Anti-nuclear weapons activist priest who drove nuclear disarmament campaign
Bruce Kent, who has died aged 92, claimed that he stumbled into the peace movement ‘‘sideways and by accident’’ while a parish curate in Kensington. ‘‘A couple of nice New Zealand girls in the youth club asked me where they might go on holiday,’’ he told The Times in 2001. ‘‘I looked in the back of the Roman Catholic papers and found an advertisement for Pax Christi, the Roman Catholic arm of the peace movement, which ran holidays in Spain . . . The girls came back so delighted with their experience that, when I was asked three weeks later to be the chaplain of this little group, I said yes.’’
Increasingly he became aware of things going on that he could not condone, including the mistreatment of conscientious objectors in Spain and Portugal. ‘‘Protesting outside the Spanish embassy was my first taste of radicalism,’’ the mild-mannered priest added. ‘‘I started to realise more and more how important it was to work for peace, and that it could not be achieved by violence.’’
The proliferation of nuclear weapons was another concern. He also realised that something needed doing to rescue the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which had been founded in 1957 but by the late 1970s had lost momentum.
He recalled: ‘‘I went to Cardinal Basil [Hume] and said, ‘This group is very small but it’s holding up a very important moral message. Can I be its secretary at least for a while?’ He said yes, reluctantly. Later, I heard that he said to someone else, ‘We will give him a year to get it out of his system.’ But then with Prime Minister Thatcher and President Reagan and cruise missiles and Greenham Common, membership went up and up and up, and CND never looked back.’’
Kent, whose portly figure was generally concealed by his cassock, had once been a rising star in the Catholic Church; he now became a regular presence on television and in the newspapers. He also undertook publicity stunts, including a 500-mile sponsored walk in 1986 from the Polaris submarine base at Faslane to the Royal Ordnance Factory at Burghfield, Berkshire, in aid of both CND and the hunger charity War on Want. ‘‘There is no genuine problem of poverty or malnutrition,’’ he insisted. ‘‘The world has the resources to eradicate them, but we choose to waste the money on arms.’’
Many people disagreed with Kent’s views, but this was an era when they would engage in courteous debate. He not only appeared in the press, but also gave talks to universities and schools. ‘‘I used to talk to trainee officers at the army staff college at Camberley and we had very reasonable and interesting discussions,’’ he said. ‘‘It annoys me when people assume that you must be a lunatic or a Russian spy.’’
Bruce Kent was born in Blackheath, southeast London, the son of Kenneth Kent, a Presbyterian businessman, and his Catholic wife, Rosemary, both Canadians who in the 1920s had ended up in London; he had an older brother, George, and a younger sister, Rosemary. At the family home in Hampstead Garden Suburb there were nannies, cooks and maids. ‘‘We always had a house, a garden, a dog and a car, or even two,’’ he wrote.
At the outbreak of war he was sent with his mother and siblings to Montreal, where he enjoyed tobogganing and skating. The family’s return to Britain in 1943 was a rude shock for Kent, not least when he was packed off to Stonyhurst, the Jesuit-run public school in Lancashire.
Later he recalled the moment when he learnt that the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima: ‘‘I was 16 and standing on Marylebone Road near Madame Tussauds. I saw the headline in a newspaper and remember thinking, ‘This is great. Those people deserve it’.’’ The first inkling of his vocation came during National Service as an officer in the 6th Royal Tank Regiment, though his father was none too pleased. ‘‘He didn’t mind me being a Catholic, but being a priest was too much,’’ Kent recalled.
During what he called his ‘‘lotus-eating years’’ he read jurisprudence at Brasenose College, Oxford, but the call came ever louder and in 1952 he began a six-year course studying for the priesthood at St Edmund’s seminary in Ware, Hertfordshire.
As a young priest Kent was secretary to the short-fused Archbishop of Westminster, John Heenan, Hume’s predecessor, who was not then a cardinal. He also became chairman of the Westminster diocesan schools commission and was marked out for a future bishopric, as was emphasised by the conferment upon him of the title of monsignor at the early age of 35.
‘‘It was certainly open to me,’’ Kent told The Times. ‘‘If I’d kept my mouth shut and behaved myself, all would have been well. But I couldn’t have done that and I’m very glad I didn’t.’’
He was given charge of the vibrant, multiethnic parish of St Mary’s, Somers Town, covering the area between King’s Cross and Euston, in 1977. Yet by then he had become involved with Pax Christi and that same year assumed the chairmanship of CND, an honorary post that could be combined with the duties of a parish priest. In 1980 he became general secretary ‘‘because nobody else wanted to be’’.
He didn’t mind me being a Catholic, but being a priest was too much. Bruce Kent on his father’s reaction to his vocation.
The timing could not have been more fortuitous for Kent’s profile, coinciding with Margaret Thatcher’s agreement to allow US cruise missiles to be sited in Berkshire. Within a year the women’s peace camp had been established at Greenham Common and hundreds of thousands of people were marching through Trafalgar Square.
For six years Hume did his best to defend his increasingly turbulent colleague from what looked at times like carefully coordinated assaults from right-wing newspapers and the Conservative Party. However, it was probably a relief to everyone when Kent resigned from his parish in February 1987. In 1988, no longer bound by his priestly vows of celibacy, he married Valerie Flessati, who wrote a history of the Catholic peace movement.
In 1992 he published his autobiography, Undiscovered Ends, and at that year’s general election stood for Labour at Oxford West and Abingdon, coming a poor third with only 14 per cent of the vote. Thereafter he made a living from lecturing and writing.
The end of the Cold War meant that CND again lost momentum and fell from public view, yet Kent was adamant that his work had been worthwhile.
‘‘We kept disarmament on the agenda and achieved quite a lot internationally,’’ he concluded. ‘‘In July 2017, 122 countries passed a resolution at the United Nations calling for the abolition of all nuclear weapons. It took 40 years to get votes for women, the ending of slavery took something like 50 years, so the fact that things take a long time doesn’t deter me.’’