Michael Randle

Michael Randle (born 1933 in England) is best known as a peace campaigner and peace researcher, one of the pioneers of nonviolent direct action in Britain, and also for his role in helping the Soviet spy George Blake escape from a British prison.

Born in England in 1933, Michael Randle spent the years of the Second World War with relatives in Ireland. He has been active in the peace movement since registering as a conscientious objector to military service in 1951. He was a member of the Aldermaston March Committee which organised the first Aldermaston March against British nuclear weapons at Easter 1958; Chairman of the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War, 1958–61; Secretary of the Committee of 100, 1960–61; and a Council and Executive member of War Resisters' International, 1960–1988, chair from 1966–73. In 1959-60 he spent a year in Ghana, participating in the Sahara Protest Team against French atomic bomb tests in the Algerian Sahara and helping to organise a pan-African conference in Accra which took place in April 1960. In 1962 he was sentenced, along with five other members of the Committee of 100, to eighteen months' imprisonment for his part in organising nonviolent direct action at a USAF Wethersfield in Essex; it was while he was serving that sentence that his first son, Sean, was born. In October 1967 he was sentenced to twelve months' imprisonment for participating in an occupation of the Greek Embassy in London following the Colonels' coup in April of that year.

During his time in Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1962-3, he became friends with George Blake, the British MI6 agent condemned in 1961 to forty-two years imprisonment for passing information to the Soviet Union. His outrage at the “vicious” sentence imposed on Blake led him and two others, Pat Pottle and Séan Bourke, to free Blake in October 1966. Blake then stayed at 'safe' houses around London which were mostly friends of Randle's and Pottle's before he was hidden in a secret compartment in a camper van and Michael Randle drove him to Eastern Europe, with Randle's children sitting on top of the seat that Blake was hidden underneath to put off any customs officers who might look into the van. In June 1991 he and Pat Pottle stood trial at the Old Bailey for their part in the escape. They defended themselves in court, arguing that, while they in no way condoned Blake's espionage activities for either side, they were right to help him because the forty-two year sentence he received was inhuman and hypocritical. Despite a virtual direction from the judge to convict, the jury found them not guilty on all counts.

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