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There have always been people who are committed to an idea, an ideal, a
value, a religion, a cause. Among them, there have always been people convinced
that, at whatever risk to themselves, their commitment must not involve the use
of violence or war. They have hung on to that conviction despite being despised,
condemned and punished for it. It takes a lot of courage to hold out against
violence and killing when your family and friends are threatened and may
themselves turn against you, when you face public hostility and hatred, when the
leaders of your society are determined that war, not peace, is the right and
heroic way forward, and when you are accused of being a coward and a traitor.
The conscientious objectors who refused to fight in the First World War were
courageous in this way.
In 1914, after 20,000 casualties in the first two weeks of the war, compulsory
call-up for British men looked increasingly likely. Pacifist members of the
No-Conscription Fellowship, set up in 1915, successfully campaigned to secure
'the conscience clause' in the 1916 Conscription Act: the right to claim
exemption from military service. [see Military
Conscription]
Over 16,000 men made that claim. They were then required to attend a tribunal
(an interviewing panel with some legal authority) to have the sincerity of their
claims assessed. The government meant well: these tribunals were intended to be
humane and fair. But the people who actually sat on the panels were a very mixed
bunch, mostly elderly businessmen, civil servants, policemen, and the like (all
too old to be called up, and all fully in support of the war). Often they were
people 'of not very great depth of vision or understanding', genuinely confused
about their task; a few were women, who seemed particularly incensed by the
conscientious objectors' (COs') point of view. The COs came from all walks of
life, and varied as widely in their ability to cope with often rude and
aggressive interviewers, whose real intent was not to judge individual
consciences opposed to the war but to replace the soldiers fighting in it. Some
COs didn't get a chance to say a word, other embarked on well-prepared argument.
Whatever they said, the result was the same: only a handful received full
exemption.
The COs, facing difficult choices for themselves, now fell into several
categories. Some were prepared to accept alternative (non-combatant) work in the
armed services. Some were prepared to accept alternative service but not as part
of the army. There were also some who held out for unconditional exemption:
these were the 'absolutists', opposed to conscription a well as war, upholders
of civil liberty and the freedom of the individual - values thought to be
respected in Britain. Absolutists (most of whom were committed pacifists)
believed that any alternative service supported the war effort and in effect
sustained the immoral practice of conscription.
But whichever category the COs found themselves (for example, misguided
tribunals often dismissed out-of-hand the cases of COs who, had they been asked,
would have readily taken part in civilian alternative service), almost all of
them at some point clashed, often painfully, with the military authorities.
Anyone whose case was dismissed but refused call-up, or who refused alternative
service when offered it, or who while on alternative service still refused to
co-operate with any military command, was arrested and sent to military
barracks. There they were treated as insubordinate soldiers, court-martialled,
and sent to prison.
COs faced these unpleasant consequences with responses as varied as
themselves. Their only backing came from the sustained vigilance of the
No-Conscription Fellowship, which despite continual harassment by the police
(which meant going partly underground) managed to keep tabs on almost all COs,
provide moral and physical support for some of their families, and campaign
against the harsh treatment and imprisonment so many of them endured. The NCF
was fortunate in its leaders, intelligent and dedicated men, and in its
organiser, a formidably efficient ex-suffragette: Catherine Marshall reckoned
that for aiding COs she was technically liable to 2,000 years in prison!
3,400 COs accepted call-up into the Non-Combatant Corps (NCC) or the Royal Army
Medical Corps (RAMC) as non-combatants. The NCC (the 'No-Courage Corps' as the
press rudely called it) was set up in March 1916, part of the regular army and
run by commissioned officers. The COs assigned to it had the status of army
privates, wore army uniforms and were subject to army discipline, but didn't
carry weapons or take part in battle. Their duties were mainly to provide
physical labour in support of the military.
The NCC came as a shock to quite a few of the COs, who immediately faced the
question of whether to submit to wearing uniform. Refusers were treated as
though they were absolutists, and underwent all kinds of punishment: bullying,
prison, deprivation, inhumane treatment, hard labour. So did men who also
refused to perform close-to-war duties such as handling munitions or building
rifle ranges. Some broke down, physically or mentally, as a result of their
treatment.
In fact, the military were handicapped: they had no precedents or guidelines for
dealing with conscripts at all, never mind conscripts who refused to fight. It
had been difficult enough in 1915, arranging adequate training for a million
volunteer soldiers. For centuries the army had been governed by what has been
called 'the discipline of fear'. Career soldiers might be expected to accept its
principles, even if they didn't always live up to them; men snatched unwillingly
from quite different occupations could not and should not. But by the time of
the Somme offensive (420,000 British dead: more than twice the number of the
entire army in 1914) most of the old British army had been killed. The scale and
manner of warfare was new and shocking, and this war seemed unstoppable. Whose
side, wondered the frustrated and angry military, were these 'conchies' on?
At the beginning of the war a group of young Quakers, trained in first aid, set
up a humanitarian project in France, which they called the Friends Ambulance
Unit (FAU). Most of its 1,200 members were pacifists; they were all civilians;
and they worked closely with the fighting soldiers. 'Our ideal as a voluntary
unit is to ease pressure on overworked or inadequate staff.' The FAU provided
its COs with a way to support the wounded but not the war. They cared for anyone
they found wounded, including Germans - 'One has to help the latter mostly by
stealth, but it is lovely to be able to do so now and then'. To the French army,
the FAU seemed an organisation of 'amiable and efficient cranks'. There's no
doubt that the drivers of the FAU ambulances and the workers at their hospital
and dressing stations on the front line were brave and dedicated, feeling, as
one said, 'privileged to try to patch up some of the results of this ghastly
mistake'.
But after conscription was introduced, for many COs (a number of whom were given
exemption on condition that they served with the FAU) the complexity of the
situation became increasingly problematic. In 1914 some FAU workers had feared
they might be taking potential non-combatant work away from volunteer soldiers,
who consequently went to their deaths instead. In 1916 it was unwilling
conscripts whom the FAU presence might be forcing into the front line. FAU staff
also thought that their exemption was unfair to other COs, whose hardships they
felt they should share. Many resigned, and soon joined their 'refusing'
colleagues in prison.
Even in prison, choices created dilemmas. Apparently innocent prison tasks
turned out to be part of the war effort, and had to be resisted. Those who
refused to do any work were punished with solitary confinement and
bread-and-water diets for long periods.
Another kind of dilemma concerned the work camps set up by the government in
1916, after a Central Tribunal had decided that, on re-examination, 4,378
prisoners were 'genuine' objectors. Was agreeing to go to the camps a measure of
war support? Some COs thought it was, and stayed in prison. Others thought it
might be a progressive move, possibly leading to enlightened penal reform, and
went. The camps varied. Some were relatively comfortable, others barely
habitable. Work varied, too, from the unpleasant (making fertiliser from dead
animals) and, much more often, to the utterly futile (manual labour for
non-existent projects).
In all, more than 6,312 conscientious objectors were arrested; 5,970 were
court-martialled and sent to prison, where they endured privations both mental
and physical (819 spent over two years in prison). Around 70 COs died because of
the harsh treatment they received; 39 became permanently mentally ill.
1,330 'absolutists' refused to do any kind of alternative war work, but never
won exemption for this principled stand; many ended up somehow involved in
activities laid on by the Home Office, before being sent back to prison again.
Prisons in those days were still run on inhumane systems inherited from the 19th
century. The silence rule was particularly harsh: almost impossible to keep, yet
invoking severe punishment when broken. One CO, Fenner Brockway, a Labour
journalist who was to be knighted in the 1960s and lived into his nineties,
started a rebellion against the silence rule. For ten days all 60 COs in
LIverpool's Walton Prison chatted openly, played games and organised concerts.
As a result Fenner, as ringleader, was transferred to another prison for eight
months solitary confinement, and 'three months bread and water treatment until
the doctor wouldn't allow more. And yet one had a sense of freedom which I can't
describe. The Governor would summon me into his presence, and instead of
standing to attention I would say "Nice morning, isn't it". One had an
extraordinary sense of personal freedom.' After the war Fenner Brockway made
prison reform a crusade.
And after the Armistice? No-one was in a hurry to release the COs - certainly
not until the surviving soldiers were brought back from the front, which took
months. Some COs went on hunger strike in protest at their continued detention:
130 were forcibly fed through tubes (as suffragettes had been) - so forcibly
that many were injured by the treatment and had to be temporarily released.
Others went on work strikes and were brutally punished for it.
In May 1919 the longest-serving prisoners began to be released; the last CO left
prison in August. Many found that no-one wanted to employ them. All of them were
deprived of their votes for up to a decade.
There were plenty of protests against war in 1914. Some of the protesters were
socialists, who believed that the working men of the world should unite, not
obey orders to kill each other. Some belonged to religious groups which forbade
taking human life. Some thought this particular war was wrong, some thought all
war was wrong. Thousands of these varied protesters gathered in London's
Trafalgar Square on August 2 to make their anti-war voices heard.
A sixteen-year old called Harold Bing was there. He had walked the 11 miles from
Croydon (and walked back again afterwards). 'It was thrilling,' he said. Harold
and his father were both pacifists (his father had opposed the Boer War as
well), and they both joined the No-Conscription Fellowship. Harold helped to
distribute NCF leaflets from house to house; on one occasion he was chased by a
hostile householder wielding a heavy stick.
After conscription was introduced in 1916, Harold was arrested and taken to
Kingston Barracks. A few days later he went before his tribunal. Harold was not
thought to qualify for exemption. '18? - you're too young to have a conscience,'
said the chairman. But not, apparently, too young to be sent to war. Although
now officially a soldier, Harold was an 'absolutist' CO. He was
court-martialled. The sentence: 6 months hard labour. In the end he spent nearly
3 years in prison.
Many COs were given what was called the 'cat and mouse' treatment: at the end of
their sentences, they were released, summoned back to barracks, arrested again
for disobeying orders, and imprisoned once more. The good thing, as Harold
observed, was that each time someone was released, they had enough time before
re-arrest to get hold of newspapers and information which they could then
covertly pass on to fellow inmates. 'I remember there was great excitement when
news of the Russian revolution came through. People thought this would make a
great difference to the war.'
Harold made a difference himself. He helped to get vegetarian food (albeit
unappetising) recognised on the prison menu, and additional nourishment (a mug
of cocoa) supplied for men who worked overtime. He also made friends with a few
of the kinder warders - helping the daughter of one of them with her maths
homework; that warder died soon after the war, and Harold and some other
ex-prisoners raised a fund to pay for the girl's secondary education.
Harold was also one of the men who together created a prison magazine: written
on thin brown sheets of toilet paper using the blunt end of a needle and the ink
supplied for monthly letters home. Just the one copy - 'different people writing
little essays or poems or humorous remarks, sometimes little cartoons or
sketches' - was passed secretly from one prisoner to another. In Harold's prison
this unique publication was called 'The Winchester Whisperer'. (The idea was
widely copied. Wandsworth COs, for example, produced their 'Old Lags Hansard',
once with an apology for late publication 'owing to an official raid on our
offices', the editor's cell. A work camp attached to a stone-breaking quarry
published 'The Granite Echo' , with copies printed by a supporter in London.)
Harold left prison with his sight damaged by years of stitching mailbags in dim
light, but also having taught himself German and French. He wanted to teach, but
many advertisements for teachers mostly said 'No CO need apply'. 'And if you did
apply, you got turned down as soon as they knew you were a pacifist.' But at
last he found a sympathetic headmaster who was willing to employ him. As well as
teaching, Harold worked as a peace campaigner (often travelling abroad) for the
rest of his life. He died in 1975.
In May 1916 fifty COs were sent to France. There were three groups of prisoners
from Richmond Castle, Abergele and Seaford; and a further 17 men came from the
gloomy fortress at Harwich, once a jail for French prisoners of war. They were
told that they would be 'under active service conditions', and if they refused
to obey orders they would be shot.
One of the Harwich 'Frenchmen' was Harry Stanton, the son of a Luton blacksmith.
He had felt isolated because of his anti-war views - but 'the very isolation
gave me a strange sense of joy - perhaps an expression of my combatant instinct!
Now and again, as I met men and women whose convictions were leading them along
the same unpopular course, came the feeling that here was something worth doing,
that we must somehow hang on to this foundation of truth and sanity we had
discovered.' On his 21st birthday he founded the Luton branch of the NCF. 'For
an individual to attempt to resist the power of the state would be a tremendous
venture.'
Alfred Evans was another Harwich prisoner. He was an apprentice piano tuner and
the son of a committed trade union man - a risky thing in those days. He was at
first willing to join the RAMC, and was granted an exemption certificate on that
condition. But when he reported to his local recruiting office, 'the lieutenant
asked for my certificate and promptly tore it up: I was going to be put in the
NCC, he said. I flatly refused, and he called the guard - two men and a corporal
with fixed bayonets - and I was taken to Hounslow Barracks.'
Before sailing Harry and Alfred were put in the punishment cells at Harwich:
'completely dark, dripping with water and overrun with rats, for three days
without food'. 'It was impossible to sleep.' 'Our guards kept telling us we'd
soon be pushing up the daisies, so we weren't surprised to hear we were going to
France - in irons. We were asked to make our wills, but all 17 of us refused.'
At Le Havre the 17 were taken to a huge parade ground and distributed among the
thousand or so soldiers lined up there. Military drill began, but 'not one of us
moved. It must have been an amazing sight to see this small group of us
scattered motionless over the huge parade ground.' After that all kinds of
tactics were unsuccessfully employed in the attempt to bully or frighten the 17
into obeying orders. Some of the regular soldiers began to observe their
visitors with respect. (One sent his dinner to Alfred Evans, 'with my
compliments'.)
Several of the men, including Harry Stanton, were moved to a punishment unit for
28 days. At first they were daily tied by the arms to a kind of crucifix; later
on they were roped, face-forward, to a barbed wire fence. Yet Harry didn't feel
they had special grounds for complaint. Recounting in detail but without drama
the vicious physical treatment he endured, Harry said: 'We were exceptional
cases, and militarism was making an effort to break down our resistance.' What
bothered him most was that the same kind of punishment might be inflicted also
on men who had willingly volunteered for the army, should they cross the
professionals.
Moved to Boulogne, the 17 were handcuffed with their hands behind their backs in
a timber cage roughly 12 feet square, with one toilet bucket between them. After
protests such extreme treatment was stopped, but conditions still weren't good.
After a month Alfred went down with dysentery. Too weak to move, he couldn't go
to the aid of a wounded man whom a medical orderly had let fall. The orderly
hauled his patient up, pointed at Alfred and said, 'There's the bloody man who
wouldn't help a wounded soldier'.
All 50 'Frenchmen' were brought together at Henriville military camp in June for
court-martialling. Just before the trials, a captain told Alfred that his papers
were marked 'Death': was he going to continue to resist? Alfred said, 'Yes. Men
are dying in agony in the trenches for the things that they believe in and I
wouldn't be less than them.' To Alfred's astonishment, 'he stepped back and
saluted me, then shook my hand.'
The sentences were read out in public, in front of thousands of soldiers in
formation. 30, including Alfred and Harry, were sentenced to death, commuted in
each case (after a dramatic pause in the reading) to penal servitude for 10
years. They were shipped back to England, this time to civilian imprisonment.
Harry and Alfred were first assigned to manual labour under the Home Office
Scheme: prisoners were employed in government work camps or hired out to private
employers. Harry found himself at Dyce Work Camp near Aberdeen. Two hundred men
were sent there, and they endured harsh conditions, leaky tents, little
sanitation, too little to eat, and no treatment for illness. One CO died, and
after that the camp was closed. At his next placement Harry soon suspected that
COs were being given jobs to liberate new conscripts to die on the battlefields.
He refused to work, and went back to prison until 1919.
Alfred Evans was sent to a waterworks in South Wales. 'It was a slave-driving
job and they put professional slave drivers over us.' Alfred soon found out that
the managers were creaming off much of the government's labour grant into their
own pockets. He called 'our boys' together; they went on strike and were
promptly sent back to prison. After 1919 Alfred had difficulty getting work. 'I
was drummed out of London.' Out of London, however, he had better luck than most
of his fellow COs: 'There was a shortage of piano tuners, you see. It was purely
economic: they wanted a tuner and so I got a job.'
Croydon-born Mark Hayler was 26 and working in a Liverpool school for young
offenders when war broke out. He was one of the first 50 people to join the
No-Conscription Fellowship. He was a Quaker (a descendant of William Penn) but
he was against war for more than religious reasons. 'We were all conscientious
objectors - my four sisters as well as my four brothers. It seemed to us too
ridiculous for words, war. Not a religious feeling, more a moral point of view.'
Mark quickly joined forces with other Liverpool pacifists, and for a while they
toyed with the idea of disappearing into the Scottish countryside. 'It seems
crazy when you think of it, but it seemed a way to deal with the situation. We
were all very young and there was a bit of adventure about it.'
Once conscription came in, they grew more serious. Mark's tribunal refused him
total exemption, and his appeal against the judgement was also dismissed. Mark's
employer told him: 'I don't mind your opinions, but don't let yourself be
arrested here - all these boys have been through the police courts'. Knowing the
railway stations were being watched, Mark cycled all the way home to London, but
was arrested the following day, remanded in custody, tried in a magistrate's
court, and handed over to the army.
Mark saw himself clearly as a civilian, not a soldier, and he was determined to
obey no military orders. His first prison sentence was in Wandsworth, at that
time run by the army. He complained to the governor, 'I'm a civilian, so why am
I in a military prison?' The governor told him: 'I've got men like you in irons
here', but, Mark recalled, 'I wasn't frightened.' The number of imprisoned COs
grew: 'it made me more determined than ever'.
After his sentence he was sent back to barracks, where he was court-martialled
for refusing to sweep a floor. He was bullied, given short rations, left naked
for hours after refusing to wear uniform, and kept isolated in a tent guarded
(at a distance, so that he couldn't speak to them) by two soldiers. At his trial
he said, 'For refusing to be a soldier I am told I may have to forfeit my life.
I cannot understand it. I thought the days of religious persecution were over,
and that an Englishman could hold and express his convictions.' He was sentenced
to a year's hard labour at Winchester, released and again arrested.
This time he was sent to Dartmoor. It was here that Mark helped to look after
Henry Firth, a CO who died there. 'I was a sort of orderly at the time. He was
only a boy, 21, a preacher with the Methodists. His wife came down from
Yorkshire and I can see her now, sitting not in the cell but on a chair outside
the door. He had pneumonia. He'd been badly treated, sent out to work on the
moor in bad weather.... It was the only funeral from Dartmoor, and all the men
attended - they couldn't have stopped them. We followed the coffin down to the
railway and it was put on the train to Plymouth. We wouldn't let the prison
authority do anything except what they had to, it was all arranged by our own
people. Some of us got hold of some fog signals and put them on the railway line
here and there. As the train went out of the little station at Princetown the
signals went off, a sort of farewell. And I remember nearly a thousand men sang
a hymn, Abide With Me.'
Mark lived on into his nineties, aware that his whole life was affected by his
experiences. At one stage in prison he had grown very depressed. 'It produces
thoughts that disrupt one's character. No-one to talk to, men shouting out in
the night, month after month, it seemed there would never be an end. It's
unbelievable what it can do to you.'
And like other COs he faced problems finding work after release. 'I was
interviewed by committees and the last question was always "What did you do
in the Great War?" I knew that was the end. I was offered a very good job
somewhere, but the offer was withdrawn: "The whole committee's very sorry
about it, but we couldn't possibly employ you with a record like that".
No-one would be responsible for employing a man who had been in prison.'
Dartmoor prison was built for French prisoners from the Napoleonic wars. At the
end of 1916 it was reopened to house over 1,000 British COs and renamed
'Princetown Work Centre'. There was a mixture of 'religious groups of all
kinds,' said Mark Hayler, 'from Plymouth Brethren down to anything from
Salvation Army, Christian Scientists, and of course Methodists and
Congregationalists. Not so many Church of England, because that was the
establishment....The Bishop of Exeter refused us the use of the church in the
prison. But if we'd been murderers we'd have had a free hand, and we could have
sung God Save The King!'
200 of the COs were put to work in the prison. The rest were sent out to the
moors, either to farm (crushing grain) or to work in the quarry (carting
granite) for 9 hours a day. In the midst of the moor the COs cleared a
rectangular patch and built round it a 7-foot drystone wall. It had no use or
purpose, and decades later was still known as 'Conchies Field'. (On the other
hand, the men offered to build a church in Princetown: the only one in Britain
built by prisoners.)
One of Dartmoor's thousand was Eric Dott, a young Scot from Edinburgh who would
later become a GP. After solitary confinement in Wormwood Scrubs, Eric found
Dartmoor refreshing. His cell ('which we prefer to call a room') wasn't locked;
there was sufficient food, a library, a games room, a gymnasium. Concerts were
arranged, conversation and debate were continual. 'I had to substitute self
discipline for prison discipline!' said Eric. He didn't enjoy stone-breaking,
however, ('cold and desperately fed up') but doctors decreed that men wearing
glasses shouldn't do such work: Eric went back to sewing mailbags in his 'room'.
He admitted, 'You had to be fit to stand it. There were many older men and men
with worries at home for whom it was very difficult. Those who weren't strong
suffered - you slept on boards with only a thin mattress. And there was almost
no medical treatment.'
By 1917 the comparative comfort of Dartmoor was arousing anger in the press,
enraged that 'The Coddled Conscience Men' were 'Princetown's Pampered Pets'. An
MP suggested they should be exchanged for wounded prisoners-of-war captive in
Germany. In the House of Lords a Princetown visitor reported on the
'intellectual anarchy' he had found there. 'Why not send the conchies somewhere
where they could be put in touch with enemy bombers? The dropping of a bomb
might bring about a sudden conversion, or at least a truer view of the political
situation.' Sometimes the prisoners were assaulted by resentful civilians.
The NCF's campaigned against giving hard and futile manual work to clerks,
doctors, painters, teachers, without adequate nourishment or clothing, now
increased. In November 1917 permission was won for men who had not broken any
rules for 18 months to look for work with private employers.
Though he was against the war, Horace Eaton wanted to help the wounded and
suffering. He took a training course with the St John's Ambulance corps and
tried to join the RAMC. He was turned down because he hadn't yet taken any
examinations, and at that point conscription was introduced. 'It was the
greatest crisis in my life, and only those called on to face a similar issue or
problem can realise the terrible weight of responsibility one felt, and above
all the anxiety to do what was right.' He looked for support from the church,
but 'so many in the Christian church supported the war and in fact some
ministers and members were very good recruiting agents'.
Horace finally decided that he would do anything he could as long as it did not
involve killing or helping to kill. He agreed to join the army's Non-Combatant
Corps. Although he also agreed to wear soldier's uniform, he admired the
uncompromising stand of the 'absolutists' he met, and their determined
resistance to military bullying.
The daily work of the NCC at Richmond Castle, where Horace was based, was to
support combatant troops. 'We had various duties to perform - sometimes
assisting to build stables and other times cleaning out various places in the
town (Darlington) for soldiers' billets.' Problems arose when their work brought
the CO non-combatants too close to military matters: 'Part of our company was
sent to the railway station to unload a van for another company of soldiers.
They moved almost everything except some rifles and ammunition and these they
refused to handle.' This difficulty occurred frequently, perhaps not
surprisingly considering that the NCC was army-run.
The men in the NCC had relative freedom, as did the 4,000 or so who'd gained
partial exemption to do civilian work. These were to be found all over the
country, driving ambulances, on forestry projects, working as hospital
orderlies, and helping on the land. Since most of them were not manual labourers
in peacetime, like the hard-labourers in prison they found the work tough. As
COs and pacifists, they also often met hostility and contempt from their
employers. However, there was one advantage of freedom which they were keen to
exploit. 'On our railway journeys we always had ample opportunity for explaining
our stand as COs. Thus we were enlightening others - and were usually given a
fair hearing.' (Not always: one young preacher got into earnest conversation
with a young woman, asked for her address and sent her a leaflet. In a chilly
reply she said it was 'real' soldiers she admired, and 'if heaven was inhabited
by conscientious objectors she had no wish to go there'.)
'Wherever we go,' said Horace Eaton, 'at first we're looked upon as some
special, suspicious kind of beings, but when people get to know us we're
generally respected. We are certainly bearing testimony to our beliefs, and hope
others will be determined to stand for peace and against bloodshed and war.'
These brave, committed men and their experiences
were to make an essential contribution to the advance of penal reform, the
growth of the peace movement, and the establishment of the Central Board for
Conscientious Objectors - of whom, next time around, there were 60,000 more.
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