Episode 63. Dick Sheppard and the Peace Pledge Union
SYNOPSIS
Born into privilege in 1880 – his father was a Minor Canon at Windsor Castle chapel – Hugh Richard Lawrie (Dick) Sheppard had, by the end of his life, transcended the boundaries of his Marlborough public school and Cambridge education and grown into one of the best-loved and most charismatic Anglican priests of his generation. Gifted with the rare capacity to inspire affection in people from all walks of life, his sudden death in 1937 unleashed a wave of national mourning. In what constituted an informal state funeral, for two days and nights 100,000 people filed past the coffin at his former church, St Martin in the Fields in central London and crowds lined the route to St Paul's for the funeral.
The first Anglican priest to exploit the medium of BBC radio (connecting with the public as the ‘People’s Padre’), Sheppard retained the knack of capturing the national mood. Converted to pacifism by his experiences as a First World War chaplain, Sheppard contacted several national newspapers and on 16 October 1934 the press published his letter calling on men to send him a postcard pledging that they would renounce war. At least fifty thousand did so, and as a result the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) was formed in 1936.
For the rest of his life Sheppard remained at the centre of a circle of influential pacifists, including Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley and the First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon, who argued against rearmament as the national mood darkened with the prospect of renewed German militarism. His untimely death deprived British pacifism of its most effective exponent.
GUESTS
Professor George M Johnson is Chair of the English Department at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, where he teaches modern literature and creative writing. .He has written extensively on the emotional consequences of war, most notably in Mourning And Mysticism in First World War Literature and Beyond: Grappling With Ghosts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), now in paperback. His screenplay, Peace Pledge, tells the remarkable story of the Peace Pledge Union, the most significant pacifist movement in modern history.
Simon’s interview with George Johnson was recorded online on 5 March 2025.