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Before leaving my student years the work camps, which I joined or led each vacation, must be described. The work-camps movement looks back to its roots in the thoughts of Jean-Jacques Rousseau who wrote about the equality of all people and the educational value of practical and craftwork. Leo Tolstoy took these ideas further and glorified the work of peasants. 'Every day…I either dig the ground, or saw and chop wood, or work with scythe or sickle or some other tool…as to ploughing …it is pure enjoyment!' Bread-labour he called it, and he inspired his family to help a neighbouring widow in haymaking. Some communities inspired by him were formed to follow his 'New Life'. In 1909, speaking at a peace congress he said: 'War is murder by another name.'
John Ruskin, especially in his book Unto This Last , developed these ideas by stressing in lectures the dignity of manual labour and also leading groups of students to build a raised track across the water meadows to the village of Hinksey from Oxford, the same village Mathew Arnold mentioned in his poem The Scholar Gypsy. This information became much more vivid when I learned that the father of a friend had taken part in the building of the raised track.
I used to regard it as an act of historical piety to walk on that same footpath to Hinksey. Gandhi valued Ruskin's contribution to the concept of International Student Service for Peace, which originated just after the First World War. Pierre Ceresole and an Englishman started this kind of 'camp'; Pierre was from French-speaking Switzerland, and he hoped to make this service an

alternative to conscription into the army. The first 'camp' was in France, near the Belgium border, and its practical outcome was to restore buildings in a village, which had been destroyed during the fighting. There is usually a shortage of labour immediately after a war; so volunteer work was welcomed, but later it became a little more difficult to find suitable projects without appearing to take work away from the unemployed.
The first International Voluntary Service for Peace camp in Britain was held in Brynmawr in 1931, a town with 86% of its workers left idle by the closure of the coalmines. A coal tip was being turned into a park intended for children in particular. It was before the days of bulldozers, and there was a need for plenty of strong men to work with shovels and wheelbarrows. My eldest brother Jan took part and came home with a poisoned blister, which needed a fresh poultice every hour. As I was the only person at home, being too young to go myself, I had a difficult task. He came home with tales of working with people from all over Europe, many of whom spoke little English. They had sung songs of an evening and all the world seemed young and hopeful.
Some years later when I was busy work-camping, Jan, faced with the ever-growing problem of unemployment, which no one knew how to remedy, joined the Communist Party. He hoped that unemployment could be brought to an end by economic planning and he felt that Capitalism could not manage to remedy it. It is often said that Hitler's rise to power was due to such economic problems in Germany, and it also explains the growth in the desire for revenge after the First World War. Certainly the lack of work for more and more people, and the lower level of unemployment pay, caused people to become more desperate, which disposes governments to enlarge the armed forces. At times we had visions, rather than expectations, that volunteers would undertake the unpaid work which is never the less badly needed on a mass scale, such as caring for handicapped people, children, and the elderly, and work for charities. Tennyson wrote, 'How dull it is … to rust unburnished, not to shine in use!' We were idealists who were committed to our own high hopes, so we responded warmly to such thoughts both for the sake of ourselves and for the unemployed. Maybe we thought that, in the long run, planning was part of any cure for unemployment, for recycling human resources.

On the top of these hopes we wanted to be regarded not as 'townies' but as people who knew one end of a spade from the other; not as soft-headed academics but as practical people able to take the rough with the smooth; not as callow youth but as people with a range of experiences; not as the privileged elite ignorant of human suffering but as friends who cared about people. These were high hopes and we were often disappointed. Mixing with other people of many different backgrounds was in itself a first step towards wisdom.
My first camp took place in the summer of 1934, a year after Hitler's seizure of power. Hugh Doncaster, a school friend, and I stayed with Pitt and Yves Kruger. Two other German refugees helped re-establish a previously abandoned farm in the Pyrenees, above Prades and Perpignan. Pitt, who was in charge, decided to make the farm self-sufficient in food as much as possible, with goats, hens, vegetables and some fruit. Meat was restricted to once a week. Bread, tomatoes, and cheese were our staple diet and some vegetables cooked for the evening meal. I recall bathing the baby in the yard in front of the house. In the village of Mosset a kilometre below, the long list of names on the War memorial provided the explanation for many farms being abandoned. Their terraces were beginning to crumble away, their fruit trees unpruned. The place reminded me of Alphonse Daudet's 'Lettres de Mon Moulin' in which the rabbits and the owl eventually became the sole inhabitants, except for visiting cows which slept à la belle étoile, a phrase which has delighted me ever since by conveying the enchantment of a starry night.
How far doing work for refugees promotes peace I have never been sure. Is one dealing with symptoms or causes? It goes against one's heart to ignore these needs and confine oneself to prevention, and this has puzzled us in many different situations. It is likely that it depends on how the caring for the refugees is done. The existence of refugees is generally caused by neglecting peace education in their country of origin. This should be made clear to all the people involved: firstly, to the members of their government who need to take more national pride in their own tolerance, hospitality, and friendliness, qualities which, incidentally, favour the tourist 'industry'. Secondly, to teachers and parents who need to demonstrate an appreciation of people of different kinds on the principle of 'I like you, you're different'.

My Aunt Esther had taken boys from Yugoslavia into her home after the First World War. Aunt Hilda had also been active in helping refugees, as was Ruth's family. Ruth’s grandfather John Bellows, with help from Tolstoy and others, had brought the pacifist Dukhobors from Russia to Canada in such dramatic circumstances that the story is worth reading in the first volume of Ormerod Greenwood's Quaker Encounters - Friends and Relief , which is a fascinating account of Quaker work abroad. They certainly provided a lasting irritant in Canada and did little to support the opinion of Professor Kenneth Galbraith, the distinguished economist that refugees tend to benefit both the countries they leave and the countries where they settle. In the USA his optimism is more likely to be confirmed.
Refugees are not a separate issue from war. War usually causes people to try to escape either from the fighting or from the consequences of extreme nationalism associated with war propaganda, as was the case with Pitt Kruger. Unlucky man, he was betrayed to the Nazis when they invaded the south of France by the priest in Mosset. He was sent to the Russian front where he was taken prisoner by the Russians and almost died of hunger in what was then Leningrad. He finally made his way home in 1948, long after the war had ended. The story of his dealings with his gaolers in Leningrad is such a perfect example of non-violence that it is unfortunate that it was omitted from the book on La Coûme . The book explains the extraordinary atmosphere of friendship for all, established at La Coûme by Pitt and his wife Yves.
Our work at La Coûme des Abeilles (The valley of bees) consisted of harvesting potatoes and tomatoes in preparation for winter, chopping firewood, and occasionally herding the goats. It was on a later visit that I was trusted with a scythe, only to cut my thumb when sharpening the blade and developing such serious blood poisoning that I barely reached Switzerland for the next part of our holiday. A mule carried me up to Saas Fé, for there was no road at that time and I was unable to walk.
The next year my Aunt and cousin, who owned the farm, invited me to find other students to follow on. One of these was my friend Denis Healey from Balliol who described his visits to Coûme in his autobiography . The Coûme developed into a home for Spanish children, refugees from the civil war, and later into a well-known experimental school for those children whose parents doubted the value of the over-organised French education system. This was a system, which undervalued spontaneity, intuition, and creativity, and over-rated uniformity and convention. It was a perfect example of Bernard Shaw's comment that too often 'schools are like prisons, only worse'. Pitt was an admirable head master, especially for such a school as L´école des buissons (the school among the bushes), which contrasted sharply with schools following national curricula.

The next so-called work camp (we were never under canvas) was in Oldham in Lancashire. The work consisted of digging up the turf on the top of Oldham Edge to make allotments for unemployed people. It was hard work and we developed good appetites so it was a good way to learn how it felt to be unemployed and have barely enough to eat. We were billeted in pairs in the homes of the unemployed people who were not necessarily the same people as those who were digging with us. When my friend and I laid out two pounds for the two of us on the table, for our week's board and lodging, our host commented: 'It's a long time since we've seen as much money as that in this home'. The dole at that time amounted to about thirty-two shillings.
One cause of conflict in many countries is the growing gap between rich and poor. It could be a part of education to live for a week on the diet of the poor, as a prosperous Quaker grocer once did, so as to generate enough sympathy to ensure that action is taken to reduce the gap. John Hoyland, Jack to his friends, who organised these work camps, was a magnificent speaker. His deep voice stirred the consciences of the privileged children in the many so-called public schools where he spoke, in a way no one else could do. He had been a missionary in India and his first wife and part of his family had died there. His suffering served to deepen the passion with which he spoke: 'Come and see how these people live and live like them for a bit. You can learn by talking over your spade better than any other way'. This was the gist of his message in his book Digging with the Unemployed, one of Jack's many books. The title sounded ironical at first, but it became apparent that the morale of the unemployed workers often needed to be raised before they would grow their own vegetables; they were surprised and pleased to have our help. Such a method can often be used effectively when violence comes to an end in an international or intra-national conflict.
In Oldham I slept in a front room, which overlooked a cobbled street. We were woken in the early morning by the sound of the wooden clogs on the cobbles as people went to work in one of the few cotton mills still working. The women wore cotton shawls over their heads. They seemed to be summing up a whole period in the history of Lancashire, but the period was fast coming to an end. Up on Oldham Edge one morning I counted one hundred and

thirty-two tall factory chimneys. I mentioned the figure to a local; 'Yes', came the reply, 'we've never been able to count them before because the air was too smoky, but now they are closing them down, the air is clearer'. Then the speaker added with a trace of bitterness in his voice, 'the managers have gone to Egypt; the machinery has gone to Egypt. It's just us who are left behind'. I have often wondered whether to rejoice that the poor, often children, of the Third World have benefited from this move, which threw people into unemployment in the 'North', for the children now work in such bad conditions. No international trade union has been able to give work to those who need it most while safeguarding reasonable conditions of work. A fair bargain is rarely struck between the rich and the hungry, because the hungry have no bargaining power. The rich tend to be corrupted by the power of wealth and the poor tend to be corrupted by the powerlessness of poverty. The result is called structural violence, a hornet’s nest for the would-be peacemaker. For such stings there was no obvious antidote, as we learned from our studies at college.
Crabbs Cross, south of Birmingham, was a dull landscape for the following work camp. It lacked the glamour of a disappearing industry and yet had its quota of unemployed in need of the opportunity to add fresh vegetables to their diet. Considering the plight of the unemployed it is surprising that there was not more shoplifting and burglary occupying the time of the police. In Crabbs Cross the reverse was true and it sounds as though it had at least one characteristic of Utopia. The local 'bobby' had a country footpath as part of his beat, where rabbits abounded. His tailcoat moved in a mysterious way because he kept a ferret in his tail pocket for catching them. Happy is the country, which has such policemen!
After Crabbs Cross came a proper international work camp held at Marienthal which lies well to the south of Vienna. As in Lancashire, cotton mills had been closed down, leaving men out of work. By some freak of management the cotton goods they had previously produced passed seven times between England and Marienthal for the different processes in the course of production. No wonder they could not compete with cotton goods from elsewhere. These people were in need of vegetable plots.

The men of Marienthal were more familiar with vegetable growing, than the cotton spinners of Oldham, due to cotton factories being relatively new in Austria, by comparison. In a more industrialised country such as England, people lose touch with their ancestors' skills in gardening, and fight shy of showing their ignorance. Then they need some assurance of help, or at least advice, to be available to them around the gardening year, which is much more than a work camp can offer. To this camp, the campers came from several different countries but mainly from England. We were suspected by the Austrian officials of being Nazi sympathisers on account of the Anglo-German naval treaty and because the Nazis had their work camps too. We were housed in huts, which had belonged to a socialist youth organisation called Kinderfreunde (Children’s friends). Our first task was to clear up the litter, which had been left behind when, for political reasons, the place had been closed. Among the rubbish I found a number of songbooks for children, which we put to use. The songs were about peace, friendship, and travel, and some had a political slant so I worried that they might be confiscated during my weeks in Hitler's Germany, where I was to stay later. The songs were so striking that there is one, which haunts me still:

Auf spielman stimme deine fiedel Come fiddler give voice to your fiddle
Jetzt geht's zum thor hinaus Now it’s time to leave
Zum abschied noch ein lustig liedel One more merry song at parting
Ade du gastlich haus. Goodbye you hospitable house
Wir wandern in dic weite We are wandering afar
Wohl in die weite wunderschone welt In the wide and wonderful world
Ade zum frischen streite Goodbye as we take our eager steps,
Ade du gastlich haus. Goodbye you hospitable house.

These simple words caught the feeling of the time, of 'World, world I am coming', of good company and adventure. I often wondered whether it sounded equally good to the German speakers. It may have expressed their wish for the freedom of the open road and their dislike for regimentation. Songs can play a special part in education for peace. They speak to the heart directly, achieving on behalf of peace, especially for international friendship, what nothing else can do. Joan Baez, like Paul Robeson, stirred people

for peace with her songs, as the Marseillaise moved Napoleon's armies. Napoleon may have claimed that armies march upon their stomachs, but men do not live by bread alone; nor does the devil have all the best tunes.
Later in the same summer of 1935 I moved on to Berlin, ostensibly to improve my German but, as it turned out, to help Corder Catchpool at the Quaker Centre. His work as a representative of the Society of Friends was in disarray; the police had searched his office. A departing Friend had her address book confiscated at the frontier and an informer attended Meetings for Worship claiming to be a genuine 'attender'. Corder arranged with me to turn up at the centre without asking questions, but I had to be prepared to spend the night away. He had promised an English Friend would come as a protection if needed. Foreigners were given much help and consideration until Germany was fully re-armed; in addition, Friends were appreciated for their work of feeding the hungry at the end of the First World War, and so I felt doubly protected. It turned out that people who had exploded bombs previously had threatened a Jewish holiday home again. I spent an evening talking among people some of whom had surprisingly been allowed to leave concentration camps. It was hard to express enough sympathy for the people who had been left behind in the camps.
That night I was invited to teach English songs to a group of young girls before they all went off to bed; the lucky ones had already planned to leave Germany. There was a loud explosion and we waited to see whether the building would be burned but nothing further happened. On another occasion I was sent to Breslau to warn a Catholic priest that the address book carried his name and that he should burn papers of interest to Nazi officials. He had been working for a better understanding between Poles and Germans, which was highly undesirable in Nazi eyes.
It is not easy to recapture at this time the feelings I had towards the Nazis. During the war German prisoners had made beautiful toys for me and I had acquired an admiration for the way of life of the rucksack-wearing outdoor Germans who appeared to be a very large portion of the population. On the other hand I had watched Hitler’s face, distorted with hatred, as he spoke to a large meeting of the Hitler Youth in Innsbruck. On that occasion he

looked so ridiculous that I thought the Germans far too sensible to follow him, but he was a more skilful demagogue than I realised. He could persuade his audiences in a single speech that Germany was both an inoffensive country surrounded by enemies who might threaten Germany by working together, and also a sleeping giant able to take on the whole world.
I have recently found it much easier to understand some of the world's megalomaniacs since reading the USA author Alice Miller’s book For Your Own Good with its brief accounts of Hitler and Mussolini in which she describes the effects of a brutalising childhood. The theme that cruelty to children produces bullies like Hitler and Mussolini is vitally important for peace workers. It explains how wars begin, and teachers can help peace education, if classes are small, and examinations do not press too hard so as to leave little time for dealing with problem children. The book is a study of greed for power among school children. They build up their gangs in order to threaten other children with violence to compensate for the violence, which they had experienced at home, to such an extent that these children become excluded from school on a regular basis. Additionally, she has explored the theme of educating younger children about peace, as a route to peace. Those who do something to heal such emotionally disturbed children are making a significant contribution to peace.
Experiences such as mine in Berlin provided me with contributions to make to the discussions, which emerge spontaneously during work camps. In Germany these discussions were far more restrained for fear of spies. While working in a camp back in Wales, my account of the denial of some newspapers of the existence of concentration camps in Germany produced the comment, from an unemployed coal miner in the Rhondda valley: 'The trouble with the papers is that they get everything upside-bloody-down'. He was working in a co-operative project of the Unemployed Miners Club in Tylorstown, which was based on permission from the mine owners to obtain free coal for themselves by driving a coal level into the side of the mountain. They had been given the wrong advice for their first attempt and needed a boost for their morale before trying again. The cheerful way that they addressed us as ‘Boy-o’ made it apparent that they enjoyed our gesture. We were in

the early stages of excavating the tunnel or level so the coal was not reached until after we had left.
The unemployed miners of South Wales were the aristocrats among the unemployed. In the Rhondda there was an adult education class in classical Greek, provided by WEA, among many other classes. They spoke with authority about political affairs, and yet the social gap between employers and employees was greater than elsewhere. My Uncle George was commissioner for the Special Areas, districts where unemployment was at its highest, and he found difficulty in getting a hearing for the plight of the poor, when he returned home to the city of London. Unemployment at that time in London was 'out of sight and out of mind'. No wonder the class war, as many Marxists called it, was at its height. One indignant man entered the law court to witness a trial, and as he did so the heavy hand of the policeman in attendance came down on his hat, crushed it up, and passed it back to him. He felt offended for being treated that way. I suspect that policeman knew nothing about ferrets; like the policeman in Crabbs Cross. Higher up the valley the milkman of the co-operative called his horse Stalin and was able to carry on his propaganda by addressing the horse with a loud voice and a careful choice of words. I was disappointed that my host for the camp in Wales, had no interest in politics, but instead owned a tent and frequently took his wife camping. I had made the mistake of thinking that the miners would have worked out ways of curing unemployment without the complications of the Soviet system, and that they would be keen to hear the views of others about them. It is sad to report that it was the Second World War, which solved their problem, by providing them with military jobs. How is it that today at the start of the new century unemployment is not solved by creating jobs through training to deal with pollution and the needs of the environment?
At another work camp in South Wales our hostess remarked, 'my grandmother used to speak "fancy" just like you', and I realised more clearly how rifts in society are noted and sometimes resented. The miners had been so proud of their craft that they looked up to no one and valued only the fellowship of the miners. We heard of miners working eleven-inch seams by lying on their sides, of rescues from danger and privations, and of strikes. They had every reason to be proud people on good terms with themselves.

The Bruderhof Camp provided an entirely different experience from that in South-Wales, although it also involved helping refugees from Germany and pacifist refugees from militarism, they were all people interested in communal living. It raised entirely different issues. When the life of monasteries was at its full height during the latter part of the Middle Ages, it was taken for granted that communal life was either the ideal way of living or at least a desirable way of living. At this period the Hutterian communities demonstrated that this sharing of private property could provide a sound basis for developing qualities of life, which are hard to achieve in any other way. Through skilled craftsmanship in wood, clay, building and gardening, closed mixed-sex communities often led the way in creating societies where it was a privilege to exist. Material needs were met collectively, thus allowing the main attention to be directed to the life of the spirit, including human friendship, loyalty, and responsibility.
The members of the Bruderhof believed that by living close together, as one does in such circumstances, they put into practice their belief in non-violence and mediation for disputes, and that this does much more for world peace than avoiding such experiences by living in modern tiny families or alone. Last century Edward Westcott wrote: 'A reasonable amount of fleas is good for a dog. It keeps him from broodin' over bein' a dog’, which should suffice to encourage lonely people to calculate the substantial financial advantages of sharing.
The Bruderhof at the time we visited was near Fulda in Germany. The members came mainly from Germany but also from Britain and other countries, sufficiently varied to present opportunities for peace making among different religions, languages, eating habits, ages and ways of bringing up children. Already the Nazi Party had led to the young men of the Bruderhof being sent to safety in Liechtenstein and also a new branch established in the Cotswolds in England.
Later, when conscription was expected in Britain, they all moved to Paraguay and they came back after the war. I stayed a short time with them in Germany, but a longer time in the Cotswolds at Ashton Keynes. They were delightful people. They lived on a diet of beans, like the Diggers of

the seventeenth century , they were earnest, and yet we enjoyed dancing country-dances, and singing, sometimes simultaneously and with great gusto. It was hard to believe that life would not become monotonous, but otherwise it was very attractive. In 1981 I encountered a man who had been one of the Bruderhof children. He had a French conscientious objector as father, an English mother, and he learned Spanish and Portuguese in South America. He retired from being a United Nations interpreter, like many others, owing to the stress of the work, and he was serving as a freelance interpreter, sitting between a British Cabinet Minister and the Prime Minister of Spain to negotiate Spain’s entry into the Common Market. 'What do you do, when someone obviously misunderstands?' I asked. 'You can’t do anything.' He replied. 'You just have to go on interpreting what they say without any suggestion that they are misunderstanding each other.'
Looking back twenty years later I wish that I had persisted and had asked him whether he had thought of warning a friend in political circles if an important misunderstanding had occurred. The principle of early warning against the outbreak of violence is widely accepted, and misunderstandings often lead to violence.
A number of friends from Oxford joined in these visits to the Bruderhof but no one, so far as I know, joined permanently in their attractive way of life; however, I hope we gave them some encouragement even though our practical work made little difference to them. Much later Ruth and I were able to compare them with the communauté de L’Arche in the South of France from where leaders were sent to practice non-violent resistance in support of the poor and the oppressed. This mingling of service to the world at large with the maintenance of community life appealed to me more. Law by itself is never enough for civilised living; there has to be created a strong public opinion in support of it in order to make it effective. With the development of international law under the auspices of the United Nations pacifists should recognise that they have a special duty to strengthen it. It is very necessary for isolated pacifists to have a strongly supportive base to which they can return for refreshment and also renewed inspiration. This role is sometimes performed by a quasi-religious order, sometimes by a university department or a family circle, but too often this

support is missing and the people feel strangers in their own homes.
During the past century and now in the twenty-first century, material wealth has excluded these other human achievements from what has come to be regarded as desirable values. One might attempt to measure the success of monasteries, families, and individuals by the wealth at their command, but the comparisons would be obviously ridiculous. The 'good life' cannot be found and lived so easily. No one believes that millionaires are the happiest people. So where can we go from here? An Irishman, directing my wife Ruth, pointed with his finger and said, 'This here is the nigh road, but for safety and sanity I’d be taking this (other) one'.
Animals can be a help to those in search of a better, peaceful way of living. For a sheep, it may be that the good life is to be found somewhere near the centre of the flock. Other sheep around it provide a cosy reassurance and it only feels deeply anxious when it is pushed by those behind into leadership or if it is cut off in some way from the flock.
Cats have different values. They appear to be most content when they are alone. Bees are particularly interesting creatures because they live together in communities and have highly elaborate social structures and yet, like humans, they go to war.
One spring I left the doorway of one hive open too wide. Members of a neighbouring hive discovered that raiding the honey supplies nearby was more rewarding than searching far and wide for flowers. This information was spread by the bee dance to the other members of the stronger hive and the robbers rapidly increased in numbers. Meanwhile the sentries of the weaker hive called, I assume, for support. When a bee stings it dies and the number prepared to sting in self-defence is extraordinary; soon the close-cropped lawn in front of the weaker hive was covered with the corpses of bees, many of them in pairs, still clinging together in death after fatal duels. After a great deal of study much is known about the behaviour of bees, but I doubt whether anyone knows how the killing comes to an end. Who gives the message to cease fighting? How are they selected? A humanist might add, 'Let's find the gene and transfer it to the human race!'

The figures for family members in Britain have changed substantially in the course of the past century so that most households now contain only one or two people and provide an inadequate preparation for living in communities of twenty or more. Already in 1953 I had found that a third of the students in the college where I was educating them to be teachers were only-children, and lacking in some ways experience desirable for teachers. It is reasonable to suppose that an only-child lacks the skills involved in sharing and co-operating, and that they expect to be in the limelight and receive much attention from adults. Smaller families may be needed, but adjustments in social lives are also needed and one of these may well be the development of social skills in groups of families such as the Bruderhof. Another may be the growing custom of creating aunts, uncles, grandparents, and above all cousins by adoption. In Quaker meetings, in theory all adults share responsibilities for the children; in practise this is not achieved. In the Bruderhof the sense of responsibility was more nearly reached and it was fascinating to watch the consequences. The children looked remarkably happy.
The next work camp I attended was in Salford in Manchester at a club used by unemployed people and their children. My main job was mending toys, many of which were already broken when they were donated. We also needed to keep children occupied and do the decorating.