A Spectator's Notebook
I NEVER supposed that Mr. Philip Toynbee's declared intention of walking all the way to Hungary at the time of the revolution would come to much. But he might at least, on Good Friday, have got farther along the road to Aldermaston than the Albert Hall. Yet when all the jokes have been made— and there is something comic about this peculiar crew of suburban housewives, babes in prams, Negro students, Hampstead schoolgirls, Royal Court actors and bearded television jazz singers trudging through rain and wind during the Easter holiday to a deserted atomic station—there re- mains no doubt that the march made a consider- able dent on the public consciousness. It received more publicity on television and in the press than any comparable political demonstration I can remember. Regarded as a coherent effort, designed to bring pressure on the Government to stop making hydrogen bombs, it was obviously a flop. But only the most naive of the marchers could have seriously imagined that that was what they were doing. Most of them, by all accounts, were simply trying, in an inarticulate and muddled way, to oppose what they feel to be an inarticulate and muddled policy. Most of the published reports by those who accompanied the march (as opposed to those who analysed the marchers from home) agree that the bystanders at least were not apathetic. They did not ignore the demonstrators, as they do May Day marchers, with a sniff and a grin. They stopped and they watched, and they read the leaflets they were given.
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