A son of two worlds
Peter James Henry Solomon was born in London on July 31, 1921, into a large Jewish family. He was the only son of Harold Solomon, a British-born army officer, and Flora Benenson, who had been born in Russia and was the daughter of the Russian-Jewish banker and financier Grigori Benenson. His father died of a long-term injury when Peter was nine. Later in life, at the wish of his dying grandfather, he took his mother’s maiden name and became Peter Benenson.
He had an unusual education. As a boy he was tutored privately by the poet W. H. Auden, and he then went to Eton. There, his social conscience showed itself early. According to one story he complained to the headmaster about the school food, prompting a letter to his mother warning of her son’s revolutionary tendencies.
Early campaigns for refugees
At sixteen, during the Spanish Civil War, Benenson helped set up a relief fund among his schoolfellows for children orphaned by the war, and personally helped pay for the support of one baby. Moved by Arthur Koestler’s account of political imprisonment in Spain, he then turned to the plight of Jews fleeing Hitler’s Germany. Despite some opposition, he persuaded school friends and their families to raise £4,000 to bring two young German Jews to Britain. After leaving Eton he helped his mother, herself a committed campaigner, find homes in various countries for refugee children arriving in London.
He went up to Balliol College, Oxford, to read history, but the Second World War interrupted his studies. He worked at the Ministry of Information and was then recruited to Bletchley Park, the secret code-breaking centre, where he served as a cryptographer in the section known as the Testery. There he met his first wife, Margaret Anderson.
A lawyer for the persecuted
After the war Benenson qualified as a barrister. He joined the Labour Party and stood unsuccessfully for Parliament four times in the 1950s. The Trades Union Congress sent him to Spain as an observer at the trials of trade unionists under Franco, and he was appalled by what he saw in the courts and prisons. At one trial he drew up a list of complaints and confronted the judge over dinner; the case ended in acquittals, a rarity in fascist Spain.
High-profile political trials in South Africa and Hungary convinced him that defending individual freedom should rise above party politics. In the late 1950s he was one of a group of British lawyers who founded Justice, the human rights and law reform organisation that became the British section of the International Commission of Jurists. In 1958 he fell ill, gave up practising law and went to Italy to recover. The same year he converted to Roman Catholicism, and his new faith became a dominant influence on his life.
Two students and a toast to liberty
In late 1960, travelling on the London Underground, Benenson read a newspaper report about two Portuguese students who had raised their glasses in a Lisbon restaurant in a toast to liberty. Portugal was then ruled by the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar, and the students were overheard and sentenced to years in prison. Benenson later said he was so enraged that he got out of the train, walked up the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields church and went in to think about what could be done to mobilise world opinion.
His idea was simple. Rather than campaign for one country’s prisoners, he would draw attention to all people imprisoned anywhere for their beliefs. On May 28, 1961, The Observer published his full-page article, The Forgotten Prisoners, launching an Appeal for Amnesty, 1961. It began by noting that any day’s newspaper carried a report of someone imprisoned, tortured or executed for opinions or religion unacceptable to a government, and that readers felt a sickening sense of impotence. If those feelings of disgust all over the world could be united into common action, he wrote, something effective could be done.
The birth of Amnesty International
The response astonished everyone. The article was reprinted in newspapers around the world, and readers wrote asking how they could help. Benenson had planned a campaign of one year. Instead, within a year, groups of letter-writers had formed in more than a dozen countries, and the appeal became a permanent organisation, Amnesty International, founded in London in July 1961. Benenson coined the phrase prisoner of conscience for people jailed only for the peaceful expression of their beliefs.
The early method was distinctive. Local groups, formed in offices, schools or churches, each adopted three prisoners: one from the Western countries, one from the Communist bloc and one from the developing world. Every member was likely to be working for at least one prisoner whose views they did not share, because what mattered was not the opinion but the right to hold it. The groups wrote letters to governments, to prison authorities and to the prisoners themselves, and sent what comforts they could. The movement’s symbol, a candle wrapped in barbed wire, came from a Chinese proverb Benenson had in mind: better to light a candle than curse the darkness.
Benenson also published a Penguin book, Persecution 1961, made up of case studies of political prisoners from many different regimes. The first international conference met at the end of 1961, and national sections soon formed in other countries. Between June 1966 and June 1967 alone, the number of local groups grew from 410 to 550, and Amnesty gained consultative status with Unesco.
What the letters achieved
Amnesty’s letter-writing worked more often than sceptics expected. Julio de Peña Valdez, a trade union leader imprisoned in the Dominican Republic, later described what happened when the letters arrived. After the first 200, the guards gave him back his clothes; after the next 200, the prison director came to see him. The letters kept coming, 3,000 of them, until the president himself was informed and ordered his release.
Over the following decades Amnesty grew into one of the world’s best-known human rights organisations, campaigning for prisoners of conscience, against torture and the death penalty, and for fair trials. It was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977, and today describes itself as a movement of more than 10 million people. Governments draw on its research, prisoners continue to be released after its campaigns, and its work helped build the worldwide campaign against torture. The idea that ordinary people anywhere can stand up for a stranger in prison is now a familiar part of public life, and it began with Benenson’s article.
Stepping back
Benenson poured his energy, and much of his own money, into Amnesty’s first years, but the organisation grew faster than its structures. Exhausted and in poor health, he stood down as general secretary in 1964. In 1966, after a report alleging torture by British forces in Aden went unpublished, he accused the British government of infiltrating Amnesty’s leadership. An inquiry, which reported at Elsinore in Denmark in 1967, rejected the allegations, and Benenson resigned. He was never again active in running the organisation, but he was later reconciled with its leaders, and one of his last acts for Amnesty was to write a message launching the appeal for its Human Rights Action Centre in London.
He continued to campaign in his own way. In the 1980s he chaired the Association of Christians Against Torture, in the 1990s he organised aid for Romanian orphans, and he founded a group to help people with coeliac disease, from which he himself suffered.
Jewish roots and a Catholic faith
Benenson was born into a large Jewish family, and his heritage is most visible through his mother’s family, the Benensons, prosperous Russian Jews whose name he took. His earliest acts of conscience were tied to Jewish suffering: as a teenager he raised money to rescue young Jews from Nazi Germany and helped his mother rehouse refugee children in London.
As an adult he chose Catholicism, converting in 1958, and his faith shaped his belief that the world would be improved not mainly by party politics but by the commitment of individuals. Amnesty, which to this day describes itself as independent of any political ideology or religion, reflected that conviction. His life bridged both traditions: a Jewish family history of persecution and rescue, and a Christian conviction about the duty of each person to act.
Last years and legacy
For most of his life Benenson refused all honours, though in his eighties, largely to please his family, he accepted a Pride of Britain lifetime achievement award in 2001. His first marriage ended in divorce in 1972, and in 1973 he married Susan Booth. He had four children, two from each marriage. Peter Benenson died of pneumonia at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford on February 25, 2005, at the age of 83, and was buried in the village of Nuneham Courtenay, where he lived.
Lighting a candle at St Martin-in-the-Fields for Amnesty’s twentieth anniversary, he said he had lit it against oblivion, so that the forgotten prisoners should always be remembered. Irene Khan, then Amnesty’s secretary general, said on his death that he had brought light into the darkness of prisons and believed in the power of ordinary people to bring about extraordinary change. Millions of people who have written a letter, signed an appeal or been freed from a cell owe something to the London lawyer who could not forget two students and their toast to liberty.
Sources & further reading
Obituary: Peter Benenson, The Guardian, 2005 · Bringing light into the darkness of prisons, Salon (from The Observer), 2005 · Who We Are, Amnesty International · Peter Benenson, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.