Tom Burke

This clip is from a series of 100 life history interviews with environmental campaigners in the UK, 1970-2020. It will feature in a book published by UCL Press in 2026. The full interview, along with the rest of the collection will be searchable on the British Library’s Sound and Moving Image catalogue and the interviews will be accessible onsite at the British Library in St Pancras from February 2026. For more information visit www.royalholloway.ac.uk/ohemQuotation:Chris Church: So Tom by late ’75 you were director at Friends of the Earth.Tom Burke: Yes.Chris Church: We have talked about the nuclear campaign but there were a great many other campaigns. And it must have been quite a challenge as director to balance the demands and the priorities of those different campaigns.Tom Burke: It’s interesting because we, I don’t think we ever thought about balancing it. We were just responding all the time. But the campaign, let me think, the three campaigns I can think of. 1) the paper campaign that I’d sort of kicked off the national sort of paper campaign which was a follow up to the bottle campaign, which I had kicked off when I took over local groups because it was very much a kind of local group led campaign. That was morphing into a much wider resource campaign. So again partly the context set by limits to growth and the idea that we were running out of resources. The whale campaign which had been one of the sort of, as it were, leading edges of FoE’s profile in those days, was run by Angela King, that was moving into a stage where we were starting to make a difference in two ways. One in terms of the UK Government, really shifting the UK Government into being quite anti-whaling. I can remember, I remember we did quite a lot of big demonstrations. And we did things like, I remember a demonstration we did with Spike Milligan outside the Japanese Embassy. So it was very focused on Japan in particular as a target for that. And then the other campaign that we were running, was a lot, the early, the anti-motorway campaigning. And one of the points we got to was that piece where we realised the real power of the lobby, the roads lobby and so we took on, we started to take on the roads lobby. That was Mick Hamer’s publication Wheels Within Wheels which had an extraordinary effect for something that was literally, it just said who was who. But nobody had ever done it before. And nobody had ever done that kind of campaign before. So it really set a marker of a kind of approach. Which again I don’t think I fully understood the value of that at the time partly because the way we- I mean you know we were making all of this up, there was no precedent for the kind of work we were doing. And we weren’t using our local groups specifically as fundraising arms. So a lot of our money was just flowing in because we were getting a lot of press coverage. We were getting I think, I remember we used to collect, get our press clippings, they’d come in a big brown envelope every month. And we’d get about 600 separate clippings a month which was in a sense, again the environment was new, you know, so we were getting a lot of local coverage as well as a lot of national coverage. And obviously they interacted with each other quite a lot. So in a sense we were running on- We were running at full strength on all fronts. We weren’t really trying to choose between them very much. We weren’t really growing in size a lot at that time. So we had a staff of about twenty people. And again we were in the early stages of doing things. So we were building a model, that core starting model for Friends of the Earth in which you do good research and then you do things that dramatise and draw attention to that research. But we also started around that time the first really sort of very focused policy campaign when we started to get into, in those first couple of years when I was director, the wildlife of- Angela King again driving forward the Wildlife and Countryside Act. Well we did a really sustained effort to make a difference to that Act and had quite a lot of influence on the final shape of that Act. So we were starting to get into legislative work in those first couple of years when I was the director.British Library catalogue number: C2037/10 Project clip number: 106