CURRICULUM VITAE

1943 Born Galashiels, Scotland to Betty (nee Cunningham) and Fred Elworthy

1954 Herts County Scholarship to Berkhamsted School for Girls

1962-5 Trinity College, Dublin: Diploma in Social Sciences

1966-69 Marketing for boutique chains in S. Africa, introduced Mary Quant range.

1969 Private pilot’s license

1970 married to Murray Stowe McLean

1970-76 Chair of KUPUGANI the South African nutrition education organisation; instituted sale of nutritious Christmas hampers to industrial employees thereby providing annual self-financing for the charity of R6 million.

1974 Gave birth to Polly Jess.

1976 Organised the building and launch of the Market Theatre, S. Africa’s first multi-racial theatre, when it was illegal for races to mix on stage or in audience.

1977 Established the Minority Rights Group in France.

1978 Researched and wrote the Minority Rights Group report on Female Genital Mutilation, leading to the World Health Organisation campaign to eradicate the practice.

1980 Researched and wrote UNESCO’s contribution to the United Nations Mid Decade Conference on Women: The role of women in peace research, peace negotiations and the improvement of international relations. Appointed Consultant on women’s issues to UNESCO.

1982 Established the Oxford Research Group, and for 23 years built up an international reputation for rigorous research into key global security issues (mainly WMD) and effective dialogue with government, the military and civil society. Raised funds annually to cover costs of a dozen employees. www.oxfordresearchgroup.org

1986 Edited (as Scilla Mclean) How Nuclear Weapons Decisions Are Made published by MacMillan, London, 1986;  the first of approx 40 books and reports on security issues.

1986 Initiated the first of 10 delegations to China on international security issues.

1988 Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize for 1st time

1986-90 Led women politicians from E. and W. Europe in dialogue with NATO and the Warsaw Treaty Organisation, working with Mikhail Gorbachev, Robert MacNamara, Lord Carrington.

1991 Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize for 3^rd time

1993 Awarded Ph.D in political science, Department of Peace Studies, Bradford University.

1996 Author: ‘Power & Sex’ (Element Books) translated into 7 languages.

1997 First of ten ‘retreats’ organised for nuclear decision-makers and their critics.

1999 Delivered Schumacher Lecture

2001 Established Peace Direct to support those working non-violently in conflict areas (Iraq, Afghanistan, Congo) to prevent or resolve conflict, and to link them with those in safer areas for support and funding. 

2001 Produced War Prevention Works – 50 stories of people preventing conflict, researched by Dylan Matthews

2001 Delivered Gandhi Memorial Lecture

2002 Produced ‘Transforming September 11^th’ at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

2003 Fact finding visit to Iraq resulting in 10 point plan for avoiding war; see Baghdad Diaries  http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0302/S00034.htms

2003 Awarded the Niwano Peace Prize

2003 appointed International Associate, Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research

2004 Handed over executive direction of Oxford Research Group to Professor John Sloboda and Peace Direct to Carolyn Hayman OBE.

2004 Adviser for Max Stafford Clark’s production of “Talking to Terrorists” at the Royal Court Theatre, London.

2005 Peace Direct awarded ‘Best New Charity’ at the Charity Times Awards.

2005/06 Appointed Consultant to First Lady of Egypt on international peace issues.

2005 Appointed Adviser to Sir Richard Branson and Peter Gabriel on the establishment of ‘The Elders’, a council of 12 wise men and women working on conflict issues globally.

2006 Co-author with Gabrielle Rifkind of Making Terrorism History (Random House, London).

2007 Case study on the siege of Fallujah in Iraq used as the basis for Jonathan Holmes production of “Fallujah” at the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane.

2007 Appointed Councillor of the World Future Council

2007 Appointed Member of the International Task Force on Preventive Diplomacy

2008 Appointed Member of the Global Problem Solving Collaborative

2008 Appointed adviser to Ploughshares Fund

2008 Co-founder with Nicholas Janni of ‘The Pilgrimage’ – a 24-hour intensive course that enables participants to make major shifts in consciousness and perception.

2009 Co-author with Anne Baring of Soul Power (Booksurge, USA)

                        PERSONAL BIOGRAPHY

From early on 

until my sixties

it seems I have an irresistible inclination

either to keep trying to be upwardly mobile

or to persuade others into joining impossible schemes involving summits.

In 1956 when I was 13, I was sitting in our living room watching a grainy black and white TV. Soviet tanks were rolling into Budapest to crush the uprising. Kids my age were throwing themselves against the tanks. I rushed upstairs and started packing my suitcase. My mum came in and asked what I was up to. “I’m going to Budapest” (having no idea where Budapest was).

“What on earth for?”

“They’re doing something awful and I have to go.”

“You certainly can’t do that.”

“I have to.”

“Calm down and pull yourself together. You have to get trained if you want to be of use. If you really want to be useful I’ll help you.”

And bless her, she did.

When I was 16 I went to work in a Sue Ryder home for people who had been in camps for Displaced Persons, since the war. Some had been in concentration camps. I listened open mouthed to their stories. In my gap year I went to work in a camp for Vietnamese refugees in France.  From there to Algiers, emerging from a terrible war, to work with orphans. My university dissertation was on refugees.

Africa

After University I got on a cargo boat in Bordeaux, that went round the west coast of Africa calling in at the ports unloading champagne and beef steak for the French expats. We called at Conakry in Guinea where I watched President Sekou Toure speaking from atop a pillar in the main square to a crowd of thousands. The boat ended up in Pointe Noire in the ex-French Congo, which was at the time at war with the ex-Belgian Congo. To get from one to the other was tricky. I found out that the French Ambassador, like me, needed to cross the River Congo. But we had to go in secret, at midnight. When we arrived at the other side, the dawn light glinted on the machine guns pointed in our direction. I got off the boat and - very quietly - made my way to the airport to catch a plane to Lusaka, and thence to South Africa.

In South Africa I realized fairly soon that if I managed to get a job in social work (the only training I had) I would be in jail in weeks. So I went in the opposite direction, getting a job in retail fashion. This was 1966, when Prime Minister Verwoerd - the ‘architect of Apartheid’ - was stabbed to death in Parliament. I did what so many South African whites do, closing my eyes to what was happening around me, living an incredible life in a flat on Clifton beach and driving a sports car.  I simply ignored the political situation.

It was when I married Murray McLean, stopped working and went to university to learn Zulu, that I began to understand a little. I did voluntary work for a nutrition education organization called Kupugani (meaning ‘self-help’) that involved work in the so-called homelands. My eyes were well and truly opened, to all the starkness of starvation. Children with huge extended bellies from kwashiorkor, alongside white men pouring surplus milk down the mines. We bought and shifted the surplus milk, to places where it saved lives. I found a derelict building near the main station where commuters left for Soweto, and we set up a shop selling oranges, soup powder, peanut butter and other cheap nutritious foods.

Income generation

When I became chair of Kupugani, I saw that we needed a regular source of income that did not involve the huge effort of constant fund-raising.  My husband by that time employed about 5,000 migrant workers in various enterprises; I observed that at Christmas, before they went home for their only holiday, these employees were given money. Often this money did not reach their families. So I developed a scheme to offer employers the possibility of giving their staff a box of nutritious food instead. We bought in bulk, used (white) volunteers to pack the boxes, and were able to sell them for a profit – a classic win-win-win, because the food reached the families, employers felt good, and Kupugani got a regular source of funds. The first year we raised about £60,000, and then doubled this every year, enabling us to expand our education work accordingly.

By the second Christmas of this scheme I was nine months pregnant. My colleagues and I were finishing packing the boxes, and swept up a huge mound of rubbish. When the rubbish was lit there was an explosion that knocked me onto my back. I thought that would be the moment that my child would arrive, but in fact my beloved daughter Polly sensibly decided to stay inside for another four weeks. 

Illness

Just six weeks after Polly was born, I got a severe form of a brain disease called encephalitis and was unconscious for several days. When the brain specialist told me he estimated that I had lost one third of my brain cells (the only ones in the body that don’t replace themselves), I burst into tears. “Don’t cry” he said “you’ve got a pretty face and a nice husband, you’ll be all right.”

It took six years to recover, six years of excruciating headaches and a great deal of patience on Murray’s part. The most effective treatment I had was acupuncture – which I tried as a kind of last resort after 5 and a half years of misery. It was so gentle, so benign and so powerful that I got interested in how Chinese medicine works, as a holistic system attending to causes rather than symptoms of illness. I like this ‘whole body’ approach so much that I have had acupuncture treatment ever since, using it as my version of health insurance, and by restoring balance it provides me with lots of energy.

The Market Theatre

One day in 1975 some actors came to our home in Johannesburg. There was at that time nowhere for black and white actors to perform together, and they had discovered that the Johannesburg fruit market – a beautiful art nouveau building in the toughest part of town – was for sale. Under the Group Areas Act it had a permit for all races to mix – the perfect venue for a multi-racial theatre. But we had to act fast, before the government caught up with us. So Murray and I threw ourselves into it. He phoned a builder friend and got a bulldozer in the next day, to rake the tilt for the stalls. At every posh dinner party we went to, I cornered the men on either side of me and took a cheque for R5,000 off each. In six months we opened with a production of the Marat Sade, and somehow nobody got arrested.

The political tension took its toll of our marriage – my husband a substantial employer (albeit an enlightened one) - and me beginning to organize black trade unions. So we left South Africa and went to live in Paris. Murray did a degree in political science, I went to work for the Minority Rights Group and then for UNESCO, and Polly went to nursery school. It wasn’t a very happy time for any of us. At Easter–time in 1980 Murray had a massive heart attack. We moved back to England, and I breathed a sigh of relief to be home – to pick brambles and live in the country. Murray slowly recovered and Polly learned to ride ponies.

Nuclear weapons

This was in the early 1980s, when the public was waking up to the huge build-up of nuclear weapons under Thatcher, Brezhnev and Reagan. I had a done a study for UNESCO on women and peace, which had woken me up to the very real dangers of accidental nuclear war. The British government issued a pamphlet recommending that in the event of a nuclear attack you should put a paper bag over your head and crawl under a table. It was entitled ‘Protect and Survive’. Cue a perfect opportunity for CND to mount a campaign entitled ‘Protest and Survive’. I did.

In 1982 I was in New York for the Second Special Session of the UN on Disarmament, lobbying delegates.  After a week of no progress, there was a massive demo through the city that filled Central Park with a million people. The New York Times gave it six pages. Back in the UN next morning I saw that not one delegation had changed its position one centimeter. Despair. There had never in history been such a big demonstration. What more can people do, to get their leaders to listen?

Strap hanging on a tram on Broadway, I had one of those flashes. “Nuclear decisions clearly are made by people, and probably not those in the UN. If the people in the streets - who care so much - could go and talk, calmly, one to one, with the people who really make the decisions on nuclear weapons, perhaps the dynamics might change. But who are the people who really make the decisions on nuclear weapons?” So I went home, and started a research group to find out.

The story of what happened next has been written elsewhere. But three years later I was in NATO HQ in Brussels with Margarita Papandreou and a battalion of women MPs from East and West Europe asking NATO leaders awkward questions, and then in Moscow asking Gorbachev equally awkward questions. Over time we learned how to engage in real dialogue with nuclear policy makers, getting to know them well enough to invite them to spend two days in a medieval manor house near Oxford talking with their most knowledgeable critics, eventually rolling up their sleeves to thrash out possible terms of treaties.

To do this we had to create a very safe environment. By this time I had begun to understand the value of meditation, and had become a Quaker. Moreover I had got to know a number of extremely wise people, including my beloved mentor Adam Curle, who really knew how to meditate. So I invited some of them to be ‘Standing Stones’ for the meetings, meditating all day long in the library underneath the room where the talks were taking place. One day one of the US State Department negotiators said to me:

“This is a really special room.”

“Yes, it was built in 1360.”

“No, it’s REALLY special.”

“I agree. It may be because many good things have happened in this room.”

“No, I mean, there’s something coming up through the floor boards!”

During the 1980s I wrote lots of articles in national newspapers, and made a lot of speeches. One day I got an invitation to speak in Verona, Italy. I was told to come to the Arena theatre, and expected the kind of small backstreet venue that most peace meetings happened in. When I got to the city and asked for the Arena, I was directed to the massive Roman amphitheatre, with what turned out to be 20,000 people steaming in from all directions. Total panic. I had nothing prepared for anything remotely like this, and spoke all of 10 words in Italian. A blessed interpreter came to my aid, I spluttered a few incoherent sentences, and a mild joke about Mrs Thatcher brought such glee that a Mexican wave took over and I didn’t have to worry any more.

Now that I’ve duly tried to impress you with my Italian story, I can tell you that in the UK the line suddenly went dead. In 1988, in order to render the highly secret process more accountable, we published a Who’s Who of 650 nuclear weapons decision-makers worldwide – with names and addresses of those who design, commission, strategize, deploy and profit from weapons. This made the British Ministry of Defence very cross; they banned the book and forbade anyone anywhere in the UK defence system to talk to us. News media also gave us a wide berth from then on for many years.

At home

Coming out as an activist was one of the factors that cost me my marriage. Although we remained friends, we divorced in 1987 and Murray died, as a result of recurrent heart attacks, in 1988. He was an entrepreneur of the very best kind, a fabulous father to Polly, and beloved of so many people. Polly was only 14 when he died.

Polly is utterly amazing. She has transformed a childhood full of challenges into a blossoming adulthood, where she embodies the ideal of servant leadership. After university she went to South Africa where she was born, and worked as a creche assistant in a township project for women with malnourished children; this opened her eyes to some of the issues around social change work in developing countries. She came back and completed a MA in Effective Learning (with a dissertation on meditation in English primary schools). In 2004 she helped inaugurate the Funding Network, which brings together interested people with catalyst charities at special events to create social change. She has turned her house in East Oxford into an informal centre where art, theatre, dance, self awareness and poetry can reach a particular audience. She works as a facilitator of women’s sexuality groups and a freelance translator of French literature, including the private diaries of Catherine Deneuve, Secret by Philippe Grimbert and most recently The Patience Stone by Atiq Rahimi.

After all the tensions of growing up (both of us) we have discovered a relationship that is wonderfully nourishing. We both enjoy the challenges and rewards of being open and truthful, and we generally find that this brings juice and joy to life. In her mid thirties Polly met and fell in love with the beautiful Rose, who has the fastest wit I have met, and they are very happy bunnies.

In my own thirties I used to have long curly brown hair. In my forties I started to go very gray, and covered it up with dye. When I turned 50 I got tired of the whole dye performance, cut my hair to a centimeter long, and went white. White hair, I can tell you, makes you invisible overnight. I was used to being at least sometimes noticed in the street; now I pined for that attention. I was also menopausal, which my partner John helped me through with humour and kindness. His daughters were about the same age as Polly and we had exceptionally happy times together, going on silly cycling holidays to France in the rain.

John also contributed in a pivotal way to the development of the Oxford Research Group; since he taught systems thinking at the Open University, he helped all of us to review our progress every six months using his delightfully effective techniques – rich pictures, systems maps, creative innovation sessions. He also encouraged me to keep things simple, not to burden the organization with a heavy structure, to take risks and have the confidence to do what needed doing and not worry what people thought. Although we no longer live together, he remains my dear friend.

Power and Sex

I suppose I must have an inbuilt career saboteur, because at key times I follow a hunch – something that I HAVE to do – which throws a hand grenade into my CV. Imagine this: I start a research group that labours mightily over thirteen years to develop an excellent reputation as a reliable publisher of factual reports on security issues. I complete a serious doctorate. I am trusted to host meetings of nuclear policy makers with critics with whom they totally disagree. And then what do I do? I write a highly personal book entitled Power and Sex – a book about women, which contains quite a lot about serpents, sexuality and inner power. 

From time to time when exhausted I have stopped everything and taken a sabbatical. That’s when the real terror hits us workaholics. What if:

·        I never get asked to do anything again

·        Nobody needs my help

·        I lose my memory

·        Everybody forgets me

·        Help!

The Elders

This is pretty much the state I was in in November 2004, after two months of enforced rest. The phone rang and someone said Richard Branson wants to talk to you. It turned out that he and Peter Gabriel had an idea to assemble The Elders, a group of wise people from all over the world who could guide better decisions for the future of humankind. They had taken the idea to Nelson Mandela, who said go away and work out exactly what it is you want to do. Then came what they called the ‘washing machine period’ where they went round and round and got more and more confused. So I got a phone call to see if I could help.

 To cut a long story short, we eventually refined the criteria for the qualities an elder should possess, worked out the options for what kind of organization it would be, how it would be funded, and what it might take on.  I developed a list of 300 potential elders that we whittled down to a selection of 12 made by Nelson Mandela, and launched The Elders on his 89^th birthday, in July 2007, with Archbishop Desmond Tutu as Chair.

Knowledge

After all these decades, what do I know?

·        I know my body is a teacher; if I can only get quiet and listen, the depth of wisdom available is limitless.

·        I find peace in the natural world – I love being in my garden where I grow vegetables and potter about looking scruffy.

·        I believe I intuition, in following hunches. Sure, I test them out, but usually I go with my gut feeling.

·        The things I find difficult, others can do with ease. And vice versa. So I conclude it’s a good idea to do the things that I do with ease.

                  ·        I quail when I’m faced with an AFGO (another fucking growth opportunity) but I                            have discovered that emotional crisis enables change. Things have to be                                          excruciating before we change.                                  

                 ·        The only person I can possibly change is me.