Collecting things seems to be human nature: lots of people collect interesting and quirky things which tell stories about their lives. Last summer I was introduced to a remarkable collection of badges, belonging to Betty Smalley, well-known volunteer and Burngreave activist. Over a period of fifteen years, Betty and her friends accumulated almost 25O badges, mostly bought at CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) marches. She came into the office last week to tell me the story behind her collection.
“When I was a young woman in my twenties there were marches Aldermaston against the bomb. I remember that my father thought the people involved were ‘barmy’ and, as a dutiful daughter, I didn’t really question that view. But then in 1979 I started to become interested in the campaign against nuclear power. It was just after the Harrisburg nuclear accident in the USA when there was a leak from one of the nuclear reactors on Three Mile Island. I remember talking to my son about it and realising that I had to do something. At that time, the national CND office was based in Sheffield and there were lots of local CND groups all over the city. I joined the Grimesthorpe Anti-Nuclear Group and we used to travel round the country going to marches and other events.Our mission statement said that we existed ‘to counter the nuclear threat’! Buying badges at each
event was one way of showing support and raising money so I kept on buying them.And friends such as Steve Cook and Sheilagh Waugh added to it. And so it became quite a collection, covering CND events and all sorts of other campaigns.”
“What do the badges mean to you?” I asked Betty.
“Well, they bring back lots of memories. I’m not a militant or an evangelist but the campaign offered me a way of expressing my concern and sympathy with different causes. And I met some marvellous people involved in them.We went all over the place to marches: London, Fylingdales, Menwith Hill, and Alconbury. I even danced around the fence at Greenham Common and we sang all the way.We organised local protests too: on the anniversary of Hiroshima, we used to dress in white and go to Firth Park >shopping centre, handing out posies of flowers with messages to remember those who had died in the war. People seemed to like that. And we organised a local showing of a film that had been banned by the BBC, which showed the impact of nuclear war.”
Looking at the badges brings back some of the great campaigning slogans and causes from the 1980s and ’90s. Amongst the CND collection are ones like ‘Bread not Bombs’, ‘Nuclear power, no thanks!’, ‘Give Peace a Chance’ and ‘Ageing hippies against the Bomb’. There are several from the days of Anti Apartheid – ‘Free Mandela’ and ‘I don’t bank on apartheid: boycott Barclays’; others from the Miners’ Strike – ‘Coal, not Dole’ and ‘Is there life after Thatcher?’; plus those with a foreign interest, such as Chile and El Salvador. They illustrate some of the big causes that Sheffield people have been involved in.
Betty told me:
“I really treasure those badges, so I was delighted when Sheffield Galleries & Museums Trust accepted my offer to donate them to Weston Park Museum. I’m so pleased they can use the collection to show a part of history that sometimes gets forgotten.”
For anyone interested in seeing them, the badges will be on show at Weston Park Museum when it reopens from 14th October. They will form part of the ‘Sheffield life and times social history’ display which will feature some of the Sheffield people involved in campaigning and standing up for their rights, going back to the 1790s.
by Nicky Wilson
