The Peace Sign

1958

Date: 21 February 1958 · Place: London, United Kingdom · Figures: Gerald Holtom, designer · Hugh Brock, Direct Action Committee organizer · Bertrand Russell, CND figurehead · Tags: ProtestIcon, Semaphore, Counterculture 01. N and D Gerald Holtom, a professional designer and conscientious objector, sketches the symbol at his Twickenham home in February 1958 for the Direct Action Committee's planned Aldermaston march. He overlays the semaphore positions for N and D, for Nuclear Disarmament, inside a circle. Holtom also describes the figure as a person with hands outstretched downward in despair, in the posture of Goya's peasant before the firing squad in The Third of May 1808. He offers it free of copyright. 02. Atlantic Crossing On 4 April 1958, between four and ten thousand marchers carry the symbol from Trafalgar Square to the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston. Within a year the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament adopts it as logo. Bayard Rustin brings it to the United States in 1958, then Albert Bigelow flies it on the ketch Golden Rule into the Marshall Islands test zone. By 1965 it is on lapel pins at every Vietnam-era march; by 1970 the National Park Service permits it on Park Service maps as a protest landmark. No copyright means perfect replication. "I drew myself, the representative of an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya's peasant before the firing squad." — Gerald Holtom, letter to Hugh Brock, 1973 Sources • Ken Kolsbun and Mike Sweeney, 'Peace: The Biography of a Symbol' (National Geographic, 2008) • Andrew Rigby, 'A Peaceful Symbol Made in Britain', Peace News, March 2008 • Commonweal Collection, University of Bradford, Gerald Holtom papers