Monday, June 20, 2011

Brian Haw


Haw under arrest before the State Opening of Parliament in 2010
Haw under arrest before the State Opening of Parliament in 2010 Photo: JEFF MOORE

Initially Haw, a former carpenter who began his vigil in June 2001, was protesting about the economic sanctions imposed by the West on Iraq, which, he claimed, were responsible for the deaths of 200 Iraqi children per day. For months he sat on a chair, fasting and praying. Not only were his prayers fruitless, but in the meantime Britain and America invaded first Afghanistan, then Iraq.

Initially Haw was regarded as something between harmless eccentric and damn nuisance, but as public opposition to the war in Iraq grew and as the authorities embarked on attempts to silence him, he acquired the status of a folk hero, symbol of protest and thorn in the side of an unpopular government. In 2006 he was voted the most inspiring political figure at the Channel 4 political awards.

Brian William Haw was born a twin, by 25 minutes, on January 7 1949, the eldest of five children. The family lived for a while in Barking, Essex, and then moved to Whitstable in Kent. They were involved in an evangelical church; Brian found his faith aged 11 at Sunshine Corner on the shingle beach next to the Oyster Company.

His father had been a sniper in the Reconnaissance Corps during the war and was among the first to enter Bergen-Belsen after its liberation. Afterwards, he worked in a betting office. Twenty years after seeing Bergen-Belsen, he gassed himself in the kitchen at the back of the church. Brian was 13.

Apprenticed to a boatbuilder at 16, he joined the Merchant Navy, sending home £4 a week. He worked as a deckhand and eventually received his certificate to steer 27,000-ton ships. He passed through the Suez Canal, climbed the Pyramids and toured the ports of the Middle East and India. He returned from one voyage to do six months at a college of evangelism in Nottingham, after which he decided to embark on a freelance mission to bring peace to the world.

Northern Ireland during the Troubles was his first port of call. At Christmas 1970 he took himself and his guitar to Belfast, singing carols in the streets round the Shanklin and Falls Roads and handing out white peace balloons in Republican pubs.

Having, by some miracle, survived this adventure, he moved to Essex where he started a removals business, also working part-time as a carpenter. He married Kay, the girl across the road and they later settled on an estate in Redditch, Worcestershire.

But family commitments did not dampen Haw’s missionary zeal and in 1989, powerfully affected by the films of John Pilger, he set off for the killing fields of Cambodia. He stayed there for three months, but when he returned he found that people did not want to hear about it: “My church gave me 10 minutes in a midweek prayer meeting to talk about genocide,” he recalled.