DW: I was born on 2nd September 1910 at Mexborough in South Yorkshire, into a meat-eating family.

DW: One of my earliest recollections is of holidays on my Uncle George's farm where I was surrounded by interesting animals. They all "gave" something: the farm horse pulled the plough, the lighter horse pulled the trap, the cows "gave" milk, the hens "gave" eggs and the cockerel was a useful "alarm clock" - I didn't realise at that time that he had another function too. The sheep "gave" wool. I could never understand what the pigs "gave", but they seemed such friendly creatures - always glad to see me. Then the day came when one of the pigs was killed: I still have vivid recollections of the whole process - including the screams, of course. One thing that shocked me was that my Uncle George, of whom I thought very highly, was part of the crew. I decided that farms - and uncles - had to be reassessed: the idyllic scene was nothing more than Death Row, where every creature's days were numbered by the point at which it was no longer of service to human beings. I lived at home for 21 years and in the whole of that time I never heard a word from my parents, my grandparents, my 22 uncles and aunts, my 16 cousins, my teachers or my vicar on anything remotely associated with any duties we might have to "God's Creation". On leaving school, I went to be an apprentice woodworker with another uncle. When I was 21, and due to become a craftsman, we found ourselves in the economic slump of the early 1930s and I discovered that craftsmen could become woodwork teachers by qualifying through the City and Guilds. With a bit of trouble I managed it and liked the job so much that I never tried to get any kind of promotion.

DW: I married a Welsh girl, who taught me a Welsh saying, "When everyone runs, stand still", and I seem to have been doing that ever since. That must be part of the answer, because so many people are running towards what I see as suicide, performing habits that everyone knows are dangerous. I've always accepted that Man's greatest mistake is trying to turn himself into a carnivore, contrary to natural law. Inevitably, I suppose, within the next ten years one morning I won't wake up. What then? There'll be a funeral, there'll be a smattering of people at it and, as Shaw forecast for his own funeral, there'll be the spirits of all the animals I've never eaten. In that case, it will be a big funeral!

DW: It was a New Year Resolution in 1924, so I haven't eaten any meat or fish for 78 years.

DW: In the two years before we formed a democratic Society, I literally ran the show. From the response that I had - thousands of letters - I feel that if I hadn't formed the Society someone else would have done so, though it might have had a different name. The word "vegan" was immediately accepted and became part of our language and is now in almost every world dictionary, I suppose. I can't help comparing our attractive quarterly magazine with my humble "Vegan News" which I produced at great labour. Normally I spent a whole night assembling the various pages and stapling them together. I'd limited the number of subscribers to five hundred because I couldn't cope with a bigger number. Compared with democracy, dictatorship has obvious advantages. In the early days of "Vegan News" I could do everything my own way. I don't think I could have survived if I had had to write to the few people concerned and ask for their opinion. I had no telephone and no motor car - I could only hope that they would see my point, until I handed over the work to a committee.

DW: I never had very deep ones. I've never been clever enough to be an atheist - an agnostic, yes. Some theologians think that Christ was an Essene. If he was, he was a vegan. If he were alive today, he'd be an itinerant vegan propagandist instead of an itinerant preacher of those days, spreading the message of compassion. I understand that there are now more vegans sitting down to Sunday lunch than there are Anglicans attending Sunday morning service. I think that Anglicans should rejoice at the good news that somebody at least is practising the essential element in the Christian religion - compassion.

DW: Well, I suppose it is the social aspect - excommunicating myself from that part of life where people meet to eat. The only way this problem can be eased is by veganism becoming more and more acceptable in guest houses, hotels, wherever one goes, until one hopes one day it will become the norm.

DW: The great advantage of having a clear conscience and believing that scientists must now accept conscience as part of the scientific equation.

DW: When I lived in Leicester a friend let me use an allotment. When the crops matured, I had to wheel them back four miles to the other side of the city. When I was lucky enough to get a job in Keswick, I got a house with an acre of garden, which was a dream come true. My compost bins are filled with all the weeds, grass mowings, vegetable waste from the garden, dead leaves - no animal manure. By the way, all my digging is done with a fork - not a spade - to preserve earthworms.

DW: As the old saying has it, if a thing seems too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true, and I'm sure this is a classic example, quite apart from the irreversible genetic nature of what is our basic food supply in the future.

DW: I think it's the bottom of the barrel. However necessary we may feel that, having got into this mess, we have to kill some creatures for their own good, to kill creatures for fun must be the very dregs.

DW: I said that cruel sports were the bottom of the barrel, but I think I'll have to move even them up one and put vivisection at the bottom. One thing we should always ask when we think that cruelty is largely delegated to the people who perform it is the simple question, if these butchers and vivisectors weren't there, could we perform the acts that they are doing? If we couldn't, we have no right to expect them to do those things on our behalf. Most orthodox medicines are tested on animals, and this perhaps is the greatest inconsistency in vegetarians and vegans who take orthodox medicines - a more serious inconsistency even than wearing leather or wool because these are by-products of industries that are primarily there to provide meat.

(Picture Don Watson by Joe Connolly - Veg News) Donald Watson Reads 1st copy of Vegan News - later to become "The Vegan" and copies of his early diaries.

DW: I've never become involved in it. I respect the people enormously who do it, believing that it's the most direct and quick way to achieve their ends. If I were an animal in a vivisection cage, I would thank the person who broke in and let me out but, having said that, we must always remember: is it just possible that our act could be counterproductive? I'd rather not say "yes" or "no" because I don't know the answer to that.

DW: Achieving what I set out to do: to feel that I was instrumental in starting a great new movement which could not only change the course of things for Humanity and the rest of Creation but alter Man's expectation of surviving for much longer on this planet.

DW: Take the broad view of what veganism stands for - something beyond finding a new alternative to scrambled eggs on toast or a new recipe for Christmas cake. Realise that you're on to something really big, something that hadn't been tried until sixty years ago, and something which is meeting every reasonable criticism that anyone can level against it. And this doesn't involve weeks or months of studying diet charts or reading books by socalled experts - it means grasping a few simple facts and applying them.

DW: Accept that vegetarianism is only a stepping stone between meat eating and veganism. There may be vegans who made the change all in one leap, but I'm sure that for most people vegetarianism is a necessary staging post. I'm still a member of the Vegetarian Society to keep in touch with the movement. I was delighted to learn that at the World Vegetarian Conference in Edinburgh the diet was a vegan diet and the delegates had no choice. This little seed that I planted 60 years ago is making its presence felt.

DW: Better than expected, certainly. The genie is now out of the bottle and no one can ever put it back to the ignorant days before 1944, when this seed was planted by people full of hope. Now wherever Man lives he can have a vegan diet. All the early work was done by volunteers. In a way, everyone the Society has ever paid to do the office work have all been volunteers. Even our Chief Executive is on a wage at the very bottom of anything that is paid in the commercial sector. Because we can afford nothing more. So the Vegan Society has always, in that sense, been supported by voluntary labour. And we're enormously grateful to these people because heaven knows what would happen if they all packed in.

DW: I hesitate to suggest anything to a movement which seems to be going well and spreading world wide. The edifice that survived all attacks before we started our work is now crumbling because of the inherent weakness of its own structure. We don't know the spiritual advancements that long-term veganism - over generations - would have for human life. It would be certainly a different civilisation, and the first one in the whole of our history that would truly deserve the title of being a civilisation.

DW: As a child seeing animals pushed through doors alongside butchers' shops to be killed. I once saw a cow and a calf enter together. I wondered later which one the butcher killed first. On one occasion I actually watched a cow being killed at an abattoir in a field where local children were free to watch and where they hoped to be given a bladder to use as a football. I also watched a pig being killed when I visited an uncle's farm. I turned vegetarian at the age of fourteen. My conversion to veganism was about eighteen years later when I learned about the biological mechanics of milk production.

DW: Very well at present, but this was not always the case in the early days when there was much concern because I was flouting nearly every medical advice at that time. On my first visit home after leaving it to earn a living, my father said, "Are you still on that vegetable diet?" When my older brother and younger sister joined me as vegetarians, non-smokers, teetotallers and conscientious objectors, my mother said she felt like a hen that had hatched a clutch of duck eggs. Such was the way my departure from orthodoxy was viewed at the time. I had good kind parents who never allowed my "peculiar" ways to destroy our good relationship. Later when we formed The Vegan Society, criticism was almost general - some of it in the form of concern about what we might be doing to our bodies. The kindest criticism we received was that we "meant well," or that the sheer problems arising from choosing to live in a world catering mainly for other people would get us down in the end. Other critics said, "It seems to suit you" without realizing that it might suit them too if only they would try it.

DW: I invited my early readers to suggest a more concise word to replace "non-dairy vegetarian." Some bizarre suggestions were made like "dairyban, vitan, benevore, sanivore, beaumangeur", et cetera. I settled for my own word, "vegan", containing the first three and last two letters of "vegetarian" -- "the beginning and end of vegetarian." The word was accepted by the Oxford English Dictionary and no one has tried to improve it.

DW: The pronunciation is "VEEGAN" not "VAI-GAN," "VEGGAN." or "VEEJAN." The stress is on the first syllable.

DW: Constant growth worldwide. Silencing critics by outliving them! Turning critics into supporters. Governments and health authorities are now doing much of our work for us by advocating a vegan diet for seriously ill patients.

DW: The five issues of the duplicated Vegan News are what I call the "Dead Sea Scrolls" of the Society. I produced them before the Society's first Committee was formed. The response I received was so great that I had to limit subscribers to 500 because I could not produce more of the twelve-page effort single handed. My friends would have helped, but we all lived far apart, so it was easier for me to do all the work rather than try to arrange for it to be shared.

As a woodworker, I had spent many years picking up tools to do specific jobs, and changing them for other tools to continue with whatever I was making. On starting to promote the vegan idea I saw words as tools and tried to use them to good effect. I knew, of course, that the pen could be mightier than the sword. I hated verbosity and gobbledegook and seldom used the first person singular "I", because it could create a fence between me and my readers. Everyone knew what I meant at the end of every sentence. The result was successful beyond my hopes. Readers either agreed with me or they didn't; those who did joined in the crusade, and few left before dying.

DW: For me veganism covers many, but I do support movements with isolated aims providing they do not use vivisection. I have a soft spot for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and for Mountain Rescue teams, where people risk their lives to save others, without payment.

DW: Bright. The genie is now out of the bottle and no one can ever put it back.

DW: Certainly not inheriting a cast-iron constitution. My father died of a coronary at sixty-three. Neither his father nor grandfather reached seventy despite the fact that, as farmers, they had plenty of fresh air, exercise, and organic foods. On my mother's side, all died around the age of seventy.

Early in life I decided my first rule of health must be to try to keep poisons out of my body, and this seems to have paid off. Today we have the new hazard of hundreds of chemicals added to manufactured foods, so we must read the small print if we want to keep clear of them. A fuller answer to this question would fill a book.

DW: Don't leave it too late. A single meal of animal food may infect you with any of the many diseases now endemic in medicated farm animals, including variant CJD (Creutzfeld Jacob Disease) from which there is no cure and which may lie dormant for many years.

DW: Yes, veganism gives us all the opportunity to say what we "stand for" in life. The ideal of healthy, humane living is now easy with modern transport bringing us vegan foods from all over the world. Join us and add decades of health to your life, with a clear conscience as a bonus.

Note on language use:
When Donald Watson uses the word "orthodox," it is not meant in any religious sense, but simply to mean "conventional" or "traditional." He does not regard "propagandist" as a pejorative term, which is how many people nowadays use it. Donald's use of English is normal for someone educated when he was, in the early decades of the twentieth century.