Rob Skinner, University of Sussex
The ‘turbulent priests’ of the title: Michael Scott, John Collins, and Trevor Huddleston, were some of the most familiar names and faces of the international anti-apartheid movement. During the 1950s, they articulated a powerful critique of South African racial policies that promoted anti-apartheid sentiment in Britain, the United States, and later, elsewhere in Europe and the Commonwealth. In return, they were subject to the opprobrium of South Africa’s nationalist press, condemned as meddlesome outsiders and proponents of "foreign" ideas that threatened "natural" social relations.
Couched in such terms, the political roles of these individual churchmen and their relations with the state and religious institutions have often been regarded as an example of the complex and tense relations between Church and State. Much of the academic assessment of the function of religious convictions and theological debate within resistance to apartheid has taken place within this framework. Issues such as the emergence of a ‘prophetic’ liberation theology; the churches’ implication in denying, or reinforcing, the legitimacy of the state; or the tensions engendered by divided Christian communities have all been treated as important factors in the development of what has been dubbed the ‘Church Struggle’ in South Africa. Discussions of this kind have, however, tended to focus upon the particular and the national, rather than the broad and international, dimensions of Christian anti-apartheid discourse.
The reference in the title to ‘movement intellectuals’ alludes to recent interventions in the debate surrounding the phenomenon of social movements. Studies of international anti-apartheid movements have been informed by a number of approaches of social movements. Catherine Jennett, for example, has focussed upon the way the Australian anti-apartheid movement affected the shape of Australian cultural identity, while Donald Culverson has emphasised the role of political processes in the upsurge in anti-apartheid activity in the United States in the 1970s and 80s.
Within the literature, broad differentiations between and within social movements and the influence of local political and intellectual cultures upon the emergence of social movements have mitigated against neat definitions of the nature of movements. The sheer range of political and social activities that have been identified with social movements places a heavy burden upon theoretical structures designed to aid our understanding of these movements. Differences in approach have stretched the focus of attention across a spectrum ranging from the relations between movements and the political system to their role in the generation of ideas and knowledge, the legitimisation of values and the cultural objectives of social movements.
Yet some elements of social movement theory do offer useful guidelines to an understanding of anti-apartheid activism, and the public role of Christian activists within that movement. For example, Eyerman and Jamison’s delineation of a ‘cognitive approach’ to social movements, which talks of such movements in terms of creative processes that define new ‘conceptual spaces’ in social thought, may allow insight into the formative role played by Christian activists in the anti-apartheid movement. They highlight the importance of intellectual activity in the emergence of social movements, in particular the ‘movement intellectual’, social actors who define the ‘knowledge interests and cognitive identity’ of a particular movement. Furthermore, they attest to the crucial role played by "established" intellectuals in the creation of social movements, and the fluid relations between these "established" intellectuals and those intellectuals formed within the movement "space" itself. The ‘prophetic’ stance of Anglican priests such as Collins and Huddleston acted out the creative process by which knowledge of social injustice in South Africa became centred upon the conceptual "Other" encapsulated by the singular term, "apartheid".
Eyerman and Jamison’s notion of the movement intellectual illustrates one way in which social movement theory may enhance our understanding of the historical significance of Christian pioneers of anti-apartheid. Similarly, Paul Byrne’s study of Social Movements in Britain offers an insight into the salience of moral protest within British political culture, with its residual notion of the rights of citizens. Anti-apartheid activities during the 1950s thus emerged in a political context that legitimised moral protest while at the same time limited its affect upon those institutions it sought to influence. Opposition to apartheid was articulated by individuals operating within the British "establishment" and operated as a moral challenge to the rigid and hierarchical structures that reinforced both domestic social power and imperial authority. It is important, however, to regard anti-apartheid activities not merely in terms of their local significance but also to recognise the international, or better transnational, nature of the anti-apartheid movement. The form of political "opportunities" or the production of knowledge in particular socio-cultural contexts must therefore be balanced by an appreciation of the internationalist dimension of anti-apartheid activity.
This paper assesses the role of Christian voices in 1950s anti-apartheid discourse in three particular areas. Firstly, it will address the relationship, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, between liberal Christian universalism and an international political culture increasingly at odds with the dominant principles of the South African state. Second, it will examine the institutional dimension of anti-apartheid activities: the interaction between churches, international religious institutions and specialist secular organisations sympathetic to anti-apartheid protest. The final section will turn attention to the ways in which 1950s Christian activists helped to shape the modes of subsequent anti-apartheid protest.
Anti-apartheid and the values of liberal humanitarianism
Hendrik Verwoerd, speaking in a radio broadcast to the South African nation in December 1958, talked of the ‘disturbance of misunderstanding’ that ‘foreign’ missionaries had brought to nineteenth century South Africa. He was, one the one hand, reproducing a central theme of nationalist discourse: that liberal humanitarianism propagated by meddling outsiders had been fundamentally destructive to ‘natural’ social relations in Southern Africa. At the same time, of course, Verwoerd was passing judgment upon contemporary Christian critics of apartheid. The missionary could be identified with a "misguided" liberal tradition that had been rejected by the planners of apartheid, seen as a dangerous and destabilizing force that provoked unnecessary resistance to government policy.
Indeed, in 1952 both Trevor Huddleston and Ambrose Reeves had identified themselves with Margaret Ballinger’s public call for a return to ‘the liberal tradition that prevailed for so many years in the Cape Colony’. However, the notion of "civil rights" embedded in nineteenth-century liberal humanitarianism, contingent as it was upon the abandonment of social and cultural norms that did not accord with those of the colonial authorities, gave scant relief to African political leaders who had grasped the implications of a war fought in the name of ‘world democracy’; by the early 1950s, claims for black citizenship rights were based, not upon the strictures of Cape liberalism, but emerging global conventions of human rights.
During the first half of the twentieth century, Christians and liberal reformers had formed an alliance of paternalist social reform that sponsored African welfare initiatives, education, and political mediation through the auspices of organisations such as the Joint Councils and South African Institute of Race Relations. Critics have rightly pointed to the degree to which this liberal-Mission network functioned as a form of social control in the context of industrialisation, yet others have strongly argued that this Social Gospel-inspired network, its paternalism notwithstanding, inculcated the universalist values and faith in conciliation that also marked post-war campaigns of resistance to apartheid. By the outbreak of war, this alliance had begun to dissolve, with liberal thought identified with either the agnostic pessimism of Alfred Hoernlé or the inward-looking Barthianism of Edgar Brookes.
During the 1940s,worldwide conflict, shifting patterns of international power and a desire to create a blueprint for post-war social order prompted South African liberal Christians to pay close attention to plans for post-war social reconstruction. The Anglican Diocese of Johannesburg produced its own reconstruction manifesto in the Church and the Nation report of 1943, the culmination of a two-year commission appointed by the then-Bishop Geoffrey Clayton.
While it condemned various ‘evil forms’ of segregation that were ‘inconsistent with the dignity of man as a child of God’, the report remained cautious over citizenship and franchise rights. It also underlined Clayton’s understanding of the mechanics of progress in South Africa, founded upon the need for ‘a change of heart within the nation’ and powered by individual acts of self-sacrifice. A small group of clergy pressed however for a stronger tone. This group of ‘idealists’, which included two new arrivals in South Africa named Michael Scott and Trevor Huddleston, focussed on the apparent contradiction between the report’s condemnation of laws and customs such as the colour-bar and the call for a mere ‘gradual removal’ of such practices. The activist group, frustrated that no broader basis of action could be conceived of save a call ‘that the nation be called back to God’, wondered whether the rest of the report’s findings could therefore be brought into being.
For one of the dissenters the answer lay outside of Church institutions. Michael Scott soon became involved in the establishment of the multi-racial Campaign for Right and Justice, whose manifesto was outlined a conference in December 1943. Intended as an organisation to co-ordinate a broad alliance of ‘popular and progressive forces’, the conference called for an immediate change in the living conditions of the mass of the South African people, the ‘full and direct representation of all sections of the community’, abolition of racially discriminatory legislation and the ‘provision of land for the landless’. The CRJ manifesto gave concrete form to the gulf between Scott’s political and social prescription for South Africa and that of the Anglican hierarchy: the Church and the Nation called for the eventual and ‘ultimate’ establishment of universal suffrage and the elimination of discriminatory legislation, whereas the CRJ manifesto recognised both as an immediate necessity. Following his resignation from the Campaign in 1945, Scott rose to national prominence as an ardent critic of segregation and apartheid and an advocate of passive resistance who had been jailed for participating in protests in Durban in 1946.
Scott took his political activities into the international realm with his campaign on behalf of the Herero people of Namibia, whose leaders sought to petition the United Nations in the hope of forestalling the South African government’s attempts to incorporate the territory. Michael Crowder has shown how the campaign that brought Scott to international prominence was in fact initiated and supported by the Botswanan chief Tshekedi Khama (while further impetus was provided by the Indian delegation), yet this should not diminish the importance of Scott’s missions to the UN. Beginning in 1947, Scott’s activities provide a tangible link between the emergence of anti-apartheid activism and the elaboration of a post-war discourse of universal rights around international institutions such as the UN. Whilst he took care to present his actions at the UN as those of a loyal South African and ‘in the permanent and deepest interests of our country,’ Scott also emphasised the global context in which South Africa’s actions would be judged, asserting that the country had ‘existed too long as a semi-feudal backwater of civilisation’ that needed to be reconciled to international moves to eliminate ‘arbitrary race-rule and unreason’.
The notion of ‘civilisation’ was central to Scott’s rhetoric at what he described as the ‘world tribunal’ of the UN (the documentary film with which he illustrated his lectures in New York was entitled Civilisation on Trial in Africa). Drawn as it was from the principle of the League of Nations’ system that conceived the administration of mandated territories such as South West Africa as a ‘sacred trust of civilisation’, Scott’s intervention spoke to an optimistic hope that the UN could provide the kind of powerful global forum that had eluded its predecessor. His own hopes for the UN had clearly diminished by the late 1950s, when he recalled the ‘terrifying sense of futility’ that was inspired by witnessing international diplomacy at first hand. As a counter to the ‘hideous strength’ of the modern state, he advocated non-violent passive resistance as the ‘moral force which would bring our leaders to their senses’ and participated in pacifist actions against French nuclear tests in the Sahara in the late 1950s and became a central figure in the more radical wing of British anti-nuclear protest, co-authoring (along with Bertrand Russell) the manifesto of the Committee of 100. While Scott’s advocacy of participatory politics and direct action pre-figured the ‘new’ political movements of the 1960s, his idiosyncratic mixture of radical politics, anti-Communism, Gandhian passive resistance and Christian faith was perhaps most significant in the late 1940s and 1950s because of his championship of African political rights in uneasy prelude to the rapid decolonisation of the 1960s.
By 1951, having been prohibited from returning to South Africa, Scott was based in the UK and began to broaden his political activities to embrace more general African issues. Calling, in a letter in the Times, for the British people to be made more aware of their responsibilities in Africa, he suggested need for an ‘African Charter’ that would act as a kind of Beveridge report for British policy towards the continent. These responsibilities, Scott believed, should incorporate programmes of technical and financial aid for social and economic development that were sensitive to the needs of the African people and committed to an ‘ecological perspective of Africa’s problems’. Such a programme, Scott declared, could ‘promote a renascence of the social, cultural, and economic life of the respective communities’.
Paul Rich, in his study of South Africa’s ‘liberal conscience’ locates the main significance of Scott’s activities through his part in sundering ‘the political accord between English and South African liberals’. Another activist priest who challenged the paternalist liberalism of the 1950s was Trevor Huddleston, through the example of his own ministry in Johannesburg and his straightforward condemnation of apartheid in principle and practice through the international media and his 1956 book Naught for your Comfort. At the heart of Huddleston’s testimony was a personalisation of the plight of Africans living under apartheid. He had spoken in 1949 how the most effective response to the so-called ‘Native problem’ was to deny the abstract nature of the issue but to view it instead as ‘something which affects human beings … their individual lives and their family life: their aspirations, their activities, their talents day by day’. His insistence upon the need to personalise South African social issues in order to appreciate what he saw as the true nature of those ‘problems’ meant that he avoided conceiving of the individual and collective needs of African people in distant and abstract terms. For Huddleston, it was the people and not the landscape of South Africa that engaged his emotional attachment to the country. Moreover, his conception of the nature of political organisation was centred upon a Christian commitment to individual human relations; the incarnation, he argued, meant that ‘human nature in itself has a dignity and a value which is infinite’. Apartheid legislation thus resulted in the ‘depersonalisation of man’ and it was in South Africa that the ‘most characteristic modern phenomenon’ of the ‘submerging of the individual in the mass’ was most clearly evident.
The core of Huddleston’s activism was thus a belief in the need to identify himself with the efforts of African people to gain political and personal freedom. He saw this, again, as a demonstration of the meaning of the incarnation: writing in Naught for your Comfort he described how support for the African National Congress was an extension of the spirit of identification that led priests to wash the feet of parishioners on Maundy Thursday. Huddleston thus articulated a belief in the need to maintain personal relations at the core of social and political activism, and that an identification with the hopes and ambitions of the poor and needy should drive such action.
Canon John Collins also acknowledged the primacy of African opinion in the determination of Christian attitudes towards Africa. One of the few Anglican clergy who gave public support for Scott on his return to Britain in the late 1940s, Collins gained a reputation in the early 1950s for voicing fierce condemnation of the South African government from the pulpit of St. Paul’s Cathedral. In 1952 Collins he preached a sermon in which he suggested that the South African Prime Minister, a ‘poor wretched man, hag-ridden with fear’, should no more be expected to rid himself of the ‘illusion of white supremacy’ as a drunkard could ‘destroy his illusion of pink elephants’. The following year Collins was quick to support Nontandu Jabavu, daughter of Professor DDT Jabavu, who had outraged mission organisations at a Christian Action-sponsored meeting to condemn ‘Western Christian civilisation’ and the pious individuals who eased their troubled consciences by seeking out Africans ‘in their miserable shacks and does good to them on the end of a barge pole’. He suggested that it was unhelpful to protest against those who explained the feelings of Africans and that, moreover, mission circles should not expect gratitude. It was ‘vital’, Collins asserted, that ‘Christians understood that Africans were beginning to lose faith in ‘the White man, including the White Christian’ and that they needed to base their approach to questions of race upon a sense of humility.
In terms of values and ideals, the leading Christian critics of apartheid broke from the established liberal position in two significant ways. Firstly, they believed that the post-war climate of international opinion was amenable to their own Christian conceptions of social justice and thus supported a Christian condemnation of apartheid. Second, the crux of their position was one of solidarity with African causes and opinion, which required support rather than guidance. In their efforts, which were in part directed towards the maintenance of African faith in Christianity and were suffused with Cold-War fears of Communist influence, the activist clergy promoted the principle of commonality with African suffering and aspirations that was a foundation of broader anti-apartheid campaigns.
The institutional background
The institutional dimension of Christian anti-apartheid activism during the 1950s emerged from the interaction of church authorities and the independent (often secular) organisations to which individual activists were attached. International religious groups, from Quakers to the Christian pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, had taken an interest in South African affairs throughout the twentieth century, but the most prominent international Christian organisation associated with anti-apartheid activism was the World Council of Churches. Yet, in the 1950s, the WCC was not the controversial ally of liberation movements it was to become two decades later. In 1950, its Central Committee made a proposal for a WCC delegation to visit South Africa in 1950, but the multi-racial delegation favoured by the committee was deemed ‘practically impossible’. Instead, the WCC Secretary, WA Visser‘t Hooft visited the country two years later and produced a report that reiterated the long-standing identification of South Africa’s ‘racial problem’ with ‘the process of disintegration of Bantu society’ and ‘detribalisation’ and recommended the strengthening of missionary activities and the encouragement of all South African churches in ecumenical discussions as the basis of Council policy.
The Anglican Church provided all of the most widely-recognised Christian anti-apartheid activists, yet this was not the result of any institutional anti-apartheid position. The church hierarchy in South Africa, guided by Geoffrey Clayton, the Archbishop of Cape Town, was clear that the church’s response to apartheid should be conceived of, and articulated, within South Africa. ‘The Church of the Province of South Africa must fight its own battles, and must fight them in South Africa’, stated Clayton emphatically in a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1949. This doctrine was to guide the official position of the Anglican church in Britain throughout the 1950s, forming the basis upon which Fisher declined to support the American ‘Declaration of Conscience’ on South Africa in 1958, while underlying attitudes towards outspoken clergy could perhaps be gauged by the apparent inability of the Anglican Church to find suitable employment for Ambrose Reeves following his flight from South Africa in 1960. Those individuals who did express strong opposition to apartheid and called for international condemnation of the policy found themselves isolated within their own Church, but it was possible to exploit the opportunities provided by their position. Collins, as Canon of St. Paul’s held a freehold position, which meant that the pronouncements he made from the pulpit could not endanger his position, while Huddleston, as a member of the Community of Resurrection, had enough insulation from the church establishment to cushion the effects of his criticism of church inaction in response to apartheid.
Christian Action, which Collins had launched as an attempt to engender radical Christian involvement in social and political affairs, was the institutional expression of Collins’ vision of the social role of religion. While an establishment figure whose appointment to St. Paul’s had been sponsored by Stafford Cripps, Collins would later recall that Christian Action was likely to encourage controversy and offend ‘Establishment-minded people’, particularly following his response to the Defiance Campaign. Support for a civil disobedience campaign meant that it had to confront the ‘incongruity’ of working within the establishment and yet remain prepared to take principled action over particular events and causes. Scott’s organisation, the Africa Bureau, was founded in 1952 as an organisation devoted to raising public awareness of African issues and to promote projects ‘providing for true cooperation between people of different races’. Not himself an establishment figure, Scott’s organisation could however claim the support of a body of ‘respectable’ sponsors, including the Conservative peer Lord Hemingford and was backed financially by David Astor. Thus, while the radical Christian opponents of apartheid may well have been cut off from the church establishment, they made contacts within, and drew support from, the wider British ‘establishment’.
It was not merely relations between the turbulent priests and church leaders that were strained, however, with tensions between institutions seeking to oppose apartheid becoming increasingly evident over the decade. Attempts to launch an inter-denominational church appeal to support churches in their response to Bantu Education Act collapsed in confusion in late 1954, while plans for a joint Africa Bureau/Christian Action appeal succeeded only in highlighting the differences between the two organisations. The Africa Bureau pressed for an appeal tied strictly to Bantu Education, but Collins was determined to make a ‘bold’ appeal that would aid ‘those suffering as a result of passive resistance’. Scott asked Christian Action ‘not to put forward issues which would limit what could be done in this country for the Africans’. Differences between the Africa Bureau and Christian Action ran far deeper than the emphasis of appeal statements, however, and reflected the contrasting nature of the two organisations. Christian Action maintained a deliberately ‘open’ constitution and was shy of becoming bound by legal instruments such as Trust Deeds, while the Africa Bureau appeared increasingly concerned to maintain strict control over the distribution of any funds raised. In February 1955 Christian Action withdrew from the appeal, undermining the confidence of the Africa Bureau in Collins and his organisation. Relations between Scott and Collins were to deteriorate further through the late 1950s, but such tensions between organisations highlighted the limitations of the informal anti-apartheid network of the 1950s to coordinate national anti-apartheid protest.
Christian networks did, however have strong international links. While church authorities articulated cautious criticism of apartheid, their structures allowed for the presence of dissident individuals who, however isolated within the church, were able to exploit their positions in the institutions in order to promote their anti-apartheid agendas and forge links between activists in strategic locations within South Africa and overseas.
Methods of protest
The third contribution of the turbulent priests of the 1950s to the shape of later anti-apartheid campaigns was their elaboration of the principle methods of protest employed in attempts to demonstrate South African isolation. Scott, both at the United Nations and in the UK, mobilised the well-tried methods of deputation and petition, as African leaders had since the late nineteenth century, in attempts to gain influence within regular political institutions.
It was more direct forms of engaging public interest in the question of apartheid that would become synonymous with anti-apartheid activities however, and fund-raising appeals to support opposition to apartheid within South Africa and the promotion of the cultural and social isolation of South Africa through boycotts were established during the 1950s. Michael Scott made the first appeal for financial aid for the ‘victims’ of apartheid in a letter in the New Statesman in 1952, in which he described the Defiance Campaign as a ‘moral challenge to the civilised world’ asked whether ‘something practical’ could be arranged to aid the families of jailed resistors. It was Collins, however, who took the initiative to maintain the momentum of increasing public awareness of events in South Africa, establishing a committee in South Africa that would distribute funds ‘without regard to the race, colour, creed or political views of the recipients’. For Collins, pronouncements and vocal condemnation were ‘not enough. It is so easy to put one's conscience to sleep in a cosy feather-bed of pious utterances and noble aspirations’, he stated, asserting that Christians’ collective response to the Defiance Campaign was ‘an acid test of our sincerity about the whole problem of race relations’.
The ill-fated attempts to co-ordinate appeals in response to Bantu Education did succeed in raising substantial sums in support of educational initiatives in South Africa, The SPG appeal, aimed at the Society’s own supporters, rather than Christians as a whole, granted over £14,000 across the Church of the Province, much going to cover salary costs at the Family Centres established in Johannesburg by Ambrose Reeves. The African Schools and Families Fund, the Africa Bureau’s response to Bantu Education, was established following its ‘Justice in South Africa’ appeal of February 1955 and raised over £7,000 between 1955 and 1958. The primary recipients of funds were Reeves’ Family Centres again, and the campaign to save St Peter’s School run by the Community of the Resurrection. In 1958 after the fund was closed, the Africa Bureau established the African Education Trust, which has continued to provide funds for schools and scholarships for individual students across Africa.
By far the most successful appeal launched during the 1950s was the Treason Trial Defence fund, which would later become the well-known Defence and Aid Fund for South Africa, the primary channel for British, and later international, funding for South African opposition and ‘liberation’ movements. In South Africa, arrangements were quickly made to set up a defence fund for the 140 arrested on charges of high treason in December 1956 with Ambrose Reeves as chair of the trustees. In London, Canon Collins had responded by sending an immediate contribution of £100 to Reeves and launching a Christian Action appeal, while a protest at South Africa House in London was arranged to coincide with the opening of preliminary hearings in Johannesburg on 19th December. By the end of February 1957, Collins had sent nearly £4000 to Reeves, and by April the fund had reached £12000. The Christian Action Defence Fund was enhanced in 1958 by the decision of the Labour Party to amalgamate its own South African appeal into Collins’ fund. Over the next two years it was to attract over £150000 worth of donations, and by the early 1960s it had become one of the core institutions of international anti-apartheid activity.
Perhaps the most prominent of post-1960 anti-apartheid activities was the long-running campaign to promote the imposition of sanctions against South Africa. One inspiration for this campaign was Huddleston’s call in a letter published in the Observer in October 1954 for a ‘cultural boycott of South Africa’. Huddleston had, however, been privately advocating not merely a ‘cultural’ boycott, but also more wide-ranging sanctions for at least a year before this article. In October 1953 the Africa Bureau executive discussed a proposal from Huddleston suggesting that the UN should co-ordinate sanctions against the South African government. One member of the Bureau’s executive was sure that such a policy ‘would not commend itself to people in Britain’, another was ‘shocked that such a policy should be advocated by a priest’. Huddleston’s Superior, Raymond Raynes, was also wary of the proposal, and noted that any who called for sanctions at that time would be considered fanatics and warmongers by the unenlightened public’.
Michael Scott was more sympathetic to the suggestion, explaining how difficult it was for those outside South Africa to understand Huddleston’s desperation. He noted that the only response to South Africa had been ‘words and debates’, and that it was important to begin to take some kind of action that may avert disaster. Alongside ‘negative’ sanctions, Scott proposed a positive and ‘coordinated programme of assistance’ that would enable UN agencies to become involved in encouraging South African government policies that would be ‘in accordance with the principles of the UN Charter. Scott would go on to develop these ideas further, and suggested in 1956 that sanctions imposed by ‘voluntary organisations’ could complement technical and financial assistance, co-ordinated through the United Nations, with the aim of developing South Africa’s ‘reserves’ along the lines envisaged by the Tomlinson Commission. Scott’s optimistic reading of the Commission report was perhaps coloured by his continued faith in the potential of regional development as an instrument for social and political change and reflected a desire to stimulate an international solution to regional issues with which he had been concerned since the late 1940s. By 1957 he was encouraging African leaders to initiate economic and social sanctions against South Africa as part of a strategy ‘which will achieve what moral persuasion and ten years of debates and attempted conciliation in the United Nations have failed to achieve’.
Yet it was the more direct approach inherent in Huddleston’s call for a ‘cultural boycott’ of South Africa that had most impact in Britain. The Africa Bureau began enquiries into the level of support for such a boycott, while others in the entertainment industry were moved to solicit advice as to how to begin a campaign. Following his return to Britain in 1956, Huddleston chaired a private meeting in the House of Lords with a group of individuals connected with the arts, entertainment and sport. He argued that protest against apartheid was a fundamental prerequisite for Commonwealth solidarity and spoke of the need ‘to seek "converts" to the anti-apartheid cause’. In Naught for Your Comfort, Huddleston paid particular attention to the place of sport in the cultural life of white South Africans, and suggested that isolation from international sport would have a significant affect upon their ‘self-assurance’: ‘it might even make the English-speaking South African wake up to the fact that you can’t play with a straight bat if you have no opponents.’ Conventions of racial discrimination had first shown signs of impacting upon South Africa’s position in international sport prior to the Second World War, when the 1934 Empire Games was shifted from Johannesburg to London amidst concerns over the treatment of African and Asian competitors and it was almost inevitable, therefore that upon his return to Britain, Huddleston began promoting plans for a campaign to impose sporting sanctions alongside those for a boycott in entertainment. In an (unpublished) letter to the Times he wrote of his hope that ‘all those who are prominent in the field of culture and sport will seize the present moment to demonstrate unmistakably in word and act that they care about the citizenship of the non-Europeans in South Africa’.
In his 1954 call for a ‘cultural boycott’ of South Africa, Huddleston had advocated the international counterpart to a tactic that had been employed with some success by the Congress movement within South Africa. That it would form one of the central means of symbolising international opposition to apartheid underlined the role of activist priests in promoting a campaign of solidarity with African ambitions that marked a fundamental shift from the gradualist paternalism of their pre-war counterparts. While they found themselves isolated, ‘prophetic’ voices within church institutions and were deterred by personal conflicts from forging their own institutionalised anti-apartheid alliance, the radical Christian voices of the 1950s successfully articulated an international front of anti-apartheid sentiment, and helped to lay the foundations of an international protest movement.