Paul Wesley - Editor, Activist and Book Shop Owner

Portrait and interview - 1994 

Paul has a bookshop in the Butterwalk opposite the market square and lives above with his family.  They have all been happy living in the town, but would like to see Totnes care more for its children.  Neither establishment councils nor ‘new age’ conservatives appear to want to provide more than pubs and cold streets for their children to meet in.

Paul grew up in Belfast where there were coffee bars and dances every night, plus religion by the bucketful; enough to give him a life-long taste for dancing and good coffee and a distaste for religion.  He is grateful it was not the other way around!

After four years at Trinity College Dublin, he started a ‘real’ education at the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence at Carmel in California, followed by three years working for the War Resisters’ League in San Francisco and three years as an editor of Peace News in London.  His third greatest pleasure in life is stopping any leviathan of injustice or oppression in its tracks. His first is loving his children.

He has been arrested with, friends with, married to or just rubbed shoulders and other bits, with Joan Baez, Martin Luther King, The Incredible String Band, Margot Fonteyn, Rudolph Nureyev, Bob Dylan and other 60s icons and has usefully dropped their names, but has mainly aspired to be a Tory’s worst nightmare ever since.

Paul thinks that the comfortable and privileged citizens of Totnes should consider the merits of speaking truth to power, confronting and confounding the evil that those in power have inflicted on England before it destroys all ‘our’ children.

Update:  Paul has since retired and has ceased trading.