Leni Gillman’s mother, Margaret O’Connell, lived through the London blitz to become a humanist and a peace activist. She would face bigotry and arrest as she strived to make the world a better place.

Margaret O'Connell

My mother was and remains my Humanist Hero. She was born and brought up in a protestant enclave in the small coalmining town of Castlecomer, Kilkenny in Ireland, then still part of the UK.

Her mother, Kate Williams, was as deeply religious as she was bigoted, and she loathed beyond reason everything to do with the Catholic church. Although some of Kate’s family members were Catholics, she never allowed them into her home. She also forbade her children from friendships with their Catholic relatives and neighbours. This was the model of Christian love that my mother absorbed as she grew up.

Margaret was an intelligent child and learned to read before she started school, having only the bible as her primer. She lost whatever faith might have been previously inculcated in her during the harsh early years at this Church of Ireland school. The teacher decided that, because she could already read, Margaret should be sent to her home adjoining the school, where she would have to sweep, clean and polish rather than sit in class and be educated.

Margaret’s father, George Williams, had little time for any church or religion, and kept his views mostly to himself, although he did discuss them with her. Through their close relationship Margaret gained a different perspective on religion and by the time she was 16, when she followed her older siblings in emigrating, she was a convinced atheist.

She felt that becoming a humanist followed naturally when she witnessed the horrors brought by the war a few years later. By then she had married and borne two daughters. She would recall the terror wrought by the blitz and later bombing campaigns of the V1s and V2s which devastated south London, where they lived. Her husband, Philip O’Connell, was also an atheist, a refugee from the Catholic church, who had become a socialist as an extension of his own humanist views.

This humanism informed every aspect of their relationship. Together they forged a collective ideal and belief in the essential goodness of human potential. Today this seems a naively optimistic view of humanity, but she always said this was what she believed. It motivated the political and peace activism which dominated their lives over the next twenty years. After they had three more children together, Margaret became the activist while Phil managed the domestic support system.

Margaret’s political initiation was when she became one of the first women elected to Lambeth Council in 1945.

The local press reported this important development in local democracy with a shocked commentary on the fact that she appeared in the council chamber wearing slacks rather than the customary skirt. Plus ça change!

The post-war settlement established nuclear weapons in international relations. Margaret and Phil were aghast that all the human suffering of the recent conflict resulted in a senseless stalemate where each side in the Cold War seemed belligerently ready to bomb the other to oblivion.

Margaret’s instinctive compassion compelled her to join the peace movement against nuclear weapons. She saw this as the most important challenge to the posturing that could finally annihilate humanity.

She took her family on the first and many subsequent Aldermaston Marches; when Polaris submarines were installed in Scotland, she led a peace protest march from London to Holy Loch. She walked the entire route, which took seven weeks. She endured the pain of blistered feet with her customary stoicism and amused resignation.

When the government ignored the peace protests, Margaret joined the Committee of 100 which formed to take non-violent direct action against the government’s nuclear weapons policy. This group included many well known intellectuals, writers and leaders of the protests. They included the eminent philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell, another Humanist Hero, then in his eighties.

Margaret was arrested for her part in their activities and was convicted on conspiracy charges. She spent a month in Holloway prison, alongside other members of the Committee of 100. This experience made her even more determined to challenge the nuclear threat. Margaret worked with protesters who adopted some novel methods of subversion which included illegal radio broadcasts of peace propaganda across London, moving the equipment from one safe house to another each night.

Later she supported other causes including the anti-apartheid campaign in this country. She went with a group in a minibus to Greece to protest against the oppression and brutalities committed by the fascist colonels’ regime. She fasted for several weeks in a public vigil outside the Greek Embassy in London to raise awareness of the cruelty of the regime.

Margaret had a parallel professional life which reflected her humanism. After the war she became a teacher, and soon discerned the needs of the poorest and most disadvantaged children, who, in the 1950s and 60s had very little dedicated provision in our education system. She studied to gain expertise in understanding and teaching these youngsters, and eventually became a headteacher in her own school, Moatbridge. This was one of the crowning achievements of her life, about which she was typically modest and self-effacing.

She had moved from small-town religious prejudice which had given her just three years of formal education, to intellectual freedom and self-determination. Through sheer dedication she turned her idealism into a practical endeavour, a school where young people had the chance of moving from failure to personal achievement.

Margaret’s rejection of the petty bigotry, hypocrisy and oppression she had experienced in religion led her to embrace Humanism. This became her moral compass, the prism through which she judged herself and her fellow humans. For her, one had to live one’s humanism: it defined how one should behave.

Once she perceived a wrong that should be put right, her humanism drove her to action. She set some tough standards for those who followed, while she never lost her sense of humour, or her affection for those she loved and the wider family of the human race.

This post is part of a series written by members, friends and Distinguished Supporters of the British Humanist Association about their own “humanist heroes”.

You can find out more at www.humanism.org.uk/humanism/humanist-tradition/heroes

Leni Gillman is a writer and journalist, a BHA member, and was also very involved in the peace movement when she was younger.  She feels strongly about the malign influence of religion in our society and culture. She has four grandchildren, three of whom are old enough to have shown an interest in these issues and they often have discussions about them.