"Stop Nuclear Testing to Save British Summer Holidays!" — One Morecambe Woman's Mission in 1962
July 1962: Torrential rain lashed against the windowpanes of Morecambe Town Hall. Inside, safe from the unseasonal howling winds, a meeting of the local Chamber of Trade Committee was underway. The weather outside may have been stormy, but international political climates that day were stormier still. The previous day, the United States had detonated a Hydrogen bomb in Nevada, the latest in a long line of tests to determine the apocalyptic power of its weaponry. Only nine months earlier, the Soviet Union had tested Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever unleashed upon the world.
As the foul weather continued to rage outside, inside Morecambe Town Hall the next speaker stood to address the committee. Councillor Nellie Bolton was the bespectacled landlady of several local shops, including a popular toy shop in Heysham Village. Far from being the adorable lady shopkeeper you might expect to find in a small village (Mrs Goggins from Postman Pat, etc), Councillor Nellie was a formidable woman who always kept one nail varnished finger on the pulse of local politics, while keeping her other hand firmly on the key to her cash register.
On that dreary day in 1962, Mrs Bolton wasn’t content to limit herself to the local political sphere: she was going international. Nuclear weapon tests, she declared, must be banned. No ifs, no buts, all tests had to stop… Between June and October. Outside those months, they were fine and dandy to continue.
To a bewildered crowd, Councillor Bolton argued that holiday trading in Morecambe had been decimated that summer by shockingly bad weather, and that it was no coincidence that an upsurge in nuclear testing coincided with the weather man’s gloomy reports. ‘If we get rain from American tests and cold winds from the Russian tests,’ she said, ‘we are not going to have any holiday weather at all. If they must hold tests they should do so in the winter.’
Rather than being met with the cheers of support she probably expected, Mrs Bolton’s suggestion was met with scepticism and hilarity, with a sprinkling of 1960s chauvinism thrown in for good measure. ‘Jocularly,’ that week’s Visitor tells us, ‘President of the committee, Mr Newman suggested Mrs Bolton write to some woman’s magazine and ask “Aunt Fanny” for her opinion’. Mrs Bolton held her ground and retorted, ‘I am serious’. You go, girl.
Blatant sexism wasn’t going to deter our Nellie. Over the coming months, as the dire weather continued and holiday trading remained in the doldrums, she repeatedly pushed her theory on the council. In late September 1962, she bombarded the beleaguered councillors with demands to write a letter to the government, demanding that they ‘ban nuclear tests in the holiday periods with a view to finding out if there was any improvement in weather’. It wasn’t made clear whether the improvement need only be limited to Morecambe, or if a global meteorological upturn was preferred.
The following January, Nellie was quick off the mark in trying to save the coming summer, stating that her plea for a holiday bomb test ban must be put before the Association of Health and Pleasure resorts ‘with a sense of urgency’ if they were to ‘get them to consider it before the 1963 season.’ She then made an allegation that world governments took ‘fiendish delight in holding their tests in the holiday season and not in the winter’.
Councillors were quick to point out that asking world leaders to cease their thermonuclear tests purely for financial gains didn’t seem particularly ethical, not to mention that they didn’t want to embarrass themselves by living up to the well-worn stereotype of the weather obsessed Brit. Councillor H. Robinson said, ‘Let us send a resolution [to the government] to say we want the H-bomb tests stopped, but let us not say that we are unhappy because they are causing bad weather. They will think we are nuts’. Another councillor, Mr R. Penhale, said he was ‘opposed to H-bomb tests for the sake of humanity, rather than what could be legitimately described as selfish interests’.
Without the support of her colleagues, Nellie didn’t have the authority to approach the government with a council approved petition. Her theories quashed, she spent the summer seething in her toy shop, as both rain and nuclear weapons continued to fall from the sky. The summer of 1963 proved to be another dismal one. Come July, Nellie was back to once again to hammer home her Bombs Bring Bad Weather hypothesis to the local council.
At a Chamber of Trade Executive meeting, she pronounced that ‘Morecambe needed more sunshine in summer to attract visitors’ and if ‘bombs were banned, the sun would come out.’ She then added, ‘In wintertime it’s not so bad’. The Visitor says that Mrs Bolton ‘then produced a newspaper cutting which she contended gave confirmation to her argument – a theory that H-bomb explosions cause electrical discharges which upset the weather balance. And, having baffled her colleagues with science, she dropped the subject’.
It seems that after July 1963, Nellie did indeed drop the subject once and for all, as no further mention of her anti-nuclear campaign is to be found in the local press archives. That’s not to say she admitted defeat, though. Rather, she acknowledged victory, as on the 5th August 1963, the Partial Test Ban Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space and Under Water was signed by the governments of the US, USSR and UK in Moscow. Who’d have thought an unassuming lady shopkeeper from a small Lancashire village would have seen it coming a year earlier?
Perhaps she wasn’t so ‘nuts’, after all.
Rebecca Shaw
Sources
The Visitor, 18th July 1962; 29th August 1962; 19th September 1962; 10th October 1962; 21st November 1962; 2nd January 1963; 6th February 1963; 17th July 1963.
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