PENSIONER Bertie Lewis chooses to spend an hour or so most Saturday lunchtimes conducting a one-man protest in Bolton town centre writes Alan Calvert

At 81, his Left-wing fire continues to burn brightly as he seeks to get his anti-war message over to anyone who cares to listen.

He is a familiar figure with his placards and, in this era of mass communication by newspapers, television, radio and the Internet, he represents the spirit of an earlier age when people with a political view were prepared to mix it directly with supporters and opponents alike.

Most people pass him by, he says, but it is not a worry.

Some who disagree mutter a few words as they walk past and others -- often teenagers -- ask him to explain what he is on about.

"I get lots of people who are really interested and I feel like a teacher," he said. "Lots of people pay me compliments and that bucks me up."

Bertie -- his real name is Hubert -- is an American citizen who has never subscribed to the "my country right or wrong" philosophy.

"I am an internationalist," he told me as we chatted in the Bolton Socialist Club in Wood Street, where Bertie is on the committee.

He believes we are already into a third world war and resents the way, as he sees it, that America and its allies use their overwhelming power against defenceless people in countries such as Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Israelis, he thinks, should leave Palestinian territory.

If the public does not put pressure on its leaders to change policies -- as happened with the Vietnam peace movement in America -- he predicts there will eventually be "hell on earth".

So what makes him tick?

When you delve into his life an interesting picture emerges of an intelligent man with an unusual degree of lifelong adherence to his personal view of the world.

Contradictions emerge when you discover that he reads both the Communist Morning Star and the Conservative Daily Telegraph.

Then there is the fact that he flew 40 wartime bombing missions as an RAF wireless operator, somehow surviving when many of his young colleagues were killed.

Bertie's parents were a travelling shoe salesman and a stenographer. He was born in Chicago and later lived in New York, where he shone in mental arithmetic at a Catholic school.

But when he took a city exam to win a scholarship to a "posh" school he found himself confronted with algebra and other things he had not been taught.

"At 15 the world was a phoney," he remembers.

So he dropped out and spent some time riding the freight trains around depression-era America, picking up jobs where he could.

The hours he spent listening to unemployed people talking about the "lousy capitalist system" formed the basis for his lifelong socialism.

At the age of 20 he was interested in the war in Europe and, after getting a job on a Norwegian ship, he ended up in London, where he joined the RAF in 1941 to make his contribution to the defeat of Hitler.

After the war he returned to New York where he became a business machines salesman and married his Austrian-born wife, Amalia.

When they decided to move to England, Bertie remembered the time he spent in the Blackpool area in the RAF and decided that Bolton -- "it seemed to be a nice place" -- was a good spot to settle down.

He worked selling cash registers in clubs and pubs before buying houses which were run as hotels. But he says he has always seen the difference between making a living and having a purpose in life.

Still conscious of the horrors of the nuclear bombs which fell on Japan, he joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1965 and has been a prominent campaigner ever since, locally and nationally.

In the mid-1990s he hit the headlines on a regular basis when he provoked widespread anger by placing Remembrance Day white poppies -- to signify peace -- on the Bolton war memorial in Victoria Square.

Bertie, who lives in Taunton Drive, Farnworth, intends to continue his one-man sessions in Victoria Square as long as he can, convinced that his message will eventually get home.

"Civilian populations need to force governments to behave," he said.

And what about the capitalist system now adopted throughout the world?

"It failed during the depression and, of course, it is going to fail again," he said.