Hugh O'Shaughnessy recalls the early days of the human rights organisation Amnesty and the essential role played by its founder, Peter Benenson, who died last Friday aged 83.
Electrified by his long article in the Observer that Sunday in 1961, I had written to Peter Benenson volunteering the services of the novice journalist that I was to a new campaign called Amnesty. Before many days were out I found myself sitting around a table in his barrister's chambers in a semi-basement at Mitre Court off Fleet Street with people such as the leading Quaker Eric Baker and Louis Blom-Cooper, who were older, wiser and much more experienced than I was.
It was a friendly, informal place. Jonathan Power, the historian of Amnesty, was right when he wrote, "There was little in the way of organisation or administration - budgets were so small that they were often worked out on the back of a cigarette packet in a pub. Everything hinged on Benenson's personality."
His was a personality of overwhelming, impetuous kindness, which perhaps he had inherited from his Russian Jewish grandfather, Grigori, who had got rich in oil and banking.
Ours was going to be a one-year affair which if we were lucky would be a intellectual rocket which would light up the sky for a short time, changing some minds and hearts, before it plunged to earth. The idea was that the pen was mightier than the sword - or indeed the prison bars.
Quite simply, Peter thought that if enough people could be persuaded to write to those who were jailing victims unjustly, then they could be freed. Our only calculation in those freezing days of the Cold War was that our little campaign should not be seen as in any government's pocket.
"Threes" would be organised, groups of volunteers committed to "adopting" detainees from the West, from the Soviet bloc and from what was then known as "the underdeveloped world". The prisoners would be written to and told they had not been forgotten. Their captors would equally be informed, much in the manner of the Skibbereen Eagle eyeing the tsar of Russia, that they were being watched.
As other volunteers swarmed in asking for jobs, filing and researching, this journalist was given the job of producing a magazine for the campaign. It was an amateurish affair but it did carry the message out, I suppose.
Meanwhile, the whole ramshackle organisation moved on to various cramped and unattractive little offices in the City of London.
One of the first tasks was to agree on a symbol - the word "logo" had not yet come into common parlance. Much thought was put into this but one day the problem was solved as if by magic.
Diana Redhouse, an artist, arrived at a committee meeting bearing a candle mounted on a piece of plywood and surrounded by barbed wire. "That's it", was the immediate response of all of us round the table. It was formally adopted at a gathering at St Martin's in the Fields, the church in which Benenson had sat and had the first idea for Amnesty. Amnesty's abolition after a year was soon to be clearly seen as nonsensical.
As the difficult job went ahead of organising volunteers in methodical habits of research and analysis, the idea of investigating missions, such as Peter himself had mounted in the 1950s for the Trade Union Congress to political trials in Franco's Spain, came to the fore.
As one who went to the Shah's Iran and Salazar's Portugal, I can vouch for their often rudimentary nature. With no knowledge of Farsi, I found myself in Tehran seeking information about some of the many political prisoners of the man on the Peacock Throne. I was soon struggling with a welter of contradictory evidence from the supporters and opponents of a particularly odious dictatorship and the intelligence I brought back was scrappy.
In Lisbon, the main contact I was given appears to have been an informer for the PIDE, the dictator's secret police, who doubtless apprised his masters of my investigations.
Meanwhile, the tensions within the organisation between the idealists and the organisation people, between those who were too suspicious of outside manipulation and those who were too trusting, multiplied.
In 1966 these spilled over on to Peter himself and he withdrew from the organisation and was not to be reconciled with it till the 1980s.
The wreckers and manipulators had their period of victory. Finally, however, Amnesty emerged stronger than ever, as the world's leading human rights organisation.