KATHLEEN JANNAWAY: PLANTING SEEDS AND TREES THE VEGAN WAY In the fifth of the ‘...And If You Know Your History’ series, Dr. Roger Yates of the Vegan Information Project continues with his account of some of the vegan social movement pioneers. Here is an account of the contribution of Kathleen Jannaway towards the vegan cause.
Born in 1915, Kathleen Jannaway’s working class origins and the values of her parents and grandparents were to shape her radical vision of a just vegan future, which she campaigned for first for the Vegan Society as its General Secretary from the early 1970s, and then as a co-founder of the Movement for Compassionate Living (MCL) from 1984 onwards. She was born into a very poor family and she remembered as a child having to go to bed early on the days when the gas would run out. Her father was a speaker for the Socialist Party of Britain (which became the British Labour Party) and he gave talks on peace and the dignity of the working class. Her grandfather held unorthodox views and was said to be opposed to Kath140
FORÇA VEGAN
leen joining the Girl Guides which he thought negatively was a “representative of the status quo.” A bright child, Kathleen Jannaway won an educational scholarship to grammar school where she learnt the value of critical thinking and to question everything. She gave up the opportunity to go to university to take a job as a teacher in order to financially help her family. She married her lifelong partner, Jack Jannaway, before the “Second World War” and, like Donald Watson, they both registered as conscientious objectors. During the war years, they both turned vegetarian when Kathleen saw the slaughterhouse truck arrive to take lambs away. Not yet vegan, she helped to organ-
ise a protest meeting for the organisation that was to become Oxfam demanding that dried cow’s milk be sent to the children of allies in mainland Europe. It was the Jannaway’s keen ability to see connections between justice issue that led them to veganism. Kathleen taught children with learning difficulties; she was peace and “freedom from hunger” campaigner, and served for many years on the executive committee of the Gandhi Foundation. Then, in 1964, the Observer newspaper in London published a two-page review (which is remarkable in itself) about Ruth Harrison’s then new publication, Animal Machines: The New Factory Farming Industry. Harrison deeply shocked
