Sign of the Times
It is Good Friday for Christians and 50 years ago on Good Friday [April 4, 1958] this symbol first appeared on signs and banners in Britain. The BBC gives some of the back ground on the World’s best-known protest symbol turns 50
It started life as the emblem of the British anti-nuclear movement but it has become an international sign for peace, and arguably the most widely used protest symbol in the world. It has also been adapted, attacked and commercialised.
It had its first public outing 50 years ago on a chilly Good Friday as thousands of British anti-nuclear campaigners set off from London’s Trafalgar Square on a 50-mile march to the weapons factory at Aldermaston.
The demonstration had been organised by the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War (DAC) and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) joined in.
Gerald Holtom, a designer and former World War II conscientious objector from West London, persuaded DAC that their aims would have greater impact if they were conveyed in a visual image. The “Ban the Bomb” symbol was born.
6 comments
It’s such an iconic symbol. I didn’t realise for a long time it was based onthe semaphore signals for N and D.
I think most people are surprised to learn it is a “designed” logo, and not some ancient rune that sprang from a medieval manuscript.
Thanks, Bryan and jams. I didn’t know the history, despite having carried such a sign in my younger days. And I’m especially remiss in not recognizing the ‘N’ and ‘D’; semaphore was one of my skills when I was a Boy Scout.
It is regrettable but unsurprising that we still need such a symbol fifty years after its invention. On the other hand, at least we haven’t yet been all vaporized. Yet.
Considering what the very real threat was 50 years ago, what the Hedgemony has done in response to a small group of fanatics is insane.
We were in a Cold War, about to be in a hot war, and no one suggested suspending habeas corpus or permitting all of the intrusions into people’s lives.
Nobody suggested it, but it was effectively what was happening anyhow, given the facts of the “Red Scare” and FBI directory J. Edgar Hoover’s obsessive collection of data about “subsversives”. The only reason the FBI wasn’t trolling every phone line in America looking for subversive thought is that the technology didn’t exist back then — creating a phone tap back then required actually physically tapping into a copper wire. But they certainly trolled the phone lines of anybody who was anybody — Hoover’s files, never found after Hoover’s death, supposedly were pretty in-depth about most men of power in the United States.
– Badtux the History Penguin
Hoover was a force unto himself who scared the hell out of just about everyone in the government. The difference is that no one pretended what he was doing was right, they just avoided bringing it up until he was gone.
We can all be grateful that Hoover was in charge before the surveillance technology had reached its current level, because he would have for damn sure used it against everyone.
I know people who believe that Hoover’s refusal to go after organized crime was in the nature of a professional courtesy.