Myrtle Solomon

After the war Myrtle Solomon joined a group called “Women for Westminster” that campaigned on feminist issues and it was here she met Sybil Morrison, a fellow lesbian, who was an active pacifist and a member of the Peace Pledge Union: “I admired her very much and learned a lot from her, and it seemed quite natural to me to become a pacifist then.” They became close friends and were living together at the time of Morrison's death in 1984.

A highlight of Solomon's tenure at WRI was a speech she made to the United Nations Conference on Disarmament in 1982, including the following observation: “Talk of disarmament has become a mythical ritual - a strange macabre dance of millions of words - but the weapons are never put down. To justify a totally illusory need, a whole new language has been invented by a sick society dominated by its weaponry.”

Solomon began working for the PPU in 1957 as organiser for the London area. General Secretary 1965–1972, she was credited with reinvigorating the PPU after it lost members to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the late 1950s and early 1960s. She represented the PPU on the War Resisters International for six years and in 1975 was elected Chair of the WRI, an election she modestly attributed to the fact that she was a woman. But, as with the PPU, WRI was close to collapse and Solomon played an important role in rescuing it, for a time living in the building in Brussels where the WRI offices were situated.

Myrtle Solomon (9 June 1921 – 22 April 1987) was a British pacifist. She was general secretary of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU), a British pacifist organisation, between 1965 and 1972, and chair of the War Resisters International (WRI) between 1975 and 1986.