A
review of a book previously cited on this blog, with two others relevant to the
same theme
David Boulton, Objection Overruled: Conscription
and Conscience in the First World War. Dent, Cumbria, Dales Historical Monographs in Association with
Friends Historical Society, 2014.
 |
| See also previous posts on COs in Ealing |
 |
CO on
left in photo above: Frederick Bromberger (of Ealing)
|
David
Boulton’s pioneering study of conscientious objectors (COs) in Britain in the
First World War was published in 1967, “to ensure that war resisters would ‘not
go unsung’”. Just over fifty years since the introduction of conscription in
the UK, historians rarely paid serious attention to those who refused it, or to
opponents of the war generally. A further half-century on, it is becoming more
likely that writers on the period will at least refer to the fact that COs and
other war resisters existed, albeit, according to the dominant narrative, as a
tiny, eccentric and reviled minority. That dismissive view is open to challenge
on all counts.
Boulton’s account
is still probably the most comprehensive available, ranging from the pre-war
prospects for internationalism, through initial reactions to the war, to the way
conscription was introduced and how it was resisted. What happened to COs is
described along with the dilemmas they faced (whether or not to accept various
forms of “service”); there are harrowing details of what their decisions
entailed, including accounts in their own words and those of their supporters, notably
but not only in the No-Conscription Fellowship (N-CF). They were far from isolated
in their stance: tribunal hearings and appeals were monitored, individual cases
taken up, instances of particularly harsh treatment publicised, questions asked
in Parliament, and dependants helped. As “pacifism became militant” resistance was
organised on an impressive scale. When 35 men were sent to France and threatened
with the death penalty, the resulting outcry ensured the sentences were
commuted. A new Appendix discusses that episode, concluding that it was both
“Conspiracy” and “Cock-up”, confusion and ineptitude combined with some elements
conspiring to kill the peace movement by using the perceived ultimate
deterrent. (p. xxxvi)
Some COs
did pay with their lives. An estimated 73 named as having died in direct
consequence of their resistance and its punishment; prison doctors, some of
whose subservience to military or prison authorities prevented them from
mitigating patients’ hardships or even saving lives, were implicated in several
fatal outcomes, through callousness or incompetence. A growing body of evidence
of the worsening health of COs is cited as a major factor in contributing to
agitation on their behalf, and a change in public attitudes towards them.
For many
who survived, the ordeal did not end with the Armistice. COs remained in prison
or might even be called up and (re-)arrested even while demobilisation was
being got into gear. Punishment often stretched into post-war life, following
“dishonourable discharge” (without pension rights), entailing social ostracism
and barriers to employment.
Cyril Pearce, Comrades in Conscience: the
Story of an English Community’s Opposition to the Great War. London,
Francis Boutle, 2014.
Just what
prevailing public attitudes to the war were is no longer a matter of such complacent
certainty, thanks to recent work, notably that of Cyril Pearce, whose Register of British
COs has been promised for more than a year “soon” to be made
interactively available on-line via the Imperial War Museum [where is it?]*).
Pearce’s
study of an English community’s opposition to the Great War, published in 2002
and now re-issued with new material and revisions, is focused on Huddersfield,
a town which by 1917 had become “a virtual citadel for the anti-war cause”.
(p.15) Unlike what is taken to have been the sequence of events in most places,
the anti-war stance of the labour and socialist movement in Huddersfield
survived the outbreak of war, and the local public mood, tinged with
scepticism, was wary of jingoistic excess. The one recorded serious attempt to disrupt
an anti-war meeting was spectacularly unsuccessful.
While outright
anti-war activism remained a minority movement it benefited from being widely
tolerated, Those who opposed the war often did so in no uncertain terms:
Paddock Socialist Club denounced the “murderous gang of war-mongers responsible
for the present European crisis” and the “efforts that are being made to
involve this country in the bloody outrage on humanity.” (p.53) Although they
are not all he considers, Pearce has thoroughly researched the identities,
choices, and fates of COs in the area, making extensive use of press reports and
organisational archives to show what can be done in the absence of Tribunal
records. Almost all of the latter have been destroyed, the exceptions being those
of the Middlesex Appeals Tribunal, and (in Scotland) of Lothian and Peebles,
and the Isle of Lewis.
When
conscription began in early 1916 it drew divergent local labour and leftwing elements
back together, in the face of what was seen as “Prussianism”, i.e. the sort of
militaristic society the war was supposed to be fighting against. Practical
preparations were made and support systems put in place, including networks to
help fugitives evade arrest. COs could become local heroes to crowds of
demonstrators; a “collective/group consciousness” arose, embodied in an
extensive and vigorous local organisation for Our Boys – in the sense of resisters
not troops. (p.162) For many the question was not whether, but how far to
resist, and what compromises, if any, to accept.
“Work of
national importance” here could mean workers staying in the jobs they already
had or being directed to similarly “essential” work (textiles, dye-works,
chemicals) in the area, to which COs from elsewhere were also sent,
contributing to its balance of dissident opinion. By November 1918 the anti-war
movement in the town is said to have been more united than ever. At the same
time the threat of industrial conscription was a further focus of resistance,
and labour struggles continued unabated. “As the war progressed it became seen
as part of an inevitable process of depriving workers of their already limited
freedoms and of harnessing them more thoroughly and repressively to the needs of
capital.” (p.194) Others, however, were motivated rather by revulsion at
violence, especially killing, and at the denial of individual freedom that was
a concomitant of war and militarism. In Huddersfield, Pearce contends, the
matter was not only a private and personal one but a public issue bound up with
multiple issues of ordinary life. The question remains, as posed at the end, “not
why there was so much opposition here, but why there was so little elsewhere.”
 |
| Conscription was presented as un-British until
the government decided it was necessary |
Or was there..?
Alison Ronan, A Small Vital Flame: Anti-war
Women in NW England 1914-1918, Manchester, Scholars’ Press, 2014.
Alison
Ronan’s book is a good example of further research already under way,
indicating that in at least one other part of the country there was more
widespread and varied opposition to the war than conventional historical
narratives have tended to acknowledge. She focuses on the even more neglected
subject of women’s contribution in this area. While Boulton and Pearce each
make some mention of women’s roles, in the context of the No-Conscription
Fellowship and of informal, family support networks respectively, these account
for only a few pages in their works; David Boulton points out this “glaring
omission” himself, and supplies some sources to atone for it, in his new Introduction
(pp.xviii-xix).
Using
research methods avowedly influenced by a feminist historical analysis, Alison
Ronan aims to examine “women’s motivation and decision to become visible
opponents of war, both at an individual and organisational level”. (p.10) The
organisations explored in detail are: Manchester and Salford Women’s War
Interests Committee, 1915-1917; the
Women’s International League (for Peace and Freedom) 1915-1918; branches of the
Union of Democratic Control, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the
No-Conscription Fellowship, and the Workers’ Suffrage Federation, 1916-1918;
and (a particularly rewarding subject) the Women’s Peace Crusade, Manchester,
1917. Perhaps it is inevitable that the focus should be on organisations, since
they kept records which survive, but the approach is far from bureaucratic,
always attending to personalities and informal interactions. Anyway they are
overdue for and repay attention, as illustrated in the case of the Women’s
Peace Crusade:
p.259 The Women’s Peace Crusade was extraordinary.
It spread like wildfire across industrial cities in England, Wales, Scotland
and Ireland during 1917 and 1918. It was unambiguously anti-militarist,
feminist, internationalist and socialist, explicitly recruiting support from women
in working-class communities across the country.-261 [Yet generally
unremembered] perhaps because the series of demonstrations were co-ordinated by
local, ordinary working-class women or perhaps because its spontaneous energy
was not organised through formal committees nor generally recorded in minutes
of meetings and so little documentation has survived. (note 4) # [The leaflets] were handed out in the
door-to-door campaign or at the public meetings and were carefully drafted to
appeal to the working-class woman... full of housekeeping metaphors and easily
recognised wartime tropes of grieving wives and mothers. They also offered a
‘commonsense’ approach to the political issue of international peace and the
negotiation of a just settlement. -262
The Crusade was against the war, its principal demands focusing on an
immediate, negotiated peace settlement. Originating in Glasgow, it used the
organisational strategies of local women who had led the women-led rent strikes
in 1915. (note 8) -265 The Crusade
lulled during the winter of 1916 and re-emerged throughout 1917 particularly
after the Russian revolution in March and during 1918 when peace was on the
horizon after the entry of the USA into the war. [Highlighting added]
In
addition, there are chapters on women in progressive organisations in the two
years preceding the war, and on wartime friendships and alliances between
suffragist, pacifist and socialist women. Throughout, the conditions and
hardships of everyday life are emphasised: shortages of food and fuel,
restrictions and surveillance, threats to women’s personal liberty. The sense
of reality and immediacy is enhanced by a few effective illustrations, posters
or leaflets from campaigns and photographs of groups with a shared purpose.
While women were clearly not subject to the same dilemmas and penalties as men
liable to call-up, to be identified as an anti-war campaigner required
considerable courage, which was not lacking, sustained by networks across
generations and overlapping affiliations.
“Belonging
to any anti-war group politicised women, because of the simultaneous
explorations of the economic, political and the gendered aspects of war.”
(p.219) “This was the pivotal issue for the anti-war women across the country
and in Manchester: to determine how ordinary women, without apolitical voice,
could affect the outcome of a war and thereby ensure a permanent, just and
international peace.” (p.10)
There is a
certain amount of repetition – and a tendency throughout to follow the
traditional lecturers’ advice, to “Tell them what you’re going to say, say it,
then tell them what you’ve said”, but given that few readers will have any
familiarity with the material, this is probably all to the good. Certainly the key
points are worth emphasising.
p.136 The disturbance to everyday life was
immediate and the critical issues for local working-class women were the threat
to their family life, their employment and the supply of food and fuel. p.138 Very quickly, the surveillance of working
women asking for relief and the relation of surveillance to the stoppage of the
new sailors’ and soldiers’ allowances, began to raise questions about the
potential wartime threats to women’s personal liberty.
p.230 By the first winter of the war, there was a
local network of people in Manchester who were prepared to come together to
protest against the threat of conscription.
-233 Many local meetings held by different organisations which were
critical of the war were not even being reported in the ‘liberal’ Manchester Guardian. -235 Pamphlets and
leaflets began to circulate more widely throughout the city because of the
local risks of holding anti-war meetings. -236 The irony of surveillance and
censorship was that it strengthened local resistance.
Ronan
concludes, like Pearce, with the idea that other places may have similar hidden
histories to be discovered and the implicit hope that other studies may follow,
modestly describing her work – which is further enhanced by an extensive
bibliography – as revealing only “a small part of a much larger, still largely
undiscovered, jigsaw of resistance to war and the demand for a just and
negotiated peace made by women anti-war activists in the First World War.” (p.332)
Together or
separately, these three books present a formidable challenge to the dominant
warmongering ideology and mainstream historical view of an overwhelmingly pro-war
consensus.
L.W.
[A
non-identical version of this combined review in Medicine,
Conflict & Survival Vol. 30, no. 4, 2014, should
be available at http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/mcs]
* The question about the Pearce Register has been partially answered, insofar as
But disappointingly
The website is not all that was hoped, in particular:
"One is obliged to register to see the individuals' records. Downloading the data appears to be impossible. Searching the data is clumsy at best; search by location doesn't work if you are not searching on a name as well. Best results are got by using the 'keywords' search at the bottom left side..."
However:
If you have a name you can view and copy a transcription of the record,
after signing up (free).
This includes a wide variety of individuals and groups,
among them some who tried to stop the tests and many who struggled for some
semblance of justice in their aftermath. Here they often speak in their own
voices, to an extent unusual in historical or scientific accounts, although not
for the first time - interviews by Nic Maclennan with Pacific islanders were
published in an earlier book, and much testimony has been recorded in the
course of the long battle for 'compensation' to have their sufferings
acknowledged. A major factor in hampering their quest, compounding the harm,
has been the failure of the authorities to keep records of their exposure to
radiation, or to destroy any that existed.
