This interview was until recently available on VeganMeans.com
which seems to not exist anymore. The interview was recorded in Donald Watson’s
home in Keswick, Northern England on Sunday December 15, 2002 by George D Rodger
of the Vegan Society. Excerpts from this interview were first published in the “Summer
2003” edition of The Vegan which you can view online.
Lee Hall from VeganMeans.com wrote in 2009: » [We]
would like to express appreciation to George D Rodger, both for conducting this
interview in the first place, and for subsequently making it available for
others to read and enjoy. If you find and wish to copy this page, please know
that while George has offered it to the public sphere, it would be appreciated
if you would note its source as George D Rodger […] of the Vegan Society. […] It
can be freely quoted, but it is important that Donald’s words not be altered.
As George Rodger explains, Donald Watson used the word "orthodox" not
in a religious sense, but simply to mean "conventional" or
"traditional." The word "Man" means humankind, not only the
male gender. Donald did not regard "propagandist" as a pejorative
term, which is how many people nowadays use it. Donald's use of English was
normal for someone educated in the early decades of the twentieth century. «
Thank you, Donald Watson. Thank you, George Rodger.
Thank you, Lee Hall.
(The following is the original unaltered transcript straight from George D Rodger.)
Interview with Donald Watson on Sunday 15 December 2002
Recorded by George D Rodger
(The following is the original unaltered transcript straight from George D Rodger.)
Interview with Donald Watson on Sunday 15 December 2002
Recorded by George D Rodger
GDR: To start
off with, could you just say a few words, to check the sound level.
DW: Before you ask me any questions, I'd like to
make two brief statements, which I think are relevant.
The first is that, at the age of 92, speaking as a
person who still has vivid recollections of the First World War, and even
before that, you must feel perhaps that I'm past my best as a speaker, but the
fact that I'm still here at all, nearly 20 years older than the average age of
death of males in this country, suggests that there is something in long term
veganism, particularly as I'm still able to do all the things I want to do, or
most of them, able to climb mountains on fine days, and that I've gone through
a long life virtually without pain or illness or any kind of medicine, orthodox
or fringe, and even without dietary supplements, apart from those that nowadays
find their way into proprietary vegan products like soya milk and so on, as a
result of which, having outlived all my critics, I'm a keener vegan now even
than I was when I started! And I do feel we're onto something really big! I
don't want to turn this preliminary comment into a soliloquy, because I know
you have questions to ask, but my overall feeling is one of great gratitude to
veganism as I've interpreted it. I'll say no more about that.
Now the other comment that I think deserves to be
recorded, I think this is something of enormous importance to all people who
feel that Man should have a closer, and a kinder, affiliation with the rest of
Creation, and this story concerns a wild bird, and the incident happened just
outside this conservatory where we now sit. This is the story, and I hope that
those who compile stories - unusual stories - of animal behaviour, and even, I
would include, their gratitude, will agree it deserves a place in any such
anthology.
Soon after we came here, in 1951, the front of this
terrace was a lovely unbroken stretch of wall, covering this house and the end
house. And living in the middle cottage, where we now sit (and which I had to
sell to pay for all the expenses of conversion and removal and so on) was an
elderly retired nurse who was dying of cancer, and she asked my wife and me
whether we would have any objection if she had a conservatory built, so that
she could spend her latter days sitting in the sun. Well, we hated the idea quite frankly, to
lose the lovely straight stretch of the wall of the property going along the
continuous terrace, but since life doesn't always give us easy choices, we said
“Oh, go ahead, we don't mind". So she had the conservatory built, and I
doubt very much if she ever sat in it – she died first. However, this was where
the interesting bit starts.
The day after the conservatory was glazed, I was
weeding the garden, and I found a dead blackbird - a male blackbird - whose
flight path along the front of the terrace had been baulked by this new
structure, with invisible glass. Well,
we buried the blackbird, and, I don't know whether it was the next day, or the
day after that, very very soon after that, we came and found a female blackbird
- the brown one - lying in the same place, not dead, but virtually dead, with
one eye hanging out, on what seemed to be like a little tube, it was hanging an
inch, or an inch and a half, away from her face. Well, I suppose many humanitarians would have
thought the best thing we can do in a case like this was to put it out of its
misery, but my wife and I had never killed anything, so we lifted it up,
carried it into the greenhouse, gave it a saucer of water, closed the door, and
left it there for the night, knowing that no predator could reach it. We fully
expected the next morning to find it dead of course. To our surprise, there it
was, sitting up, the eye had gone back into place, we opened the door, and it
flew out. That's not the end of the story!
The really important part was still to come. A couple or so days later,
my wife was hanging clothes out on the line, which went across the bottom side
of our lawn. This blackbird flew parallel with the clothes line, and, in front
of my wife, as it went by, it dipped in flight.
Well, Dorothy came in, and told me this story, she said it must have
remembered what we did and this was a "thank-you". And even that's
not the end, because this was repeated time after time. My wife didn't hang
clothes out every day, but, when she did, this blackbird, that was living
somewhere in the garden, came along, did its little loop of gratitude, as it
went by. Knowing, as we did, that birds and all creatures have feelings, it was
news that even a bird, a wild bird, could show a sense of gratitude. And I've
thought about it since. Perhaps this is why the stories of Saint Francis and
other people, long ago, had such an intimate relationship with creatures they
lived among. I think, if I've done justice to the story, that needs recording,
even if more briefly than I have described it. Well, we're at the scene of that
event! It was that window there!
GDR: This is
George Rodger recording an interview with Donald Watson on the afternoon of
Sunday 15th December 2002. What you've just heard was what Donald said when I
asked him to say a few words for a sound check, but it was so fascinating I
just let it run on. We'll now start the interview proper.
GDR: Where
and when were you born?
DW: I was born on the 2nd of September, 1910, at
Mexborough, in South Yorkshire.
GDR: Tell me
about your family.
DW: My father was the headmaster of a big school at
nearby Denaby Main. He started life as a poor farm boy, three miles away, and
by hard work and study managed to become a headmaster, I believe at the age of
about 30. And, although in every respect he was a good parent, he was orthodox
in all his ways, so I was part of a meat-eating family, a church-going family,
and part of the moral instruction we received as children (my brother, my
sister and I) was that we must never steal, we must never trespass, but we may
swear if we felt like it, but, only when we heard him swear, which we never
did. That, very briefly, in a few words, comprises my family background. I
could write a book on the whole subject, but, as I often feel, who on earth
would be remotely interested in it now, when people are living from day to day
with pressing economic problems, feeling their various body parts from day to
day, for suspected lumps which shouldn't be there, questioning everything
that's been traditionally accepted, chiefly through religion, as being true and
honest and of good report. Well, I don't know whether further questions will
concern that, but they're hardly relevant to veganism, which I suppose the bulk
of your questions will relate to.
GDR: Would
you like to say any more about your childhood?
DW: This is a story - I can only give it in precis,
otherwise it will take the whole of the afternoon to report, but, very briefly:
I suppose I was one of millions of children with a
very similar, orthodox, background, and one of my earliest recollections in
life was being taken for holidays to the little farm where my father had been
born. It was run by my grandmother and her son, George, who was the elder son
of the family and therefore inherited the farm. And my first impression of
those holidays was one of heaven. As a little boy, living in a town, I was
surrounded by interesting animals. There was the big Shire horse, who pulled
the plough. There was a horse of lighter build, that pulled the trap, which in
those days was the equivalent of the modern motor car, which took my granny
into local markets to sell her butter and eggs. There were the cows, there were
the pigs, there were no sheep on the farm - they lived in a field hundreds of
yards away. There were hens, there was a cockerel, there were two cats, the
farm dog, Rover, and all these creatures gave me an insight into the kind of
life I'd never seen before, and I realised that they all "gave"
something. The farm horse pulled the plough, the lighter built horse pulled the
trap and the wagonette, which was a bigger wagon, carrying at least half a
dozen ladies to market with their butter and eggs every Saturday. The cows
"gave" milk, the hens "gave" eggs, the cockerel was a
useful "alarm clock" - I didn't realise at that time that he had
another function too!
The sheep, I knew, "gave" wool and my
impression was one of heaven, especially since my granny used to allow me to
help make the butter - I turned the churn and, when she patted the butter into
little rolls, ready for the market, and placed the butter on the sheet of muslin,
she allowed me to wield the little gadget across, which had some leaf patterns
on the wheel, which was transferred to the butter, and after this had finished,
the buttermilk was put in a separate receptacle and added with all the kitchen
waste and some meal from a bag, and it was fed to the pigs. The whole
structure, by the way, I learned had been built by one of my ancestors, several
generations before, who had six daughters, and they made the bricks in moulds
from local clay, mixed with straw, and they baked them on huge wood fires, to
build the house. My great-great-great-grandfather had designed it, no planning
permission needed of course in those days and I could draw a plan of that farm
now and, as an example of functional planning, I can't fault it.
The toilet was an antiquated affair. It was a
structure in wood, it was an earth closet of course, with a raised section,
with two holes in the top, and then a lower section, with three holes, for
children. And the contents deposited there periodically were shovelled out from
the back, by my Uncle George, who wheeled them all to a part of the garden, not
the part where food was being grown, but a part where the food would be grown
in years to come. Ecologically, this was the system that had prevailed for
centuries, in tens of thousands of little farms, where I believe about three
quarters of the population of this country, and probably of others, made their
living. I could never understand what the pigs did - all the other animals
"gave" something, but I couldn't for the life of me see what the pigs
"gave", and they seemed - there were usually two - such friendly
creatures, always glad to see me, and grateful for almost anything that was
thrown to them in the sty. Well, the day
came when I came downstairs for breakfast, and Granny wasn't alone in the
kitchen - there were two women there I'd never seen before, and they were very
busy boiling an enormous amount of water, one pan after another, on the fire.
What was all this about? Soon after, I saw two men cross the path in front of
the kitchen window, carrying what seemed to be like a trestle, with handles on
each end, and they took it through to the little yard where the pigsty was. It
wasn't long before the business of killing one of the pigs began. No attempt
was made to keep me away from the scene, I just went there, full of interest,
to see what all this was about. And I still have vivid recollections of the
whole process from start to finish, including all the screams of course, which
were only feet away from where this pig's companion still lived. And then, when
the pig had finally expired, the women came out, one after another, with
buckets of this scalding water, and the body of the pig was scraped - all the
hairs were taken away.
The thing that shocked me, along with the chief
impact of the whole setup, was that my Uncle George, of whom I thought very
highly, was part of the crew, and I suppose at that point I decided that farms,
and uncles, had to be re-assessed. They weren't all they seemed to be, on the
face of it, to a little, hitherto uninformed boy. And it followed that this
idyllic scene was nothing more than Death Row. A Death Row where every
creature's days were numbered by the point at which it was no longer of service
to human beings. There is much more I could say about my life on the farm. I
remember at harvest time, when a field was due to be mown, a man used to go
round with a scythe, opening it up, that meant making a space near the hedge,
where the horse that would pull the reaper could go without trampling on the
corn. And then the reaper came - I heard that there was a new machine, called a
binder, which automatically collected the straws into sheaves, and threw them
out - but my uncle wasn't rich enough to have one of those. He just had the
old-fashioned reaper. And, as the reaper went round, the standing corn became
smaller and smaller and at that point the farm hands came with their guns
because the rabbits had all been driven into this ever-diminishing area of
safety until there was none left and then they fled, and of course they were
shot. Another aspect of idyllic family life that didn't seem all that it had
been cracked up to be, and afterwards of course the sheaves of corn were all
stacked and the farmers hoped for two or three days of fine weather so that the
rain wouldn't come and make the wheat wet so that it sprouted. They had to get
it into a straw stack as quickly as possible.
Well, the straw stack was built on a structure of old tree branches and
logs to keep it off the ground and when it was finally built, it was thatched,
not with the same care as a cottage of course, but there were no plastic sheets
in those days. And this straw stack was
absolutely heaven for mice - they were free from predators, they were warm, they
had a food supply. Until threshing day
came of course, by which time they'd all had their families, and as the sheaves
of corn were forked off, and thrown into the thresher, everyone available was
there with their sticks, to kill the mice and the young mice as they lay there
in their nests. I'm told that, in the
old days, sparrow pie was one of the national dishes among the peasants, the
reason being the easy way by which they got the sparrows - it was to put a net
round the straw stack, and, as they fluttered out, they were killed. And they got enough sparrows to make a pie
quite quickly. And so the story goes on,
as our past on which our present civilisation is built. And, quite early in life, I came to the
conclusion that, if I was to report on Man's progress, I had to settle for the
comment beloved of schoolteachers: "could do better". And from that, The Vegan Society was
formed. Well, that's a bit of the story
and then going back home, I lived at home for 21 years. In the whole of that time, I never heard a
word, from my parents, or from my grandparents, of from my 22 uncles and aunts,
or my 16 cousins, or my teachers or my vicar, on anything remotely associated
with any duties we may have to what the religious people call "God's
Creation".
GDR: So that
was your childhood. Would you like to go on and say something about your
adolescent years and your early adult life?
DW: Oh yes. That's another story entirely. When I was 14, my father asked me what I
wanted to do. And I didn't say anything, I was afraid of offending him, because
my older brother had been to college and become a teacher and there was nothing
I wanted to do more than make things. I
wanted to be a woodworker. And it took
a long time before I plucked up enough courage to tell him this. The result was that, since I'd never been
happy at school, I went to be an apprentice with my uncle in a little village
three miles away. And there I got an
insight into village life which strengthened all my earlier convictions about
our relationship with the rest of Creation.
Our workshop was down a yard adjacent to the local inn and the innkeeper
had been the village butcher, and living there was the old bachelor who had
been his assistant, I suppose for most of his life. And old Albert spent his days looking after
the hens and the geese and a few pigs and a little garden. He kept his corn bin in our workshop. And he
also used the workshop to kill the hens - he brought them in every week or so,
wrung their necks, hung them up on a row of pegs and left them there,
fluttering until they died. Well, among the denizens of this farmyard was a
gander, to whom I became quite attached. It used to come into the workshop, as
I was having my lunch, sitting on the sawing stool, it would share my lunch
with me, and we became very friendly. I've still got a photograph of him
somewhere. Well, one day, after I
suppose two or three years, old Albert came into the workshop with this gander
under his arm and then put the body between his legs and the gander was
rebelling, not knowing what was going to happen, and I heard Albert say
"Not this time, boy”. The gander
went the same way as all the hens, and he was hung up, fluttering for I suppose
the best part of five minutes, and that was the end of my friendship with
him. On another occasion, when Albert
was called in by one of his friends to kill a pig, he came into the shop and
said to my uncle (in broad Yorkshire), “Would t'lad (me) give them a hand with
this awk'urd pig?" This "awk'urd pig" was rebelling, not
surprisingly, at being killed. My uncle,
who knew that I was a vegetarian, he said “No - my lad doesn't believe in
murder". So I was let off that! This town where I lived, like all other towns
at that time, had a succession of butchers' shops along the main road, about
four in half a mile. I can remember
Wagstaffs, Law's, Biggin's, Beaumont's; Hillerby's, the fishmongers, who also
sold rabbits, and all these butchers did their own killing. They had two doors alongside their shop, and,
as the animals were delivered, they went in and the doors closed behind
them. And Mrs Biggins once said to my
mother, who traded there, since we were meat-eaters, in her broad Yorkshire,
"T'little calves do cry when Charlie (her husband) kills 'em".
As I went to school each morning, on many mornings,
a van would arrive at Law's, the pork butchers, with two or three pigs - they
needed those for the day's supply - and they were pulled out, with their tails,
squealing, and pushed up the passage.
And so, several of the school staff passed that way on their way to
school and I remember on one of my reports the French mistress gave a very
cutting comment, "He does not even
know his verbs!" And I thought, on
reading this, "No, and she does not even know what is happening down the
road! Or, if she does know, she doesn't
care."
That was the very brief background of my
upbringing. I must add just one other
thing - the vicar, a Dr Briggs, who was a Doctor of Divinity (Mexborough was
very proud to have a Doctor of Divinity as a vicar) ran a Bible Class for
youths, boys by the way, not girls, every Sunday afternoon, and I was one of
the youths who went to this Bible Class, and the only reference he ever made as
a Doctor of Divinity to any kind of compassion for the Animal Kingdom was that
if we did collect birds' eggs, we were to take only one from each nest. That just shows how far we've gone in the last 70 or 80
years. If any vicar now said that, he'd
soon find himself before the Court, wouldn't he?
GDR: You did, in fact, train as a woodworker,
which you said just now was your ambition, and you worked at that for some
time. How and why did you switch to
teaching, as you did later on?
DW: Oh, that's an easy one! When I was 21, and due
to become a craftsman, I presumed for the rest of my life, we found ourselves
in the middle of an economic slump, which went on for several years in the
early 1930's. And millions of people had no work. And I discovered that craftsmen could become
woodwork teachers without going to college by qualifying through City and
Guilds, providing they became of an acceptable standard. So, I enrolled. I took correspondence
courses, I passed my first examination, which qualified me to teach for three
years, during which time I was expected to take the final, which would give me
the same status as a college-trained teacher.
I don't think I found any difficulty in this, because during the whole
of my adolescence, I was reading books - "The Origin of Species",
Gilbert White's "Natural History of Selborne", Hudson's "A
Shepherd's Life", Dickens' "The Old Curiosity Shop". My main problem was maths, but with a bit of
trouble I managed it and I got a job in Leicestershire as a peripatetic teacher,
teaching all over the county, going there by bike, by the way, sometimes
leaving home at half past six to reach distant places like Ashby-de-la-Zouche
and Castle Donington, Shepshed, Hugglescote, Cosby, Hinckley, Sileby - the list
goes on. By the way I was claiming bus
fares, quite legitimately, and the bus fares came to nearly half my wage, which
helped. And after three years of this I was appointed to a new school on the
outskirts of Leicester, where life became very much easier. And then, I liked
the job so much, I never tried to get any kind of promotion, because I couldn't
think of a more useful job than training what was, over the years, thousands of
boys in the art of using tools. But I
did move to do the same job here in Keswick.
And when I became sixty I felt so fit and able that
I couldn't think of retiring, so I kept on for another three years, after which
I took a job for seven years, as a guided walks leader, when I led parties of
visitors to Keswick out on the fells. There was no charge in those days - they
charge five pounds a time now, I believe, and sometimes the parties numbered as
many as seventy. And over the summer and autumn, we covered about five hundred
miles at least. And I suppose I took out nearly a thousand people. I must be in
photograph albums in many parts of the world.
GDR: You are
92 years and 104 days old as of today. To what do you attribute your long life?
DW: Oh, am I?
I did another calculation this morning, with the help of my calculator,
and I found out that I'd lived nearly 34,000 days, and I had a strange
thought. Since I must die in the next
few years I thought 33,600 times I've gone to sleep at night and in a way I've
died, always assuming I'm going to wake up again, and the day must come when I
won't, and I thought, what a crowning glory that must be for anyone who's lived
without illness or pain, and kept out of police hands, by the way, to just go
to sleep one day, or one night, and not wake up, as we all do, every day of our
lives.
GDR: So
you've lived all those thousands of days - to what do you attribute your long
life? Is it because of being vegan, or is
it because of choosing the right parents, or is it just good luck?
DW: I can
answer that in several ways, but, twice a year, I go to a dentist in Bangor in
North Wales. We lived down there, nursing my sister-in-law for three years and
we got in with this dentist - who is a very good dentist. I go for my checkup,
and last time I went, he asked if I minded filling up a form - apparently
dentists now have to be very careful how they administer anything to patients,
in case it militates against any medicines they might be taking - and this form
was a long form and it went “Do you ever have this or that or the other",
and I kept putting ticks under the "no"s, right down to the bottom,
and it was a long row of “no"s. And my dentist looked at this and said “I
wish I had more customers like you! To
what do you attribute it?" I said,
“Well, that's a long story, but 57 years ago, I married a Welsh girl, who
taught me a Welsh saying, ‘When everyone runs, stand still’, and I seem to have
been doing that ever since.” And that
must be part of the answer to the question, because so many people are running
towards what I see as suicide.
They're performing habits which everyone knows are
dangerous, and I really believe that the commonest cause of death now in this
and several other countries, is slow suicide, by people doing what they, and
every authority in every school of medicine, is agreed to be wrong, smoking,
taking alcohol, turning night into day, promiscuity, sleeplessness, lack of
exercise, you know I recently made a list, it was about twelve reasons that
came into my mind, straight away.
"When
everyone runs, stand still." And, in that sense, although I've done a lot
of travelling about, mainly by bicycle, and on foot, I've been standing still.
Veganism, of course, probably leads all the rest,
because I've always accepted that Man's greatest mistake throughout all
recorded history, is through trying to turn himself into a carnivore, which is
absolutely contrary to natural law. As
long ago as 1863, T H Huxley wrote his book, "Man's Place In Nature",
in which he listed all the reasons where Man differs from the carnivores and is
similar in his anatomy and in his habits to those of the anthropoid apes. The structure of our body and all the juices
that create this miraculous process of digestion are those of a frugivore. 200 years before Huxley wrote his book, which
must be one of the most significant books on medicine ever written, John Ray
said very much the same thing. So, we've
had plenty of sound, incontrovertible evidence to work on and, although, in
1944, the few of us who were working to form this new movement, felt we were
the first out on the frozen pond, as it were, and wondered whether the ice
would hold, and everything that's happened in the 60 years since has proved
that all our hopes and precepts and aspirations have been fulfilled.
GDR: You've
already mentioned that you were a vegetarian when you were a lad. When, and why, did you first become a vegetarian,
and at what age?
DW: It was a New Year Resolution in 1924. Did you ever hear anyone say there's no point
in making New Year Resolutions because they're always broken? You can quote me as an exception to the rule,
because, since 1924, I've never eaten any meat, or fish. How long ago is that -
78 years is it? 78 years!
GDR: Of
course, you invented the term "vegan" in 1944, which was 20 years
after that Resolution, but you had already been a vegan for two or three years
before that. So why did you actually go vegan?
DW: A year or two before the Society was formed, I
was corresponding with a very small number of people, scattered far and
wide. Leslie Cross, who founded the
Plant Milk Society, was a great friend of mine.
He died comparatively early, well, in his early 70s, I think, and, in a
letter he sent me, shortly before he died, he mentioned that, as a child, he'd
fallen heavily from a gate and the authorities thought he might not recover
and, I think, if he had an early death for a vegan, it may have been the
consequence of that. He was certainly
one of the outstanding people who have served the movement and, in retirement,
he went up and down the country, giving his lecture, "Milk of Human Kindness"
- all voluntarily of course, paying his own expenses, and co-ordinating Frey
Ellis and others, medical people who were interested in the idea of creating a
plant milk that was acceptable - some of the earlier efforts were pretty
crude! But it was not until 1965 that my
great friend, Arthur Ling, who has devoted most of his adult life to creating
and propagating the vegan idea, especially with regard to dairy produce, felt
able to market an acceptable alternative to cows' milk. And of course, he's gone on from there, and,
apart from running the Plamil firm, he's taking a great interest in the feeding
of vegan infants. Because, of course, if
any diet fails to produce healthy children, well, we must find a reason for it,
and proceed from there, not taking “no" for an answer. But now, thanks to Arthur's work and those of
many others, we've reached a point where the only safe way to rear children is
on a vegan diet, which obviously must conform to a few well-proved
requirements, and that's why Plamil and certain other vegan proprietary
products now are fortified with vitamin B12, which, although it's a vitamin
that we need an infinitesimally small amount of, we must have, and some people
have lost the capacity to produce it in their own gut, so now we feel that,
since B12 is a vegan product, produced quite cheaply fortunately, unlike some
of our modern wonder drugs, so-called, we take it as part and parcel of our
normal food intake. I would bracket, of
all the many people who have subscribed to the vegan cause, I hesitate to
single out anyone, but I would say Leslie Cross and Arthur Ling must be put in
the records as being the two outstanding, faithful, contributors to our
cause. I hesitate to include my own
name, as the Society's obstetrician; I leave it to others to say whether I made
a good job there, but I think I must have done, because, in the two years
before we decided to officially form a democratic Society, I literally ran the
show. I was the Secretary, the
Treasurer, the Auditor, and the Banker, not that we'd ever very much to bank,
in fact the flow of money very often went the other way, and I remember on one
occasion, after I'd produced my first duplicated copy of the "Vegan
News", which had four pages, out of the blue someone sent me two pounds,
which was eight times the contributions of five shillings I was charging as the
annual fee to be informed about the progress that was being made.
And with that two pounds I rushed out and bought
enough foolscap copying paper to enable me to enlarge the "Vegan
News" to twelve pages. And, reading
them recently, I think that these must now be what we might call "The Dead
Sea Scrolls" of the vegan movement, because they describe how the whole
idea was started, at a most difficult time. And, from the response I had,
thousands of letters, sometimes as many as 30 or 40 a day, I sometimes feel
that we had reached a watershed and if I hadn't formed the Society, someone
else may have done it, very soon, although it may have had a different
name. I did appeal to my readers to
suggest what the name might be, and I had a list of very bizarre suggestions,
which some people may already have heard of - I won't list them now - but, in
an inspired moment, I settled for the word “vegan", which was immediately
accepted and, over the years, became part of our language and is now in almost
every world dictionary, I suppose.
GDR: That's
very interesting stuff about the early days of the Society. Can you tell me why
you, yourself, first decided to give up on all animal products - in other
words, became vegan, before the word was invented?
DW: Well, I think if an open-minded, honest person
pursues a course long enough, and listens to all the criticisms, and in one's
own mind can satisfactorily meet all the criticisms against that idea, sooner
or later one's resistance against what one sees as evil tradition has to be
discarded. About the time the Vegan
Society was formed, Archbishop Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said, or
wrote, or reminded his flock, of what I think was a great truth, that,
throughout history, good and devout people have pursued evil practices, in the
firm belief that they were doing nothing wrong.
And I thought, well, that applies to what I'm doing. I seem to be taking on the world virtually
single-handed, with no recognised qualifications other than a conviction that,
with all the conceit I can muster, I am right, and they're all wrong! It's a dangerous state of mind, but one
which, sooner or later, one can't dispel, and one has to go that way. I remember one of the sayings that convinced
me at the time when I was in the throes of what I saw as a struggle, I read
somewhere that the Norwegian poet and dramatist, Ibsen, had said, "The
strongest man in the world is the man who can stand alone", and I thought
that the way people are worn down by the traditions of the cultures in which
they've been born, this must be a great truth.
Ibsen died in 1906, four years before I was born, and I thought what
better service can I give to this man who wrote such a great truth than include
it in my answer to any appropriate question that I might now be asked. So I say. "Well said, Ibsen!"
GDR: In
addition to being vegan, I believe you're a lifelong teetotaller, a lifelong
non-smoker. . .
DW: I have tasted wine, and I once tasted
champagne, at a wedding, and I thought it was poor stuff, compared with grape
or apple juice, but I've never tasted beer. I suppose there are very few men in
this part of the world who can say they've never tasted beer, and I must have
saved quite a lot of money - and quite a lot of tax!
GDR: You were
also, I believe, a conscientious objector during the Second World War, and a few
other things of principle, and I just wanted to ask you, one at a time, how all
these relate to your veganism. We'll
start with teetotalism, since you've already started on it - how does the
following relate to your veganism - being a lifelong teetotaller?
DW: I don't think that links particularly with the
ethics of veganism, especially since one can now buy wines that are vegan, not
treated with a fish product to make them clear.
I think it was more that I'd seen so many people destroyed by alcohol
that I felt this was a slippery slope that, as a sensible chap, I'd better not
put my foot on it.
GDR: In the
same way, can you comment on being a non-smoker in relation to veganism?
DW: Well, I always thought that smoking was so
utterly daft - a person with a little fire hanging out of their mouth. It was
neither food nor drink, and, although in those days there wasn't strong medical
evidence, I thought to draw chemically-loaded gases into the lungs couldn't
possibly be doing them any good. Many
doctors smoked, in fact one or two even said it was beneficial, because it
killed germs. Well, now, all that
nonsense has gone, and we know that tobacco is a killer and sensible people
don't do it. And morally-inclined people
don't inflict it upon other people. I sometimes think now we're protecting
children against the evils of paedophiles and it is still legal, unbelievably
legal, for a pregnant woman to smoke, and inflict this poison on an unborn
child, impairing it probably for life. I think, to use a religious expression,
we must accept that the physical body is the "temple of the spirit".
It mustn't be abused in any way.
Everything we do must be to try to preserve it and feed it properly and
give it everything that's necessary to prosper and live as long as possible so
that, whatever the purpose of life is, we fulfil it to the best of our
abilities.
You did ask me a question earlier about
conscientious objection. I'd like to
mention, very briefly, it isn't really the subject of this interview, that
vegetarians, and vegans, were placed in a dreadful position at the beginning of
the last War. We were faced with an evil
regime that was executing people who didn't fully agree with the Nazi
philosophy. They were exterminating the
Jews by the million.
And we had to decide whether to fight in the only
way that seemed practical, to fight this evil, and overcome it in the hope that
something better would result, although it never had from previous wars, and my
own feeling was that, if I enrol, and I'm allotted to any branch of the
Services, I immediately become liable to military law. Suppose they direct me
to work in a slaughterhouse? Or anywhere
else, where I'm expected to conform to orders from above. What do I do?
I refuse, I'm put on a charge of insubordination, and I'm faced with
punishment, goodness knows what. I knew
what happened to "awk'urd" types like that in the First World War, I
think 307 of them were shot! And I
thought, surely since Churchill had said there was to be no witch hunt of
conscientious objectors, I thought, well, there must be a place somewhere
during this crisis, where I can work for the life of the nation, and not kill
people I'd never met, and leave their descendants bereaved, and, as it turned
out, bomb cities like Dresden where 50,000 people died in one raid and the
bodies had to be piled in the streets and burnt. My great friend Douglas Eld, who was a keen
member of the Leicester Vegetarian Society, of which I was the Secretary, was
so moved by the evil stories of what the Nazis were doing, that he renounced
his pacifism and joined up. And he
joined a bombing crew and he was one of the thousands who never came back. And so was a keen member of my night school
in Leicester, Clifford Ginetta; he never came back. And my school friend,
Harold Platt, he joined up and he never came back. And my cousin John Smith, died in the last
week of the war. He wasn't a
conscientious objector, or a vegetarian, he was just one of the millions who
paid the price of war. It was a terrible
dilemma for anyone with high principles to see thousands, millions of people,
killed, because the whole idea was so mad that Man should still, at this late
stage in his evolution, be trying to solve his problems by this evil method.
But that was the dilemma, so, after much thought, for right or wrong, I became
a CO. My terms for being given this
privilege, which it was, of course, was that my salary as a teacher was reduced
to two pounds a week - the pay of the lowest-serving member of the Forces, who
were, of course, fed and clothed. My
night school pay was stopped too, because the Leicester City Council said that
the terms were that I mustn't have more than two pounds a week. Well, as a thrifty young man, I'd saved 500
pounds, which was a lot of money in those days, and so, with the two pounds a
week, and this 500 pounds, I was able to stagger my way through the war without
getting into debt. I carried on with the
night school, which was always filled by men, many of them working in the
shadow factories on good money. (The
shadow factories where bits and pieces were made to be assembled elsewhere into
tanks and guns and whatever. No-one was
supposed to know what these shadow factories were making, in case they were
bombed.) It was difficult for me to
serve all these people on big money, and, among all the rest, there were
evacuees from London and there were two men sent for occupational therapy. They'd been rescued at death's door from the
Burma railway, and they were as near to death as I'd ever seen anyone - they
could hardly speak, and over the weeks and the months, they gradually came back
to life and started making simple articles.
I was also in the AFS - the Auxiliary Fire Service
- where, on two days a week, I had to go down and spend the night at the Granby
Halls, in my full fireman's regalia, in case we had a bombing raid. Fortunately we didn't. The raid on Coventry, I understand, was intended
to be on Leicester, but Leicester, in a valley, or a saucer-shaped dent in the
landscape, filled with mist, on the night of the Coventry raid, and the planes
that flew over Leicester thought it was a lake. They thought it was Swithland
Reservoir. So poor Coventry had the raid
that was intended for Leicester. And if
it had been Leicester, I might not have been here today. It's a longer story than that, but that, very
briefly, is the dilemma. And I'm left
with the thought how lucky these young people are today not to have this
terrible choice to make, of whether they should go to war or not. War as we knew it then, of course, will never
return, it will be a different kind of war, push-button, where civilians will
be as much in it as anyone else for much of the time.
GDR: How did
being a Conscientious Objector affect your working and social life?
DW: Veganism always had an effect on my social
life. I think that's an inevitable price
we had to pay and which people, especially young people, have to pay
today. But, if one is going to be out of
step with all the catering that is done for people who are different from
oneself, one must accept a certain amount of excommunication, as it were, from
the rest of society - that is where I think the Vegan Contacts work is so
absolutely essential, why vegans, especially those who live isolated from other
vegans, must have some contact with the rest of our movement, which is now, of
course, an ever-growing world movement, I like to think the greatest movement that
ever was! Because it's the only one,
now, that can save Mankind. All the
lesser movements for doing good work in themselves, in a limited sphere, are
only, to use the common cliche, like the people re-arranging the deck chairs on
the Titanic, instead of helping us to guide the searchlight on the iceberg
which is going to be the end of the whole show.
And, when I think that the world population, which was about 2 billion
people in 1944, is now more than 6 billion people, in spite of all the losses
in war, disease, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, all the things
that wipe out people by the tens of thousands.
It has still become this astronomical explosion of over 6 billion, along
with, I would say, a corresponding explosion of animals to feed most of
them. And those animals are there, fed
on food that should be growing for the Third World, where people are having big
families, because they have to, they've no social security, they have to have
many children because many of them in every family are likely to die and that,
I think, may be the reason for this explosion.
Well, we know that, throughout history, nature rebels against any
species that becomes too numerous, usually by food shortage, or by disease,
both of which are now rampaging ahead in the human community without - I won't
say without a thought - but without anyone except the vegans having a possible
solution to this crisis.
AIDS, to mention just one, is now affecting a third
of the population in many African countries and spreading to other
countries. This is the Black Death of
our modern age and no-one knows where it's going to stop. Apart from that I might add all the diseases
that are infecting Man from eating animal food, with its ever-growing list of
diseases, so that in parts of the world, including our own, even farming is now
under such threat that another visitation of foot and mouth disease or BSE, is
still so frightening that farmers daren't risk it - they can't be insured
against this enormous risk. So livestock
farming is on the way out, as we've always known it, and, looking on the bright
side, this could, in a properly organised world, create a labour force big
enough to do all the jobs that we so desperately need doing - coping with
drought, coping with floods, coping with disease, of course. And perhaps, most critical of all,
reafforestation, stopping the ever-growing growth of the deserts and the
ever-decreasing amount of fertile land on which Man lives and we know now that
even the so-called harvest of the seas, through Man's avarice, interfering in a
region where he has no business to go, has reached such a point of depletion
that many species have almost become extinct.
Again, one must admit, leading to unemployment of all the people
employed in the fishing industry, but one is reminded of the reply given by
somebody when slavery was abolished and one of the people against abolition
said “What on earth is going to happen to the families of the people who make
the whips, if slavery is abolished?"
Well, the obvious answer to that - they are given more profitable and
humane work to do! And that is the great
challenge facing Mankind. Carrying on St-Barbe Baker's work - "Men of the
Trees", restoring the deserts, so that we don't get these great areas of
land where the temperature rises and it upsets the whole weather pattern that
spreads throughout the world, whereas a world covered with trees would have a
more controlled climate, one that was safer, and sustainable, in which Man
could work out his destiny. Oh - I'm
turning it into a soliloquy, aren't I? I have to say, next question.
GDR: How does
your veganism relate to any religious beliefs you may have?
DW: I never had very deep ones. Some theologians, I
believe, think that Christ was an Essene.
And if he was an Essene, he was a vegan.
If he were alive today, he'd be an itinerant vegan propagandist instead
of an itinerant preacher of those days, spreading the message of compassion,
which, as I see it, is the only useful part of what religion has to offer and,
sad as it seems, I doubt if we still have to enrol our first priest as a member
of the Vegan Society. I understand that
there are now more vegans sitting down to Sunday lunch than there are Anglicans
attending Sunday morning service. That
is the way things are moving. I also think that Anglicans should rejoice at
this good news that somebody at least is practising the essential element in
the Christian religion - compassion.
When I received all my thousands of letters in the
years preceding the formation of the Society, I don't remember ever having one
from any student or lecturer at a university. And I think, at that time, about
two percent of our most intelligent youths were going on to university. I
thought, “What am I up against here? Here are the top two percent of the people
I'd like to convert and they aren't even interested in this idea!" My letters came from atheists and agnostics
and people who couldn't care less about any of the religions. I think the only vicar who ever wrote a book
on the subject was Holmes Gore, who wrote his excellent book, “These We Have
not Loved". Good for him! But, if any priest of any denomination wants
to distinguish himself - or, nowadays I must add "herself” - the
opportunity is open for them to join the vegan movement and really express the
core element of what they are professing to stand for. I think we can say to the religious movement,
“Yes, the meek will inherit the Earth, if anyone if going to, because the violent
people will exterminate themselves, and not before long, as things are
going."
GDR: I think,
in fairness, I should remind you of religious organisations like The Order Of
The Cross, The Followers Of The Way, these are religions which are very much in
line with the vegan philosophy.
DW: When I was in Leicester, running the Leicester
Vegetarian Society, I had several members of The Order Of The Cross among my
members, including our Chairman. I went
to one or two of their meetings. Todd
Ferrier, their leader, was making a lifetime job of trying to introduce other
Christians into this idea of spreading the Gospel, but they were all
vegetarians, not one was a vegan. In
fact, at that time I think I was the only one, in Leicester anyway. And, as the vegan idea developed, we saw, or
some of us did, that, although vegetarianism was a very useful
“stepping-stone" to veganism, and one which we had all used to get to
where we were, unless the consumption of dairy produce was limited, it could be
an even more cruel diet than the orthodox diet, where the meat came from a
large animal like a cow which was feeding one meat-eater for a year or two,
whereas the milk drinkers - they were going back to the cow suckling (what a
bizarre idea that is!) at virtually every meal and claiming to be leading the way
to a more humane life! So, although I'm
still a member of the Vegetarian Society, I send my one pound fifty a month by
direct debit, I do so to keep in touch with the movement, because I came from
it and I am tremendously interested to be kept informed about the way it's
moving and I was delighted to learn recently, at the IVU Conference in
Edinburgh, that the diet was a vegan diet and that the delegates had no choice.
That is the influence of the vegan idea. This little seed which I planted 60
years ago, and has been worked on by now thousands of people ever since, is
making its presence felt in a world that is dying for salvation, to use again
the religious expression.
Holman Hunt's famous picture, "The Light Of
The World", shows the Christian sitting beside the globe, implying that
Christianity was the only way there.
Well, if it's the form of Christianity that the Essenes knew, we'll say
"yes". Holman Hunt sent a
famous message - veganism!
GDR: I think
you may consider you've already answered this question, but to what extent do
you think your veganism relates to your still being alive and healthy at the
age of 92?
DW: Well, again I repeat what I said earlier, an
hour ago: "When everyone runs, stand still." That, one day, will be out-of-date, because,
when everyone is running towards veganism, I wouldn't say "Stand
still"!
GDR: What do
you find most difficult about being vegan?
DW: Well, I suppose it is the social aspect. Excommunicating myself from that part of life
where people meet to eat, and the only way this problem can be eased is by
having veganism more and more acceptable in guest houses, hotels, wherever one
goes, until one hopes one day it will become the norm.
GDR: And, the
other side of the coin. What do you find
easiest about being vegan?
DW: Easiest?
I suppose it must be the great advantage of having a clear conscience
and believing that scientists must now accept conscience as part of the
scientific equation. A stricken conscience is not a health measure for
anyone. We have to believe our finer
feelings of this guilt and proceed from there as stronger men and women. Whenever I look across a graveyard and see
all the stones, I think what enormous agony all the people who are buried there
- most unnecessary agony - must have gone through during their lives and all
the herds of cattle and flocks of sheep and shoals of fish went into the lives
of every one of them to keep their little show on the road, believing, as Lang
said, they were doing nothing wrong.
The tragedy of the whole existence of Mankind is
that, long ago, Man went from his home in Africa, into climes where he had to
eat animal food to keep himself alive, and then he invented weapons, to kill
animals, to safeguard his food supply, and then he invented fire, to make the
unnatural food edible, and then he invented the means of domesticating animals,
to further safeguard his unnatural food supply and so the great mistake went on
until now, of course, we have refrigeration and other methods of food
preservation, to make animal food available, with our systems of transport,
anywhere in the world. Not that vegan
food can't be taken anywhere in the world - it can, now, daily. Wherever Man lives, he can have a vegan diet.
When I went to be an apprentice woodworker, one of
the first things I learnt was the enormous difference between the hardness and
the toughness of wood from slow-growing trees like oak, and all the other
hardwoods, compared with that from fast-growing trees like spruce. And I did think, and I have thought, many
times, afterwards, slow-growing wood can be compared to slow-growing
animals. If we make an animal,
especially in its young days, grow faster than the rate nature had planned, the
cells are bigger, and the flesh is less durable and that is precisely what
happens if we feed babies on milk with a higher protein content than mother's
milk. We get big, bouncing babies, or
six-foot six teenagers, as we see now, walking our streets, bodies that are
bigger than nature ever intended which, throughout the ages, seems to have been
about between five feet and five feet six, and, will these bodies that have
been subjected to this accelerated unnatural growth stand the test of
time? Like oak does, compared with pine. I'm not a scientist, all my theories about
veganism have been developed from using my conscience and my commonsense and my
observation of events that have been happening all around me and so often my
conclusion has contested with that of tradition. I remember one of the
thousands of boys I taught - early in my career, in Leicester - frequently if I
told him anything, he would look up at me and say, "How d'you make that
out, Sir?" I often wonder where
that boy finished up in life - he must have gone far. He wasn't accepting what the teacher said, he
wanted it saying another way round, or a simpler way, or stronger proof, before
he was willing to accept. "How
d'you make that out, Sir?" I'll
never forget that boy.
GDR: I know
you have a fairly large garden and several compost bins. How important has
gardening been in your life?
DW: Well, shall I tell you how it started? I was
always keen on growing things - I thought it was magic to put something in the
ground and not do anything else except look at that bit of ground, day after
day, until, as if by magic, something had grown. And I remember the house where I was born,
one of a row in South Yorkshire, had a little back garden about the area of
this conservatory where we are now sitting.
It was surrounded by bricks, put on end, forming a zig-zag pattern, as
people did in those days and, every year, my mother used to buy a packet of
Virginia stock seed, and she let me scatter these seeds right round the
border. And, after a week or two, little
green sprouts seemed to appear and then, suddenly, the first flower
appeared. Well, Virginian stocks, as you
know, are little flowers that come in many colours, white, blue, red and
perhaps other colours too. I shall never
forget going in the house and announcing the great news that the first Virginian
stock was in flower. That's how my
gardening started.
I never became a flower gardener - I was more
attracted to the more practical side of gardening, which was growing food,
especially compost-grown food, and among my many friends in Leicester was a
young man, a member of my Vegetarian Society, his name was Tom Rawls, and he
had several theories, and one of them was, if you want anything, don't ask how
you're going to get the money to buy it, visualise it, and, if you visualise it
strongly enough, it will come about. I thought, well, as a practical man, this
seems a bit far-fetched, but I did visualise having a kitchen garden outside my
back door, so that I didn't have to cross Leicester to an allotment which a
friend let me use. And, when the crops
matured, I had to wheel them back four miles from Thurmaston, right across
Leicester, to the other side of the city, and I was so keen on getting this
food, apart from not having to buy it (because, remember, I was on two pounds a
week), that I did it for, certainly, two or three years, and then, lo and
behold, when I was lucky enough to get a job in Keswick, which I think must be
one of the loveliest places in the world, I also got a big house - not that we
wanted a big house, we wanted a big garden, but it had an acre of garden with
it, including an orchard, and a lawn, and a kitchen garden, which was walled on
two sides, which was a dream come true, and I thought of Tom, I said, Tom first
told me about visualising what I wanted, and I did, and it's come true! And, another thing, based on my comments
about religion, my vicar, as a young man, when I went to his Bible Class, told
us one day, "There's nothing wrong with inventing your own prayers - don't
limit your prayers to those in the Prayer Book. If you can think of any prayers
that you would like to see fulfilled, just invent one, and say it, as often as
you think appropriate."
So I went away with this idea, I thought, fair
enough, I'll make my shopping list. I thought then that prayer was an appeal to
some Higher Force to give one what one wanted, a rather rudimentary idea which
many people still hold. They pray for
what they want. Anyway, that was my
stage in my evolution at that time so I thought, what do I want, and I made my
"shopping list". It was that I
should have health, wealth, wisdom, long life and happiness. And a few years ago I went through this list,
and I ticked them off. I thought, well,
I've always, after a poor start as a child, had good health. I am not in debt, which is wealth indeed
these days. Wisdom, well, that's for
other people to judge, but I think at least I have had the wisdom to avoid
doing all the suicidal things that so many people find attractive. At nearly 93 years old I have had long
life. But what about happiness? That's
more difficult in such an evil, crime-ridden world. The stuff seems to be everywhere. I cannot accept the concept that there is a
"Happy Land, far, far away."
Nor can I accept that evil can only be overcome by more evil. We need to fight evil in a way never before
tried - veganism, and all it implies.
I've never been clever enough to be an atheist - an
agnostic, yes, over big spheres of life, where the problems seem debatable and
insuperable, but I could never believe that Creation could ever have happened
without some sort of Creative Force and that, after the Big Bang or whatever it
was that started the whole system off, there must be some Driving Force, some
Evolver, to enable everything as we know it today to have developed from simple
forms. That doesn't mean anything
personal in the way we think of old men with beards, or prophets, or people who
have only sons born without the usual process of reproduction, it means some
Force which we are quite incapable of fathoming and, behind all this is the
frightening thought which I daren't think about it too deeply - I understand
some people have been driven mad by trying to conceive what it means, and it is
that eternity in time and space, by definition, must go on for ever, and these astronomers,
who talk about the edge of the universe, are myopic - the universe can have no
end, by definition, there must be something beyond any boundary and so with
time, there is no end to the eternity in which we may have to pay for all the
errors we make, to correct all the errors we make, through departing from
natural law, about which we can do nothing.
If pious people step over the edge of a cliff, down
they go. Their piety does not save them
because they are ignoring a law of nature - gravity. If there are similar immutable laws -
spiritual laws - these too must be obeyed.
No excuse is made for ignorance of spiritual laws any more than there is
for physical laws. We suffer if we
disobey them. Piety does not excuse
us. In veganism we can see that
something happens that is beyond our wildest dreams and if I am asked what do I
think about the progress of the Vegan Society after 60 years of struggle, by
thousands of workers in it, here and throughout the world, I would say a brief
comment that progress has been better than I expected. Next question.
GDR: Well
that question was on gardening, but the answer was over a very wide area. What are your views on organic gardening and
agriculture, and by "organic" of course I mean "veganic"?
DW: You've seen my row of compost heaps, each with
wire netting round the sides, to let the air in, covered with a roof. Those
compost heaps have never had any animal manure on them. Not that I have any
objection to animal manure, it's all been part of the natural scene since the
beginning of time, only to animal manure coming from exploited animals. My compost heaps are filled with all the
weeds, grass mowings, vegetable waste from the garden, dead leaves, except for
privet leaves. I once tried one packet
of some activator, I forget what it was called, I thought it was terribly
expensive, I tried this on one of the sections of the compost heap, and I felt
the compost wasn't any better the next year, so I never used it again.
There is also a huge leaf hopper, which I built of
brick, early in my retirement. It's about ten feet high and six feet square,
and the bricks are set with spaces between for the air to go through, and when
we have more compost than the usual compost heaps will hold, or the compost
needs more than a year to decompose, we simply throw it in that bin which has a
little trap door at the bottom, where, several years later, the compost can be
shovelled out and taken back to the garden.
All my digging was done with a fork, not a spade, so as not to harm
earthworms.
GDR: Do you
feel that all food production should be grown organically?
DW: Well, ideally, yes. I think in a vegan world,
of course, there wouldn't be any animal manure on the scale that we have it
now. I suppose we could always have a few animals, oh it would be a dangerous
experiment to use, because we'd have the problem of the surplus males, as all
the people who've tried goat keeping have found, but they could be allowed to
live in a wild state over tracts of land, there'd be plenty of land to house
them, of course, if it wasn't used for growing crops largely for animals, as at
present.
Every vegan knows, of course, that the units of
nutrition that can be got from any area of fertile land are many times greater
if that land is devoted to plant crops than to animals and even in this age
when the seas are overfished, I'm told that fish farms are not the answer to
the question, because for every ton of fish that comes from them, between one
and three tons of fish, smaller fish, according to the kind of fish they're
farming, has to be used to feed the salmon or whatever else. So, this attack on the sea must still be
used, in order to feed this terribly unnatural means of creating an unnatural
food. And one further point about fish
and fishing, which has always been accepted as a very peaceful occupation, one
to encourage young children to adopt, because it takes their mind off other
nefarious things that young people fall into - these creatures can never be a
threat to man, because they're trapped in their environment. Unlike any other animal pests, they can never
over-run the dry land - they're trapped there, and, when caught, they can never
relieve their feelings with a scream, like other animals do. What agony they
die in, in their millions, will never be known. So much for the pacifist view
of fishing, and fish farms.
GDR: Moving on from fish farms to genetically
modified organisms, in fact a lot of farmed fish are genetically modified, what
are your views on genetically modified organisms, plants or animals?
DW: Well, it seems to me, as an ordinary,
not-very-scientific person, the whole thing seems too good to be true - that we
can alter the genetic make-up of any animal or plant by clever working in the
laboratory, so that genes taken from fish can produce strawberries that have a
longer shelf life. As the old saying has
it, if a thing seems too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true,
and I'm sure this is a classic example, quite apart from the irreversible genetic
nature of what is our basic food supply in the future. We mustn't "play God", to use a
religious expression. Science must
realise that there must be commonsense bounds to whatever they do, otherwise
they may find themselves with irreversible problems, which science can't
solve. When H G Wells, late in life,
wrote his book, "The Fate of Homo Sapiens", which I read recently,
towards the end of that book, he said, "There is only one invention that I
can think of that didn't create more problems than the one it sought to
solve." Now that may have been an
exaggeration; the example he quoted was chloroform. What seems to be a wonderful innovation
makes problems that alter virtually the whole of Man's life, in every
respect. I suppose if he were alive today
he would use the motor car as a classic example. We can't reverse it now. I was thinking the other day of the recent
series on television of the hundred greatest Britons who had ever lived, I
thought someone ought to say what are our greatest inventions and mine would be
the bicycle. I can't think of a single
bad thing about the bicycle which was my main source of transport until I was
the age of fifty, when I bought a car, for reasons I needn't go into now. And it was invented by a blacksmith, who lived
just across the Solway Firth.
GDR: What are
your views on blood sports? I presume you're agin them! You know, fox
hunting, shooting, you've already spoken about angling.
DW: I think it's the bottom of the barrel. However
necessary we may feel that, having got into this mess, we have to kill some
creatures for their own good, to kill creatures for fun must be the very dregs.
And to think that much of the "sport" is led by the so-called
aristocracy, I think prompts the idea, who are the aristocracy? Well, I think we choose ourselves whether
we're going to be in the aristocracy.
The aristocracy are the people who live by high moral principles, who
try to keep themselves healthy, who don't gossip about other people, by saying
things that they wouldn't say to their face, which constitutes most of what we
call gossip. The aristocracy are the
people, certainly, who don't kill for fun, of all things, and the people who
refuse to join the long queue to their own extermination and to the gutter.
Someone once said, "The way to Heaven is the
first turning to the right and keep straight on." Well, whatever sort of place Heaven might be,
I consider veganism is, as near to that aspiration that we, as fallible humans,
can get. Someone also said, "Heaven
is a temper, not a place." and I hope most vegans would believe in
that. But, whilst I'm referring to wise
things that other people said, may I quote four lines of poetry that have
always impressed me, by that very prolific poet, Anon.
Someone ought to write a book of a collection of
all the wise things that Anon said, and this one, my word, it's true. These are
the four lines.
We are all
blind until we see that, in the human plan,
Nothing is
worth the making, that does not make the man.
Why build these
cities glorious, if man unbuilded goes?
We build a
world in vain, unless the builder also grows.
What wisdom there is there! At this time, all our
cities are under threat, needlessly, because Man has taken a wrong turning,
early in his history, and throughout all recorded history, even throughout all
his early battles. I read recently about
the Battle of Agincourt. At the end of
the day, the corpses of horses and men were lying six feet deep. Why should one creature have suffered as the
horse has done, in the service of such a fallen creature as we are? And remember, we're all descended from tens
of thousands of generations of these violent people. The miracle is that any of
us, at this late stage, could find in our make-up, the wherewithal to have this
latent wisdom, to see the folly, and to act upon it and to spread the gospel so
that other people may be infected as the same way as people are infected with
evil in all its forms.
One thing the first vegans decided upon early in
our experiment, shall I call it, is that we should try to avoid what annoys us
in propagandists in other fields and we decided that the first person singular,
"I", should not be repeated too often, because it can make a barrier,
like a fence, cutting us off from those we would convert. So, in all my early writings, I doubt, if I
ever used the first person singular and another thing we thought would be wise,
would be not to exaggerate before we had proved our point, because we couldn't
escape the fact that we were taking on the world, unlike any other reformers
before - we were in this tremendously responsible position of saying to
virtually everyone else, "You are just plain wrong, in so many aspects of
the things you are claiming in your life style."
GDR: What are
your views on animal experiments?
DW: I said that cruel sports were the bottom of the
barrel. I think I've got to move even them one up, and put vivisection at the
bottom. It is probably the cruellest of all Man's attack on the rest of
Creation. Particularly since it hopes to
give benefits. Even if it does, we must
ask the question, after millions of lives have been sacrificed, if all this
effort had gone into other fields of investigation, like simple reformed
living, would not the results far outweigh the benefits of vivisection,
whatever they may be. I think one
question vegetarians and vegans should always ask when we think that cruelty,
these days, is largely delegated to the people who perform it, is the simple
question, if these butchers and vivisectors weren't there, could we perform the
acts that they are doing? And, if we
couldn't, we have no right to expect them to do it on our behalf. Full stop!
That simply compounds the issue.
It means that we're not just exploiting animals - we're exploiting human
beings. So that, day after day, year
after year, they're doing their job, to think again of Lang's famous words
"in the firm belief that they are doing nothing wrong."
GDR: OK. What
are your views on direct action?
DW: I've
never become involved in it, except in the general way of being a propagandist,
which is the most direct action of all.
I respect the people enormously who do it, believing that it's the most
direct and quick way to achieve their ends.
If I were an animal in a vivisection cage, I would thank the person who
broke in and let me out, but, having said that, we must always remember: is it
just possible that our act could, just could, be counter-productive? I'd rather not say "yes" or
"no", because I don't know the answer to that.
I've respect for all the people who do it, but my
own personal feeling is that I wouldn't do it. To use an analogy, I sometimes
see, when on my walks, people climbing up vertical cliffs with their ropes and
I sometimes think, there is an alternative way of getting to the top and
getting the view, by just going a few hundred yards sideways, and walking up a
valley. A rock-climber would, of course,
say that idea is nonsense, we don't do it for the view, we do it for the
challenge! But, if people want challenges,
there is no shortage of sensible, humane, safe, challenges to get engaged
in. I would never take up rock-
climbing, and dangle on the end of a rope, that might be weak in one spot. The strength of a chain is its weakest link,
and so is the strength of a rope, and if that rope breaks, as inevitably, I
think it will, sooner or later, I would probably get killed. And then I wouldn't be able to proceed with
whatever peaceful work I'm on earth to do.
So, rock-climbing is out, as far as I'm concerned. But, at least, it isn't hunting innocent
animals and I don't stand on a soapbox to condemn them - it's their own
business, let them get on with it. (As long as they don't disturb peregrines'
nests on the way up!)
GDR: What are
your views on vaccination?
DW: Vaccination? I wasn't vaccinated as a child. I
was always too weak!
GDR: So weak
that you're now 92 years old?!!
DW: Yes. I was a weakling, I suffered from
constipation, I'd a weak heart, I'd
anaemia. For a long period in my
schooldays I had to go down to Boots with my weight card, on doctor's orders,
to have my weight registered. So, I wasn't vaccinated. My brother was, and my sister was, and my
sister had a terrible arm, I remember.
She was eight years younger than I was, but I wasn't vaccinated, and I
didn't get smallpox. There is a story,
by the way, about vaccination, which tells us how careful we have to be about
statistics. It dates from the days of
the Raj in India, where a company of recruits went out to serve in the army,
and they were lectured by the Medical Officer of Health, warning them that they
should be vaccinated. It wasn't
compulsory but the evidence was very strong that they'd be in dire danger if
they weren't. In the last company, who'd
gone out the year before, half of those who were not vaccinated had died. But when someone pursued the records, they
found that only two were not vaccinated, of whom one never got smallpox, and
the other one was killed by a tiger, so his claim that fifty percent of the
soldiers who weren't vaccinated were completely wiped out was absolutely true,
but one needs to know aII the facts before falling for statistics, especially
from those who have something to sell. I
like to think that vegans are less naive and gullible than most people and, more
often than other people, they comment, when they read an advert, by saying
"Well, they would say that, wouldn't they?"
What do I think about vaccination? That was the question. I keep going off the point! Of course, smallpox was a terrible killer and
it wasn't surprising that scientists sought some kind of antidote, to protect
the people from it. We shall never know, of course, whether smallpox, like all
the other zymotic diseases, came about, not through lack of prophylactics, but
through wrong living, which so reduced the natural resistance of Man that he
couldn't meet the attacks of pathogens, which were there all the time, in his
environment. And I pin my faith now to
building up our natural resistance against disease.
GDR: Of
course, the point is that most, if not all, vaccines, are cultured on things
like chick embryos, and other animal materials.
DW: Oh, yes!
And I may add that most orthodox medicines are also proved, or tested,
on animals, and this perhaps is the greatest inconsistency in vegetarians and
vegans who may try to conform to the rules of their societies, but take
orthodox medicines, hoping that they've not been produced as a result of animal
tests. And that is one reason I've never
taken them. And, in my view, that is a more
serious inconsistency even than wearing leather or using wool, because these
are by-products of industries that are primarily there to provide meat. I know, in a vegan world, these products
wouldn't exist. But we mustn't fuss
about what are obviously the lesser evils of a life in which we're trying to
cope with situations that are brought about by a world designed to cope for
people who don't hold our principles. We
must try to find another way round the back, and, hopefully, I think we must do
it over the years and perhaps over the decades by bringing back our natural
resistance. I sometimes feel we must all
accept that, in nature, the law of the fittest prevails - the weakest go to the
wall and the strong carry on the story.
The strong breed and Man is the only exception where we give precedence
to the weak, instead of letting them go to the wall. But I would add, we must also match nature's
system by eliminating the weak by making them strong. That is the ultimate answer. And that can only come about, probably, over
generations, by correcting these dreadful mistakes that Man has made throughout
the whole of his history. That is why
veganism must come first among all our noble causes we support and nearly all
of us, I suppose, subscribe to many of them.
I know in my case, my pension, or quite a substantial part of it, goes
to causes which are tackling the problem in a fragmented way, but I see the
point of their limited approach to what is inevitably a much wider and more
difficult problem.
GDR: What do
you think of the way the Vegan Society has developed since you were running it?
You've already partly answered that, and you also said you wanted to talk about
the magazine. So, perhaps you could develop that now.
DW: Well, better than expected, certainly. One wonders how far it will go, now that we
have the machine all set up, at great expense and work on behalf of thousands
of people, hundreds of them already earning a living, catering for the vegan
idea in one kind or another. The fact is
that it is still here, growing stronger, all the time, now spreading to many
parts of the world. This 2003 calendar,
with my picture on it, is from a vegan society in New South Wales. I think the genie is now out of the bottle,
no-one can ever put it back, to the ignorant days before 1944, when this seed
was planted by people full of hope, full of aspiration that surely this idea
would attract enough followers for it at least to survive.
And now, of course, we have our attractive
quarterly magazine. I can't help
comparing it with my humble "Vegan News" which I produced at great
labour before the Society was first inaugurated. Normally I spent a whole night assembling the
various pages, and stapling them together.
I'd limited the number of people, who subscribed their five shillings a
year, to five hundred, because I couldn't cope with a bigger number.
I had my own life to live, which wasn't easy at
that time, and to produce five hundred copies of a twelve-page newsletter meant
running six thousand pieces of paper slowly through my Roneo and inspecting
each one to see that every line was clear and readable, because there would
have been no point in all my work if what I sent out wasn't readable! Even one word missing from a sentence can
make the reader wonder about the whole sense of that sentence. This brings me to the only criticism I have
of our present attractive magazine. I
hesitate to make it but it is made constructively in the hope that we will have
a yet better magazine. There is a little
jingle, you know, that must have been invented long ago, for children, which
went "good, better, best, never may I rest, till my good is better, and my
better best". That is not only good
advice to children, it's good advice to all of us, and to those who produce
magazines, propagating ideas in the hope that they'll convert readers, but how
can they convert anyone if they leave the reader in doubt of what was written?
And so I come to my only criticism and I'm going to
quote the misuse of colour, which can add so much to the attractiveness of any
periodical. If the printer uses his art
to make anything that's printed difficult to read then he must be told that
this is not desirable and I'm going to quote, however pretty his art might make
a periodical appear, an article that appeared in the Summer 2002
"Vegan". It's called
"Carrots and Cannibals". It
was printed in the usual spidery type, which I feel, for the benefit of those
who are growing old, could be one step larger, to make the type easier to read,
but it's printed on a coloured background so that, in my case, I found it so
hard going to read that I missed it out and about a fortnight later I went
back, with the help of a hand glass, and I read this article, which was one of
the best articles I have ever read in "The Vegan", written by Anne
Philbrow. I thought what a pity if other people like me, older people, have not
read that article that was so carefully constructed, just because it was simply
too difficult to read. Compare that with
this clear printing on the front of the Summer "Vegan" - white
letters on a dark background, standing out clearly, and yet, in the latest
magazine, we get the contents in white letters on a virtually white background
- most difficult to read for most people whose eyesight is not as good as it
was.
So, I say there's nothing wrong with colour
printing providing it doesn't obliterate the words or make them more difficult
to read, especially for older people who may, for all we know, be the very
people who leave legacies to the Society.
The legacies don't come from teenagers or young people who're
struggling, day by day, to live, and pay the basic living expenses, to keep
their business, and their educations, going.
The legacies come from older people, not rich people, but people with no
dependents, very often, who can leave thousands of pounds as a kind of blood
transfusion to keep our message still available for those who are drawn to read
it. I suppose there may be people who
will object to that, or any other, criticism, but I felt, early in my life as a
propagandist, in vegetarian societies especially, and, in the early days of the
Vegan Society, we were sometimes unfortunate enough to find, on our committees,
people who seemed to object to everything, relishing it, at last, because of
frustrations elsewhere in their own lives, in their jobs or in their
marriages. At last they'd found a
platform where other people had to listen.
These people are few and far between, but they mustn't be allowed to
destroy the peaceful atmosphere of people who travel far, and very often at
their own expense, to deliver what they see as a fair judgement on the problems
that we have to face as a movement. I
won't say that they must be swatted, but they must be told, or made to see, in
the nicest possible way, that this isn't the way to behave in any
committee. I've never been at a Vegan
Society Council meeting, I don't know the people on it, it's no reflection on
anyone there, but I've seen it happen in my early experience, and I suppose it
happens on all committees - people who relieve their frustrations, created by
factors elsewhere in life, and glorifying the fact that at long last they have
a vote and people have to listen. May
such people always be outvoted by the more sensible members of any committees,
anywhere, where we try to make the difficult process of democracy work. Compared with democracy, dictatorship has
obvious advantages. I know, from the
work I did, in the two years before the Vegan Society was formed, when I'd
no-one to consult, I could do everything my own way, I don't think in those
years I could have survived, if I had to write to the few people concerned, and
ask for their opinion. I had no
telephone, I'd no motor car, I could only hope that they would see my point,
until the point arrived, when I had to hand over the work to a committee and to
people paid to do the job. All the
early work was done by volunteers.
In a way everyone whom the Society has ever paid to
do the office work, to answer all the thousands of enquiries, that a growing
movement, bursting with contacts, receives, all those people have necessarily
been underpaid, so that, when their so-called salaries have been used, to pay
their basic expenses, in a way they've all been volunteers. Even our Chief Executive is on a wage at the
very bottom of anything else that is paid in the commercial sector. Because we
can afford nothing more. And we're
enormously grateful to these people, because heaven knows what would happen if
they all packed in, and got jobs stacking supermarket shelves or something as
menial as that, in order to keep the show on the road. So, my own opinion must be to say a big
"thank you", you won't be there for ever, you can't be, by the nature
of the job you have. And that job, in my
view, is the most important job in the world.
I wrote a letter when our last Chief Executive was appointed, reminding
him that he had the most important job in the world, but unfortunately not the
highest paid. So the Vegan Society has
always, in that sense, been supported by voluntary labour. May there always be people who apply for
vacancies in the office, who are willing to make this sacrifice, even for a
brief period in their careers. We're all
indebted to them. Next question.
GDR: In what
direction do you think the Vegan Society should go in the future?
DW: I hesitate to suggest anything to a movement
which seems to be going well, and spreading world wide, and silencing critics,
still surviving, still around. Speaking
from my old age, I sometimes think I've outlived my critics, and I can't
remember the last time that I encountered one.
The edifice, if that's the right word, that survived all attacks before
we started our work, now is crumbling, because of the inherent weakness of its
own structure. Even farming, which for
centuries was our basic industry, employing more people than any other, seems
now to be on the way out. Farmers can no
longer get insurance against diseases like BSE, foot and mouth disease, all the
rest of the afflictions that farmers need to handle, usually at great expense,
through the service of vets, and as we saw in the foot and mouth debacle,
having their whole animal populations wiped out, destroying not only their own
industry, but, certainly in many parts of the country, the tourist industry
too. People were no longer willing to
come to the Lake District, for instance, if they couldn't walk on the
fells. So, the tourist industry, which
was far more valuable than the farming industry, suffered. I won't say irretrievably, because, even
after one year, it is now, slowly, getting back to normal, but if we had a
return of the foot and mouth disease, any government in power would have to
have a different policy altogether from that applied in the last time. Farmers are diversifying, but there is a
limit to the extent that this can go.
They need to be ingenious, hard-working, living on a lower income than
they've ever had before, and wondering whether their children could carry on
their farms, as they have done for centuries before, when the parents were no
longer able to run them.
GDR: Do you
have any regrets about your life?
DW: Well, after a slow start, I married the right
woman, at the ripe old age of 36, and we remained happily married for 47 years,
until her death nine years ago. That certainly wasn't anything I regretted,
although we live in different times now, and whether, if I were young today, I
would ever dare to commit myself for life, for better or worse, to anyone else,
I hesitate, but that's a hypothetical situation, which fortunately I'll never
have to meet. But the marriage vows, for better or worse, were necessary in
centuries past, when, if a man walked out on a woman, she was bereft of an
income, and, especially for those who had passed the first flush of attractive
youth, they had a very bleak future indeed.
I'm not an opponent of marriage, because it worked well for me, but I do
think that, when it doesn't work, it can be a most cruel affliction, especially
on the innocent party. That isn't
directly associated with veganism, it can happen to anyone on any diet, of
course, or life style. But, because
things are changed, we have to take a more tolerant view of those who feel
that, when young, they made a mistake, and they deserve to be given a fresh
start, either with a new partner, married or not. I mustn't say more on that subject because it
doesn't, strictly speaking, relate to veganism any more than it does to any
other life style.
GDR: It
doesn't have to be related to veganism, Donald.
But thank you for that answer.
DW: I've been lucky in that I chose the right job,
and, as I said in my little speech when I retired at the age of 63, as a
woodworker I'd been a square peg in a square hole and that I'd never seriously
thought of doing anything else. That indeed is luck which many people, alas,
never have. So, I had the right wife, I
had the right job, I've lived in the right place which I can't fault, except
there aren't enough vegans in it, but one lesson we have to learn in life is we
mustn't expect too much. We have to say,
"So far so good, I've been lucky, I appreciate it, and, indeed, what have
I done to deserve it?", when things repeatedly go right, while for so many
other people they go wrong. Is that
luck? Or is it something that happens
inevitably if one pursues a course that one feels is right? And, having made that commitment, day by day,
one feels one's way as one goes along.
GDR: What do
you consider your greatest achievement in your life?
DW: My
greatest achievement? Well, it's in
succeeding, I think, although I mustn't be the judge, in my own estimation, in
achieving what I set out to do. One can
hardly rise higher in one's opinion of one's life in general, than to feel I
was instrumental in starting a great new movement which could even, not only
change the course of things, for Humanity and the rest of Creation, but alter
Man's expectation of surviving for much longer on this planet.
GDR: If you had your life to live over again,
what changes would you make, if any?
DW: There is one little thing that I would
change. In my early days, before I was
married, I had a succession of digs, or lodgings, and, sometimes, when I went
away at the weekend, I would ask for a reduction on the weekly rent I paid,
because obviously I hadn't been there, eating the food. I always got it, but I feel now that I
niggled about something which a more generous person would have forgotten
about. I wouldn't niggle about money any
more, if I had my time again.
GDR: Donald, do you have any message for the many
thousands of people who are now vegan?
DW:
Yes. I would like them to take
the broad view of what veganism stands for.
Something beyond finding a new alternative to, shall we say scrambled
eggs on toast, or a new recipe for a Christmas cake. I would like them to realise that they're on
to something really big, something that hadn't been tried until sixty years
ago, and something which is meeting every reasonable criticism that anyone can
level against it.
And I would say that this doesn't involve weeks or
months of studying diet charts or reading books by so-called experts. It means grasping a few simple facts and
applying them, just as the early sailors, who were at sea for months, found
they developed scurvy because they were lacking in vitamin C, because they were
living on dried meat and biscuits, and when they made port, and had access to
fruits like limes, their illnesses vanished.
Simple proof, like that, that someone once wrote a book, I think his
name was Otto Carque and he called the book "Vital Facts About
Food". That was written a long time
ago, and we could add to it today, with many things that have been discovered
by trial and error, over the last sixty years.
I think all vegans should make themselves familiar with these very
simple facts and remember, all the time, what an awful lot of danger they're
avoiding. In the early days our critics
used to say, "You don't know what you're missing!" We know now! We're missing an awful lot that they're
having! Conditions so serious that it
shortens their life by many decades, gives them pains and illnesses very soon
after the first flush of youth has passed, and ties them to that medicated
regime for the rest of their lives. That
is what vegans are missing, providing, as I say, they obey a few simple,
commonsense, rules. That's my message to
vegans who have not been long in the cause.
GDR: Do you
have any message for vegetarians?
To vegetarians, I would say, accept, as, if you're
honest you must, that vegetarianism, whilst being a necessary stepping-stone,
between meat eating and veganism, is only a stepping stone. We all use this
stepping stone, I've not met a vegan who didn't approach the movement by that
route. There may be vegans I've never known,
over the last sixty years, who made the change all in one leap, but I'm sure
that, being a realist, I accept that vegetarianism is a necessary staging-post
in the evolution of humane dietetics.
All my early work was in the vegetarian movement. I ran the Leicester Vegetarian Society for
many years. I organised their monthly
meetings. I met virtually all the
speakers at that time, who were anybody in the movement. I got a unique insight into what was then
considered as far as anyone might be expected to go towards a plant-based diet,
but, of course, we've now moved on from there and vegetarians must realise
that, although they might find it inconvenient at times, to go the whole way,
that is .the path that our experience shows that they must go.
GDR: Do we
have your permission to publish an edited extract of this interview in
"The Vegan" and a longer version of this interview on the website?
DW: Yes, you have my full permission. I do fear the consequences of publication
because it could lead to the kind of correspondence I had in the early years -
far too many letters, or perhaps even callers, that I could possibly deal
with. That is my only fear. I suppose I could reply by directing them to
7 Battle Road.
GDR: That's
the thing to do. In fact, there's not
likely to be all that many letters nowadays, but there'll be floods of emails.
You can't receive emails anyway, so that lets you off the hook! And the office can easily deal with emails.
DW: Since all these new methods of communication
have led to the virtual extinction of letter-writing, which someone once said
was the gentlest art, my letters now are few and far between. I'm always delighted to have them - providing
they don't need replies!
I might say there that when I was producing the
"Vegan News", the hard work really was not producing the newsletter,
but the avalanche of correspondence that followed, most of which needed
answering, many of which didn't include a stamped addressed envelope for the
reply, which I hardly knew how to deal with, being on two pounds a week, and
yet the questions were so sensible and those who wrote them were so sincere,
that usually, and I think always, I did reply to them. I can't think of, ever, not replying to a serious
enquiry, but I can't guarantee that now, in my old age, that would still be
possible.
GDR: One last
question. Won't you please come and visit the office in St Leonards? I've asked you before, and you haven't
come! I would be very pleased, in fact
I'd be honoured to collect you from here, and drive you down there myself - I
suggest not in the wintertime, but maybe in the springtime when the milder
weather comes along.
DW: You are
rather out on a limb, aren't you, for anyone living up here in the far north -
not as far north as you are, of course, but then you're, what is it, thirty
years younger than I am. Would you do it
in thirty years' time? That's the
point. I’m a sociable person - I seem to
have been mixed up with crowds of people all my life, and I do like, now, to
meet them one at a time. I feel that one
of my anathemas in life is what is called "the lively debate", where
so many people all talk together, across each other, so that no-one can tell
what anyone says. I think when one
person is speaking, the rest should listen and that, nowadays, is expecting a
lot of people when they assemble.
And another thing I've noticed, especially in the
last few years, people on television seem to be speaking faster and faster all
the time, and I feel if only they'd slow down, and think a little bit more
before they say it, there's a saying, if I can remember it, "People who
say what they think, should think what they say", because so often people
say what they think, and then they regret it.
That is one of the dangers of being a propagandist.
GDR: Well,
you know what they say - if you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.
DW: Yes,
that's very true. And yet, the
propagandist has to get the message across somehow. In my early days I accepted that the pen is mightier
than the sword, and the pen in my case was a typewriter, which I had to buy
second-hand along with my Roneo in order to get started, and I had to learn how
to use them.
I sometimes think, well I'm thinking non-stop, all
the day, just sitting down with my comfortable body, well fed, and not short of
sleep, at long last, I've no commitments, I just think, and providing I'm warm,
I think of the future as Man has always done, of course, and, sometime,
inevitably, I suppose within the next ten years, one morning I won't wake
up. What then? There'll be a funeral, there'll be a
smattering of people at it, and, as Shaw forecast at his own funeral, there'll
be all the spirits of all the animals he'd never eaten. In that case, it will be a big funeral!
And I certainly don't seek fame in any form, except
when I'm dead and then, only because the idea I spawned will be progressing,
generation after generation, learning how to be healthy, how to avoid all the
pitfalls that are bringing other people down, and leaving one satisfied in the
sense that one has gone as far as one could with the limited mental and
emotional equipment we have. Further
than that, I can't think that mortal Man can travel any further always keeping
our ears open for those who have new ideas as we expect our would-be converts
to listen what we have to say. Veganism
certainly can't stand still, it must move on, perhaps in the direction of more
raw food when we all know the destructive power of heat on food, how its nature
is changed and perhaps its value too.
Finally, if this is the last question, I think we should accept that
although enormous strides have been made, by our workers over the last sixty
years, science hasn't got the complete answer.
I doubt if anyone really knows how our digestion
works. They might think they know, but
the whole thing is so wonderful, that food can be converted into flesh and
blood, bone and hair, as well as energy, mental processes, and even into
spiritual enlightenment, that science has hardly got round to accepting as a
possibility. We don't know the spiritual
advancements that long term veganism - I mean not over years or even decades,
but over generations, would have on human life.
It would be certainly a different civilisation, and the first one in the
whole of our history that would truly deserve the title of being a
civilisation. Full stop.
GDR: Which, I
think, is a very positive note on which to end the interview. Thank you,
Donald.
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Update 11 July 2019:
This interview is currently also available as a PDF on the Vegan Society website.
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Update 11 July 2019:
This interview is currently also available as a PDF on the Vegan Society website.