AS SOMETHING of a connoisseur of political demon- strations, I
have no doubt that the last stages of this year's Aldermaston march provided the greatest turn-out for any cause that London has seen since the war. When I travelled along it from head to tail, the head was entering Trafalgar Square, and the column proceeded virtually un- broken down Whitehall, round Parliament Square, along Victoria Street, past Victoria Station, up Grosvenor Gardens, round Hyde Park Corner, and on well into Kensington. There were curious sights to be seen: the Editor of Tribune and the music critic of the Spectator in the column, and the Assistant Editor of the New Statesman with a pram on the pavement; Mr. Ian Mikardo, depu- tising for Dr. Sumpierskill, retired; and even Mr.. Frank Cousins, stumping along for all the world as if he had meant what he said in his famous speech at the Brighton Conference of the Labour Party. But the sight of 15,000 people walking across London was undeniably impressive, and must have been so even to the most fervent advo- cate of the nuclear deterrent. Even so, there were some dissenters; BBC Television managed to ignore the march (at any rate for the first three days—I didn't see it on the last day) though the sound-radio news, which had stoutly maintained at the beginning that the only interesting thing about it was Dr. Summerskill's withdrawal, caved in before the end. And the Daily Express broke its own record for misleading headlines by topping its more or less objective account of the final stages 'Big March Ends in Row'—presumably a reference to the fact that one of the Trafalgar Square speakers mildly criticised the traffic arrangements made by the police.
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