Pat Pottle

Patrick Pottle (8 August 1938 – 1 October 2000) was a founding member of the Committee of 100, an anti-nuclear direct action group which broke away from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). He was born in Maida Vale, north London. His mother was from an Irish Catholic family: his father was a Protestant trades union official.[1]

In 1962, at the height of the Cold War, Pottle was jailed for 18 months for conspiracy (as one of the Wethersfield Six) to organise the Committee of 100 demonstrations at the nuclear base USAF Wethersfield in Essex.

In Wormwood Scrubs prison, Pottle met the spy George Blake and his outrage at the “vicious” sentence imposed on the spy led him and two others, Michael Randle and Sean Bourke, help Blake to escape in October 1966.[1][2][3]

A few months after Blake had escaped, Pottle met and married Susan Abrahams, the daughter of the Olympic champion Harold Abrahams and his wife, Sybil Evers.[4]

For most of his working life Pottle was a printer, running his own Stanhope Press in the 1960s, working as printer for the Peace Pledge Union in the early 1990s, and running his own Pottle Press in the late 1990s.

Notes
  1. Patrick Pottle, The Daily Telegraph, 4 October 2000
  2. Richard Norton-Taylor, Pat Pottle, The Guardian, 3 October 2000
  3. Nick Cohen, A jailbreak out of an Ealing comedy, New Statesman, 9 October 2000
  4. Lloyd Jones, The man who loved liberty, BBC, 22 February 2008
gollark: Politics is complicated and multidimensional and can't be conveniently reduced to 2 without losing something, but it conveys information.
gollark: Yes.
gollark: Again, it's the "all extreme ideologies look identical" horseshoe theory thing.
gollark: Radical centri-extremism.
gollark: The Riemann sphere thing is *basically* horseshoe theory.

References
  • Michael Randle and Pat Pottle. The Blake Escape: How We Freed George Blake — and Why. ISBN 0-245-54781-9, 1989
  • Illtyd Harrington. "Forget the train robbers, this was the great escape". Camden New Journal, 29 May 2003
  • Kevin O’Connor. Blake and Bourke and The End of Empires. ISBN 0-9535697-3-X, 2003
  • Extradition (Irish Republic), Hansard, 30 July 1982
  • Sean Bourke. The Springing of George Blake. ISBN 0-304-93590-5, 1970
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