gandhian movement.
In between, he has packed this book with surprises as he recounts his experiences at school in Oxford, (where he became a close friend of Michael Foot), at Balliol College, as a social worker for the unemployed in the 1970s and later for refugees from the second world war, as a conscientious objector and farm worker, a teacher, a civil servant with UNESCO, and a Quaker peace worker in Belfast and Geneva.
Through much of the more recent period he was a trustee of the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust (in which his father had been a trustee from the beginning) and of a family trust - the Polden Puckham Trust which he helped set up. He also wrote much - the Swiss constitution was the subject of one book, in which he explored its potential relevance to other countries seeking to accommodate minorities. Another book concerned the future of Bristol. He was always interested in future studies and believed that it should form part of the education of young people.
In all of this he was his own man, always questioning conventional wisdom and trying new ideas. I remember him once offering an education project I was involved with an unsolicited grant of 'mad money'. We could spend it on anything but the actual work.
He was challenging us to think creatively and to care for the relationships and human context in which we were working.
His driving ambition has always been, and remains, a quest for peace, the abolition of war, and the promotion of a culture of peace. He has an unswerving commitment to the UN as the crucial agent of change, and this book reflects this priority. Above all, perhaps, Nicholas is a thoroughly good and spiritual man, who has challenged orthodoxy at every step and risked much to make his ideals come true. This book is as unconventional as he is, and as rewardingly serendipitous. Read it as a whole, or dip into it at will: something intriguing surely awaits you.
----Simon Fisher Warwickshire MM