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| Courtesy of Charlene Simon |
The Raging Grannies couldn’t believe their luck when USS Texas, a nuclear-powered guided missile cruiser, docked at CFB Esquimalt in Greater Victoria for a public open house in July 1992.
Pulling off comical protests to disrupt visits of American nuclear ships was something of a specialty for the colourful rabble-rousers, and this event was allowing them to walk right onto the ship, which was freshly back from the Persian Gulf and Operation Desert Storm.
Plans for a surprise onboard tea party quickly took shape. Grannies newcomer Alison Acker set to work embroidering a tablecloth with the words “Tea Not Tomahawks.” She and the other Grannies boarded the ship in their usual gaudy finery that they wore to protests, then set up a tea service on deck and sent word to the captain that he was invited to tea.
A furious captain and his officers in full dress uniform stormed down. Pointing at the tablecloth, the captain barked, “That is a political slogan!” Ms. Acker looked up calmly from her tea cup. “That is a tablecloth,” she corrected him. The Grannies got a military escort off the ship and a story in the local newspaper, just as they had hoped.
“My mother wanted me to be Shirley Temple,” Ms. Acker, 96, recalled in an interview leading up to her medically assisted death in Victoria on Nov. 17. “I rebelled against her from the age of three. I always knew I didn’t want a boring life.”
Born to William and Ruth Sutherland in London, England on Oct. 8, 1928, Alison Ruth Sutherland (later Acker) embraced a life of principled disobedience from an early age. She was just 17 when she was tossed out of the University of Nottingham after painting a statue of major university patron Sir Jesse Boot bright red.
“They said I could come back in two years, but I never did,” Ms. Acker said.
She would go on to become a “muck-raking journalist” with Fleet Street tabloids including The Daily Express, and later a high school teacher, and instructor of English literature at what is now Toronto Metropolitan University, after immigrating to Canada in 1955 with then-husband Phil Hunt and their young son, Jonathan.
She travelled extensively in Central America gathering young people’s stories for her 1986 book Children of the Volcano, and recalled a frightening encounter with the military in Guatemala in which she negotiated with them to lay their weapons down before entering the little village where she was living.
“It’s amazing what you can do in a tight situation – people have the power!” she said of that day.
But it was her decades with the charmingly disobedient protest group the Raging Grannies that brought Ms. Acker some of her most satisfying moments.
The Grannies were born around a Victoria kitchen table in 1987, when 10 women of a certain age – all veterans of the local anti-nuclear movement and faith-based peace community – decided they’d had enough of trying to influence change through the writing of imploring letters to this politician or that.
They would opt instead for satire, song, and civil disruption, all the while dressed in campy, floral outfits and big floppy hats that played up their “granny” status – a strategic move to attract media, which it certainly did in the early years.
Two years after that inaugural meeting, Ms. Acker – living in Toronto and contemplating retirement – saw a news segment on the Victoria-based Grannies, who by then had sparked a movement among similarly frustrated social justice advocates that had led to chapters springing up across Canada, the United States, Australia and beyond.
Ms. Acker immediately packed her bags for the coast. She found an instant fit with the Raging Grannies, and soon enough was one of the group’s chief songwriters.
“She could write songs in five minutes that were very funny – that’s a real skill she had,” friend and fellow Grannies veteran Anne Moon said. “She wrote the bulk of them.”
An example, to the tune of The Battle Hymn of the Republic:
“Every month the U.S. nuclear battleships drop by,
They’re crewed by lovely fellas who would never hurt a fly,
But each of them could blow British Columbia sky high
‘Cuz they’re carrying nuclear bombs!”
Friends sang many of Ms. Acker’s songs at a farewell party for her in late October. She had been newly diagnosed with cancer at that point – she named her tumour Charlie – and had made the decision to seek a medically assisted death.
“Though Alison wasn’t there at the very beginning of the Raging Grannies, she was the inspiration, the dynamo,” her friend Sylvia Krogh said. “She was the glue.”
Ms. Acker thoroughly enjoyed every protest. Like the time the Grannies sailed out in their fleet of “Granny boats” and mooned the military at CFB Esquimalt to protest the entry of U.S. nuclear warships. Or when they slipped into the B.C. legislature one by one, then gathered in a circle once inside and fake-cried over health-care cuts until the police showed up.
Anti-poverty activist Kym A. Hines recalls counting on Ms. Acker’s extensive experience with civilized rebellion as he filmed the approach of police during a protest against homelessness.
“I was shaking, but Alison said, ‘Keep filming! Don’t be scared!’” said Mr. Hines, who would go on to become one of Ms. Acker’s closest friends. “The way she interacted with poor people – never patronizing – was amazing to see.”
Of her many Grannies exploits, Ms. Acker particularly relished her arrest and subsequent three weeks in jail that she was given for participating in the “War in the Woods,” a summer of blockades in 1993 to protest the logging of Clayoquot Sound on Vancouver Island.
“There was a big guard dog where we were held that was supposed to keep us in check,” Ms. Acker recalled. “We called her Fluffy, and in no time at all she would roll over so I could tickle her tummy. I got accused of misuse of government property for that.”
Ms. Acker’s personal life was adventurous and free-wheeling, but also marked by tragedy.
She was 10 when her father died from injuries suffered after his downtown London office was bombed early in the Second World War. “My mother went to pieces. My sister and I were sent to my mother’s people in Derbyshire. We had a rather rough time.”
The new life she began in Canada in the mid-1950s with her husband, also a journalist, had barely begun when he died unexpectedly from a chronic disease picked up while serving in the Pacific theatre of war. Heavily in debt, she was left living hand-to-mouth on Ward’s Island in Toronto with her toddler son Jonathan, where she and friend Ellen Edmonstone counted on each other’s support to get through numerous life crises.
“We were both young women with small children and no money when we met,” said Ms. Edmonstone, who now lives in Victoria. “I was able to help Alison by looking after her son so she could go to university. She was living in really miserable circumstance – so hard that people were trying to get her to give up her son. But she wouldn’t even consider that.”
A love affair with Canadian poet Earle Birney added new sparkle to her life for a period. Then came a joyous few years of summers in the Ontario countryside in a converted schoolhouse on the Bruce Peninsula with her second husband, Harold Acker.
“He was high-level crazy, but in a good way,” Ms. Acker said. “He taught sociology at Ryerson, which was amazing in itself given how crazy he was.”
Mr. Acker had three adult sons of his own and adopted young Jonathan, who took his surname. The family kept various farm animals, a horse, and a pet raccoon named Ringo that Ms. Acker had tamed. Ms. Edmonstone remembers one instance when Mr. Acker returned home from a farmer’s market with a live sheep in the back seat of the car. Ms. Acker made him take it back.
But Mr. Acker died suddenly as well after several years of marriage, of an aortic aneurysm. He died in the car as a frantic Ms. Acker negotiated the narrow country roads separating them from the nearest hospital.
The death of Ms. Acker’s son in 2022 was a final tragic blow that she couldn’t bounce back from, her friends say.
“I have some good friends, but I have no family. I’m sorry about that,” Ms. Acker said. “As I grew older, I didn’t have any of the caregivers that people have. I lost them all along the way.”
When she wasn’t rabble-rousing, Ms. Acker was a writer – she and fellow Granny Betty Brightwell co-wrote the 2004 Raging Grannies history Off Our Rockers and Into Trouble – as well as being a crafter, a quilter, an avid race-walker, equestrian, traveller and volunteer. She continued to make passionate presentations on social causes to Victoria City Council well into her 90s.
The day before her death, Ms. Acker insisted on visiting Ms. Edmonstone. The two old friends talked about spirituality. Ms. Acker was not a religious person, but Ms. Edmonstone said she appeared to take comfort from the conversation: “I told her that we’re energy, and energy never dies.”
Ms. Acker went to her death with four close friends at her side, including Ms. Edmonstone and long-time Grannies collaborator Freda Knott.
Ms. Acker had requested that the socialist anthem The Internationale be played as she died, said Ms. Knott. The group sang together as Ms. Acker’s voice slowly faded, arm upraised in one last gesture of solidarity.
