Today, I will share a discussion between George D Rodger – a former CEO of the Vegan Society UK & Donald Watson – a co-founder of the Vegan Society. It shows the reader Donald Watson’s views of his friends, of the Society, and of wider animal rights issues. It is in our Ernest Bell Library as a typed transcript. Without changing any words, I have done my best to punctuate it.
GDR: To start off with, could you just say a few words, to check the sound level.
DW: Before you ask me any questions, I’d like to make two brief statements, which I think are relevant.
The first is that, at the age of 92, speaking as a person who still has vivid recollections of the First World War, and even before that, you must feel perhaps that I’m past my best as a speaker, but the fact that I’m still here at all, nearly 20 years older than the average age of death of males in this country, suggests that there is something in long term veganism, particularly as I’m still able to do all the things I want to do, or most of them, able to climb mountains on fine days, and that I’ve gone through a long life virtually without pain or illness or any kind of medicine, orthodox or fringe, and even without dietary supplements, apart from those that nowadays find their way into proprietary vegan products like soya milk and so on, as a result of which, having outlived all my critics, I’m a keener vegan now even than I was when I started! And I do feel we’re onto something really big! I don’t want to turn this preliminary comment into a soliloquy, because I know you have questions to ask, but my overall feeling is one of great gratitude to veganism as I’ve interpreted it. I’ll say no more about that.
Now the other comment that I think deserves to be recorded, I think this is something of enormous importance to all people who feel that Man should have a closer and a kinder, affiliation with the rest of Creation and this story concerns a wild bird, and the incident happened just outside this conservatory where we now sit. This is the story, and I hope that those who compile stories – unusual stories – of animal behaviour. and even, I would include, their gratitude, will agree it deserves a place in any such anthology.
Soon after we came here, in 1951, the front of this terrace was a lovely unbroken stretch of wall covering this house and the end house. And living in the middle cottage, where we now sit (and which I had to sell to pay for all the expenses of conversion and removal and so on) was an elderly retired nurse who was dying of cancer and she asked my wife and me whether we would have any objection if she had a conservatory built, so that she could spend her latter days sitting in the sun. Well, we hated the idea quite frankly, to lose the lovely straight stretch of the wall of the property going along the continuous terrace, but since life doesn’t always give us easy choices, we said “Oh, go ahead, we don’t mind”. So she had the conservatory built, and I doubt very much if she ever sat in it – she died first. However, this was where the interesting bit starts.
The day after the conservatory was glazed, I was weeding the garden, and I found a dead blackbird – a male blackbird – whose flight path along the front of the terrace had been baulked by this new structure, with invisible glass. Well, we buried the blackbird, and, I don’t know whether it was the next day, or the day after that, very very soon after that, we came and found a female blackbird – the brown one – lying in the same place, not dead, but virtually dead, with one eye hanging out, on what seemed to be like a little tube, it was hanging an inch, or an inch and a half, away from her face. Well, I suppose many humanitarians would have thought the best thing we can do in a case like this was to put it out of its misery, but my wife and I had never killed anything, so we lifted it up, carried it into the greenhouse, gave it a saucer of water, closed the door, and left it there for the night, knowing that no predator could reach it. We fully expected the next morning to find it dead of course. To our surprise, there it was, sitting up, the eye had gone back into place, we opened the door, and it flew out. That’s not the end of the story! The really important part was still to come. A couple or so days later, my wife was hanging clothes out on the line, which went across the bottom side of our lawn. This blackbird flew parallel with the clothes line, and, in front of my wife, as it went by, it dipped in flight. Well, Dorothy came in, and told me this story, she said it must have remembered what we did and this was a ‘thank-you’. And even that’s not the end, because this was repeated time after time. My wife didn’t hang clothes out every day, but, when she did, this blackbird that was living somewhere in the garden, came along, and did its little loop of gratitude, as it went by.
Knowing, as we did, that birds and all creatures have feelings, it was news that even a bird, a wild bird, could show a sense of gratitude. And I’ve thought about it since. Perhaps this is why the stories of Saint Francis and other people, long ago, had such an intimate relationship with creatures they lived among. I think, if I’ve done justice to the story that needs recording, even if more briefly than I have described it. Well, we’re at the scene of that event! It was that window there!
GDR: This is George Rodger recording an interview with Donald Watson on the afternoon of Sunday 15th December 2002. What you’ve just heard was what Donald said when I asked him to say a few words for a sound check, but it was so fascinating I just let it run on. We’ll now start the interview proper.
GDR: Where and when were you born?
DW: I was born on the 2nd of September, 1910, at Mexborough, in South Yorkshire.
GDR: Tell me about your family.
DW: My father was the headmaster of a big school at nearby Denaby Main. He started life as a poor farm boy, three miles away, and by hard work and study managed to become a headmaster, I believe at the age of about 30. And, although in every respect he was a good parent, he was orthodox in all his ways, so I was part of a meat-eating family, a church-going family, and part of the moral instruction we received as children (my brother, my sister and I) was that we must never steal, we must never trespass, but we may swear if we felt like it, but, only when we heard him swear, which we never did. That, very briefly, in a few words, comprises my family background. I could write a book on the whole subject, but, as I often feel, who on earth would be remotely interested in it now, when people are living from day to day with pressing economic problems, feeling their various body parts from day to day, for suspected lumps which shouldn’t be there, questioning everything that’s been traditionally accepted, chiefly through religion, as being true and honest and of good report. Well, I don’t know whether further questions will concern that, but they’re hardly relevant to veganism, which I suppose the bulk of your questions will relate to.
GDR: Would you like to say any more about your childhood?
DW: This is a story – I can only give it in précis, otherwise it will take the whole of the afternoon to report, but, very briefly:
I suppose I was one of millions of children with a very similar, orthodox, background, and one of my earliest recollections in life was being taken for holidays to the little farm where my father had been born. It was run by my grandmother and her son, George, who was the elder son of the family and therefore inherited the farm. And my first impression of those holidays was one of heaven. As a little boy, living in a town, I was surrounded by interesting animals. There was the big Shire horse, who pulled the plough. There was a horse of lighter build that pulled the trap, which in those days was the equivalent of the modern motor car, which took my granny into local markets to sell her butter and eggs. There were the cows, there were the pigs, there were no sheep on the farm – they lived in a field hundreds of yards away.
There were hens, there was a cockerel, there were two cats, the farm dog, Rover, and all these creatures gave me an insight into the kind of life I’d never seen before, and I realised that they all “gave” something. The farm horse pulled the plough, the lighter built horse pulled the trap and the wagonette, which was a bigger wagon, carrying at least half a dozen ladies to market with their butter and eggs every Saturday. The cows “gave” milk, the hens “gave” eggs, the cockerel was a useful “alarm clock” – I didn’t realise at that time that he had another function too!
The sheep, I knew, “gave” wool and my impression was one of heaven, especially since my granny used to allow me to help make the butter – I turned the churn and, when she patted the butter into little rolls, ready for the market, and placed the butter on the sheet of muslin, she allowed me to wield the little gadget across, which had some leaf patterns on the wheel, which was transferred to the butter, and after this had finished, the buttermilk was put in a separate receptacle and added with all the kitchen waste and some meal from a bag, and it was fed to the pigs. The whole structure, by the way, I learned had been built by one of my ancestors, several generations before, who had six daughters, and they made the bricks in moulds from local clay, mixed with straw, and they baked them on huge wood fires, to build the house. My great-great-great-grandfather had designed it, no planning permission needed of course in those days and I could draw a plan of that farm now and, as an example of functional planning, I can’t fault it.
The toilet was an antiquated affair. It was a structure in wood; it was an earth closet of course, with a raised section, with two holes in the top, and then a lower section, with three holes, for children. And the contents deposited there periodically were shoveled out from the back, by my Uncle George, who wheeled them all to a part of the garden, not the part where food was being grown, but a part where the food would be grown in years to come.
Ecologically, this was the system that had prevailed for centuries, in tens of thousands of little farms, where I believe about three quarters of the population of this country, and probably of others, made their living. I could never understand what the pigs did – all the other animals “gave” something, but I couldn’t for the life of me see what the pigs “gave”, and they seemed – there were usually two – such friendly creatures, always glad to see me, and grateful for almost anything that was thrown to them in the sty.
Well, the day came when I came downstairs for breakfast, and Granny wasn’t alone in the kitchen – there were two women there I’d never seen before, and they were very busy boiling an enormous amount of water, one pan after another, on the fire.
What was all this about? Soon after, I saw two men cross the path in front of the kitchen window, carrying what seemed to be like a trestle, with handles on each end, and they took it through to the little yard where the pigsty was. It wasn’t long before the business of killing one of the pigs began. No attempt was made to keep me away from the scene, I just went there, full of interest, to see what all this was about. And I still have vivid recollections of the whole process, from start to finish, including all the screams of course, which was only feet away from where this pig’s companion still lived. And then, when the pig had finally expired, the women came out, one after another, with buckets of this scalding water, and the body of the pig was scraped – all the hairs were taken away.
The thing that shocked me, along with the chief impact of the whole setup, was that my Uncle George, of whom I thought very highly, was part of the crew, and I suppose at that point I decided that farms, and uncles, had to be re-assessed. They weren’t all they seemed to be, on the face of it, to a little, hitherto uninformed boy. And it followed that this idyllic scene was nothing more than Death Row. A Death Row where every creature’s days were numbered, by the point at which it was no longer of service to human beings.
There is much more I could say about my life on the farm. I remember at harvest time, when a field was due to be mown, a man used to go round with a scythe, opening it up, that meant making a space near the hedge, where the horse that would pull the reaper could go without trampling on the corn. And then the reaper came – I heard that there was a new machine, called a binder, which automatically collected the straws into sheaves, and threw them out – but my uncle wasn’t rich enough to have one of those. He just had the old fashioned reaper. And, as the reaper went round, the standing corn became smaller and smaller and at that point the farm hands came with their guns because the rabbits had all been driven into this ever-diminishing area of safety until there was none left and then they fled, and of course they were shot. Another aspect of idyllic family life that didn’t seem all that it had been cracked up to be, and afterwards of course the sheaves of corn were all stacked and the farmers hoped for two or three days of fine weather so that the rain wouldn’t come and make the wheat wet so that it sprouted. They had to get it into a straw stack as quickly as possible. Well, the straw stack was built on a structure of old tree branches and logs to keep it off the ground and when it was finally built, it was thatched, not with the same care as a cottage of course, but there were no plastic sheets in those days. And this straw stack was absolutely heaven for mice – they were free from predators, they were warm, they had a food supply. Until threshing day came of course, by which time they’d all had their families, and as the sheaves of corn were forked off, and thrown into the thresher, everyone available was there with their sticks, to kill the mice and the young mice as they lay there in their nests.
I’m told that, in the old days, sparrow pie was one of the national dishes among the peasants, the reason being the easy way by which they got the sparrows – it was to put a net round the straw stack, and, as they fluttered out, they were killed. And they got enough sparrows to make a pie quite quickly. And so the story goes on, as our past on which our present civilisation is built. And, quite early in life, I came to the conclusion that, if I was to report on Man’s progress, I had to settle for the comment beloved of schoolteachers: “could do better”. And from that, The Vegan Society was formed.
Well, that’s a bit of the story and then going back home, I lived at home for 21 years. In the whole of that time, I never heard a word, from my parents, or from my grandparents, of from my 22 uncles and aunts, or my 16 cousins, or my teachers or my vicar, on anything remotely associated with any duties we may have to what the religious people call “God’s Creation”.
GDR: So that was your childhood. Would you like to go on and say something about your adolescent years and your early adult life?
DW: Oh yes. That’s another story entirely. When I was 14, my father asked me what I wanted to do. And I didn’t say anything, I was afraid of offending him, because my older brother had been to college and become a teacher and there was nothing I wanted to do more than make things. I wanted to be a woodworker. And it took a long time before I plucked up enough courage to tell him this. The result was that, since I’d never been happy at school, I went to be an apprentice with my uncle in a little village three miles away. And there I got an insight into village life which strengthened all my earlier convictions about our relationship with the rest of Creation.
Our workshop was down a yard adjacent to the local inn and the innkeeper had been the village butcher, and living there was the old bachelor who had been his assistant, I suppose for most of his life. And old Albert spent his days looking after the hens and the geese and a few pigs and a little garden. He kept his corn bin in our workshop. And he also used the workshop to kill the hens – he brought them in every week or so, wrung their necks, hung them up on a row of pegs and left them there, fluttering until they died. Well, among the denizens of this farmyard was a gander, to whom I became quite attached. It used to come into the workshop, as I was having my lunch, sitting on the sawing stool, it would share my lunch with me, and we became very friendly. I’ve still got a photograph of him somewhere. Well, one day, after I suppose two or three years, old Albert came into the workshop with this gander under his arm and then put the body between his legs and the gander was rebelling, not knowing what was going to happen, and I heard Albert say “Not this time, boy”. The gander went the same way as all the hens, and he was hung up, fluttering for I suppose the best part of five minutes, and that was the end of my friendship with him. On another occasion, when Albert was called in by one of his friends to kill a pig, he came into the shop and said to my uncle (in broad Yorkshire), “Would t’lad (me) give them a hand with this awk’urd pig?” This “awk’urd pig” was rebelling, not surprisingly, at being killed. My uncle, who knew that I was a vegetarian, he said “No – my lad doesn’t believe in murder”. So I was let off that!
This town where I lived, like all other towns at that time, had a succession of butchers’ shops along the main road, about four in half a mile. I can remember Wagstaffs, Law’s, Biggin’s, Beaumont’s; Hillerby’s, the fishmongers who also sold rabbits, and all these butchers did their own killing. They had two doors alongside their shop, and, as the animals were delivered, they went in and the doors closed behind them. And Mrs Biggins once said to my mother, who traded there, since we were meat eaters, in her broad Yorkshire, ”T’little calves do cry when Charlie (her husband) kills ’em.”
As I went to school each morning, on many mornings, a van would arrive at Law’s, the pork butchers, with two or three pigs – they needed those for the day’s supply – and they were pulled out, with their tails, squealing, and pushed up the passage. And so, several of the school staff passed that way on their way to school and I remember on one of my reports the French mistress gave a very cutting comment, “He does not even know his verbs!” And I thought, on reading this, “No, and she does not even know what is happening down the road! Or, if she does know, she doesn’t care.”
That was the very brief background of my upbringing. I must add just one other thing – the vicar, a Dr Briggs, who was a Doctor of Divinity (Mexborough was very proud to have a Doctor of Divinity as a vicar) ran a Bible Class for youths, boys by the way, not girls, every Sunday afternoon, and I was one of the youths who went to this Bible Class, and the only reference he ever made as a Doctor of Divinity to any kind of compassion for the Animal Kingdom was that if we did collect birds’ eggs, we were to take only one from each nest.
That just shows how far we’ve gone in the last 70 or 80 years. If any vicar now said that, he’d soon find himself before the Court, wouldn’t he?
GDR: You did, in fact, train as a woodworker, which you said just now was your ambition, and you worked at that for some time. How and why did you switch to teaching, as you did later on?
DW: Oh, that’s an easy one! When I was 21, and due to become a craftsman, I presumed for the rest of my life, we found ourselves in the middle of an economic slump, which went on for several years in the early 1930’s. And millions of people had no work. And I discovered that craftsmen could become woodwork teachers without going to college by qualifying through City and Guilds, providing they became of an acceptable standard.
So, I enrolled. I took correspondence courses, I passed my first examination, which qualified me to teach for three years, during which time I was expected to take the final, which would give me the same status as a college-trained teacher. I don’t think I found any difficulty in this, because during the whole of my adolescence, I was reading books – “The Origin of Species”, Gilbert White’s “Natural History of Selborne”, Hudson’s “A Shepherd’s Life”, Dickens’ “The Old Curiosity Shop”.
My main problem was Math, but with a bit of trouble I managed it and I got a job in Leicestershire as a peripatetic teacher, teaching all over the county, going there by bike, by the way, sometimes leaving home at half past six to reach distant places like Ashby-de-la-Zouche and Castle Donington, Shepshed, Hugglescote, Cosby, Hinckley, Sileby – the list goes on.
By the way I was claiming bus fares, quite legitimately, and the bus fares came to nearly half my wage, which helped. And after three years of this I was appointed to a new school on the outskirts of Leicester, where life became very much easier. And then, I liked the job so much, I never tried to get any kind of promotion, because I couldn’t think of a more useful job than training what was, over the years, thousands of boys in the art of using tools. But I did move to do the same job here in Keswick.
And when I became sixty I felt so fit and able that I couldn’t think of retiring, so I kept on for another three years, after which I took a job for seven years, as a guided walks leader, when I led parties of visitors to Keswick out on the fells. There was no charge in those days – they charge five pounds a time now, I believe, and sometimes the parties numbered as many as seventy. And over the summer and autumn, we covered about five hundred miles at least. And I suppose I took out nearly a thousand people. I must be in photograph albums in many parts of the world.
GDR: You are 92 years and 104 days old as of today. To what do you attribute your long life?
DW: Oh, am I? I did another calculation this morning, with the help of my calculator, and I found out that I’d lived nearly 34,000 days, and I had a strange thought. Since I must die in the next few years I thought 33,600 times I’ve gone to sleep at night and in a way I’ve died, always assuming I’m going to wake up again, and the day must come when I won’t, and I thought, what a crowning glory that must be for anyone who’s lived without illness or pain, and kept out of police hands, by the way, to just go to sleep one day, or one night, and not wake up, as we all do, every day of our lives.
GDR: So you’ve lived all those thousands of days – to what do you attribute your long life? Is it because of being vegan, or is it because of choosing the right parents, or is it just good luck?
DW: I can answer that in several ways, but, twice a year, I go to a dentist in Bangor in North Wales. We lived down there, nursing my sister-in-law for three years and we got in with this dentist – who is a very good dentist. I go for my checkup, and last time I went, he asked if I minded filling up a form – apparently dentists now have to be very careful how they administer anything to patients, in case it militates against any medicines they might be taking – and this form was a long form and it went “Do you ever have this or that or the other”, and I kept putting ticks under the nos, right down to the bottom, and it was a long row of nos. And my dentist looked at this and said “I wish I had more customers like you! To what do you attribute it?” I said, “Well, that’s a long story, but 57 years ago, I married a Welsh girl, who taught me a Welsh saying, ‘When everyone runs, stand still’, and I seem to have been doing that ever since.” And that must be part of the answer to the question, because so many people are running towards what I see as suicide.
They’re performing habits which everyone knows are dangerous, and I really believe that the commonest cause of death now in this and several other countries, is slow suicide, by people doing what they, and every authority in every school of medicine, is agreed to be wrong, smoking, taking alcohol, turning night into day, promiscuity, sleeplessness, lack of exercise, you know I recently made a list, it was about twelve reasons that came into my mind, straight away.
‘When everyone runs, stand still.” And, in that sense, although I’ve done a lot of travelling about, mainly by bicycle, and on foot, I’ve been standing still.
Veganism, of course, probably leads all the rest, because I’ve always accepted that Man’s greatest mistake throughout all recorded history, is through trying to turn himself into a carnivore, which is absolutely contrary to natural law. As long ago as 1863, T. H. Huxley wrote his book, “Man’s Place in Nature”, in which he listed all the reasons where Man differs from the carnivores and is similar in his anatomy and in his habits to those of the anthropoid apes. The structure of our body and all the juices that create this miraculous process of digestion are those of a frugivore. 200 years before Huxley wrote his book, which must be one of the most significant books on medicine ever written. John Ray said very much the same thing. So, we’ve had plenty of sound, incontrovertible evidence to work on and, although, in 1944, the few of us who were working to form this new movement, felt we were the first out on the frozen pond, as it were, and wondered whether the ice would hold, and everything that’s happened in the 60 years since has proved that all our hopes and precepts and aspirations have been fulfilled.
GDR: You’ve already mentioned that you were a vegetarian when you were a lad. When, and why, did you first become a vegetarian, and at what age?
DW: It was a New Year Resolution in 1924. Did you ever hear anyone say there’s no point in making New Year Resolutions because they’re always broken? You can quote me as an exception to the rule, because, since 1924, I’ve never eaten any meat, or fish. How long ago is that – 78 years is it? 78 years!
GDR: Of course, you invented the term “vegan” in 1944, which was 20 years after that Resolution, but you had already been a vegan for two or three years before that. So why did you actually go vegan?
DW: A year or two before the Society was formed, I was corresponding with a very small number of people, scattered far and wide. Leslie Cross, who founded the Plant Milk Society, was a great friend of mine. He died comparatively early, well, in his early 70s, I think, and, in a letter he sent me, shortly before he died, he mentioned that, as a child, he’d fallen heavily from a gate and the authorities thought he might not recover and, I think, if he had an early death for a vegan, it may have been the consequence of that. He was certainly one of the outstanding people who have served the movement and, in retirement, he went up and down the country, giving his lecture, “Milk of Human Kindness” – all voluntarily of course, paying his own expenses, and coordinating Frey Ellis and others, medical people who were interested in the idea of creating a plant milk that was acceptable – some of the earlier efforts were pretty crude! But it was not until 1965 that my great friend, Arthur Ling, who has devoted most of his adult life to creating and propagating the vegan idea, especially with regard to dairy produce, felt able to market an acceptable alternative to cows’ milk. And of course, he’s gone on from there, and, apart from running the Plamil firm, he’s taking a great interest in the feeding of vegan infants. Because, of course, if any diet fails to produce healthy children, well, we must find a reason for it, and proceed from there, not taking “no” for an answer. But now, thanks to Arthur’s work and those of many others, we’ve reached a point where the only safe way to rear children is on a vegan diet, which obviously must conform to a few well-proved requirements, and that’s why Plamil and certain other vegan proprietary products now are fortified with vitamin 812, which, although it’s a vitamin that we need an infinitesimally small amount of, we must have, and some people have lost the capacity to produce it in their own gut, so now we feel that, since B12 is a vegan product, produced quite cheaply fortunately, unlike some of our modern wonder drugs, so-called, we take it as part and parcel of our normal food intake.
I would bracket, of all the many people who have subscribed to the vegan cause, I hesitate to single out anyone, but I would say Leslie Cross and Arthur Ling must be put in the records as being the two outstanding, faithful, contributors to our cause. I hesitate to include my own name, as the Society’s obstetrician; I leave it to others to say whether I made a good job there, but I think I must have done, because, in the two years before we decided to officially form a democratic Society, I literally ran the show. I was the Secretary, the Treasurer, the Auditor, and the Banker, not that we’d ever very much to bank, in fact the flow of money very often went the other way.
I remember on one occasion, after I’d produced my first duplicated copy of the “Vegan News”, which had four pages, out of the blue someone sent me two pounds, which was eight times the contributions of five shillings I was charging as the annual fee to be informed about the progress that was being made. And with that two pounds I rushed out and bought enough foolscap copying paper to enable me to enlarge the “Vegan News” to twelve pages. And, reading them recently, I think that these must now be what we might call “The Dead Sea Scrolls” of the vegan movement, because they describe how the whole idea was started, at a most difficult time. And, from the response I had, thousands of letters, sometimes as many as 30 or 40 a day, I sometimes feel that we had reached a watershed and if I hadn’t formed the Society, someone else may have done it, very soon, although it may have had a different name.
I did appeal to my readers to suggest what the name might be, and I had a list of very bizarre suggestions, which some people may already have heard of – I won’t list them now – but, in an inspired moment, I settled for the word “vegan”, which was immediately accepted and, over the years, became part of our language and is now in almost every world dictionary, I suppose.
GDR: That’s very interesting stuff about the early days of the Society. Can you tell me why you, yourself, first decided to give up on all animal products – in other words, became vegan, before the word was invented?
DW: Well, I think if an open-minded, honest person pursues a course long enough, and listens to all the criticisms, and in one’s own mind can satisfactorily meet all the criticisms against that idea, sooner or later one’s resistance against what one sees as evil tradition has to be discarded. About the time the Vegan Society was formed, Archbishop Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said, or wrote, or reminded his flock, of what I think was a great truth, that, throughout history, good and devout people have pursued evil practices, in the firm belief that they were doing nothing wrong. And I thought, well, that applies to what I’m doing. I seem to be taking on the world virtually single-handed, with no recognised qualifications other than a conviction that, with all the conceit I can muster, I am right, and they’re all wrong! It’s a dangerous state of mind, but one which, sooner or later, one can’t dispel, and one has to go that way. I remember one of the sayings that convinced me at the time when I was in the throes of what I saw as a struggle, I read somewhere that the Norwegian poet and dramatist, Ibsen, had said, “The strongest man in the world is the man who can stand alone”, and I thought that the way people are worn down by the traditions of the cultures in which they’ve been born, this must be a great truth. Ibsen died in 1906, four years before I was born, and I thought what better service can I give to this man who wrote such a great truth than include it in my answer to any appropriate question that I might now be asked. So I say. ‘Well said, Ibsen!”
GDR: In addition to being vegan, I believe you’re a lifelong teetotaller, a lifelong non-smoker. . .
DW: I have tasted wine, and I once tasted champagne, at a wedding, and I thought it was poor stuff, compared with grape or apple juice, but I’ve never tasted beer. I suppose there are very few men in this part of the world who can say they’ve never tasted beer, and I must have saved quite a lot of money – and quite a lot of tax!
GDR: You were also, I believe, a conscientious objector during the Second World War, and a few other things of principle, and I just wanted to ask you, one at a time, how all these relate to your veganism. We’ll start with teetotalism, since you’ve already started on it – how does the following relate to your veganism – being a lifelong teetotaler?
DW: I don’t think that links particularly with the ethics of veganism, especially since one can now buy wines that are vegan, not treated with a fish product to make them clear. I think it was more that I’d seen so many people destroyed by alcohol that I felt this was a slippery slope that, as a sensible chap, I’d better not put my foot on it.
GDR: In the same way, can you comment on being a non-smoker in relation to veganism?
DW: Well, I always thought that smoking was so utterly daft – a person with a little fire hanging out of their mouth. It was neither food nor drink, and, although in those days there wasn’t strong medical evidence, I thought to draw chemically-loaded gases into the lungs couldn’t possibly be doing them any good. Many doctors smoked; in fact one or two even said it was beneficial, because it killed germs. Well, now, all that nonsense has gone, and we know that tobacco is a killer and sensible people don’t do it. And morally-inclined people don’t inflict it upon other people. I sometimes think now we’re protecting children against the evils of pedophiles and it is still legal, unbelievably legal, for a pregnant woman to smoke, and inflict this poison on an unborn child, impairing it probably for life. I think, to use a religious expression, we must accept that the physical body is the “temple of the spirit”. It mustn’t be abused in any way. Everything we do must be to try to preserve it and feed it properly and give it everything that’s necessary to prosper and live as long as possible so that, whatever the purpose of life is, we fulfil it to the best of our abilities.
You did ask me a question earlier about conscientious objection. I’d like to mention, very briefly, it isn’t really the subject of this interview, that vegetarians, and vegans, were placed in a dreadful position at the beginning of the last War. We were faced with an evil regime that was executing people who didn’t fully agree with the Nazi philosophy. They were exterminating the Jews by the million.
And we had to decide whether to fight in the only way that seemed practical, to fight this evil, and overcome it in the hope that something better would result, although it never had from previous wars, and my own feeling was that, if I enrol, and I’m allotted to any branch of the Services, I immediately become liable to military law. Suppose they direct me to work in a slaughterhouse? Or anywhere else, where I’m expected to conform to orders from above. What do I do? I refuse, I’m put on a charge of insubordination, and I’m faced with punishment, goodness knows what. I knew what happened to “awk’urd” types like that in the First World War, I think 307 of them were shot! And I thought, surely since Churchill had said there was to be no witch hunt of conscientious objectors, I thought, well, there must be a place somewhere during this crisis, where I can work for the life of the nation, and not kill people I’d never met, and leave their descendants bereaved, and, as it turned out, bomb cities like Dresden where 50,000 people died in one raid and the bodies had to be piled in the streets and burnt.
My great friend Douglas Eld, who was a keen member of the Leicester Vegetarian Society, of which I was the Secretary, was so moved by the evil stories of what the Nazis were doing, that he renounced his pacifism and joined up. And he joined a bombing crew and he was one of the thousands who never came back. And so was a keen member of my night school in Leicester, Clifford Ginetta; he never came back. And my school friend, Harold Platt, he joined up and he never came back.
And my cousin John Smith, died in the last week of the war. He wasn’t a conscientious objector, or a vegetarian, he was just one of the millions who paid the price of war. It was a terrible dilemma for anyone with high principles to see thousands, millions of people, killed, because the whole idea was so mad that Man should still, at this late stage in his evolution, be trying to solve his problems by this evil method. But that was the dilemma, so, after much thought, for right or wrong, I became a CO. My terms for being given this privilege, which it was, of course, was that my salary as a teacher was reduced to two pounds a week – the pay of the lowest-serving member of the Forces, who were, of course, fed and clothed. My night school pay was stopped too, because the Leicester City Council said that the terms were that I mustn’t have more than two pounds a week.
Well, as a thrifty young man, I’d saved 500 pounds, which was a lot of money in those days, and so, with the two pounds a week, and this 500 pounds, I was able to stagger my way through the war without getting into debt. I carried on with the night school, which was always filled by men, many of them working in the shadow factories on good money. (The shadow factories where bits and pieces were made to be assembled elsewhere, into tanks, guns, and whatever. No-one was supposed to know what these shadow factories were making, in case they were bombed.) It was difficult for me to serve all these people on big money, and, among all the rest, there were evacuees from London and there were two men sent for occupational therapy. They’d been rescued at death’s door from the Burma railway, and they were as near to death as I’d ever seen anyone – they could hardly speak, and over the weeks and the months, they gradually came back to life and started making simple articles.
I was also in the AFS – the Auxiliary Fire Service – where, on two days a week, I had to go down and spend the night at the Granby Halls, in my full fireman’s regalia, in case we had a bombing raid. Fortunately we didn’t. The raid on Coventry, I understand, was intended to be on Leicester, but Leicester, in a valley, or a saucer-shaped dent in the landscape, filled with mist, on the night of the Coventry raid, and the planes that flew over Leicester thought it was a lake. They thought it was Swithland Reservoir. So, poor Coventry had the raid that was intended for Leicester. And if it had been Leicester, I might not have been here today. It’s a longer story than that, but that, very briefly, is the dilemma.
And I’m left with the thought how lucky these young people are today not to have this terrible choice to make, of whether they should go to war or not. War as we knew it then, of course, will never return, it will be a different kind of war, push-button, where civilians will be as much in it as anyone else for much of the time.
GDR: How did being a Conscientious Objector affect your working and social life?
DW: Veganism always had an effect on my social life. I think that’s an inevitable price we had to pay and which people, especially young people, have to pay today. But, if one is going to be out of step with all the catering that is done for people who are different from oneself, one must accept a certain amount of excommunication, as it were, from the rest of society – that is where I think the Vegan Contacts work is so absolutely essential, why vegans, especially those who live isolated from other vegans, must have some contact with the rest of our movement, which is now, of course, an ever-growing world movement, I like to think the greatest movement that ever was! Because it’s the only one, now, that can save Mankind. All the lesser movements for doing good work in themselves, in a limited sphere, are only, to use the common cliché, like the people re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, instead of helping us to guide the searchlight on the iceberg which is going to be the end of the whole show. And, when I think that the world population, which was about 2 billion people in 1944, is now more than 6 billion people, in spite of all the losses in war, disease, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, all the things that wipe out people by the tens of thousands. It has still become this astronomical explosion of over 6 billion, along with, I would say, a corresponding explosion of animals to feed most of them. And those animals are there, fed on food that should be growing for the Third World, where people are having big families, because they have to, they’ve no social security, they have to have many children because many of them in every family are likely to die and that, I think, may be the reason for this explosion. Well, we know that, throughout history, nature rebels against any species that becomes too numerous, usually by food shortage, or by disease, both of which are now rampaging ahead in the human community without – I won’t say without a thought – but without anyone except the vegans having a possible solution to this crisis.
AIDS, to mention just one, is now affecting a third of the population in many African countries and spreading to other countries. This is the Black Death of our modern age and no-one knows where it’s going to stop. Apart from that I might add all the diseases that are infecting Man from eating animal food, with its ever-growing list of diseases, so that in parts of the world, including our own, even farming is now under such threat that another visitation of foot and mouth disease or BSE, is still so frightening that farmers daren’t risk it – they can’t be insured against this enormous risk. So livestock farming is on the way out, as we’ve always known it, and, looking on the bright side, this could, in a properly organised world, create a labour force big enough to do all the jobs that we so desperately need doing – coping with drought, coping with floods, coping with disease, of course. And perhaps, most critical of all, reafforestation, stopping the ever-growing growth of the deserts and the ever decreasing amount of fertile land on which Man lives and we know now that even the so-called harvest of the seas, through Man’s avarice, interfering in a region where he has no business to go, has reached such a point of depletion that many species have almost become extinct. Again, one must admit, leading to unemployment of all the people employed in the fishing industry, but one is reminded of the reply given by somebody when slavery was abolished and one of the people against abolition said “What on earth is going to happen to the families of the people who make the whips, if slavery is abolished?” Well, the obvious answer to that – they are given more profitable and humane work to do! And that is the great challenge facing Mankind.
Carrying on St. Barbe Baker’s work – “Men of the Trees”, restoring the deserts, so that we don’t get these great areas of land where the temperature rises and it upsets the whole weather pattern that spreads throughout the world, whereas a world covered with trees would have a more controlled climate, one that was safer, and sustainable, in which Man could work out his destiny. Oh – I’m turning it into a soliloquy, aren’t I? I have to say, next question.
GDR: How does your veganism relate to any religious beliefs you may have?
DW: I never had very deep ones. Some theologians, I believe, think that Christ was an Essene. And if he was an Essene, he was a vegan. If he were alive today, he’d be an itinerant vegan propagandist instead of an itinerant preacher of those days, spreading the message of compassion, which, as I see it, is the only useful part of what religion has to offer and, sad as it seems, I doubt if we still have to enrol our first priest as a member of the Vegan Society. I understand that there are now more vegans sitting down to Sunday lunch than there are Anglicans attending Sunday morning service. That is the way things are moving. I also think that Anglicans should rejoice at this good news that somebody at least is practising the essential element in the Christian religion – compassion.
When I received all my thousands of letters in the years preceding the formation of the Society, I don’t remember ever having one from any student or lecturer at a university. And I think, at that time, about two percent of our most intelligent youths were going on to university. I thought, ‘What am I up against here? Here are the top two percent of the people I’d like to convert and they aren’t even interested in this idea!” My letters came from atheists and agnostics and people who couldn’t care less about any of the religions. I think the only vicar who ever wrote a book on the subject was Holmes Gore, who wrote his excellent book, “These We Have not Loved”. Good for him! But, if any priest of any denomination wants to distinguish himself – or, nowadays I must add “herself’ – the opportunity is open for them to join the vegan movement and really express the core element of what they are professing to stand for. I think we can say to the religious movement, “Yes, the meek will inherit the Earth, if anyone if going to, because the violent people will exterminate themselves, and not before long, as things are going.”
GDR: I think, in fairness, I should remind you of religious organisations, like The Order of the Cross, The Followers of the Way, these are religions which are very much in line with the vegan philosophy.
DW: When I was in Leicester, running the Leicester Vegetarian Society, I had several members of The Order of the Cross among my members, including our Chairman. I went to one or two of their meetings. Todd Ferrier, their leader, was making a lifetime job of trying to introduce other Christians into this idea of spreading the Gospel, but they were all vegetarians, not one was a vegan. In fact, at that time I think I was the only one, in Leicester anyway.
And, as the vegan idea developed, we saw, or some of us did, that, although vegetarianism was a very useful “stepping-stone” to veganism, and one which we had all used to get to where we were, unless the consumption of dairy produce was limited, it could be an even more cruel diet than the orthodox diet, where the meat came from a large animal like a cow which was feeding one meat-eater for a year or two, whereas the milk drinkers – they were going back to the cow suckling (what a bizarre idea that is!) at virtually every meal and claiming to be leading the way to a more humane life! So, although I’m still a member of the Vegetarian Society, I send my one pound fifty a month by direct debit, I do so to keep in touch with the movement, because I came from it and I am tremendously interested to be kept informed about the way it’s moving. And I was delighted to learn recently, at the IVU Conference in Edinburgh, that the diet was a vegan diet and that the delegates had no choice. That is the influence of the vegan idea. This little seed which I planted 60 years ago, and has been worked on by now thousands of people ever since, is making its presence felt in a world that is dying for salvation, to use again the religious expression.
Holman Hunt’s famous picture, “The Light of the World”, shows the Christian sitting beside the globe, implying that Christianity was the only way there.
Well, if it’s the form of Christianity that the Essenes knew, we’ll say “yes”. Holman Hunt sent a famous message – veganism!
GDR: I think you may consider you’ve already answered this question, but to what extent do you think your veganism relates to your still being alive and healthy at the age of 92?
DW: Well, again I repeat what I said earlier, an hour ago: ‘When everyone runs, stand still.” That, one day, will be out-of-date, because, when everyone is running towards veganism, I wouldn’t say “Stand still”!
GDR: What do you find most difficult about being vegan?
DW: Well, I suppose it is the social aspect. Excommunicating myself from that part of life where people meet to eat, and the only way this problem can be eased is by having veganism more and more acceptable in guest houses, hotels, wherever one goes, until one hopes one day it will become the norm.
GDR: And, the other side of the coin. What do you find easiest about being vegan?
DW: Easiest? I suppose it must be the great advantage of having a clear conscience and believing that scientists must now accept conscience as part of the scientific equation. A stricken conscience is not a health measure for anyone. We have to believe our finer feelings of this guilt and proceed from there as stronger men and women. Whenever I look across a graveyard and see all the stones, I think what enormous agony all the people who are buried there – most unnecessary agony – must have gone through during their lives and all the herds of cattle and flocks of sheep and shoals of fish went into the lives of every one of them to keep their little show on the road, believing, as Lang said, they were doing nothing wrong.
The tragedy of the whole existence of Mankind is that, long ago, Man went from his home in Africa, into climes where he had to eat animal food to keep himself alive, and then he invented weapons, to kill animals, to safeguard his food supply, and then he invented fire, to make the unnatural food edible, and then he invented the means of domesticating animals, to further safeguard his unnatural food supply and so the great mistake went on until now, of course, we have refrigeration and other methods of food preservation, to make animal food available, with our systems of transport, anywhere in the world. Not that vegan food can’t be taken anywhere in the world – it can, now, daily.
Wherever Man lives, he can have a vegan diet.
When I went to be an apprentice woodworker, one of the first things I learnt was the enormous difference between the hardness and the toughness of wood from slow-growing trees like oak, and all the other hardwoods, compared with that from fast-growing trees like spruce. And I did think, and I have thought, many times, afterwards, slow-growing wood can be compared to slow-growing animals. If we make an animal, especially in its young days, grow faster than the rate nature had planned, the cells are bigger, and the flesh is less durable and that is precisely what happens if we feed babies on milk with higher protein content than mother’s milk. We get big, bouncing babies, or six-foot six teenagers, as we see now, walking our streets, bodies that are bigger than nature ever intended which, throughout the ages, seems to have been about between five feet and five feet six, and, will these bodies that have been subjected to this accelerated unnatural growth stand the test of time? Like oak does, compared with pine.
I’m not a scientist, all my theories about veganism have been developed from using my conscience and my commonsense and my observation of events that have been happening all around me and so often my conclusion has contested with that of tradition. I remember one of the thousands of boys I taught – early in my career, in Leicester – frequently if I told him anything, he would look up at me and say, “How d’you make that out, Sir?” I often wonder where that boy finished up in life – he must have gone far. He wasn’t accepting what the teacher said, he wanted it saying another way round, or a simpler way, or stronger proof, before he was willing to accept. “How d’you make that out, Sir?” I’ll never forget that boy.
GDR: I know you have a fairly large garden and several compost bins. How important has gardening been in your life?
DW: Well, shall I tell you how it started? I was always keen on growing things – I thought it was magic to put something in the ground and not do anything else except look at that bit of ground, day after day, until, as if by magic, something had grown. And I remember the house where I was born, one of a row in South Yorkshire, had a little back garden about the area of this conservatory where we are now sitting. It was surrounded by bricks, put on end, forming a zig-zag pattern, as people did in those days and, every year, my mother used to buy a packet of Virginia stock seed, and she let me scatter these seeds right round the border. And, after a week or two, little green sprouts seemed to appear and then, suddenly, the first flower appeared.
Well, Virginian stocks, as you know, are little flowers that come in many colours, white, blue, red and perhaps other colours too. I shall never forget going in the house and announcing the great news that the first Virginian stock was in flower. That’s how my gardening started.
I never became a flower gardener – I was more attracted to the more practical side of gardening, which was growing food, especially compost-grown food, and among my many friends in Leicester was a young man, a member of my Vegetarian Society, his name was Tom Rawls, and he had several theories, and one of them was, if you want anything, don’t ask how you’re going to get the money to buy it, visualise it, and, if you visualise it strongly enough, it will come about. I thought, well, as a practical man, this seems a bit far-fetched, but I did visualise having a kitchen garden outside my back door, so that I didn’t have to cross Leicester to an allotment which a friend let me use. And, when the crops matured, I had to wheel them back four miles from Thurmaston, right across Leicester, to the other side of the city, and I was so keen on getting this food, apart from not having to buy it (because, remember, I was on two pounds a week), that I did it for, certainly, two or three years, and then, lo and behold, when I was lucky enough to get a job in Keswick, which I think must be one of the loveliest places in the world, I also got a big house – not that we wanted a big house, we wanted a big garden, but it had an acre of garden with it, including an orchard, and a lawn, and a kitchen garden, which was walled on two sides, which was a dream come true, and I thought of Tom, I said, Tom first told me about visualising what I wanted, and I did, and it’s come true!
And, another thing, based on my comments about religion, my vicar, as a young man, when I went to his Bible Class, told us one day, “There’s nothing wrong with inventing your own prayers – don’t limit your prayers to those in the Prayer Book. If you can think of any prayers that you would like to see fulfilled, just invent one, and say it, as often as you think appropriate.”
So I went away with this idea, I thought, fair enough, I’ll make my shopping list. I thought then that prayer was an appeal to some Higher Force to give one what one wanted, a rather rudimentary idea which many people still hold. They pray for what they want. Anyway, that was my stage in my evolution at that time so I thought, what do I want, and I made my “shopping list”. It was that I should have health, wealth, wisdom, long life and happiness. And a few years ago I went through this list, and I ticked them off. I thought, well, I’ve always, after a poor start as a child, had good health. I am not in debt, which is wealth indeed these days. Wisdom, well, that’s for other people to judge, but I think at least I have had the wisdom to avoid doing all the suicidal things that so many people find attractive. At nearly 93 years old I have had long life. But what about happiness? That’s more difficult in such an evil, crime ridden world. The stuff seems to be everywhere. I cannot accept the concept that there is a “Happy Land, far, far away.” Nor can I accept that evil can only be overcome by more evil. We need to fight evil in a way never before tried – veganism, and all it implies.
I’ve never been clever enough to be an atheist – an agnostic, yes, over big spheres of life, where the problems seem debatable and insuperable, but I could never believe that Creation could ever have happened without some sort of Creative Force and that, after the Big Bang or whatever it was that started the whole system off, there must be some Driving Force, some Evolver, to enable everything as we know it today to have developed from simple forms. That doesn’t mean anything personal in the way we think of old men with beards, or prophets, or people who have only sons born without the usual process of reproduction, it means some Force which we are quite incapable of fathoming and, behind all this is the frightening thought which I daren’t think about it too deeply – I understand some people have been driven mad by trying to conceive what it means, and it is that eternity in time and space, by definition, must go on forever, and these astronomers, who talk about the edge of the universe, are myopic – the universe can have no end, by definition, there must be something beyond any boundary and so with time, there is no end to the eternity in which we may have to pay for all the errors we make, to correct all the errors we make, through departing from natural law, about which we can do nothing.
If pious people step over the edge of a cliff, down they go. Their piety does not save them because they are ignoring a law of nature – gravity. If there are similar immutable laws – spiritual laws – these too must be obeyed. No excuse is made for ignorance of spiritual laws any more than there is for physical laws. We suffer if we disobey them. Piety does not excuse us. In veganism we can see that something happens that is beyond our wildest dreams. And if I am asked, what do I think about the progress of the Vegan Society after 60 years of struggle, by thousands of workers in it, here and throughout the world? I would say a brief comment, that progress has been better than I expected. Next question…..
GDR: Well that question was on gardening, but the answer was over a very wide area. What are your views on organic gardening and agriculture, and by “organic” of course I mean “veganic”?
DW: You’ve seen my row of compost heaps, each with wire netting round the sides, to let the air in, covered with a roof. Those compost heaps have never had any animal manure on them. Not that I have any objection to animal manure, it’s all been part of the natural scene since the beginning of time, only to animal manure coming from exploited animals. My compost heaps are filled with all the weeds, grass mowings, vegetable waste from the garden, dead leaves, except for privet leaves. I once tried one packet of some activator, I forget what it was called, I thought it was terribly expensive, I tried this on one of the sections of the compost heap, and I felt the compost wasn’t any better the next year, so I never used it again.
There is also a huge leaf hopper, which I built of brick, early in my retirement. It’s about ten feet high and six feet square, and the bricks are set with spaces between for the air to go through, and when we have more compost than the usual compost heaps will hold, or the compost needs more than a year to decompose, we simply throw it in that bin which has a little trap door at the bottom, where, several years later, the compost can be shoveled out and taken back to the garden. All my digging was done with a fork, not a spade, so as not to harm earthworms.