Sybil Morrison

Sybil Morrison (2 January 1893 – 26 April 1984) was a British pacifist and a suffragist as well as being active with several other radical causes.

As a young and enthusiastic suffragist, Morrison was persuaded by Emmeline Pankhurst that she was too young to go to prison. During World War I she began in 1916 to drive ambulances in London, and attributed her decision to become a pacifist to the sight of a Zeppelin being shot down over Potters Bar. In the streets of London, ordinary, decent people were clapping and cheering and dancing as though at a play or a circus……..I suddenly saw that war made yet another impact on human beings; it deprived them of their humanity. I became a pacifist then and nothing has happened since to alter my conviction that war is a crime against God and humanity.

Morrison became in 1936 one of the first women members of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU), a British pacifist organisation and UK section of War Resisters International (WRI). She served as a Campaign Organiser and Chair and wrote the first history of the PPU. In 1940 she spent a month in Holloway Prison, having spoken against the war at London’s Speakers' Corner. Morrison was an active member of the Women's International League for Peace & Freedom (WILPF), being at one stage the Chair of its British branch.

Sybil Morrison was secretary of the short-lived Women’s Peace Campaign, set up by the PPU at the end of 1939. It had been hoped to obtain the signatures of one million women against the Second World War but as Morrison admitted: The invasion of Scandinavia has, of course, made it much more difficult now to approach people about signing an appeal for negotiations because opinion is hardening against the pacifist. The Campaign was doomed after the surrender of the French in June, 1940 but the collapse may also have had something to do with the opposition of John Middleton Murry, editor of Peace News. Murry was described as having a “frightful” attitude towards women and was not at all supportive of the campaign.

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