'Fill the jails' : identity, structure and method in the Committee of 100, 1960 – 1968
The Committee of 100 (C100) (1960 – 68) were a British anti-nuclear protest group 
who campaigned for mass non-violent direct action (NVDA) in an effort to force the 
government to revise its defence policy. The formation of C100 created tensions with 
the already-established Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), whose leaders 
objected to C100's commitment to civil disobedience. The two anti-nuclear campaigns 
had some membership overlap but always remained separate. Until now, any 
investigation of C100 has been incorporated within wider studies of CND or has been 
quantitative in method. This thesis therefore addresses a historical gap by employing a 
life history approach to examine C100 as a distinct group. Drawing upon oral history 
interviews with twenty-four C100 members the resulting analysis reveals new aspects of 
C100's innovative structure and method, and identifies the particular nature of those 
who joined the campaign. 
A new image of first wave anti-nuclear activists emerges when focusing on C100 
protestors. The respondents reveal motivations for campaign engagement that contrast 
with those of earlier representations of CND supporters. They were inspired by a 
common interest in global civil rights concerning human health and survival and a need 
to actively challenge rather than merely petition the authorities. Significantly, many 
C100 members came from left-wing, progressive or anarchist backgrounds. They were 
an erudite group with regard for knowledge, despite many putting conventional 
education on hold to fully engage in the campaign. 
This thesis examines C100's libertarian nature, and the extent to which its membership 
managed to be anti-hierarchical in structure, ethos and policy. It explores tensions 
within C100 concerning limits and definitions of NVDA that changed over time and 
came to radicalise the campaign. A biographical approach also reveals significant 
factors around C100 prison experience concerning issues of class and gender. This 
thesis serves to situate C100 for the first time in its own right on the socio-political map, 
both historically and globally.
Granny Made Me an Anarchist
Stuart Christie, Britain's most famous anarchist, was at the centre of two events that define a forgotten, radical period of British history - a period when people thought they could change the world.
Truthfulness, history and identity
A theme of this book is interconnection, an aim to assert that the separate approaches of different disciplines must be brought together if we are to understand the actual unity of an oral representation of pastness. In such a unified approach, we can also recognise key distinctions between genres and see how these relate to the social formation in which they appear, and which they help to reproduce. In this concluding chapter, I argue that we must also make connections between terms commonly distinguished: truth and falsehood, memory and history. These connectivities are also imbricated in the final topics of discussion – personal identity, social identity, and their relation to history-as-recorded. Truth, falsehood and forgetfulness In the analyses I have presented of African narrations, I have not given much time to their status as historical evidence, concentrating rather on their constitutive features, because these must be understood before such evaluative judgments can be made. Historians may object that I have downplayed distinctions between true and false, given that their business is to try to reconstruct the passage of the past, and for that it is crucial to test for what in an account is true, or can be shown to be false. As with ‘time’, ‘truth’ is a term to which massive attention has been given, and this book cannot rehearse all the arguments.