| Description | Minutes for the Peace Committee start in 1954 and it is unknown whether earlier minutes have survived. However, according to a report to Warwickshire North Monthly Meeting by the Peace Committee in 1936, the committee was established in 1933. Its main objective was to encourage the wider knowledge and understanding of the Quaker stance on peace and its application to world problems. It aimed to do this via poster campaigns, advertising in the press, the distribution of handbills, giving talks to local Quaker meetings and other organisations, writing letters to other churches, the press and Members of Parliament, attending and organising conferences. In the years after World War Two, issues on which it campaigned included testing of the hydrogen bomb, nuclear disarmament, conscientious objection and conscription, support for United Nations, the Suez crisis, the Vietnam War, race relations in Birmingham.
Prior to the Second World War, the Committee working with the Peace Pledge Union to organise open air meetings in various locations across Birmingham and in the surrounding villages and towns. By the end of the 1950s, it was recognised that public meetings had become less effective since the advent of television so the Committee turned its attentions towards film campaigns as a method of spreading its message. In 1960, it invited the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Peace Pledge Union to create a Joint Pacifist Co-ordinating Committee to select and show films which transmitted the peace message in other churches and other organisations. After successful trials, this led to the establishment of Concord, Birmingham which showed films on topics such as peace and war, nuclear weapons, race relations and famine relief.
The Committee worked with other organisations such as the Council for War on Want (partly formed through the efforts of the Peace Committee) to combat poverty and famine, the Birmingham branch of the National Peace Council, the Peace Pledge Union and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Regional Board for Conscientious Objectors, Christian Action, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
It was laid down in 1987 when the West Midlands Peace Education Project Steering Committee was established. See SF/2/1/1/23. |