On Station

Banning the bomb has become an outdoor sport that threatens to surpass bird watching in Britain. On Good Friday last year, 20,000 demonstrators gathered at Britain's atomic-weapons research center at Aldermaston, carrying knapsacks and pushing prams; they thoroughly snarled Easter-weekend traffic as they made their annual trek 54 miles east to London, winding up for a 100,000-man rally beneath the stern statue of Lord Nelson in Trafalgar Square. Last week the ban-the-bombers turned their attention to Holy Loch, a tiny inlet on Scotland's Firth of Clyde. The 18,500-ton tender Proteus was due to dock there and remain on permanent station to service the U.S. fleet of Polaris-bearing atomic submarines. More than 200 newsmen turned out expecting a lively demonstration.

But Holy Loch proved to be alien ground, too far from the pacifists' comfortable London hangouts to draw a crowd. Only six demonstrators showed up, equipped with four canoes and two dinghies that they planned to paddle into the Proteus' path. They pitched tents on the harbor shore, set up a 24-hour watch for the Proteus' approach.

Their first trouble came from residents of the local town of Dunoon, who were looking forward to a boost to business from free-spending U.S. sailors. One night a band of about 16 Scots seized the pacifist ringleader, Lawrence Otter, 22, snipped off his four-inch beard and cut his boats adrift. "We don't like you foreigners coming in here causing trouble," they said.

The demonstrators managed to recapture their flotilla in time, but when the Proteus finally sailed into view, an escort of Royal Navy launches swamped one rowboat and a canoe and chased the others off. The demonstrators wound up in jail, the kind of mild martyrdom they had obviously had in mind. "We called the local police," said one, "to be sure there were enough cells for us." Next day a crowd of 1,000 appeared at Holy Loch waving placards. But the Proteus was on station, and Dunoon welcomed it with a civic reception and a dance. Said Town Clerk Duncan Anderson: "You'd have to search for a long time round here to winkle out anyone who doesn't want Americans to come."

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