Charlotte Johnson Wahl (1942-2021) Labour voter & CND supporter
Charlotte Johnson Wahl has died at 79. An accomplished portrait painter who has exhibited her work, she was also previously married to Stanley Johnson and is the mother of Boris Johnson.
Her family background and views suggest someone firmly part of the British Establishment, indeed far more so than the Johnson variant.
She was a member of the Fawcett family well known campaigners for women’s suffrage and human rights and against racism.
Her father Sir James Fawcett was a member of the European Commission of Human Rights. Her mother Beatrice was the first translator of Thomas Mann into English.
In short the Fawcett’s were (and no doubt) a classically liberal part of the English if not the British Establishment.
Boris Johnson’s biographer Sonia Purcell notes that Charlotte certainly in younger years was a Labour voter, CND supporter and attender at anti-apartheid protests. Purcell suggests some of this may have made its way into the Johnsonian worldview. I’m not so sure not least because material being determines consciousness (in the main)
Update
The London Review of Books (September 2020) published an account of Charlotte Fawcett’s CND activities(thanks to Ian Birchall for the link)
Over the Easter weekend of 1961 we took part in the CND march from the Atomic Weapons Research Centre at Aldermaston to London. The march, which had first taken place three years earlier, was already becoming an annual tradition. We went through Slough, and one slogan we chanted was a riposte to John Betjeman’s poem, with its call for ‘friendly bombs’ to fall on the town: ‘Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Slough – think now!’
In the summer Charlotte worked in London as a volunteer for the Africa Bureau, an anti-colonial think tank and part of the anti-apartheid movement, selling tickets for a benefit concert which starred the cast of Beyond the Fringe. At the gig, Peter Cook performed his Harold Macmillan routine, comparing the four-minute warning before a nuclear strike to Roger Bannister’s mile record (‘I’d like you to know that in this great country of ours a man can run a mile in four minutes’). In August I joined the Fawcett family at the villa they’d rented in Tuscany. Charlotte and I hitched back to England over several days, travelling in vehicles of every kind, from trucks to two-seater sports cars. We slept outside in northern Italy and France, and spent a restless night on the stony beach at Dieppe.
Our next political outing was in September 1961, in an action organised by the Committee of 100. The previous year, Bertrand Russell had given up the presidency of CND to play a leading role on the committee, whose members hoped to drive disarmament forward by means of civil disobedience and non-violent resistance. Two sit-down protests in London had drawn thousands and the Macmillan government reacted to the plan for a third – which was to culminate in a sit-down in Parliament Square – by banning the rally in Trafalgar Square that was to precede it. In the week leading up to the action, a third of the Committee of 100, among them Robert Bolt, Arnold Wesker and Christopher Logue, as well as Bertrand Russell and his wife, had been sent to jail, accused of inciting ‘members of the public to commit breaches of the peace’.
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