Bruce Kent
Catholic priest and energetic leader of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament who robustly opposed the Thatcher government
BRUCE KENT, who has died aged 92, was a charismatic, controversial Roman Catholic priest who revived the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the early 1980s as a serious irritant to Margaret Thatcher’s government.
During Monsignor Kent’s five years as general secretary, CND – galvanised by America’s planned deployment in Britain of Cruise missiles – increased its membership from 9,000 to 110,000 and threw ministers on to the defensive with Hyde Park rallies of up to 250,000. Yet Kent did not expect demonstrations to win the argument: he aimed to reach “moderate people” by organising in churches, trade unions and professional groups.
Kent’s campaigning was tolerated by Cardinal Heenan, whose secretary he had been, but less so by Cardinal Hume. In 1987 he abandoned his priesthood – “the greatest crisis of my life” – to concentrate on campaigning, and the next year he married.
By then, CND was in eclipse. Michael Heseltine as Defence Secretary had waged an effective propaganda campaign against “onesided disarmament”, and the Cold War ended barely a year after Kent burned his boats with the Church.
A compelling orator, not least at Glastonbury which was then a CND event, Kent was energetic in whatever he did. In 1988 he walked 750 miles from Warsaw, home of the Warsaw Pact, to Brussels, headquarters of Nato, to raise funds for war victims in Mozambique and Nicaragua.
Kent looked back on the 1980s as a time when those in power tried to “suppress us and marginalise us in every way”. He accused Winston Churchill (the wartime leader’s grandson), head of a committee Mrs Thatcher set up to combat CND, of a smear campaign, and blamed the government for a letter bomb and threats he received.
Certainly his telephone was tapped, the courts refusing to overturn an order made by Leon Brittan, the Home Secretary. But the truth was that until Heseltine’s resignation over Westland in 1986 Kent faced an even more gifted propagandist; and Mikhail Gorbachev’s subsequent ending of four decades of Soviet confrontation with the West stopped CND in its tracks.
The Right, and the Soviet defector Vladimir Bukovsky, whom Kent threatened to sue for libel, claimed that CND under his leadership was a Soviet catspaw. Kent responded by offering £100 – never claimed – to anyone who could prove it was funded by the Kremlin.
Kent condemned the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the crackdown on Poland’s Solidarity trade union, yet praised Britain’s Communist Party as a “force for peace”. Criticised for visiting Moscow, he said it was “important to talk to people who are supposed to be your enemies”.
His campaigning relied heavily on the obiter dicta of his opponents. Any general who admitted to a flaw in the doctrine of deterrence found Kent quoting him as a convert; comments by Earl Mountbatten just before his assassination that “civilian resistance” could be more effective than nuclear defence were latched on to with particular zeal.
Dr Edward Norman, Dean of Peterhouse and not a man of the Left, rated Kent “a serious and respected priest, influential with many sections of the English Roman Catholic Church”. But Norman also branded him an “agitator” for urging sailors at the Faslane submarine base not to handle nuclear missiles.
Bruce Kent was born on June 22 1929, the second child of a Canadian wounded in the First World War who managed an American firm’s London office. His mother, a staunch Catholic, sent him to a prep school at Hitchin whose headmaster was an authority on the lives of the martyrs; beatings there left an indelible mark.
When war broke out, Bruce was sent to Lower Canada College in Montreal. He returned in 1943 to board at Stonyhurst – “a culture shock after the luxury of Canada; for a year I hated it, then I enjoyed it very much”.
Kent went into the Royal Tank Regiment for National Service, emerging a second lieutenant. “I quite liked it,” he recalled. At the height of his anti-nuclear campaigning, he donated his demob papers to the Imperial War Museum.
By the time he went up to Brasenose College, Oxford, to read Law, Kent had decided to be a priest, having had “almost a Billy Graham experience” when, revisiting Stonyhurst, he heard a Jesuit preach on “What are you doing for God?”
His father could accept Kent’s Catholicism, but not his becoming a priest. “There were a lot of family difficulties and he left home for a few days. Then we came to a compromise: I agreed to go to university first, and if I was still determined to be a priest at the end, he wouldn’t make a fuss. He gave me a 350cc motorcycle as a sign of the re-establishment of our relationship.”
Graduating in 1952, Kent was ordained in 1958. His first contact with CND came when Aldermaston marchers became mixed up with a wedding in Kensington he was conducting as parish curate. “I thought they were absolute loonies.”
In 1963 he became private secretary to Heenan, and chairman of the Diocesan Schools Commission. Three years later he was appointed chaplain to the University of London, a post he held for eight years. He brought the Anglican Archbishop Ramsey to speak there, and raised theological doubt over the ordering of Polaris submarine crews to commit “mass murder”. Thus began his journey to CND.
Kent became increasingly critical of the Church for not speaking out against the bomb, as civilians would be the victims of a nuclear war. But it took a visit to Biafra in 1969 to convince him he had to “get my hands dirty”. The sight of starving children surrounded by Britishmade armoured cars was Kent’s epiphany; on his return he became secretary of the Co-ordinating Committee for Action on Nigeriabiafra.
He was one of the leaders of CND’S 1973 march on Faslane, and the next year became chaplain to Pax Christi, the Catholic peace movement, hailing Pope Paul VI as a peacemaker. In 1975 he attended the AGM of Consolidated Gold Fields at the request of Heenan, who had died days before, to raise concerns about the conditions of its workers in South Africa.
In 1977 Kent became parish priest at Somers Town, St Pancras, and a year later chairman of CND. Within months the Carter administration decided to site Cruise missiles in Britain to match the deployment of Soviet SS20S in eastern Europe. In 1980 he joined CND full-time as general secretary, declaring: “My aim is to put CND out of business by making it unnecessary.”
The Labour Party was turning unilateralist, and Kent spoke at its first anti-cruise rally. When the Thatcher government’s 1981 defence White Paper directly addressed CND’S arguments, Kent was “flattered, but found the reply inadequate”. That autumn, with Tony Benn, he led a procession to Hyde Park rated London’s largest in 20 years.
Soon after, CND’S conference voted for civil disobedience against Cruise and the Trident system proposed for the Royal Navy. Protesting women surrounded the base at Greenham Common earmarked for Cruise; throughout their lengthy stay, the Greenham women kept Kent – and men generally – at arm’s length.
By now Heseltine was warning that mass CND demonstrations would tell the Kremlin it had no need to continue the Geneva arms talks; Kent told supporters they were in for a “very long haul”.
Hume warned Kent he might have to give up his work for CND if it became an embarrassment for the Church, suggesting the general secretary’s job might “more fittingly” be done by a lay person. Kent thanked Hume for his “characteristic kindness and generosity”, but carried on.
The cardinal denied acting under pressure from the Vatican, or from Heseltine. But the papal pronuncio, Archbishop Bruno Heim, observed: “Mgr Kent should try preaching in East Germany.” Just when Kent needed friends in the Church, a women’s magazine published an interview in which he criticised the lifestyle of the clergy and John Paul II’S stance on women. Embarrassed, he wrote an apology.
With Mrs Thatcher re-elected by a landslide and the arrival of Cruise imminent, Kent urged British troops to question orders to protect the missiles. In October 1983 250,000 people demonstrated in Hyde Park, but polls showed opposition to Cruise down from 61 to 48 per cent.
Kent’s speech to the Communist Party weeks later earned him a carpeting from Hume. At the end of 1983 he was voted the Today programme’s Man of the Year, opposite Mrs Thatcher. But when CND held its first demonstration outside the Cruise base at Molesworth – Kent conducting a service – only 700 protesters showed up.
He now withheld the £31 in income tax he reckoned went toward nuclear weapons in the hope of being sent to prison; to his irritation, a well-wisher paid up. He was arrested outside RAF Sculthorpe and charged with criminal damage to the fence, but the case was dropped after he elected for trial by jury.
In 1985 Kent stepped down as CND’S general secretary to become its vice-chairman and concentrate on campaigning. He “retired from active ministry” in 1987, but remained in good standing with the Church. Hume accepted his resignation with regret, but said he was doing the right thing.
That September he joined the Labour Party, and weeks later was elected chairman of CND a second time; with arms talks under way, membership was down to 75,000. When the superpowers signed the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty – eliminating Cruise – that December, Kent shared champagne with protesters at Molesworth.
In 1988 Kent married Valerie Flessati, a former general secretary of Pax Christi, at Camden register office. He said he had found life “unbearably lonely” after giving up his ministry. He always denied having left the priesthood for a woman; he did not apply to Rome for special dispensation to marry as the process would have taken five years. But it hurt him that he could no longer hear confession.
Kent still regarded the Church as his home. He always read the epistle of the week, the psalms and the collects. He believed that women priests and married clergy would be accepted, but stood with the Vatican on abortion.
When the missiles left Greenham in 1989, Kent refused to celebrate because they could be based elsewhere. Labour’s conference voted to break with unilateralism – with Kent, a constituency delegate, a strong dissenting voice. He irritated the leadership by successfully moving a further resolution demanding a drastic cut in defence spending, but the victory was hollow.
With the Berlin Wall down, Kent pressed for wider disarmament, with the “peace dividend” diverted to social welfare. But he moved to the sidelines of CND, though re-emerging to lead protests at air bases during the Gulf War. Critics saw no coincidence in his withdrawing from the leadership once it lacked a high profile.
In 1992 he fought Oxford West & Abingdon for Labour, finishing third. He pressed for British troops to relieve the Serbs’ siege of Sarajevo, condemned “barbaric” Russian actions in Chechnya, and – as an executive member of the United Nations Association – voiced fears that Nato’s bombing of Serbia during the 1999 Kosovo campaign had damaged the UN.
Kent was president of the International Peace Bureau from 1985 to 1992, and of the National Peace Council in 1999-2000.
Bruce Kent is survived by his wife Valerie. There were no children of the marriage.