Barclays and Shell

Hammersmith and Fulham AA Group members held a year-long weekly picket of this Shell garage on Fulham Road in west London. The photograph shows health workers from Charing Cross Hospital at the protest. On 1 March 1987 the AAM launched a boycott of Shell as part of an international campaign organised jointly with groups in the USA and the Netherlands. Shell was joint owner of one of South Africa’s biggest oil refineries and a lead company in its coalmining and petrochemicals industries.

The AAM’s 1986 annual general meeting reaffirmed its call for a total boycott of the oil major Shell. This issue of Embargo’s newsletter reported on the November 1986 month of boycott action against Shell. It announced plans for an international day of action on 21 March 1987 to expose Shell’s role as the biggest oil company in South Africa. Embargo was a coordinating group set up by ELTSA (End Loans to Southern Africa) to campaign for a boycott of Shell.

Leaflet advertising a demonstration outside Shell’s annual general meeting on 13 May 1988. Inside the meeting activists asked questions about Shell’s support for apartheid and sang protest songs when the chairman attempted to move next business. On the day before the meeting, the AAM held a press conference at which MSF union General Secretary Roger Lyons, Sheffield Councillor Michael Buckley and Methodist minister John Pritchard explained why their organisations were boycotting Shell.

Tyneside AA Group asked spectators to boycott Shell products at Newcastle upon Tyne’s May Day carnival in1989. 

In May 1978 the South African Defence Force massacred over 600 people at a SWAPO refugee camp at Kassinga in Angola. They included 120 children. This leaflet accused Shell of being complicit in the killings because they supplied fuel for the SADF in its operations in Namibia and Angola. The leaflet was distributed on the 11th anniversary of the massacre in 1989.

In January 1987 the AAM launched a campaign for a boycott of Shell products as part of an international campaign to make Shell withdraw from South Africa. This leaflet was published shortly after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. He endorsed the boycott and said that continued economic pressure was necessary to force the apartheid government into negotiations.

Southwark AA Group supporters picketed a Shell garage in South London in 1990. After Nelson Mandela’s release, the AAM kept up its campaign for a boycott of Shell and for sanctions to pressure the South African government to agree a genuinely democratic constitution.

Chris Child became involved in the campaign to make Barclays Bank withdraw from South Africa when he was a student at Durham University. He was an Anti-Apartheid Movement staff member from 1976 to 1982, initially as Trade Union Secretary and later as Deputy Executive Secretary. He was responsible for the AAM’s work with trade unions, the disinvestment campaign, Namibia and liaising with local AA groups.

This is a complete transcript of an interview carried out as part of the Forward to Freedom AAM history project in 2013.