Pat Pottle
Patrick Pottle was a founding member of the Committee of 100, an anti-nuclear direct action group which broke away from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He was born in Maida Vale, north London. His mother was from an Irish Catholic family: his father was a Protestant trades union official.
In 1962, at the height of the Cold War, Pottle was jailed for 18 months for conspiracy to organise the Committee of 100 demonstrations at the nuclear base USAF Wethersfield in Essex.
In Wormwood Scrubs prison, Pottle met the spy George Blake and his outrage at the “vicious” sentence imposed on the spy led him and two others, Michael Randle and Sean Bourke, help Blake to escape in October 1966.
A few months after Blake had escaped, Pottle met and married Susan Abrahams, the daughter of the Olympic champion Harold Abrahams and his wife, Sybil Evers.
For most of his working life Pottle was a printer, running his own Stanhope Press in the 1960s, working as printer for the Peace Pledge Union in the early 1990s, and running his own Pottle Press in the late 1990s.
