www.insearchofpeace.net

Foreword

Nicholas Gillett has led an active life in steady pursuit of the aims and principles that spring from his Quaker beliefs. Coming from a family with a tradition of devotion to serious causes he has characterized his own objective as “a quest for peace, the abolition of war, and what is now termed the establishment of a culture of peace.” These are certainly important, not to say ambitious, objectives. In pursuing them, Nicholas Gillett has at various times been a social worker in the 1930s work camps for the unemployed and later for refugees from Hitler; a farm worker (as a conscientious objector in World War II; a teacher; an international civil servant (with UNESCO); a director in a charitable trust; and a peace worker in Belfast. While in the Quaker office in Geneva, he wrote an invaluable small book, The Swiss Constitution: Can It Be Exported? Gillett’s experiences in various parts of the world inclined him to think that on the whole it could not.
It is refreshing to read a memoir based on a respected but largely unfashionable point of view, and on an approach that maximises the cause and the philosophy and minimizes the kind of ill-concealed bragging and pretension that characterize so many memoirs. Gillett believes, I think, that we shall only transform the world through changing the way people think and by thus building a culture of peace. This is an enormous task that can best be tackled at what the Americans call the ‘grass roots level.’ Nicholas Gillett’s memoir gives a splendid account of one man’s attempt to do this.

Sir Brian Urquhart
Formerly Under-Secretary General
of the United Nations.