Looking back to 1916 from COs' Day 2018

For International Conscientious Objectors' Day, 15 May
A day in the implementation of the Military Service Act

as reported in The Scotsman, 10 June 1916, p.8, cols. 6-7

When newspapers had pages full of news...
Amongst the war news reported on the 10th of June in The Scotsman (Edinburgh) there are several reports about reactions and resistance to conscription, introduced nationally in the Military Service Acts of 1916 (January and May). One of these features Dr John MacCallum, mentioned previously in a review of Robert Duncan's Objectors and Resisters and more extensively in a subsequent post.

Transcription: 

ARGYLLSHIRE ASSISTANT MEDICAL OFFICER

_______________

FINED AS AN ABSEBTEE

In Oban Sheriff Court yesterday – before Sheriff Substitute Wallace – John Cameron MacCallum, M.B., Ch.B., Muckairn Manse, Taynuilt, recently Executive Tuberculosis Officer and Assistant Medical Officer for the Country of Argyll, appeared on a charge that, having been deemed to have been enlisted and transferred to the Army Reserve under the Military Service Act, and having on 13^th may been called up from the Reserve for service, he failed to report himself at Stirling Castle on 30^th May in accordance with the requirements of the notice served on him.

The accused pleaded not guilty.

In reply to the Sheriff-Substitute, he admitted a breach of the statute, but, in view of the conscientious objections which he held to participating in war service in any capacity, he maintained he could tender no other plea than that of not guilty. He acknowledged that he had not received a certificate for exemption as a conscientious objector, although he had applied for one.

Formal evidence having been led by the Procurator-Fiscal, the Sheriff-Substitute convicted the accused, and sentenced him to pay a fine of £2, or one week’s imprisonment. 

On leaving the dock, Dr MacCallum was taken into custody by a military escort.

 - The Scotsman, Saturday June 10, 1916, p.8, col.6-7. Military Service: Labour and Recruiting

Dr MacCallum was of course not alone in his stand, as shown in the next two reports.

Further details on most of the other COs listed can be found at:
https://search.livesofthefirstworldwar.org/search/world-records/conscientious-objectors-register-1914-1918.

As is also well know and well documented, all was not quiescent on the labour front either - not only on 'Red' Clydeside.

The same columns contain brief notices of how conscription was affecting essential work (‘agricultural labour’, ‘female labour in bakeries’, and ‘Fife colliery’), and several industrial disputes: Edinburgh corporation workers wanting an increase in wages; Edinburgh painters rumoured to be nearing a settlement after 11 weeks; and Dundee calender [sic*] workers back to work after 3 months on strike with an expectation of having their claim considered. Not to mention Galsgow muntions workers and the vexed question of postponing the traditional ‘Glasgow Fair’ annual holidays, in the national interest of course.

Calender Girls?

(There were many women working in the jute industry in Dundee even before the war)

*CALENDERER / CALENDERMAN / CALENDER WORKER - operated a machine which pressed using two large rollers (calender) used to press and finish fabrics or paper. - Answer to an online query.


The official labour and trade union movement of course supported the war...but not unanimously.

Finally, column 8 on the same page under the heading Biographical Notes records the sad fate of many of those who had gone to the war. The whole page can be seen as a pdf.      

Sections of CO group photographs, as featured on the cover of

Voices from War and Some Labour Struggles (Edinburgh, Mercat Press, 1995), ed. Ian MacDougall

(no picture credits given other than for the cover design as a whole).

For more events on 15th May see Peace Pledge Union:

http://www.ppu.org.uk/coday/coday2018.html

And a related news story from Edinburgh, 15-5-2018:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-44110224

------------------------------------

POSTSCRIPT:
Another small part of the story, this time from Aberdeen -
National Council Against Conscription (Aberdeen) (1916) 
"During World War One, the National Council Against Conscription was established in response to the Military Service Bills of 1916, which introduced conscription for men between 18 and 40. The Council opposed conscription as an infringement on civil liberties and campaigned against the bill seeking to stop it passing through Parliament. The Council was one of many groups operating at the time, such as The No-Conscription Fellowship, and these groups monitored the work of the military tribunals and gave advice to the men who appeared before them. The Council changed its name in 1916 to The National Council for Civil Liberties (n.b. there was another organisation with the same
name from the early 1930s and which became Liberty, as it is known today).
"There was a branch in Aberdeen and William Davidson, a stores porter, Vice President of the Aberdeen Independent Labour Party, was secretary.
"References: Conscientious Objectors Register 1914 – 1918 at Imperial War Museum website (record of William Davidson)."

Incitement to Mutiny, 1912

Text from: 1912 The Syndicalist Trials, pdf at lib.com 

OPEN LETTER TO BRITISH SOLDIERS

Men! Comrades! Brothers!

You are in the army.

So are we. You, in the army of Destruction. We, in the Industrial, or army of Construction.

We work at mine, mill, forge factory or dock etc., producing and transporting all the goods, clothing, stuffs etc., which makes it possible for people to live. You are Workingmen's sons.

When We go on strike to better our lot, which is the lot also of Your Fathers, Mothers, Brothers and Sisters, You are called upon by your Officers to MURDER US.

Don't do it.

You know how it happens. Always has happened.

We stand out as long as we can. Then one of our (and your) irresponsible Brothers, goaded by the sight and thought of his and his loved ones' misery and hunger, commits a crime on property. Immediately you are ordered to murder Us, as You did at Mitchelstown, at Featherstone, at Belfast.

Don't You Know, that when you are out of the colours, and become a `Civvy' again, that You, like Us, may be on strike, and You, like Us, be liable to be murdered by other soldiers.

Boys, Don't Do it.

'Thou shalt not kill', says the Book. Don't forget that! It does not say 'unless you have a uniform on'.

No! MURDER IS MURDER, whether committed in the heat of anger on one who has wronged a loved one, or by clay–piped Tommies with a rifle.

Boys, Don't do it. Act the Man! Act the Brother! Act the Human being! 

Property can be replaced! Human Life, Never!

The Idle Rich Class, who own and order you about, own and order us about also. They and their friends own the land, and the means of life in Britain. You Don't! We Don't!

When We kick they order You to murder Us. When You kick, You get court–martialled and cells.

Your fight is Our fight. Instead of fighting Against each other We should be fighting with each other.

 Out of Our loins, Our lives, Our homes, You come.

Don't disgrace Your Parents, Your Class, by being the willing tools any longer of the Master Class. You, like Us, are of the Slave Class. When We rise, You rise; When We fall, even by your bullets, Ye fall also. England with its fertile valleys and dells, its mineral resources, its sea harvests, is a heritage of ages to us.

You have no doubt joined the army out of poverty. We work long hours for small wages at hard work, because of our poverty. And both Your poverty and Ours arises from the fact that, Britain with its resources, belongs to only a few people. These few, owning Britain, own Our jobs. Owning Our jobs they own Our very lives.

Comrades, have we called in vain? Think things out and refuse any longer to Murder your Kindred. Help US to win back Britain for the British, and the World for the Workers.

[This appeal gave rise to the Syndicalist prosecutions of 1912. It was printed in The Syndicalist of January 1912.] From solwest.org.uk

As well as foreshadowing WW1 trials for publication of anti-war material, the case evidently showed up some differences, which were to become more acute, with (and within) the official suffragette movement.

The above leaflet seems to suggest that the reduction of the sentences in the Syndicalist case was unduly lenient, if only by comparison with the treatment of women activists. It does not relate to the First World War itself, as may appear at first sight (and as implied in the programme of events from which it is copied).

Midinettes, Métallos, Mutineers...

Strikes in the Great War

From an article by historian Jean-Louis Robert:

http://www.humanite.fr/node/342630                         Keywords: Centenaire de l'Humanité

Despite the military confrontation devaluing struggles in the « rear », many movements of a pacifist type led to the rise of new forms of radicalism.

Within a few days in 1914, mobilisation depleted the ranks of workers’ organisations. Everywhere the « union sacrée » [sacred union, presumed national consensus for the war effort] took over. But from 1917-1918 a social movement, both significant and unprecedented, broke out in France. Significant, because the level of strikes in  1917 and 1918 exceeded those from 1906 to 1910, a fact made still more noteworthy considering they were in a state of war. Unprecedented because struggles by new segments of the working class came to the fore, and because the forms of those struggles were also new. This article will look at two cases : the « midinettes’ » strike of 1917and the  metalworkers’ (« métallos « ) strike,  1918, both in Paris.

The midinettes’ strike has to be located in a wider context, first and foremost that of the notable increase in women’s employment. And this « féminisation » of work was accompanied by a feminisation of strikes. During the war women were involved in as many strikes as men, in fact in more in some years, as in 1917. Suddenly they were there in the front line of struggle, leading active, often victorious strikes, more concerned with demands than with politics. This struggle was generally also spontaneous, which was certainly the case with the midinettes’ movement of 1917. On 11th May, a few days after the spectacular failure of the Chemin des Dames offensive, the [haute couture, up-market] dress-makers went on strike for « the English week » [Saturday afternoons off].  They were to be seen on 15th May « in serried ranks » in the rue de la Paix and rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. There were no unions involved when this started. But there was another unusual feature, which was that those wartime strikes ran up against the State, which could not ignore them, and the whole trend of wartime government policy was to put into effect forms of social control in which the unions would have their set place. So if the unions were absent at the start of the strike, they were present when it came to negotiations, which ended by achieving perceptible successes. And the strikers joined the ranks of organised labour.

The second strike to be considered is that of the 100,000 metalworkers in the war factories in May 1918. Let’s have a quick look back at the context here too. Within a few months, industrial mobilisation established a system of war factories where there was massive weapons production with hitherto unprecedented speed-up of work. It was the First World War that saw the earliest bastions of industry, first of all being Renault Billancourt with as many as 20,000 workers. In those factories, new work practices developed, and a new labour force (unskilled) appeared. At the same time the state took control of the labour force, aiming to install new forms of social relations with, for example the creation of workshop delegates [shop stewards, more or less] at the end of 1917. But these factories soon also became the seed-beds for new developments in radicalisation of struggle, and of pacifism too – which in  France had never been revolutionary defeatism. This is what the 1918 movement, kicking off on the morning of 13th May at the instigation of delegates from  Renault, signified. The strike was basically an assertion of pacifism, demonstrated in opposition to moves to re-assign the young men eligible for call-up from the factories to the front.* And from then on the metalworkers of Paris became the spearhead; they provided the majority in subsequent strikes (instead of the building workers, as before 1914), bringing in their own forms of struggle such as factory occupation – already frequent in 1918 – and building a dynamic and determined trade unionism [syndicalisme].

At the same time those two conflicts had uneven effects on unionism. It must never be forgotten that the war was on and that the primary sacrifice was at the front: hundreds of thousands killed, wounded, mutilated, gassed, with smashed faces, driven mad, losing their memory. Everything is viewed through this prism that creates a latent opposition between the front and the rear (all seen as dodgers on a cushy number). Women first and foremost. This is Péricat, one of the leading revolutionaries and a future founding member of the French CP, yelling at workers on 16th December 1917 « Go and see them in the suburbs, covered in furs, with boots up to their knees! In the cinema, in the theatre, women all laughing, having a good time. French women have no guts. They’re neither mothers nor wives nor fiancées ». Like a war of the sexes. And the women who joined the trades union for a time in 1917 very soon left. The problem with the metalworkers was the same: those workers assigned to the rear were certainly on strike for peace, but were also suspected of defending their privilege [of being in a reserved occupation]. So they were not qualified, at least during the war, to claim any vanguard role.

So, social history can never be reduced to the simple black-and-white contrasts that people sometimes attribute to it. Like life no doubt.

*[At an earlier stage conscripts had been withdrawn from combat to work in mines and war industries].

[About Mutineers, see previous post]

Paris in the Spring, 1917

Spring 1917. As the Great War moved towards its 4th year, the vast scale of the sacrifices undergone weighed on all the belligerents. From the Eastern Front the first rumours were arriving of the collapse of the edifice of tsarism. Spring and summer were marked by strikes in the rear as well as mutinies at the front...

Away from the front, the situation of male and female workers mobilised en masse for the war effort had got steadily worse, In Paris, for the first time since 1914 the first of May was taken as a holiday , thousands of trade unionists came out on strike and 4000 demonstrators assembled in the rue de la Grange-aux-Belles where the CGT [General Confederation of Labour, the large general union] was based, for a meeting. Starting on 11th May, the women (« midinettes ») employed in the big fashion houses gradually stop working.

The midinettes’ strike  triggered a movement that spread all over the country and into all sectors, including the war industries. Everywhere the demands were the same : relief from the high cost of living, and no work on Saturday afternoons.  The movement grew until the end of May, and when one strike ended, another started. It declined slowly from the beginning of June and came to an end in July, contained by the partial satisfaction of its demands. This was far from signifying a return to social peace, however; there would be further strikes in September, and especially in 1918.

Translated from article by

Hervé (AL Marseille)     [Libertarian Alternative].

http://www.alternativelibertaire.org/?1917-mutineries-dans-les-tranchees       [Accessed 20-1-14]