Stroud paid tribute to a pioneering politician on Monday when hundreds of people joined a procession from his funeral at the Sub Rooms to his final resting place, paying their respects to John Marjoram.
The procession left the Sub Rooms shortly after midday with hundreds of people following the cortege to the cemetery off Horns Road.
John Marjoram was the UK’s first elected Green councillor in 1985, and subsequently mayor of Stroud.
The funeral was held in the Ballroom, and the Sub Rooms was at its capacity of 386 people with staff allowing mourners into the room once others had left.
Mr Marjoram was a lifelong pacificist and caused controversy in the late 1980s when he attended the Remembrance Day event in Stroud’s Park Gardens wearing a white poppy.
Growing up in rural Essex in the 1940s gave John Marjoram an enduring love of nature, while dinner-table debates with his staunch Labour father and Conservative-voting mother gave him an early interest in politics.
Other formative influences were two uncles, one a conscientious objector during World War One, and the other who did take part in the fighting but talked to John about the horrors he’d seen. Young John vowed that he would never use a weapon or kill anyone. He retained anti-war and pacifist beliefs throughout his life.
These childhood influences were a natural precursor to his subsequent involvement in Green politics – John was to become one of the first Greens in the country to be elected to office and holds a record as the longest continuously serving Green councillor.
Born in 1939, an only child, John left school at 15 and worked in factories, offices, farms and building sites. He was briefly a member of the Communist Party and was sacked from a factory job for trying to start a trade union.
In 1959 he was called up for national service but declared himself a conscientious objector. “Christ said ‘thou shalt not kill’; it was that simple,” said John, a practising Quaker, many years later. While the rest of his intake went to Malaysia to fight the Communists, he remained in England working in an administrative role.
About that time, he got involved with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Peace Pledge Union, and took part in the second Aldermaston March during leave from national service in 1961.
He was twice arrested and jailed for using a plough to break into American military bases. He subsequently attended numerous anti-war rallies and organised hundreds of coaches to go to national protests. After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, John was involved in numerous local actions and vigils.
In 1968 John moved to Stroud with his young family, drawn here by his affiliation with the Quakers, who had a strong presence in the town.
He helped to set up the Home Farm Trust in 1970, turning 10 acres of agricultural land into a space for local residents to learn gardening and farming skills. He saw this work as a way of balancing his political work with practical caring for the land, animals and people.
In 1972 John went back to college to study for a diploma in youth and social work, going on to run a youth club in Stonehouse.
In 1975 he co-founded a local branch of the People Party (later to become the Ecology Party and then the Green Party). He was inspired after reading the Club of Rome’s report “Limits to Growth”, which explained how fast the finite resources of the planet were being consumed.
During the mid-1970s, John was a founding member of the successful Stroud Campaign Against the Ringroad (SCAR), and as a member of Stroud District Council planning committee prevented many unsightly developments from happening locally. He was pivotal in preventing the Hill Paul building being demolished, saving Uplands Post Office and enabling the Town Council’s purchase of Lansdown Hall.
1985 saw the creation of Stroud Green Party and John was among the six people who turned up to the first meeting. Not long after that, the subject of the 1986 local elections came up and, as John later recalled: “All eyes turned to me.”
John was the obvious choice to be the Green candidate, as he had been a school governor for several years and had been involved in local campaigns. His campaign was boosted by growing public concern about the environment following the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986.
John won the Trinity ward seat on the District Council, becoming the first Green Party councillor to be elected in the UK. He later remembered his young daughter rushing across the room with tears in her eyes and flinging her arms around him shouting ‘Dad, you’ve won!’
John was assigned to sit on the planning committee because of his interest in architecture, and he served on it as a member or deputy chair for 31 years. He recently recalled mammoth committee meetings lasting up to 12 hours, during which councillors would deal with every planning application themselves. He was saddened by the fact that most decision-making over planning applications had since shifted to officers.
John was one of the first councillors elected to Stroud Town Council when it was formed in 1990. John had lobbied for the creation of a town council so that local people would have more say in hyper-local issues.
John served as mayor for 10 civic years, and deputy mayor for seven. He was the UK’s first Green Party mayor. He introduced the concept of the ‘Mayor’s Bench’, a particular bench in the town centre where he would sit every Friday so that residents could come and talk to him. He recommended the open-air surgery concept to other councillors, joking: “If you invite people to your house, you never get them out again!”
In 1993 he co-founded the Association of Green Councillors, which now has hundreds of members.
In 2012, while Mayor, John was prosecuted for refusing to fill in his census form because of his beliefs as a Quaker. He said he “couldn’t live with myself” if he “collaborated” with a military corporation (the census was run by Lockheed Martin UK).
He pleaded not guilty and the Crown Prosecution Service dropped the case. At the time John said: “I am disappointed not to have been given the opportunity to give evidence in my defence and to ask some pertinent questions about why the case was brought against me in the first place.”
In 2018, committed remainer John seconded a Green/Labour motion at Stroud District Council calling for a People’s Vote on the final terms of any Brexit deal. He pointed out that 55% of Stroud District voted to remain in the EU and that Brexit would have a profound effect on the health and wellbeing of local residents and therefore had significant implications for the work of Stroud District Council.
In 2020, John supported the Black Lives Matter movement and was concerned that Covid-19 disproportionately affected Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people. John was among the local Green councillors who demanded an independent public inquiry into this. They said Covid-19 treatments and vaccines should be made available without profit to poor countries, rather than boosting the profits of the big pharmaceutical companies. John said at the time: “We can’t go back [after Covid] to the “business as usual” that created such huge safety and health inequalities in our society.”
In 2023, John received the title of Stroud’s first Honorary Freeman in recognition of his services to the community. He stepped down from politics in 2021, having been a district councillor for Trinity ward in Stroud since 1986 and Mayor 10 times.
Pictures and video by Matt Bigwood
