David McTaggart

Obituary The Independent

David McTaggart, who died in a car crash near his home in Umbria on Friday aged 68, was one of the first to respond to the call to the Greenpeace flag in the early 70s. By some accounts a sucessful property and construction operator (and by jaundiced ones, a failed one), he was then the footloose owner/skipper of a sturdy 38 foot ketch, Vega, built in the 40s in New Zealand and still based there as the 38 year old Canadian cruised the South Pacific. Hearing of the attempts of assorted Canadians in a rented ship to halt US nuclear bomb testing in the Aleutians, and their call for help with similar work against the French in the South Pacific waters near Moruroa, in April 1972 McTaggart began what became a lifetime’s mission.

Though news of his various adventures in the boat the re-named Greenpeace lll would shortly reverberate round the world as a classic maritime tale of derring-do, and do much to forge Greenpeace’s image as the 'Rainbow Warriors”, engaged in a battle in the David and Goliath mould, McTaggart was much more important to the movement in defining its structure and methods, and combining them with the ethos that others had already determined. There was his fellow Canadian Patrick Moore (who has since spectacularly turned his back on Greenpeace) who was and remained for years a brave small-boat skipper, and there were journalists such as Robert Hunter (of the Vancouver Sun) who understood the value of publicity. There were men such as Jim Bohlen who, as Quakers or admirers of Quakers, understood the power of peaceful but confrontational bearing witness.

McTaggart epitomised all of those qualities, but relentlessly and sometimes ruthlessly determined in the early years that Greenpeace should be an international body with strong central organisation (not to say control) in the hands of a small number of people working within a powerful code. By 1977, there were an estimated 8,000 people around the world in 13 very active groups and about 28 more which occasionally surfaced, and the group were famous for campaigning against commercial whaling, and against sealing. It would take on nuclear power production, toxic wastes, marine incineration, the chlorine industry, logging and more. It was McTaggart who found the way, as he invented Greenpeace International, under his chairmanship from 1979 to 1991, to preserve the appearance of spontaneity and even anarchy, within a machine which could marshal ships and inflatables on the oceans of the world (not to say climbers and chemists on its smokestacks and outfalls) and then deliver soundbites and images to the growing army of affluent armchair conservationists in the West. It was he, too, who saw in the early 80s that Latin America and, in the late 80s, the old Soviet world needed Greenpeace, and drove the efforts to set up offices there.

He always saw that, in the words of Greenpeace UK’s erstwhile director, Peter Melchett, 'It was never enough just to be boys in boats. If one phone call would get the result without any publicity, that’s what we do, and on to the next thing”. Indeed, McTaggart shunned any kind of personal publicity and made it part of Greenpeace’s method that it was always the mission and the group which got the attention and not the personalities.

His was an unreconstructed character, though. University graduates and even a few intellectuals of the post-modern stamp would join and lead Greenpeace, but McTaggart remained both peppery and salty. Attending innumerable conferences and meetings, and lobbying cleverly as he might, he brought an air of the dockyard to the late night bar of whatever hotel one might meet him in.

David McTaggart was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, on June 24, 1932. As a youth he was an outstanding athlete whose interests included skiing, tennis, squash, and golf. He won the Canadian National Badminton championship in the singles division three years running. He said that it was a fire, and injury to two of his employees in it, at a ski resort development of his near San Francisco which in 1969 turned him against his business life. He hinted to me that he suspected arson, and others have suggested that he was also in financial trouble. These facts, like those surrounding his personal relationships, were shrouded in mystery. It is believed that he was married several times, and though he certainly had children it is not clear quite how many. When he left Greenpeace in 1991, it was perhaps typical of him to retire to his beloved Italy, and to leave Greenpeace to its own devices. He grew olives at Palciano], and did some campaigning, mostly in a personal capacity.

For years, he had been based in Europe, which he knew well, not least because he had organised Greenpeace offices in various countries there. Rammed by the French navy on his first voyage in 1971 and beaten up by its marines on his second in 1972, McTaggart’s relations with France would define his pragmatism as well as his doggedness. In the first two decades of Greenpeace’s activity, he was also pursuing the French government for legal redress without success. By 1985, Greenpeace had three ships and 50 campaigns around the world. In Aukland, the group’s Rainbow Warrior (a 145 foot onetime UK Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food research vessel) was preparing to campaign against underground nuclear testing at Moruroa. Agents of the French government (which had also infiltrated the organisation locally) scuttled the ship with underwater bombs. Most of the crew escaped unharmed, by the Dutch/Portugese photographer Fernando Pereira was trapped and drowned in the sunken vessel. McTaggart, attending a meeting on whaling in London when he heard the news, apparently suspected the French authorities, but dismissed the thought: 'I thought they couldn’t be that stupid”, he remarked later. Once again the French had hopelessly misread the situation and delivered to Greenpeace a propaganda coup which did much for its fame, supporter rolls and subscriptions.

Yet it was French government support which McTaggart sought, won and deployed as he initiated and conducted a campaign to preserve Antarctica from development in the later 80s. Being a purely wilderness project, this was perhaps nearest to the heart of a campaigner whose interest in the earliest anti-nuclear work had been piqued not by peace and pollution issues, but by the impertinence of the French in declaring tracts of the free ocean as no-go areas. Antarctica symbolised for McTaggart a place where governments had renounced nationalism in favour of internationalism, and where none could be heavy-handed. The continent never was, in fact, declared an 'international park” as Greenpeace wanted, and Antarctica hardly needed Greenpeace to defend it from miners: the weather mostly does that.

It is possible that one day historians will revisit the Greenpeace story and find that much more often than the group likes to suppose, its campaigns were misguided or superfluous. Respect for evidence was often an early casualty of its skirmishes with authority and industry. It will not be doubted, though, that the campaigns certainly had charisma and courage, and in that were thoroughly in the character of David McTaggart.