Angela Walder, a clear-eyed 37-year-old, would pass unnoticed in a very small crowd. She impresses you with the matter of factness you might expect from a nurse or a teacher; yet the former Home Office Chief Inspector under the Cruelty to Animals Act, Colonel Vine, calls her "an hysteric...a trouble-maker, a pain in the neck", and a former president of the Research Defence Society, who candidly admits "She's my bΩte noire", adds that she's "a right battleaxe".
Angela Walder's particular value to the animal rights movement is that she worked in a cancer research laboratory as an animal technician for 15 years before joining the opposition.
Every morning at half past eight above the Costa Brava nightclub in the Charing Cross Road she begins an 11-hour day as scientific advisor to the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection. As World Day for laboratory animals approaches the offices have been open six and seven days a week. Beside the research papers to be read, the letters and lectures, the collating of new statistics and the publishing of the "Liberator", there has been the complicated organization of Sunday's march from Clapham to Carshalton involving seven meetings with the police.
BUAV is an angry, active movement that has outgrown the respectable image of the National Anti-Vivisection Society. Young vegetarians and Positive Punks have replaced kindly middle-aged ladies in hats.
Angela Walder's first job was as an animal technician with a local drugs firm. "There was and is a careless attitude to life. A researcher will ask for large numbers of animals to be bred and then go off for a seminar or a holiday. When he comes back the animals are the wrong age for the experiment, so they are all killed."
At 19 she joined the new Institute of Animal Technicians and in 1965 went to the Gray Laboratory to look after the animals bred for cancer research. She had decided that she could do more for the animals inside the system than outside.
Angela remembers Dr Gray, the director of the establishment, with affection. "He was a decent chap. He said to me that if I saw something I didn't like I could come and discuss it with him at any time. I could say to him or to Dr Hewitt 'Must the experiment be done like that? Couldn't we design it like this instead, and cut down on the number of animals used?'"
When Dr Gray died, his place as director was taken by Professor Fowler, a medical physicist with, despite the title, no medical qualifications. His first move was to double the number of animals. Angela was made chief animal technician, and almost immediately became concerned over the treatment of the animals and the value of the experiments.
But she was most concerned over a series of new experiments by lab staff.
"On one occasion I found that they were taking live mice and chopping off their heads with a decapitating machine. I asked why the mice weren't anaesthetized and was told that the anaesthetic might get into the bloodstream and invalidate the experiment. Anyone with an ounce of medical knowledge would have known that a volatile anaesthetic doesn't get into the bloodstream."
Her experiences at Gray Laboratory need not be taken as the norm, but after six years of detailed research into British vivisection she concludes that the 4,500,000 experiments a year rarely benefit humans.
"The World Health Organization itself tells us that out of the 30,000 to 40,000 drugs on the market, only 220 are of any real benefit. We already know that smoking and alcohol are bad for us, we do not need any further testing on cosmetics╔ And as far as cancer research is concerned, Lord Zuckerman stated in the report carried out for the Government that giving cancer to laboratory animals has not and will not help us to understand the disease or to treat human sufferers."
Angela and two of her technicians were encouraged to leave the cancer research laboratory in 1976. Professor Fowler remains the director.
With Kim Stallwood and Faye Funnell, Angela set up Coordinating Animal Welfare and under the same team BUAV took on an aggressive new lease of life. Membership in two and a half years has risen from 2,500 to 16,000. Their first achievement was to close Club Row, a notorious East London animal street market. She has worked closely with Lord Houghton of Sowerby, chairman of the Committee for the Reform of Animal Experimentation, and on March 3 he put a Bill to close all sales of pets in street markets through its final reading in the Lords.
The battle cost Angela Walder eight arrests. She regards Club Row as "one small victory", but her solicitor Mary Rose Barrington remembers the long battle with admiration.
"When you meet Angela at first," she says, "she gives you no inkling that she is a really remarkable woman. It dawns on you gradually. She does get emotional, but I notice on television and on the radio she can get very angry but retains her grasp of facts and figures. While other people are blustering she'll inject five crisp facts."
